Chief Experience Officer

About the Company

Ad Astra is a technology firm dedicated to higher education, partnering with colleges and universities to enhance student graduation rates by leveraging data-driven academic planning and course scheduling software. Serving over 550 institutions, their AI-powered Smart Scheduling platform integrates courses, faculty, facilities, and events to optimize efficiency and support timely graduations.

Role Overview

The Chief Experience Officer (CXO) leads the post-sale business operations, responsible for converting revenue contracts into retained, growing, and highly recommended client relationships. This executive oversees the full post-sale P&L from implementation through renewal, focusing on scaling the business profitably by managing gross revenue retention (GRR) and optimizing operational efficiency.

Primary Responsibilities

• Own GRR as the main performance indicator, establishing churn, renewal, and downgrade objectives, plus develop forecasting and monitoring tools.
• Define and implement a superior client experience standard across service benchmarks, staffing, and delivery processes at scale.
• Design and manage the comprehensive post-sale operating framework covering migration, onboarding, adoption, and support with clear deliverables and ownership.
• Lead disciplined client migrations ensuring data accuracy, timely transitions, and readiness for go-live.
• Operate onboarding and deployment as a tightly controlled P&L entity, accountable for revenues, margin, utilization, and cost management; set capacity models aligned with sales pipelines to prevent scope creep.
• Regularly analyze and report monthly service P&L results.
• Develop a client health scoring system that translates usage data into proactive churn risk and expansion indicators, enabling early interventions.
• Manage support functions efficiently with defined SLAs, performance tracking, cost controls, and feedback loops to drive product improvements.
• Collaborate with sales and finance leadership on capacity planning aligned to revenue bookings and renewal projections.
• Enforce disciplined pricing strategies and margin tracking to guide investment decisions.
• Lead the analytics and insights team to convert institutional data into meaningful client reports and renewal support materials, enhancing sales effectiveness.

Qualifications

• Extensive leadership experience (minimum 12 years) in post-sale SaaS roles including client success, implementation, and support, with P&L responsibility at VP or C-suite levels for at least 5 years.
• Proven skills in boosting gross revenue retention and identifying growth opportunities through operational improvements.
• Experience managing complex, large-scale client migrations under stringent timelines with strong data governance.
• Deep familiarity with SaaS post-sale metrics including GRR, NRR, time-to-value, utilization, COGS, CSAT/NPS, and ability to leverage data insights for decision making.
• Bachelor’s degree is mandatory; MBA or advanced degree preferred, especially with quantitative or management focus.
• Hands-on leadership of professional services with focus on service revenue, utilization, and cost optimization.

Preferred Additional Skills

• Proven success scaling post-sale organizations rapidly, maintaining quality and profitability.
• Demonstrated quantifiable improvements in retention metrics and expansion revenue.
• Expertise in managing sizable data migrations with documented delivery and margin outcomes.
• Familiarity with modern post-sale software platforms including CRM, ticketing, analytics, and professional services automation tools.
• Experience building analytics functions that support both internal enablement and external client reporting, positively impacting sales and retention.

Success Metrics

• Monthly tracking of GRR, renewal, churn, saves, and downgrade rates versus targets.
• Client outcomes including student progress, retention gains, graduation improvements, client satisfaction, and referrals.
• Financial and operational health of onboarding and deployment: revenue, margin, utilization, cost efficiency, and implementation speed.
• Client product adoption monitored via health scores, usage patterns, and expansion driven by success strategies.
• Support operations efficiency measured by response times, resolution durations, ticket deflection, satisfaction scores, and cost-to-revenue ratio.
• Performance metrics for professional services including revenue, gross margin, utilization, rate adherence, and cost control.
• Quality and influence of analytics and reporting on renewals and new sales enablement.