A pioneer who helped define the customer success function in the cloud industry during his 16-year tenure at Salesforce, John Durocher joins Calix to lead the expansion of its market-leading customer success organization to accelerate customers’ transformation from a legacy broadband operating model to a managed service innovation model that meets the changing needs of their communities
Calix, Inc appoints John Durocher as its chief customer officer (CCO), demonstrating its long-term commitment to helping broadband service providers (BSPs) succeed in a transforming industry. Calix plays a critical role in this endeavor by enabling BSPs to differentiate themselves in their markets, provide superior experiences, and transform their business models through its unique platform and managed services.
John is a cloud industry pioneer with over 30 years of experience helping customers achieve breakthrough business transformations and maximize technology investments. He was most recently an executive vice president at Salesforce, where he ran customer success, support, services, and renewals. He is widely recognized as one of the founders of customer success in the cloud industry.
As CCO at Calix, John will leverage his extensive experience to scale and expand Calix Customer Success Services, Professional Services, Education Services, and Global Support Services. This will further enable BSPs to thrive in an increasingly competitive market by allowing them to differentiate, improve subscriber satisfaction, and increase revenue and margins—ultimately making a positive impact in their communities.
John succeeds Martha Galley, who has served as Calix chief customer success officer since 2018 and founded the company’s customer success function. Since its inception, the customer success organization has enabled thousands of BSPs to transform their businesses and grow their value for the communities they serve. Over several months, Martha will transition to executive vice president of corporate social responsibility (CSR) at Calix. This new function will allow her to go well beyond Calix environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals by expanding partnerships with customers through joint ESG initiatives.
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“The chance to lead the renowned customer success, services, education, and support organization at Calix as they work with BSPs to uplift their rural communities is a once-in-a-career opportunity,” said John Durocher. “Calix is built on the transformational mission to enable BSPs to simplify their business and excite their subscribers to grow their value and enrich life in their regions. With the massive influx of public, private, federal, and local funding entering the industry, the teams at Calix are working with BSPs of all types and sizes to significantly impact the future of their communities and society. I’ve watched with deep admiration as the customer success organization at Calix set a new broadband industry standard for customer enablement and support services under Martha’s extraordinary leadership. I look forward to reaching great new heights together.”
As one example of the expanding investment in customer success, John will oversee the expansion of Calix Business Insights Services, which launched in October 2022. This capability enables even the smallest BSPs to leverage the data available in Calix Cloud® to build business-transforming action plans faster and with significantly deeper insight than a data-blind and slow-moving legacy competitor.
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“Our 12-year, $1+ billion investment in the industry’s only end-to-end cloud, software, and systems platform has matured at a pivotal time in the broadband market,” said Michael Weening, president and chief executive officer at Calix. “Legacy providers are coming to grips with the fact that the dumb-pipe speed strategy they have used for decades is a fast path to business decline. Calix-partnered BSPs work closely with our teams—well beyond our unique platform—to completely transform their businesses. The Calix customer success organization is at the forefront of this critical partnership for change. I am thrilled to have the opportunity to work with John again as he brings extensive knowledge to guide our teams in supporting our customers’ success. Furthermore, John’s decision to join Calix, when he could have gone to any company in the cloud industry, is a testament to how inspiring it is to support our customers’ purpose: transforming communities for generations to come.”