The focus of the CCO in a company is to help infuse the executive team with a customer-centric vision uniting all departments to work together and support this goal and deliver a consistent customer experience. At Dataloop, especially in light of our recent growth, we knew it was time to strengthen our customer voice and strive to construct exceptional relationships with our customers. This is where Bill Heffelfinger came into the picture. We are pleased to introduce you to our new Chief Customer Officer (CCO) Bill Heffelfinger.
Bill is well known for building and leading global teams with exceptional technical and functional subject matter experts for more than 3 decades. He is super excited to have joined the Dataloop team and has been a friend of ours for over 3 years. As CCO, Bill will be overseeing Dataloop’s relationship with our customers and driving efforts to assess and elevate each touchpoint across the entire customer journey. It’s time for all of you to meet Bill, so I’ll share with you a discussion I had with him in order to get to know him better.
Q & A with Bill Heffelfinger– Dataloop’s New CCO:
1. What can you tell us about yourself?
I’m a Pennsylvania, USA native that moved South, to North Carolina in 1990. I love living and working in the Research Triangle Park area of North Carolina as this locale enables a lot of innovation in tech – which I not only enjoy as a profession, but also as a hobby. I’ve been married to my amazing wife, Cristi, for 32 years, have 2 cats, and sponsor the financial aspects of rescued exotic cats like leopards, lions, tigers, and Geoffrey cats. I also love to travel and learn about other cultures.
I “officially” started working in technology in 1994. I like to describe my career in tech as 50% IT and 50% high-tech. The first 50% of my career I focused on data, ERP, and data center operations as a DBA, developer, and leader of teams covering those disciplines. This time also included a stint as a leader responsible for managing a large portion of a Fortune 250 company’s data center.
The high-tech portion of my career includes building and leading high performance teams in the data storage realm working for companies like NetApp and Nimble Storage – and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. I also spent a few years in the AI startup space with my first SaaS startup being Pendo. Out of all of my work experiences, I found that I love getting in early and helping companies grow by way of helping to make individuals, teams and customers successful. This is why I’m so excited about the opportunities that come with my new role at Dataloop as Chief Customer Officer. This role combines many of my passions and experiences. I can’t wait to see what we all do together at Dataloop.
2. What is the biggest challenge in your role?
I would say the biggest challenge our customer organization is centered around maturing our processes in a way that helps us scale as the business grows while ensuring we all continue to embrace the special Dataloop culture that has gotten the company to where it is today – and that our customers have come to enjoy, too.
3. What excites you about Dataloop?
I was first introduced to Dataloop in April 2019. I had the pleasure of meeting all of Dataloop’s co-founders as my introduction to the company and platform. I met Nir first, then Avi, and then a few months later Eran. At this time, the role I had was Head of Solution Engineering at CloudFactory. Part of what I did in that role was to literally put my hands on every labeling tool and platform that was available then – some 96 different offerings – and run them through my validation tests to ensure they met a certain standard. Dataloop was one of 3 computer vision data and people management platforms at that time that “wowed” me. The people were amazing, the tech delivered everything it promised and, as a result, it landed on the top of my “CV data enrichment platform” list.
Fast forward 3.5 years and Dataloop still has wonderful people, many whom I’ve known now for 3+ years and am happy to be able to call them friends. The platform has matured very nicely and meets even more use cases. The vision for where we’re headed next is something I can’t wait to be part of to make it real. In short, it’s pretty much everything I’ve loved for 3.5+ years about Dataloop, but more of it!
4. What do you hope to achieve?
I have a humble goal of adding value to whoever and whatever I touch. Wrapped around that is a desire to help Dataloop continue to mature and do so elegantly as we reach a far larger scale than we have to date. That will take a strong company-wide customer focus, energy, communication and commitment and I for one look forward to lending a hand however I can to ensure we’re collectively successful.
5. Tell us something surprising about yourself.
Beyond what I shared in the first question above, it might surprise people that I am a speed freak. I love going fast. People tell me I’m calm and laid back, and can’t imagine me behind the wheel of a high performance vehicle driving it to its limits. Well…that’s me. Ask me about my race track and autobahn experiences some time. You’ll soon have to ask me to change the topic. I can speak endlessly about it.
6. What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?
If someone had the guts to put me behind the wheel of an F1 car…I would be an F1 driver. I also would probably not last very long. See above comment – no fear of driving to the limit. I’d probably “exit early.”
7. If you could have any superpower what would it be?
This sounds cliché, but the immediate super power that came to mind when you asked this question was to be able to bring about peace. I wouldn’t even go for world peace. Just peace between beings. Imagine all the great things we could do if we stopped trying to control each other and live in peace.
Summed Up
And there you have it, our new CCO Bill Heffelfinger. You can just hear the excitement oozing out of him, and we’re diggin’ the enthusiasm Bill. And Bill, we’re just as excited to have you with us, even more so. We look forward to the greatness you’re going to achieve and we’d like to officially welcome you to Dataloop! We look forward to a successful road forward.
If you’d like to check out a recent post entitled, “A Day in The Life: Lessons I’ve Learned As Dataloop’s Customer Success Manager” then you’ll be able to hear about common challenges our Customer Success Manager, Adva faces and how she tackles them. Stay tuned for more great posts to come!
