Donald Chesnut recently joined Mastercard as the Chief Experience Officer. In this role, he is responsible for bringing “outside-in”, customer and consumer-centric thinking across Marketing, Sales, Products & Innovation, Operations and Technology.
Before joining Mastercard, Mr. Chesnut was the Chief Experience Officer at the consultancy SapientRazorfish, which is a leader in customer experience-led digital business tranformation. Mr. Chesnut led Sapient’s global Customer Experience Practice, which included capabilies such as Customer Research and Insight, CX Strategy, Experience Design, and Experience Innovation. Some of his priorities were evolving digital capablities to support new types of customer experiences such as wearable products, digital/physical environments, and cognitive experiences (AI-powered customer experiences), digital service design, and the global delivery of experience-based services.
In his two decades as a consultant, he has helped some of the world’s leading brands in their journey of digital transformation, bringing both CX strategy and UX design best practices to how those business were transforming. Some clients included Disney, HSBC, Target, RBS, Wall Street Journal, Walmart, United Airlines, Citibank, Hilton, UBS, Unilever, Carnival, US Bank, and many others across the range of vertical industries. Many of his clients have been global in nature, and he spent two years working in Europe helping build Sapient’s presence across Europe.
Prior to Sapient Mr. Chesnut was a product manager at American Express in their Interactive Services division, and an Interactive Services leader at Siegel & Gale, a leading brand strategy consultancy.
Mr. Chesnut has a Masters degree in Interactive Telecommunications and an undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Dramatic Literature (double major), both from New York University. He is a published author, frequent speaker, and jury member in the areas of Customer Experience and best practices in Digital Product and Experience Design.