John Samuel McCahan

John McCahan joined Fellers in July 2026 as Chief Customer Experience Officer after more than two decades leading service transformations across retail, banking, manufacturing, and other industries. Most recently, he led the customer experience turnaround at FTD, where he developed a clear philosophy for how AI should fit into customer experience.

McCahan sees AI as a way to augment employees instead of replacing them. His approach is to automate routine and transactional tasks to give frontline employees more room to handle complex problems and build longer-term customer relationships. That distinction also changes how he measures CX. Rather than optimizing primarily for efficiency metrics such as handle time, he emphasizes resolution, loyalty, and customer lifetime value.

He put that model into practice at FTD after joining the company following its 2019 bankruptcy. McCahan inherited a fragmented service environment where, as he later described it, communications were siloed, and customers often had to repeat themselves across channels and agents. He consolidated eight systems into one and introduced AI across voice, digital, and agent channels, helping FTD handle peak demand with faster responses and fewer seasonal hires. During the broader transformation, the company more than doubled customer lifetime value.

McCahan pairs division of labor between humans and AI with a bias toward experimentation. His maxim is to “fail fast, fail early, fail small,” testing new capabilities in contained environments and scaling what proves useful. He is particularly interested in agentic systems that can move beyond responding to requests and begin anticipating customer needs and personalizing interactions.