Janey Whiteside knows a thing or two about building customer loyalty. During her time as EVP and chief customer officer at Walmart, she oversaw the rollout of an ambitious membership program in the midst of a global pandemic. Launched in September 2020, Walmart+ was a sprawling initiative undergirded by an unflinching truth: The customer always comes first.
Now partner and chief growth officer at advisory firm Consello, Whiteside has taken that mantra into her current role working with Fortune 100 CEOs. It’s clear she’s a leader that wants to skate to where the puck is going to be, and for that, data is critical.
“If you think about what’s really important today and what’s really important moving forward, it is what data do you have on people who are either your customers today, or that you want to be your customers, and how are you using that to make sure that you’re providing them really personalized experiences, solutions, and product recommendations,” Whiteside said.
Speaking on her early days at Walmart, Whiteside said landing on a unified vision of the customer was crucial at a time where the in-store and online customers were more separate entities. “You build your organization and your business and your experiences and your products and everything associated that way,” she said.
Leading Walmart’s growth
A term that tends to come up in conversations with Janey Whiteside: cognitive load. Not hers, to be clear, but the customer’s. She and her team were determined to eliminate this once and for all through an end-to-end membership plan, which currently offers free grocery delivery, 10 cents off a gallon of gas at select stations, Paramount+, and other perks for $12.95 per month (plus tax).
“They knew exactly what you were paying and you could order as many times as you wanted and get those groceries delivered,” Whiteside said. Though its exact impact on the overall business is unclear, a 2025 Morgan Stanley survey estimates Walmart+ has between 17.2 million and 26.5 million members.
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Ensuring the customer experience remained undisturbed was a key consideration when Walmart’s media business, Walmart Connect, was rebooted in January 2021. While Walmart Connect isn’t a consumer-facing initiative, Whiteside said it was a way to leverage the company’s expansive customer base to expand into a new revenue channel.“How can we leverage the eyeballs and the traffic we’ve got in a way that allows us to create more revenue?” she said. “We could then plow into making sure that we were able to make the sorts of investments we needed in customer experience…continue to invest in product for our customers.”
Perpetually living in the customer’s shoes, Whiteside said the move occurred through the lens of ensuring “the ad business in no way interfered with building and delivering a spot on frictionless customer experience.”
This surely remains a crucial consideration as ad sales are becoming an increasingly bigger slice of Walmart’s revenue pie.
Customer above all
The biggest takeaway Whiteside took from her role at Walmart was being clear on the “design target,” or optimal customer profile.
“By being really super specific on who the design target was, and everybody thinking about that, it kept us very clear-eyed on ‘are we building something because we can or are we building it because we know it’s solving a need or an unmet need on behalf of our customers?’” she said.
She explained that this strategy isn’t narrow or exclusionary because it gives clients a jumping off point to build from.
“One of the common misconceptions about a design target, particularly when you’re dealing with large-scale brands is: ‘Is that reductive if I’m only designing for a design target?’” Whiteside said. She explained the use of a specific target is not intended to leave anybody out but should capture the requirements of other customers in the general vicinity. Regardless, the north star remains the same. “You’re engaged in a customer and giving them reasons to want to come back on a continued basis,” she said.