50 Essential Customer Experience Thought Leaders

Last updated: June 2026

The leaders shaping customer experience right now are not all writing airport bestsellers or keynoting the same ten conferences. Some are running CX strategy for global insurers, redesigning patient journeys in African hospitals, or building AI-powered coaching systems for European contact centres. This list was compiled to surface the 50 voices in customer experience and CX leadership who genuinely deserve to be far better known, drawing from independent consulting, in-house practitioner work, academic research, and frontline innovation across six continents.

As of June 2026, customer experience has become one of the most contested and consequential battlegrounds in business strategy. Forrester's research shows that companies delivering superior customer experience can charge a premium of up to 16 percent for their products and services. At the same time, Forrester's 2024 US Customer Experience Index found that only 3 percent of companies are genuinely customer-obsessed, placing customers at the centre of their leadership, strategy, and operations. The gap between knowing CX matters and actually delivering it consistently remains wide, and that gap is exactly where the people on this list do their best work.

The shift toward AI is accelerating urgency across the field. McKinsey has estimated a $1.3 trillion opportunity in AI-powered customer experience, but the same analysis found that only 15 percent of executives are positioning their organisations to capture it. The leaders on this list are working out what that transition actually looks like in practice, navigating real customers, real organisations, and real constraints rather than theoretical frameworks.

Rather than recycling the same handful of names that appear on every CX list, this compilation draws on a wider range of contexts, industries, and geographies. The people featured here have made substantial contributions to customer experience through published frameworks, in-house transformation, research, or consistent, substantive public thought leadership in 2025 and 2026. Each was selected based on documented professional output and active engagement with the discipline.

If your organisation is navigating leadership alignment, team dynamics, or the cultural foundations of a truly customer-centric strategy, Jonno White, author of Step Up or Step Out (10,000+ copies sold), brings the facilitation and leadership work that helps executive teams build the internal conditions for great CX. Book Jonno for your next leadership offsite or keynote at jonno@consultclarity.org.

How Was This List Compiled?

Each person on this list was selected based on at least one of the following: documented publication, recognised credential, sustained public thought leadership in 2025 or 2026, or notable in-house practitioner achievement at an organisation where customer experience is a strategic priority. The selection covered independent consultants and authors, in-house chief customer officers and VPs, academic researchers, keynote speakers, and practitioners across five continents. The list is organised into seven thematic categories. Every person appears exactly once.

Why Does Customer Experience Leadership Matter Right Now?

Customer experience is no longer a support function. It is a board-level priority, a revenue driver, and in many industries, the primary differentiator between organisations that grow and those that plateau. Gallup's 2025 State of the Global Workplace report found that only 21 percent of employees globally are engaged at work, down from 23 percent the previous year. That engagement deficit costs organisations an estimated $438 billion in lost productivity, and disengaged employees are one of the most reliable predictors of poor customer experience. The connection between how employees feel and how customers are treated is now quantified, not just assumed.

Research from Qualtrics has found that poor customer experiences could cost businesses nearly $3 trillion in sales globally as customers cut their spending in response to a bad experience. The implication is not that CX is a nice-to-have. It is that ignoring it is measurably expensive, in ways that show up directly in quarterly results.

The challenge for CX leaders in 2026 is not knowing that customer experience matters. It is building the organisational systems, leadership cultures, and measurement frameworks that actually deliver it consistently at scale. The people on this list have dedicated substantial portions of their careers to solving exactly that problem.

For teams working on building the leadership foundation that enables great CX, Jonno White works with executive teams through working sessions, offsites, and coaching that help leadership teams communicate, decide, and execute with greater clarity. For more on building high-performing leadership teams, check out my blog post '21 Best Executive Team Offsite Facilitators' at https://www.consultclarity.org/post/executive-team-offsite-facilitators.

The Pioneers: Authors and Researchers Who Built the CX Discipline

These are the thinkers who built customer experience as a professional discipline, creating the frameworks, credentials, and shared vocabulary the rest of the field now uses.

1. Jeanne Bliss

Jeanne Bliss is the founder of Customer Bliss and co-founder of the Customer Experience Professionals Association. She holds the distinction of being one of the first practitioners to hold a formal Chief Customer Officer role, serving in CCO positions at Lands' End, Microsoft, Coldwell Banker, and Allstate, accumulating decades of practitioner experience that her advisory work now draws on directly. Her five-competency framework for achieving customer-driven growth has become one of the most widely adopted models at the C-suite level.

Her book Chief Customer Officer 2.0 outlines her five-competency model in detail, drawing on more than two decades as a practitioner and over a decade coaching senior leaders globally. She has guided more than 20,000 leaders on using the framework to achieve measurable customer-driven growth. Her CX philosophy centres on the principle that companies earn growth by improving customers' lives, not by managing metrics, and her consistent articulation of this argument has shaped how a generation of CCOs frames their mandate.

2. Bruce Temkin

Bruce Temkin is one of the most credentialled minds in customer experience research and practice. He co-founded the Customer Experience Professionals Association, founded Temkin Group, and led the Qualtrics XM Institute. Before that, he spent 12 years at Forrester Research where he was the most-read analyst for 13 consecutive quarters. His work established many of the research frameworks CX professionals now use to measure and manage experience quality across organisations.

His contribution to CX thinking is most visible in his work on experience management as a genuine organisational discipline: the argument that customer experience cannot be owned by a single function but must be embedded in the operating model of the whole enterprise. His writing consistently pushed the field beyond journey mapping and satisfaction scores toward genuine cultural and structural transformation. He remains an active voice in CX through speaking and writing engagement with practitioners globally.

3. Kerry Bodine

Kerry Bodine is the founder of Kerry Bodine and Co, a CX research and consulting firm. She is co-author of Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Centre of Your Business, written with Harley Manning, which became a landmark text on building the organisational infrastructure for customer-centricity. Her professional background spans research, consulting, and advisory work at Forrester, where she served as vice president and principal analyst in the customer experience practice.

Her specific contribution to CX thinking is her rigorous, evidence-based approach to building the governance structures, accountability systems, and measurement approaches that turn CX intention into CX capability. Her frameworks are used by practitioners who need to move beyond advocacy and into systematic delivery across functions and geographies. She is a regular speaker and contributor to the global CX conversation through her firm and her ongoing public writing.

4. Annette Franz

Annette Franz is the founder and CEO of CX Journey Inc and a former Chair of the Board of the Customer Experience Professionals Association. With more than 25 years of experience in CX consulting, she has built a reputation as one of the clearest practical voices on the link between employee experience and customer experience. She is the author of Customer Understanding: Three Ways to Put the "Customer" in Customer Experience (and at the Heart of Your Business).

Her most recent major work is Employee Understanding: A Three-Pillar Framework for Designing a Great Experience and Driving Business Success, which applies rigorous CX thinking to the employee journey. Her argument, developed consistently across her writing and speaking, is that organisations cannot deliver a customer experience that is better than the employee experience that produces it. This framing has influenced how practitioner-oriented CX professionals approach internal culture work. She is highly active on LinkedIn and a regular keynote speaker.

5. Jeannie Walters

Jeannie Walters is the CEO and Chief Experience Investigator of Experience Investigators and one of the most credentialled CX educators globally, with more than 800,000 learners completing her LinkedIn Learning courses. She is a TEDx speaker and the founder of the CXI Membership community for CX leaders. Her book Experience Is Everything: Making Every Moment Count in the Age of Customer Expectations was released in April 2026.

Her contribution to CX leadership thinking is her consistent focus on bridging the gap between strategy and execution. She has spent more than 20 years working with companies including JPMorgan Chase, SAP, Comcast, and Verizon to help them move beyond stating CX ambitions and toward building the day-to-day disciplines that deliver them. Her Experience Action podcast addresses the specific operational and cultural questions CX leaders face when getting from diagnosis to delivery. Her 2026 book continues this focus at a moment when the field needs practical execution frameworks more than additional strategy frameworks.

6. Blake Morgan

Blake Morgan is a customer experience futurist, author, and founder of CXOHouse.com. She is the author of three books on customer experience, including The Customer of the Future, and hosts The Modern Customer Podcast, which regularly features C-level executives from companies recognised for customer-centric leadership. Her work focuses on helping organisations meet the expectations of the customer of the future, defined by speed, personalisation, and digital fluency.

Her specific contribution is her focus on the intersection of technology and human experience: the argument that great CX in 2026 is not choosing between digital and human but designing systems that deploy each where it serves customers best. She has become one of the most widely read voices on what AI-enabled customer experience actually requires from leadership, culture, and operating model, translating technology trend analysis into decisions CX leaders can act on.

7. Shep Hyken

Shep Hyken is the Chief Amazement Officer of Shepard Presentations and one of the most widely followed customer service and experience experts globally. He is a National Speakers Association Hall of Fame speaker (CPAE, CSP), and the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of eight books, including The Convenience Revolution and The Cult of the Customer. He has worked with more than 1,200 organisations, including Disney and FedEx, on building loyalty-focused service cultures.

His specific contribution to CX thinking is his consistent emphasis on convenience as a competitive advantage and the design of experiences that make doing business easy. His research-backed approach draws on more than 3,000 published articles and ongoing studies on what actually drives repeat business. Where many CX thinkers focus on delight, Hyken has made a distinctive argument that reducing friction, removing obstacles, and making the customer's job easy is the most reliable path to loyalty at scale.

8. Isabelle Zdatny

Isabelle Zdatny is Head of Thought Leadership at the Qualtrics XM Institute, where she produces industry-leading research, trains CX and EX professionals, and advises organisations on the design and execution of experience programmes. She is a certified CX professional (CCXP) and experience management professional (XMP) and has spent more than a decade working on the research frameworks and practitioner tools that help organisations translate measurement into action.

Her specific contribution is her evidence-based approach to the most pressing practical questions in CX: how to build measurement programmes that drive decisions rather than just reports, how to navigate the feedback recession as customers respond at lower rates, and how to use AI in CX without sacrificing the trust that underpins loyalty. Her research published by Qualtrics found that poor customer experiences could cost businesses nearly $3 trillion in sales globally, a figure that has shaped how many boards now frame CX investment.

The Global Consultants and Advisors Shaping CX Strategy

These independent consultants, advisors, and speakers have built practices and public platforms that directly shape how CX is practised across industries and geographies.

9. Jay Baer

Jay Baer is a globally recognised business growth and customer experience researcher with more than 30 years of experience advising Fortune 500 companies on customer service trends and digital transformation. He is the founder of multiple consultancies and the author of seven books on customer experience and marketing, including Hug Your Haters and Talk Triggers. His research and speaking focus on the intersection of speed, responsiveness, and customer retention.

His specific contribution to CX thinking is his rigorous exploration of how companies respond to customer complaints and feedback. His book Hug Your Haters documented, through original research, that responding to every customer complaint on every platform drives measurable improvement in customer retention and advocacy. This research shifted how many CX practitioners approach complaint handling, framing it not as damage control but as a growth strategy.

10. Nienke Bloem

Nienke Bloem is a global CX thought leader, educator, and keynote speaker based in the Netherlands. She is a Recognised Training Provider with the CXPA, has delivered CX education and speaking to audiences across the globe, and is the host of CX Leadership Talks, one of the most focused podcasts for practising customer experience leaders. She is also co-author of the CX Leadership Masterbook, a comprehensive practitioner guide for senior CX professionals.

Her specific contribution is her sustained, practical focus on the development of CX leadership as a discipline in its own right: not just what a customer-centric organisation looks like, but how to build the leadership capability to create and sustain one. Her podcast gives CX leaders peer-to-peer insights from practitioners navigating the same strategic and operational challenges, and her training and facilitation work has helped thousands of CX professionals develop the leadership skills their roles require.

11. Steven Van Belleghem

Steven Van Belleghem is a Belgian futurist and co-founder of Nexxworks, an inspiration agency helping organisations navigate digital and technological transformation. He is the author of multiple books on customer experience and the future of customer relationships, including When Digital Becomes Human and Customers the Day After Tomorrow, and is a board member of Plan International. His work focuses on helping companies understand and design for customer expectations shaped by AI, personalisation, and instant gratification.

His specific contribution to CX thinking is his framing of AI not as a replacement for human connection but as a relationship amplifier: technologies that anticipate needs, recognise sentiment, and enable teams to act with insight and warmth. He has argued consistently that the brands winning in 2026 and beyond will not have the smartest algorithms, but the strongest customer relationships powered by those algorithms. This framing has influenced how CX leaders in Europe and globally think about the role of technology in human-centred experience design.

12. Adrian Swinscoe

Adrian Swinscoe is a UK-based customer experience consultant, advisor, Forbes contributor, and keynote speaker with more than 25 years of experience helping organisations develop customer-focused strategies. He is the author of Punk CX and Punk XL, and previously How to Wow: 68 Effortless Ways to Make Every Customer Experience Amazing. His clients have included Apple, Shell, Harper Collins, and The Economist Group, and his podcast Punk CX features interviews with leading entrepreneurs and CX practitioners.

His specific contribution is the "punk" framing of customer experience: the argument that conventional, compliance-driven approaches to CX are fundamentally insufficient, and that the organisations that create genuinely remarkable customer experiences do so by challenging norms and building cultures where everyone takes responsibility for the experience rather than delegating it to a CX team. This contrarian lens on the field has made him one of the most distinctive and provocative voices in the European CX conversation.

13. Ian Golding

Ian Golding is a global CX specialist and consultant, certified CCXP, and founder of AmplifyXM. He has spent more than 25 years helping organisations around the world build practical customer experience capabilities, working with companies across multiple industries and continents. He is a regular speaker at major CX events globally and was included in CX Network's Top 50 CX Leaders to Follow for 2026.

His specific contribution is his pragmatic, practitioner-oriented approach to CX transformation: the tools, processes, and governance structures that allow large organisations to move from customer experience as a stated priority to customer experience as an operational reality. He has a particular focus on the role of leadership in CX transformation, arguing that the senior team's genuine engagement with customer outcomes is the most important determinant of whether CX investment delivers results.

14. Lynn Hunsaker

Lynn Hunsaker is the CEO of ClearAction Continuum and a leading voice on the business case for customer experience management. She serves as a board member of the Customer Experience Professionals Association and holds multiple CX leadership credentials. Her firm focuses on helping organisations build CX management capabilities that drive sustainable competitive advantage through systematic customer intelligence, cross-functional alignment, and experience governance.

Her specific contribution is her rigorous focus on the economics of CX: the measurement frameworks, financial modelling, and business case methodology that allow CX professionals to translate customer outcomes into language that drives executive and board commitment. She has been a consistent voice on the challenge of proving CX ROI and has developed practical approaches to connecting CX investment to financial outcomes, making her a go-to resource for CX leaders who need to justify and sustain organisational commitment.

15. Bill Staikos

Bill Staikos is the founder and managing partner of Be Customer Led, where he helps organisations design CX strategies that are both profitable and purpose-driven. He has an extensive practitioner background in financial services CX and is an active LinkedIn voice on AI-driven CX strategy. His work focuses on the intersection of data strategy, experience design, and the organisational changes that enable customer-led growth.

His specific contribution is his forward-looking perspective on AI in CX strategy. He has argued that synthetic data will allow companies to test experience changes and predict customer reactions faster and with fewer privacy risks, and that AI-orchestrated experiences, where decisions happen in real time based on context and intent, represent the next major shift in how organisations create personalised journeys. This combination of financial services practitioner depth and emerging-technology orientation makes him a distinctive voice at the frontier of CX strategy.

The In-House Practitioners: CCOs and VPs Delivering CX at Enterprise Scale

These leaders are doing customer experience transformation from inside major organisations, building the capabilities, cultures, and systems that make great customer experience repeatable across hundreds of thousands of touchpoints.

16. Conny Kalcher

Conny Kalcher is Group Chief Customer Officer at Zurich Insurance Group and brings more than 30 years of experience in customer-centric leadership to one of the world's largest insurance organisations. She has been widely recognised across industry CX lists for her work making CX a genuine board-level priority inside a large, complex financial services organisation spanning dozens of markets and product lines.

Her contribution is her demonstration that customer-centric transformation is achievable inside a global insurer, where products are complex, distribution is multi-layered, and customer touchpoints span multiple jurisdictions. Her work has helped shift the conversation about CX from consumer-facing retail contexts to the regulated environments of financial services. She is a regular contributor to the global CX conference circuit and an active voice on what it takes to embed customer-experience thinking at enterprise scale in a traditionally product-driven industry.

17. Heather Garboden

Heather Garboden is Vice President of Customer Experience at American Airlines, one of the world's largest carriers by passenger volume. Her work sits at the intersection of operational complexity and passenger expectation, managing customer experience across an organisation where disruption, baggage, and scheduling create persistent friction points that CX strategy must navigate in real time rather than in controlled test environments.

Her contribution to practitioner-level CX thinking is her experience of delivering experience improvement in a scale-and-complexity context that no consulting engagement fully replicates. American Airlines operates thousands of daily flights across hundreds of destinations, and building consistent experience quality across that footprint requires governance, measurement, and cultural alignment that makes her perspective genuinely instructive for any CX leader working at enterprise scale. She was named in CX Network's Top 50 leaders to follow for 2026.

18. Jorie Sax

Jorie Sax leads the United Airlines Innovation Lab, where her work focuses on testing and scaling emerging technologies to improve the traveller experience. With more than 25 years of experience across legal, marketing, and partnerships functions, her role represents the convergence of technology strategy and CX delivery that defines the frontier of the discipline in 2026. She was named among CX Network's top 40 future CX leaders for 2026.

Her specific contribution is her leadership of experience innovation in a context where the customer relationship is high-stakes, highly regulated, and deeply operational. The United Airlines Innovation Lab has explored mixed reality, embodied AI, and other emerging technologies as tools for experience improvement rather than cost reduction alone. Her work is one of the clearest examples in global aviation of CX innovation being driven by someone with the operational depth to understand the constraints and the vision to work around them.

19. Calum Laming

Calum Laming is Chief Customer Officer at British Airways, one of the most visible CCO roles in European aviation. His work involves managing the CX implications of an airline whose routes span long-haul premium travel, short-haul leisure, and business travel, each with distinct expectations and friction patterns. CX leadership in aviation requires navigating the tension between brand promise, operational reality, and the volatile external factors of weather, regulation, and infrastructure constraints.

His contribution to the field is his leadership of a major CX function at an organisation where the customer journey involves multiple touchpoints often across days, and where service recovery is as strategically important as service delivery. His public engagement at industry events highlights the practical reasoning behind how a major carrier approaches the structural trade-offs in experience design. He was recognised in CX Network's list of top 40 future CX leaders for 2026.

20. Marion Boberg

Marion Boberg is Head of Customer Experience at Orange Belgium, where she leads CX strategy for a major European telecommunications provider serving millions of customers across multiple product lines. Her work involves managing the full customer lifecycle in a highly competitive telecom market where switching costs are low and customer expectations for digital, in-store, and service interactions are rising in parallel.

Her contribution is her practitioner-level perspective on what it actually takes to transform CX in a large European telco: the stakeholder management, data infrastructure, and team capability development that sit behind any visible improvement in customer satisfaction or NPS. She brings a consistent, operational lens to the CX leadership conversation that complements the more strategic or theoretical frameworks common in the advisory space. She was included in CX Network's Top 50 CX Leaders to Follow for 2026.

21. Manpreet Singh

Manpreet Singh is a Chief Customer Officer at CIMB, one of Southeast Asia's leading universal banks operating across nine markets. His work involves building customer-centric banking experiences across a highly diverse regional context, where language, regulation, digital infrastructure, and cultural expectations vary substantially from market to market. He was featured in CX Network's 2026 list of future CX leaders.

His contribution to global CX thinking is his articulation of what CX leadership looks like in a high-growth, multi-market Asian banking context. The CIMB customer base spans tens of millions of customers, and building consistent experience quality across that diversity while managing the pace of digital transformation requires governance and cultural alignment at a level of practical sophistication that offers real lessons for any large organisation operating across markets with different development levels.

22. Montserrat Padierna

Montserrat Padierna leads customer experience at Walmart Canada, one of the country's largest retailers. Her work spans the digital and physical dimensions of a retail CX function at enormous scale, connecting customer insight to operational decisions that affect millions of shopping journeys weekly. She was included in CX Network's Top 50 CX Leaders to Follow for 2026.

Her contribution is her practitioner experience of building customer-centric operating rhythms inside one of the most operationally complex retail environments in North America. Her work touches inventory, digital experience, service recovery, and the increasingly important intersection of e-commerce and in-store experience, and her perspective on what customer-centricity requires from a large retail operation is grounded in the day-to-day realities of running customer experience at scale in a cost-conscious, high-volume environment.

The Empathy and Human-Centred Experience Advocates

These leaders have made the human, emotional, and ethical dimensions of customer experience their central focus, arguing that technology and process alone cannot substitute for genuine empathy, connection, and respect.

23. Stacy Sherman

Stacy Sherman is an award-winning international keynote speaker, author, and Customer eXperience advisor who created the Doing CX Right methodology, drawing on more than 25 years of experience leading CX and marketing initiatives at brands including Verizon, AT&T, and Schindler Elevator Corporation. She is a recognised Global CX Guru, a 2026 ICMI Hall of Fame inductee, and host of the Doing CX Right podcast, ranked in the top 2 percent globally with more than 200 episodes.

Her specific contribution is her practitioner-based, commercially grounded approach to CX improvement: the argument that doing CX right is not about customer delight as an abstract goal but about building the discipline, the systems, and the accountability structures that allow organisations to consistently deliver on their promises. Her Doing CX Right methodology is used by companies of all sizes to improve retention, referrals, and brand reputation, and her LinkedIn Learning courses extend that practical guidance to a large global audience.

24. Dan Gingiss

Dan Gingiss is the founder of The Experience Maker, a consultancy and speaking practice focused on helping organisations create remarkable customer experiences. He had a 20-year corporate career at McDonald's, Discover, and Humana in customer experience, marketing, social media, and customer service leadership before moving into full-time speaking and advisory work. He is the author of The Experience Maker: How to Create Remarkable Experiences That Your Customers Can't Stop Sharing.

His specific contribution is his framework for creating shareable customer experiences: the argument that the most effective CX investments are the ones that generate word-of-mouth advocacy because customers share them unprompted. His background across three major US brands in very different industries gives him a practitioner credibility that translates well across sectors, and his focus on the connection between great experience and organic marketing makes him a distinctive voice among CX thinkers who tend to focus on retention rather than acquisition.

25. Mimi Nicklin

Mimi Nicklin is the founder and CEO of Empathy Everywhere, the world's most widely reaching organisational empathy training and engagement platform, and a three-time bestselling author. She has been named the number one EQ keynote speaker in the USA in 2026 and has reached more than 2.5 million people globally through keynotes and leadership experiences delivered across the USA, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia.

Her specific contribution is her evidence-based case for empathy as a business-critical capability in CX and organisational leadership. Her book Empathy at Work argues that decades of declining empathy levels in workplaces have created a disconnection that drives disengagement, poor customer experience, and innovation deficits. Her ALUR methodology provides practitioners with a practical framework for building listening-led leadership at scale, and her work with governments across several countries demonstrates the breadth of contexts in which her approach has been applied.

26. Nate Brown

Nate Brown is Head of Education and Enablement at Metric Sherpa and co-founder of CX Accelerator, a community of more than 4,000 customer experience leaders. He has worked across gaming, SaaS, retail, healthcare, and technology CX, building contact centres and CX functions from the ground up. He was named CX Influencer of the Year by CloudCherry and Most Impactful Influencer in CX by Kustomer in 2023.

His specific contribution is his focus on the practitioner community-building dimension of CX leadership: the argument that CX professionals advance faster and create more impact when they learn from each other in structured, peer-to-peer settings. CX Accelerator has become one of the most substantive practitioner communities in the field, and his ongoing work at Metric Sherpa on the intersection of human connection and technology in customer interactions makes him a distinctive voice on what healthy CX organisations look like from the inside.

27. Vinay Parmar

Vinay Parmar is a UK-based keynote speaker and CX thought leader who has built a public platform focused on putting humanity back at the centre of customer and employee experience. His background includes senior experience roles at major UK organisations, and his speaking and writing draw on the intersection of culture, leadership, and CX to argue that great experiences are built by people who feel genuinely valued and empowered, not by processes and technology imposed on disengaged teams.

His specific contribution is his accessible, story-led approach to the human foundations of customer experience, which has made his work resonant with audiences who find more technical or framework-oriented CX thinking abstract. His focus on the leader's role in creating the conditions for genuine service connects the CX discipline to the broader leadership development conversation in a way that practical managers and team leaders find genuinely actionable. He was included in CX Network's Top 50 CX Leaders to Follow for 2026.

28. Megan Burns

Megan Burns is a customer experience expert, author, and keynote speaker who has spent her career at the intersection of CX research, strategy, and storytelling. Her background includes senior analyst work at Forrester, where she developed frameworks for how organisations build internal CX leadership capability, and she now works as an independent consultant and speaker focused on helping CX leaders communicate the value of their work to stakeholders who are not yet convinced.

Her specific contribution is her focus on the storytelling and communication challenge of CX leadership: the argument that CX professionals often fail not because their strategy is wrong but because they cannot make the case for it in language that resonates with finance, operations, or the C-suite. Her practical frameworks for building the internal narrative around CX, and for using customer data and stories together rather than separately, fill a genuine gap in the CX thought leadership space.

The AI and Technology Frontier in CX

These leaders are working at the forefront of how artificial intelligence, data, and digital technology are reshaping what customer experience looks like and what it requires from the people who lead it.

29. Tiffani Bova

Tiffani Bova is a globally recognised technology and business growth strategist and fellow at The Futurum Group, a research and advisory firm. She is the author of Growth IQ: Get Smarter About the Choices That Will Make or Break Your Business, and has spent decades advising Fortune 500 companies on growth strategy at the intersection of technology, customer experience, and market transformation. She was featured in CX Network's top 40 future CX leaders for 2026.

Her specific contribution to CX thinking is her Growth IQ framework, which documents 10 growth paths available to organisations and the conditions under which each applies. Her consistent argument is that customer experience is not one of many growth levers but the strategic foundation from which other growth strategies either succeed or fail. Her ongoing research at The Futurum Group into how AI and digital technology are reshaping growth dynamics makes her a valuable voice for CX leaders who need to connect their work to boardroom conversations about revenue.

30. Daniel Newman

Daniel Newman is the CEO and Principal Analyst of The Futurum Group, one of the most cited technology research and analyst firms covering the intersection of AI, digital transformation, and enterprise business strategy. He is the author of multiple books on digital transformation, a prolific LinkedIn voice on enterprise technology trends, and a regular contributor to Forbes and Entrepreneur.

His contribution to CX thinking is his consistent articulation of how AI, cloud, and data technologies are changing what customer experience is technically capable of, and what organisational and leadership changes are required to realise that potential. His research on the gap between AI ambition and AI execution in large enterprises is particularly relevant for CX leaders trying to understand why technology investments are not always translating into experience improvement.

31. Sneha Iyer

Sneha Iyer is a CX and AI leader at Observe.AI, a platform focused on AI-powered contact centre intelligence and quality management. Her work involves helping organisations deploy AI tools that evaluate customer interactions, surface coaching insights for agents, and drive measurable improvements in CX quality at scale. She was included in CX Network's Top 50 CX Leaders to Follow for 2026.

Her specific contribution is her practical, implementation-level perspective on what AI in CX actually requires: not just the technology, but the change management, quality frameworks, and team enablement that determine whether AI tools improve or undermine the customer experience they are meant to enhance. Her focus on the agent experience as a precondition for great customer experience makes her a distinctive voice in the AI-in-CX conversation.

32. Kristi Faltorusso

Kristi Faltorusso is Chief Customer Officer at ClientSuccess and one of the most active LinkedIn voices on customer success, CX leadership, and the operational challenges of building and scaling customer-facing teams. Her background spans multiple CCO and VP-level customer success roles, and her public thought leadership on career development, team structure, and the evolving relationship between customer success and broader customer experience functions has built her a substantial following among practitioners.

Her specific contribution is her focus on the talent, culture, and leadership dimensions of CX delivery: not what great customer experience looks like from the outside but what it requires from the people and teams responsible for building it. Her consistent, candid writing on the realities of CX leadership, including the difficult conversations, the organisational politics, and the career development challenges, makes her a trusted voice for practitioners navigating the human side of the discipline.

The Regional and Global Innovators

These leaders are doing important customer experience work in contexts that rarely receive prominence in CX thought leadership dominated by North American and Western European perspectives, and their work offers lessons that the field needs to draw on more widely.

33. Ron Kaufman

Ron Kaufman is the founder of UP! Your Service and one of the world's most sought-after keynote speakers on service excellence and customer experience. Based in Singapore, he has spent more than three decades helping organisations build uplifting service cultures that deliver sustainable results. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller Uplifting Service! The Proven Path to Delighting Your Customers, Colleagues and Everyone Else You Meet, along with 14 other books on service and leadership.

His specific contribution is his development of the Uplifting Service framework, which provides a structured architecture for building service cultures that go beyond customer satisfaction to create genuine emotional uplift. His work across Singapore played a significant role in helping build the country's international reputation for exceptional service standards. The UP! Your Service consulting and training methodology has been applied in organisations across every continent, making him one of the most globally influential practitioners in service culture development.

34. Faran Niaz

Faran Niaz is a CX innovator and thought leader at HALA, a financial technology and services organisation based in the UAE. His work sits at the intersection of financial services, digital customer experience, and the rapidly evolving consumer expectations of the Gulf Cooperation Council market. He was named among CX Network's top 40 future CX leaders for 2026.

His specific contribution is his practitioner-level perspective on CX in a fintech context in one of the fastest-growing and most digitally advanced consumer markets in the world. The UAE market represents a combination of high expectations, diverse customer demographics, and intense competition between established banks and digital-native challengers, making his experience instructive for any CX leader navigating similar market dynamics.

35. Nermien Emad

Nermien Emad is a senior CX leader at TP Infinity in Saudi Arabia, where she leads customer experience strategy in one of the Middle East's most rapidly transforming economies. Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 has created significant urgency around customer experience across both private and public sector organisations, and her work reflects the specific challenges and opportunities of building CX capability in that context. She was included in CX Network's Top 50 CX Leaders to Follow for 2026.

Her specific contribution is her articulation of what CX transformation looks like in the Saudi Arabian context: the regulatory environment, the pace of digital adoption, the diverse customer base, and the leadership expectations that shape how CX strategy is designed and implemented. Her experience at TP Infinity gives her visibility across multiple client industries, and her perspective on the enablers and blockers of CX transformation across different organisational contexts in the Middle East offers insights that generalist CX frameworks often miss.

36. Alma Angela Olela

Alma Angela Olela is Head of Customer Experience at Jubilee Health Insurance Kenya, where she was named CX Leader of the Year at the CX Africa Awards in South Africa in 2025, one of the most significant customer experience recognitions on the African continent. Her work involves building customer-centric healthcare insurance experience at one of East Africa's largest and most respected insurance groups.

Her specific contribution is her demonstration that rigorous, award-winning customer experience leadership is being built in African healthcare contexts, not just in the consumer technology or financial services sectors that dominate global CX conversation. Her work at Jubilee Health Insurance involves navigating the intersection of health outcomes, insurance complexity, and customer trust in a context where the stakes of poor experience are particularly high. Her regional recognition signals the quality and consistency of the CX practice her team has built.

37. Portia Ayivor

Portia (Dzigbordi) Ayivor is a customer experience professional at Airport Women's Hospital in Accra, Ghana, where she is building CX practice in a healthcare context that reflects the growing sophistication of the discipline in West Africa. She was included in CX Network's Top 50 CX Leaders to Follow for 2026, reflecting her growing recognition within the global CX community.

Her specific contribution is her work in patient experience and healthcare CX in a Ghanaian hospital context, where the intersection of patient dignity, clinical quality, and service design creates a uniquely complex CX challenge. Her presence on the CX Network 2026 list alongside major corporate practitioners from Europe and North America reflects a broader recognition that excellent CX thinking is happening in healthcare contexts across Africa, and that the global field is enriched when those voices are heard.

38. Andre Luis Missano

Andre Luis Missano is a senior CX leader at Claro Brasil, one of Brazil's largest telecommunications providers. His work involves managing customer experience across a vast and diverse customer base in a market known for its intensity of competition, its digital infrastructure challenges, and its highly engaged consumer culture. He was included in CX Network's Top 50 CX Leaders to Follow for 2026.

His specific contribution is his practitioner perspective on what CX leadership looks like in a large South American telco, where the combination of geographic scale, economic complexity, and consumer sophistication creates CX challenges that are underrepresented in the global conversation. Brazil's mobile and broadband market is one of the most competitive in Latin America, and his experience building customer experience capability inside that environment offers lessons for CX leaders in any highly competitive, cost-sensitive, high-volume consumer market.

39. Scott Lee Holloway

Scott Lee Holloway is a CX strategist and practitioner at APS Bank in Malta, where he leads customer experience in a small island market that has undergone significant digital transformation in banking over the past decade. He was included in CX Network's Top 50 CX Leaders to Follow for 2026 and is an active contributor to the European CX practitioner community through speaking and writing.

His specific contribution is his grounded perspective on what customer-centric banking looks like in a context where the entire customer base is small enough that genuine relationship and community familiarity still shape expectations. His focus on digital CX in a market where physical banking relationships remain important offers a useful counterpoint to the dominant narrative of digital-first CX, and his willingness to share his work publicly through CX Network has made him a valued voice in the European CX community.

40. Tushar Joshi

Tushar Joshi is a customer experience leader at Schneider Electric in India, where he leads CX strategy for one of the world's leading energy management and automation companies across one of its largest and fastest-growing markets. His work involves building customer experience capability in a B2B industrial context where the customer relationship involves complex procurement, technical services, and long-term contracts. He was included in CX Network's Top 50 CX Leaders to Follow for 2026.

His specific contribution is his practitioner-level work on CX in a B2B industrial context in India, a market of enormous scale and complexity where digital transformation, infrastructure development, and energy transition are happening simultaneously. His experience at Schneider Electric offers insights into how CX in industrial settings differs from consumer-facing CX in its design requirements, measurement approaches, and success factors, adding geographic and sector diversity to the global CX conversation.

The Emerging Voices and Specialised Practitioners

These leaders are building distinctive contributions to the CX discipline through specialised expertise, emerging platforms, or sector-specific work that is expanding the field's reach and relevance.

41. Katie Stabler

Katie Stabler is the founder of CULTIVATE and co-author of the Amazon number one bestselling book Customer Experience 2, written with Katie Bowden, and author of CX-ISM. She was ranked among the top global CX thought leaders in 2024 and is a regular keynote speaker, trainer, and contributor at major CX conferences and forums. Her work focuses on helping organisations build customer-centric cultures that are sustainable, genuinely human, and designed around the needs of real customers rather than idealised personas.

Her specific contribution is her practical, culture-focused approach to CX development: the argument that the most important CX improvements are not made at the touchpoint level but at the cultural level, by building organisations where empathy, curiosity, and accountability for the customer experience are embedded in how decisions are made and how people are developed. Her book Customer Experience 2 provides a practical framework for the culture-first approach to CX transformation that she advocates in her speaking and training work.

42. Natalie Calvert

Natalie Calvert is the founder of HuddleCX and a customer experience specialist with a focus on contact centre transformation, digital CX, and the design of service operations that genuinely delight customers. She was included in CX Network's Top 50 CX Leaders to Follow for 2026 and is an active contributor to the UK CX community through speaking, writing, and consultancy work.

Her specific contribution is her focus on the contact centre as a CX asset rather than a cost centre, arguing that organisations that invest in agent development, technology, and customer-centric service design at the contact centre level create measurable competitive advantage. Her practical, operations-informed perspective on CX is particularly valuable for CX leaders working in service-intensive industries where the contact centre is the most important touchpoint in the customer relationship.

43. Sobia Ehsan

Sobia Ehsan is a CX leader at Babble, a UK-based technology services company, where she leads the customer experience function across a business-to-business environment. She was named among CX Network's top 40 future CX leaders for 2026, reflecting her growing profile as a practitioner voice on CX in the technology services sector.

Her specific contribution is her perspective on CX in a B2B technology services context, where the customer relationship is built over long contract cycles, involves multiple stakeholder contacts, and requires CX leadership that spans both the sales and post-sales experience. Her work reflects the growing recognition that B2B customer experience deserves the same rigour and investment as B2C, and her public engagement through CX Network contributes to that understanding across the practitioner community.

44. Amjad Khan

Amjad Khan is a CX transformation leader at Notting Hill Genesis, one of the UK's largest housing associations, where he is building customer-centric approaches to service delivery in a public service context. He was named among CX Network's top 40 future CX leaders for 2026, reflecting his work applying commercial CX disciplines in a social housing context where the stakes of poor experience for residents are particularly high.

His specific contribution is his demonstration that rigorous CX practice can and should be applied in public service and social housing contexts, not just in commercial consumer markets. His work at Notting Hill Genesis involves building resident experience frameworks in an organisation where residents often have fewer choices and greater vulnerability than typical commercial customers, making the ethical dimensions of CX design particularly salient.

45. Maranda Dziekonski

Maranda Dziekonski is Chief Customer Officer at Fexa, a facilities management software company, and one of the most vocal practitioners on the realities of building and scaling CX and customer success functions inside growing technology companies. She is an active LinkedIn voice, frequent podcast guest, and keynote speaker on customer success, CX leadership, and the organisational challenges of customer-centric growth. She was named among CX Network's top 40 future CX leaders for 2026.

Her specific contribution is her candid, practical perspective on the operational and leadership challenges of scaling a customer-facing organisation: the hiring decisions, the metrics, the team structures, and the leadership styles that determine whether a CX or customer success function grows into a genuine competitive advantage or remains a reactive support function. Her focus on the technology sector CCO experience brings practical depth to conversations about CX leadership that often stay at the level of strategy and principle.

46. Leandro Perez

Leandro Perez is a senior CX leader at Salesforce, where he works on the strategy and design of customer experience for one of the world's largest enterprise software companies. His focus is on helping organisations use Salesforce's platforms to design and deliver more connected, personalised, and effective customer journeys. He was named among CX Network's top 40 future CX leaders for 2026.

His specific contribution is his perspective on CX design and delivery from inside one of the most influential CX technology platforms in the enterprise market. His work at Salesforce gives him a distinctive vantage point on how organisations are actually using technology to attempt CX transformation, what is working, and what gaps remain between the ambition of CX technology investments and the experience they ultimately deliver to customers.

47. Aurelia Pollet

Aurelia Pollet is Chief Customer Officer at CarParts.com, where she leads CX strategy for one of the USA's leading e-commerce retailers of automotive parts and accessories. Her work involves building customer experience capability in an e-commerce context where product knowledge, logistics, and service intersect in ways that require significant operational and CX investment. She was included in CX Network's Top 50 CX Leaders to Follow for 2026.

Her specific contribution is her practitioner-level experience of building a customer-centric culture inside a specialist e-commerce business, where the customers are enthusiasts with high product knowledge and the operational challenges of automotive logistics create distinctive service and experience requirements. Her presence on the CX Network 2026 list reflects her growing profile as a voice on data-driven, operationally grounded CX leadership in e-commerce contexts.

48. Ricardo Saltz Gulko

Ricardo Saltz Gulko is the Managing Principal of Eglobalis Information, a CX and innovation research and advisory firm based in Germany. He is recognised among the global top thought leaders in customer experience by Thinkers360 and other ranking bodies, and is a frequent speaker and contributor to the European and global CX conversation. His work focuses on helping multinational organisations build customer-centric innovation strategies that connect experience design to business growth.

His specific contribution is his integration of innovation thinking and CX strategy: the argument that the organisations best positioned for sustained CX advantage are those that embed customer insight into their innovation processes, not just their service design. His base in Germany, and his work with European and global clients, makes him a distinctive voice in a field where advisory thought leadership is disproportionately concentrated in the USA.

49. Carlos Sanchez Sanz

Carlos Sanchez Sanz is Head of Customer Experience at Kia Spain, where he leads CX strategy and design for one of the Spanish market's fastest-growing automotive brands. His work involves building the customer-centric capabilities of a major automotive CX function in a market where digital, in-store, and service touchpoints are being redesigned around the electric vehicle transition. He was included in CX Network's Top 50 CX Leaders to Follow for 2026.

His specific contribution is his practitioner-level perspective on CX transformation in the automotive sector during the EV transition, a context where customer expectations are being reshaped by new purchase journeys, charging infrastructure questions, and the shift toward more direct customer relationships. His work offers lessons for any CX leader navigating industry-level disruption to the customer journey, and his Spanish market perspective adds geographic diversity to the CX conversation.

50. Alejandro Rodriguez Salvatierra

Alejandro Rodriguez Salvatierra is the Director of Customer Experience at Fuerte Group Hotels, a family-owned Spanish hospitality group with a portfolio of premium hotels. His work involves building the customer experience capability of a heritage hospitality brand in an industry where digital transformation, post-pandemic expectations, and sustainability concerns are reshaping what guests want and expect from their stay. He was included in CX Network's Top 50 CX Leaders to Follow for 2026.

His specific contribution is his perspective on CX in independent, family-owned hospitality: a context where the absence of corporate scale means CX investment must be exceptionally targeted, and where the personal, relational dimensions of hospitality experience require a different leadership approach than the process-driven CX of large hotel chains. His profile extends the field's conversation into the independent hospitality sector, demonstrating that rigorous CX leadership is not the exclusive property of large corporations.

Notable Voices We Almost Included

The global customer experience space has no shortage of people doing important work, and this list of 50 cannot capture all of them. Several names that almost made the final selection deserve mention. Phil Klaus, Chairman of the PK Customer Experience Institute and one of the most academically credentialled CX strategists globally, produces research that bridges customer experience theory and board-level strategy. Jill Raff, founder of the JillRaff Group and a specialist in hospitality-informed CX, brings a distinctive service industry lens that is underrepresented in the broader CX conversation. Kiri Sinclair, a New Zealand-based CX practitioner, represents the ANZ region's growing contribution to global CX thought leadership. Dennis Wakabayashi, a US-based digital marketing and CX strategist, brings a consistent focus on the intersection of digital experience and brand building that many CX practitioners find immediately actionable.

Common Mistakes in Customer Experience Leadership

The most common and costly mistake CX leaders make is treating customer experience as a project rather than a discipline. Projects have end dates, defined deliverables, and completion criteria. Customer experience has none of these. It requires sustained investment in culture, measurement, and leadership capability over years, not quarters, and organisations that approach it with a project mindset consistently find that their CX improvements plateau and erode as soon as the project sponsor moves on or the budget cycle changes.

The second most common mistake is measuring satisfaction when the business question is loyalty. Satisfaction scores tell you whether a customer felt okay about their last interaction. They do not reliably predict whether that customer will return, recommend, or increase their spending. Net Promoter Score, customer effort score, and more sophisticated retention and lifetime value metrics give a more accurate picture of the customer relationship, and organisations that focus their CX measurement on satisfaction risk optimising for the wrong outcome.

A third mistake is investing in CX technology before investing in CX culture. Contact centre AI, journey mapping software, and personalisation platforms can accelerate and scale CX delivery, but they cannot substitute for a leadership culture where employees feel empowered to resolve customer issues and take ownership of the customer's experience. Organisations that deploy technology into an indifferent or fearful employee culture typically find that the technology amplifies existing problems rather than solving them.

A fourth mistake is treating CX as the responsibility of a single function rather than as a cross-functional operating discipline. The customer experience is produced by every part of the organisation that touches a customer, from product design to billing to after-sales service, and CX teams that lack the mandate, the relationships, and the measurement frameworks to influence those functions will always be fighting fires rather than preventing them.

The final mistake worth naming is failing to connect CX investment to financial outcomes. Every leader on this list has, in one form or another, had to make the business case for customer experience investment. The leaders who do it well frame CX in terms of retention, revenue per customer, cost to serve, and lifetime value. The ones who struggle to sustain investment typically frame CX in terms of how customers feel rather than what customer experience delivers to the organisation financially.

For organisations working on the leadership culture that enables great CX, Jonno White facilitates executive team sessions that build the communication, alignment, and accountability foundations for any major transformation initiative. For more on this work, explore my blog post on thought leaders in change management at https://www.consultclarity.org/post/thought-leaders-change-management.

How Can Organisations Start Improving Customer Experience Leadership?

The clearest starting point is connecting leadership behaviour to customer experience outcomes at the strategic level. This means making customer experience a standing agenda item at the executive team level: not a quarterly metrics report but a genuine leadership conversation about specific experience gaps, the root causes behind them, and the decisions the leadership team needs to make to address them. The organisations that do this consistently outperform those that delegate CX leadership entirely to a CX function.

The second step is measuring what matters. Organisations should audit their current CX measurement against the question of whether the metrics they track actually predict the customer behaviours they care about: retention, repeat purchase, referral, and willingness to pay a premium. If the primary metric is satisfaction or complaint volume, consider adding or replacing with metrics that reflect the customer relationship rather than the most recent interaction.

The third step is mapping the employee experience alongside the customer experience. The leaders on this list are consistent on this point: sustainable CX improvement requires employee environments where people feel informed, empowered, and genuinely valued. This is not a separate HR initiative. It is the precondition for CX delivery, and organisations that invest in one without the other consistently find their CX improvements surface-level and fragile.

The fourth step is identifying the three to five moments that matter most in the customer journey: the touchpoints where customer decisions about loyalty, advocacy, and continued relationship are actually made. Most organisations spread CX investment thinly across every touchpoint rather than concentrating on the moments of highest impact, and the organisations with the strongest CX outcomes are typically those that have identified and redesigned those critical moments with the most rigour and investment.

Finally, organisations should invest in developing internal CX leadership capability rather than outsourcing CX strategy to external consultants. External expertise is valuable, but the organisations that build sustained CX advantage do so by developing internal leaders who understand the customer, can advocate for CX investment, and can build the cross-functional relationships that make CX improvement repeatable.

If your organisation needs a facilitator, workshop leader, or keynote speaker who can help leadership teams build the shared understanding and accountability for customer experience that drives sustainable improvement, Jonno White works with executives across corporates, schools, and nonprofits globally. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a customer experience thought leader?

A customer experience thought leader is a practitioner, researcher, author, or speaker who shapes how the field thinks about designing, delivering, and measuring the interactions between an organisation and its customers. The best CX thought leaders combine credible track records in the field with active public contributions that advance how practitioners and organisations approach customer experience as a discipline. They range from academics who study CX to consultants who advise on it to in-house leaders who build it at scale.

Why does customer experience matter more in 2026 than it did a decade ago?

Customer experience matters more in 2026 because the conditions that once made poor CX survivable have changed. Digital channels have made switching easier, online reviews have made poor experiences more visible, and customer expectations have been continuously reset upward by the service standards of the most customer-centric companies in the world. At the same time, Forrester research shows that only 3 percent of companies are genuinely customer-obsessed, meaning the gap between expectation and delivery is widening for most organisations even as the cost of that gap grows.

How do AI and technology change CX leadership?

AI and technology change CX leadership by expanding what is technically possible while increasing the risk that poorly deployed technology makes customer experience worse rather than better. The leaders on this list are consistent in their view that AI in CX is most valuable when it extends the capacity of empowered human teams rather than replacing human judgement and empathy. The organisations deploying AI most effectively in CX are those that have invested in their employees, their service culture, and their measurement frameworks first.

What is the difference between customer experience and customer service?

Customer service is a component of customer experience: it refers specifically to the assistance provided when a customer needs help, encounters a problem, or has a question. Customer experience is the broader term encompassing every interaction a customer has with an organisation across the entire relationship, from awareness and consideration through purchase, use, and advocacy. Great customer service in a single interaction does not guarantee great overall customer experience if the product, billing, delivery, or any other touchpoint in the journey fails to meet expectations.

What is the Working Genius framework and how does it relate to CX?

Working Genius is a team productivity and engagement framework created by Patrick Lencioni. It helps teams understand each member's innate gifts and frustrations across six types of work, enabling teams to align roles and responsibilities with what naturally energises each person. For CX teams and organisations building customer-centric cultures, Working Genius is relevant because team effectiveness and employee engagement are direct predictors of customer experience quality. Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator who works with teams to build the team dynamics that underpin sustainable performance. Reach out at jonno@consultclarity.org to discuss how Working Genius might support your team.

For more on this, check out my blog post '35 Best Employee Engagement Keynote Speakers' at https://www.consultclarity.org/post/employee-engagement-keynote-speakers.

Final Thoughts

Customer experience is at an inflection point. The AI transformation is expanding what is technically possible while raising the stakes of getting it wrong. The leaders on this list represent the clearest thinking available on how to navigate that moment: from the foundational thinkers who built the discipline, to the in-house practitioners who are building it daily at enterprise scale, to the emerging voices who are pushing the field into new geographies, industries, and frameworks.

The common thread across all 50 is that great customer experience is fundamentally a leadership challenge, not a technology challenge. It requires leaders who take genuine ownership of the customer's experience, build cultures where employees are informed and empowered, invest in measurement that reflects the customer relationship rather than the last interaction, and maintain the strategic commitment to CX improvement when short-term pressures push for cost reduction or speed over quality.

The organisations that get this right consistently outperform those that treat customer experience as a support function or a project. The leaders on this list are the ones who have worked out how to get it right, in contexts ranging from global aviation to African healthcare, from Belgian telecoms to Singapore's service culture. Following their work is one of the best investments any CX or leadership professional can make.

If your organisation is ready to invest in the leadership foundations for a genuinely customer-centric strategy, Jonno White works with executive teams through keynotes, workshops, and facilitated offsite sessions that build the alignment, communication, and accountability frameworks that great CX requires. Email jonno@consultclarity.org to start the conversation.

About the Author

Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, author of Step Up or Step Out, and leadership consultant who has worked with schools, corporates, and nonprofits around the world. His book Step Up or Step Out has sold over 10,000 copies globally, and his podcast The Leadership Conversations has featured 230+ episodes reaching listeners in 150+ countries. Jonno founded The 7 Questions Movement with 6,000+ participating leaders and achieved a 93.75% satisfaction rating for his Working Genius masterclass at the ASBA 2025 National Conference. Based in Brisbane, Australia, Jonno works globally and regularly travels for speaking and facilitation engagements. Organisations consistently find that international travel is far more affordable than expected.

To book Jonno for your next keynote, workshop, or facilitation session, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Sources

Forrester Research: Forrester 2024 US Customer Experience Index. Gallup: 2025 State of the Global Workplace report. Qualtrics XM Institute: 2025 and 2026 consumer experience trend research.

Next Read

Customer experience cannot be built by a CX function alone: it requires leadership alignment, team engagement, and the operating conditions that allow people to do their best work. For executive teams working to build those conditions, facilitated offsites are one of the highest-leverage investments available.

For more on the facilitators, formats, and frameworks that help leadership teams build the alignment they need to drive customer-centric transformation, keep reading: '21 Best Executive Team Offsite Facilitators' at

https://www.consultclarity.org/post/executive-team-offsite-facilitators