Theme #3

Beyond the Org Chart:
Designing Customer-Centred Organisations

From the customer’s vantage point, brands serve their wants and needs through a single, continuous relationship. Most enterprises, however, continue to operate as a collection of disparate departments, priorities, and reporting lines that often fragment that experience.

It’s a subject that cut across myriad discussions on stage: the imperative to align around a single view of the customer. Each individual brand experience draws on multiple teams, systems, and data sources, placing greater emphasis on how effectively decisions are coordinated across the business. The consensus among speakers was that CX is very much a reflection of organisational design.

Designing Around the Customer

Karen Ehrlich, Vice President – General Manager, Skincare at Estée Lauder, argued that CX transformations often succeed or fail long before technology even enters the conversation. As organisations work through their change programme, many leadership teams instinctively organise around functional boundaries as opposed to starting with the customer and working backwards. “This gives operating models, responsibilities, and processes a much stronger foundation to build on,” she said.

This view held throughout the event. Indeed, customers have little interest in which function owns a touchpoint or a particular experience; they simply expect every part of the brand to deliver on the same promise. Katy Howell, CEO of Immediate Future, unpacked the commercial consequences through the lens of social media, describing it as "everybody's issue." Every interaction now contributes to a brand's public standing, exposing any disconnect between customer promise and operational reality. She explained how AI-powered search is amplifying that effect, surfacing customer conversations during the discovery journey for future buyers. Brand reputation, customer experience, and operational execution are, then, becoming inseparable – turning internal cohesion into a source of commercial resilience as well as operational effectiveness.

_{^{Immediate Future's Katy Howell reflected on how to build operating models that deliver social CX.}}

Aligning Around Shared Outcomes

Breaking down silos, though, demands structural reform. It requires organisations to redefine how success is measured and create incentives that encourage every function to work towards the same customer outcome.

Henkel’s Marketing and Category Management Director Eve Kolesova illustrated this through the company's "Triple Win" framework, which ensures every decision delivers value simultaneously for shoppers, their retail partners, and the brand. The principle reflects a broader move away from optimising individual functions towards creating solutions that succeed across the wider ecosystem. Innovations rarely scale when they solve a problem for one stakeholder group yet generate a different problem for another.

This philosophy also depends on a richer understanding of customer data. Throughout the sessions, speakers frequently expressed the importance of connecting fragmented information and unifying shared knowledge to inform decision-making across the enterprise. AI is making insight abundant – the advantage now belongs to whoever turns it into coordinated action.

_{^{Eve Kolesova presented a masterclass on how to turn shopper behaviour into category growth.}}

Building Connected Experiences

The Summit also challenged the assumption that digital transformation inevitably reduces the importance of human or physical experiences. Instead, speakers described a future in which technology removes friction while people create confidence.

Autotrader’s Chief Customer Officer Ian Plummer observed that customers increasingly want to complete much of the purchasing journey digitally, while still valuing the reassurance, expertise, and trust that physical environments provide. Asif Aziz, Retail Director at BT Group, shared a similar perspective, explaining how the company’s retail estate is evolving from traditional phone shops into “community hubs where customers can seek advice on digital safety, connected technology, and emerging services.”

These examples point to a wider evolution in CX strategy. Leading organisations are engineering digital and physical touchpoints as complementary elements of the same customer relationship, allowing each channel to play to its strengths. AI may increasingly orchestrate interactions behind the scenes, but the moments that shape trust, confidence, and loyalty remain deeply human.

_{^{Asif Aziz offered insights into BT Group’s human-centred approach to CX.}}

Other Soundbites that Stuck:

_{Customer experience belongs to every employee across our entire operational division, not just the customer services team.}

^{Johanna Marks, Head of Customer Service,}
^{UK Hydrographic Office}

_{Organisational alignment is about getting everyone following the same path}
_{so that everybody, from technology teams to marketing, knows the}
_goal.

^{Zack Wragg, Senior Product Owner–Digital Commerce Transformation,}^{Merlin Entertainments}

_{Lead with how you can help the customer. And keep out of your own internal structure and internal speak so that messaging is actually digestible.}

^{Brian Flanagan, Head of Public Websites,}^HSBC

Numbers Worth Knowing:

_{The Silo Struggle: 60% of organisations identify internal silos and weak cross-team collaboration as the single biggest barrier to meeting customer expectations.}

_{Source: CCW Europe.}
_{The State of Customer Management in 2026}

_{The Disconnect Problem: Only 9% of organisations report having truly cross-functional involvement in the design and evolution of customer processes.}

_{Source: CCW Europe.}
_{The CX Maturity Index}

_{The Context Crisis: Less than 10% of organisations deliver a truly seamless experience where customer history and context are fully preserved across all touchpoints.}

_{Source: CCW Europe.}
_{The CX Maturity Index}

What's Next?

The 2027 edition of the CCW UK Summit is already in the making – in the calendar 11th – 13th May. You can register now to take advantage of some early bird pricing.

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If you can’t wait until then, we’ve got plenty more you can get involved in:

CCW Europe Summit

5th – 7th October, 2026

Amsterdam, The Netherlands

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CCW UK Executive Exchange

2nd – 4th November, 2026

London, The UK

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