The top 50 customer experience professionals

Customer experience is a topic that is earning ever-increasing attention, not only from marketers but colleagues across their businesses and in company boardrooms.

Far from being a buzzword, CX is constantly gaining traction as a key differentiator for businesses in all sectors, which is why Marketing Week, Zone and Cognizant have partnered for the second successive year to announce the new members of the CX50.

This list celebrates the 50 professionals currently doing the most to foreground customer experience and fulfil its potential – both in their brands and across the UK’s consumer marketplace today. The individuals we have identified come from a variety of industry sectors and occupy roles as diverse as chief marketing officers, startup founders, chief technology officers and general managers. The full list of 50 names can be found in the table below.

READ MORE: Download the profiles of the CX50 inductees here

Methodology

In order to compile the CX50, Marketing Week, Zone and its parent company Cognizant used their combined editorial and professional expertise, as well as a number of publicly available information sources, to generate a shortlist of companies with impressive CX achievements in the past year. We identified the individual CX leaders working for them, and also included individuals known to have been at the forefront of CX delivery for a number of years.

We then used three key criteria to whittle this shortlist down to the final 50: innovation (adopting new processes, technologies and ideas to deliver best-in-class CX); influence (successfully making the case for CX in their businesses and beyond); and impact (the tangible results of their efforts in terms of financial and brand measures, as well as evidence of business transformation). We assessed all individuals based on the totality of their achievements across these three metrics.

Reflecting the many different faces of CX and the collaboration needed to achieve progress, we looked at a range of industry sectors and job functions to find those excelling in the field. The variety of job titles present in the CX50 demonstrates that this is not just a concern for marketers, but also technologists, digital specialists, CEOs and company founders.

READ MORE: How customer experience is building brands and businesses

The CX50 in full