Whether you refer to digital transformation, customer experience transformation, or sustainable transformation, the most important success factor is often the same, whatever the industry. It is all about the role leaders play in evolving the culture of their organisation. As my colleague Katy Tynan sums it up, this is more about leadership change than about change management.

Having worked with dozens of clients in different industries in helping them to transform their organisations, many executives want to focus on their competitors and their industry and consider their case to be unique because they’re either in a regulated industry or in a fast-moving environment.

In my experience, it is better to focus on what is common to any organisation and what takes the most time to evolve: culture. You can’t really change a culture. You share a vision in the hope that employees will evolve their behaviors. And leaders play a key role in that by embodying change.

If you don’t start your executive board meetings or your management meetings with a client story or a client metric, if you don’t truly listen to clients, if you don’t talk to them, if you don’t open a bank account on their behalf, then you can’t really embody change and ask your employees to be customer-obsessed. This is especially true in CX transformation, where it is key to take an outside-in perspective to learn from best practices in other verticals or other industries. More often than not, CMOs and CX leaders I speak to have questions about how they can demonstrate the value of CX to their management, but they also forget to embody the change needed to become customer-obsessed.

Come learn from Guy Flament, former global CEO at Yves Rocher, at Forrester’s Executive Leadership Exchange at CX EMEA on June 22/23 in London.

I am very honored to have the opportunity to discuss all these topics with Guy Flament, former global CEO at Yves Rocher, a leading beauty brand with over 1.5 billion Euros and a presence in 100-plus countries across 3,000 shops! Guy and his team elevated the omnichannel customer experience a tthe company, with Yves Rocher consistently ranking among the top three brands (across all industries) for CX in France.

Guy has kindly accepted the invitation to join a fireside chat with me during our Executive Leadership Exchange program, where selected CMOs and chief experience officers will join us at CX EMEA on June 22 and 23, to discuss how to build culture and performance through customer-obsessed leadership. It will be very interesting to hear from a former CEO about how he fostered the emergence of a CX function, boosted Yves Rocher’s CX culture, and measured the value of CX across the organization.

These VIP leaders will also benefit from an exclusive executive lunch and networking session, an interactive workshop session led by my colleagues Mary Beth Kemp and Richard Sheahan, and a facilitated roundtable discussion led by my colleague Dipanjan Chatterjee.

Last but not least, attendees will also be able to attend the full two-day conference at the InterContinental London — The O2 hotel, with great keynote speakers, including Alison Broussy from Accor Hotels and Michela Cocco from Nespresso. For more information on the content that will be delivered at these keynotes, have a look at my colleague Maxie Schmidt’s blog post on the lies we tell ourselves and why companies aren’t optimising value for customers. For more details about the other track sessions and the conference itself, check out our dedicated website here.

If you’re interested in joining the Executive Leadership Exchange, feel free to contact your account manager or email us.