About CXellence

CXellence was born from Manuela Pifani’s desire to apply her passion for building customer-led businesses to helping a broader number of organisations in their CX transformation journey to maximise the impact and ROI from CX initiatives.

Customer-centric companies are proven to be more profitable and grow faster, but in reality, only a few organisations have happy and loyal customers. In an ever-evolving world of behavioural and technological change, many invest in transformational initiatives which are primarily aimed at increasing sales or productivity or reducing costs, with limited results in terms of customer experience.

We all want to be the catalyst who leads our organisation to deliver an excellent experience and become the brand of choice for customers, creating sustainable competitive advantage and profitability growth. However, many leaders sometimes find it difficult to influence investment decisions towards customer priorities:

They may get stuck inside the labyrinth of data and feedback, unable to generate clear insight on who their customers are and their needs, motivators and decision drivers;
Other times they struggle to identify the most profitable CX strategy and set a clear vision;
Sometimes they can get bogged down with bureaucracy and low impact projects, which don’t deliver good-enough results;
Some may have had success in the past, but they now reached a plateau and cannot move the dial further on customer and business performance;
Or others may simply have limited team bandwidth or skills to successfully joggle all the priorities.

Lack of focus on improving these essential CX management capabilities will lead them to more frustrations, as they will get stuck in a vicious circle of tactical initiatives and small budgets, which will not be impactful enough. They won’t be able to remove process inefficiencies and channel silos or re-focus proposition and journey design around customer needs and outcomes, ultimately resulting in a progressive decrease in customer satisfaction and loyalty and, consequently, business profitability.

But it does not have to be like this!

During over 20 years as a CX leader, I have learned that customer experience excellence does not happen by chance but is the result of a carefully co-designed and well executed insight-led CX strategy and transformation, which sets a clear North Star vision and roadmap, and progressively aligns the hearts and minds of the whole organisation behind its delivery.

Differently from many in the sector, I have walked in your shoes in CX Director roles for large financial services and retail organisations in the UK and across Europe. I understand the challenges and issues you face and the ups and downs of the journey towards CX excellence, as well as the ROI opportunities and success drivers. This hands-on business-side experience, coupled with the use of my multi-award-winning proprietary CXM frameworks, collaborative co-design techniques and proven solutions, will help you fully unlock the power of ‘CX by design’ and maximise the impact and ROI of your CX initiatives.

I will help you orchestrate:

Intentional and memorable customer experiences that deliver your brand promises;
Seamless omnichannel customer journeys to best meet customer needs and expectations, easily and efficiently;
Emotionally engaging interactions and optimal brand-aligned customer outcomes to generate brand loyalty and advocacy;
Customer-centric mindsets, behaviours and culture embedded across the organisation, supported by empowered and engaged employees;
And most importantly, clear results by focusing on what matters most to your customers and has the biggest impact on your business performance.

You now have a choice.

You can continue to operate at your current pace, or you can make a change. We are facing a challenging time, but I see this as an opportunity rather than a risk. My proven CXM frameworks, solutions and intuition will help you maximise the impact and ROI of your CX initiatives and boost your brand to the next level through:

A step change in the way your organisation thinks about customers - from the Board to the frontline;
Insight-led and collaborative transformational activities, leading to strong CX results and ROI, fast;
Clear exec buy-in to the CX vision and delivery roadmap to generate sustainable competitive advantage for your organisation;
Effective CX management operationalised consistently across a culturally customer-centric organisation.

If this is your goal, contact me now. I would be delighted to work with you to fully unlock the value from your CX investments.

Manuela Pifani

About Manuela Pifani

The Top 20 Global CX Leaders 2022 who won the Insight Award, a Top 10 CX Influencer 2021 and the winner of 18 prestigious awards, including UK CX Professional of the Year, Manuela is currently one of the most renowned independent CX consultants and thought leaders in the UK.

Differently from many in the sector, for over 20 years, she has been in the trenches. She previously spent 15 years as CX Director for large Financial Services and Retail organisations across Europe like Barclays, Royal Bank of Scotland, Direct Line Group (incl. the brands Direct Line, Churchill, Privilege and Green Flag), ASDA and Kingfisher (incl. the brands B&Q, ScrewFix, Castorama and Brico Depot). She helped them transform the way they thought about their customers and radically improved CX across the stages and touchpoints of the end-to-end customer journey, always generating higher NPS and brand preference, while increasing revenues and lowering operating costs and customer complaints.

Having walked in their shoes, she understand the ups and downs of the journey towards CX excellence, as well as the ROI opportunities and success drivers.

By working together, Manuela can help you co-design a winning brand-aligned and insight-led customer strategy, orchestrate seamless omnichannel journeys and boost your CX and cultural transformation to deliver intentional and memorable customer experiences, which will increase customer loyalty and, ultimately, help you to stand out from the competition and generate clear business results and sustainable profitability growth.

If this is your goal, get in touch now.

Some endorsements from Manuela’s corporate career

“I am extremely fortunate to know a lot of people who have chosen Customer Experience to be their profession. To some, a profession is a job, To others, it is a vocation. Manuela is a CX Professional who brings the vocation of CX to life - brilliantly. The true epitome of the type of person a business needs to ‘operationalise CX’, Manuela is award winning for a reason - she possesses the skill, capability and personality to influence people at all levels of an organisation to become demonstrably customer centric. Manuela is a truly inspirational CX Leader.”

— Ian Golding, Global CX consultant, Customer Experience Consultancy, UK

“At Direct Line Group Manuela strongly demonstrated her Customer Experience and strategy setting expertise. Starting from ground zero and with a big catchup agenda Manuela set the strategic direction for a large scale transformation of CX and then drove that through into execution over multiple years. This was a major undertaking requiring the mobilisation of, and collaboration across, multiple business areas behind a clear set of priorities. Manuela was particularly impressive at presenting and influencing at an Exec and Board level to get buy-in to the overall programme This led to very significant gains across all brands and journeys in both NPS and Net Ease culminating in a raft of awards in recognition of the transformation that we had undertaken and the standards that we had achieved. Manuela left a strong legacy in terms of a high capability team with a strong combination of analytical rigour, change implementation skills and teamwork, which has helped towards a continuing improvement across our journeys and metrics long after her move to Kingfisher.”

— Mark Evans, Marketing Director, Direct Line Group, UK

“Manuela has an incredible grasp of all the elements that comprise customer experience across complex (eg multi channel, multi brand) organisations.
She is able to draw out meaningful strategic insight from the huge heap of customer interactions and feedback programmes across and organisation, re-purposing historic schemes, and present this to anyone in the organisation from a new starter to the chairman and CEO.
Cleverly, when Manuela explains some issue she has found, its impact on customers and the P&L, the solution often becomes self evident. In this way, she drives a phenomenal amount of positive change across a company. Creating a real excitement around how things can be much better for customers and colleagues alike.
Manuela also builds a strong and capable team around her of high performing individuals. Its a real pleasure to watch her and her team diligently shape, influence and progress the customer agenda. ”

— Julian Elliott, Director of Customer & Multi-Channel Experience, Direct Line Group, UK