in this issue
Leading Transformational Change
Why the biggest challenge in CX isn’t technology; it’s leading people through it.
by Execs In The Know
Customer experience (CX) leaders have spent the past several years navigating an unprecedented pace of disruption. Artificial intelligence (AI), evolving customer expectations, economic pressure, and constant organizational change have forced businesses to rethink not only how they serve customers, but how they operate internally. Yet while technology often dominates the conversation, many transformation efforts continue to fall short for a much simpler reason: organizations underestimate the human side of change.
The most successful CX transformations aren’t defined by the platforms organizations implement, but by the trust they build, the cultures they cultivate, and the leaders who help employees adapt with confidence. In this article, we explore why leading transformational change has become one of the most critical capabilities for today’s CX executives, and how organizations can build the resilience needed to keep both employees and customers engaged through continuous change.
Transformation Isn’t Optional
There was a time when transformation meant a defined project. A start date, an end date, a steering committee, a champagne toast when the new system went live. That era is over. Gartner’s research on organizational change1 describes today’s environment plainly: change is no longer episodic or contained within a single initiative. It has become a continuous condition, one that requires new mindsets and new approaches to leadership rather than a new phase-gated plan.
That shift matters more in CX than almost anywhere else in the business. Customers don’t experience your org chart. They experience the sum of every decision your company makes about people, process, and technology, all at once, in real time. When transformation becomes permanent, CX becomes the place where every unfinished change shows up first.
Most CX leaders already understand what needs to change. The technology decisions, the journey redesigns, the AI use cases: these are the easy part to name. What’s genuinely hard is leading the people who have to make the change real, day after day, while still answering the phone, still working the queue, still facing the customer who has no idea any of this is happening.
The Biggest Barrier Isn’t Technology
If you’ve sat in an executive board meeting in the last few years, you already know this. The conversation starts with a platform decision and ends with a conversation about culture, trust, and whether the frontline believes any of this will work.
Gartner’s HR practice put a number on the problem, and it’s a sobering one. Only 32% of business leaders say the last change they led actually achieved healthy adoption among employees,2 meaning employees acted on the change, did so in a reasonable timeframe, and weren’t left burned out or disengaged in the process. Even more telling: the same research found that 79% of employees report low trust in organizational change. Not skepticism about one project. Low trust in the very idea that change, in general, will be handled well.
McKinsey’s long-running research on transformation tells a similar story from a different angle. Across years of surveying executives, the finding hasn’t moved: roughly 70% of transformation efforts fail to hit their goals,3 and the reasons cited most often have nothing to do with the technology itself. Insufficient aspiration, weak engagement across the organization, and underinvestment in building the capabilities people need to work differently top the list.
So why do so many CX transformation plans still open with a technology roadmap and treat the people plan as an appendix?
Why Leaders Must Become Change Leaders
Here’s the uncomfortable part for a lot of executives: being good at running a customer experience organization and being good at leading people through disruption are not the same skill. You can be excellent at journey mapping, service design, and workforce planning and still watch a transformation stall because you led it the way you’d lead a steady-state operation.
Leaders instinctively try to inspire adoption. They paint the vision, they hold the town hall, they roll out the new mission statement. That approach works, but only in an environment of high trust. When trust in change is already low, which describes most large organizations today, the inspirational approach falls flat. Gartner’s recent modeling found that when change trust is low, only about a quarter of changes led primarily through inspiration achieve healthy adoption.4
What works instead is what’s called “routinizing change”: helping employees treat change as a normal part of how work gets done rather than a disruptive event to survive. That’s a fundamentally different leadership posture. It means less time spent on the big vision speech and more time spent helping people build the habits and instincts to handle whatever comes next, because something always comes next.
This isn’t a new idea, even if the language around it is new. John Kotter’s classic Harvard Business Review research5 on why transformation efforts fail identified the same root cause three decades ago: companies skip the hard, unglamorous work of building genuine buy-in and communicating a vision people can act on, and they pay for it later. Kotter’s research found that well over half of the transformations he studied stumbled in the very first phase, largely because leaders underestimated how difficult it is to move people out of their comfort zone.
Thirty years of AI platforms, automation waves, and reorganizations later, that first phase is still where most transformations quietly die.
Managing Up: Translating Vision into Reality
Leading transformation means managing in every direction, not only guiding teams through change, but helping executives understand what it takes to make change successful. CX leaders increasingly find themselves in the middle: translating ambitious business goals into realistic plans, connecting emerging technology to meaningful outcomes, and creating the focus teams need to execute effectively.
A critical part of this role is influencing the C-suite with clarity and perspective. As AI and transformation continue to dominate executive conversations, CX leaders must help shift discussions from what technology can do to where it can create measurable value. The strongest leaders bring forward customer insights, operational realities, and frontline perspectives to help executives make informed decisions about where to invest, where to experiment, and where to hold back.
That also means setting realistic expectations both above and below. Transformation rarely happens as quickly or as simply as initial enthusiasm suggests. New capabilities require time, testing, process changes, training, and adoption. Leaders who establish a shared understanding of what success looks like, what resources are required, and what challenges may arise create stronger alignment and reduce the risk of disappointment later.
In the current AI landscape, CX leaders also play a critical role in translating hype into reality. With new tools and possibilities emerging every day, organizations can easily fall into the trap of chasing innovation without a clear purpose. Effective leaders help teams and executives separate meaningful opportunities from distractions by asking practical questions: Does this solve a real customer or business challenge? Does it improve the employee experience? Are we prepared to support the change required to make it successful?
Perhaps one of the most important responsibilities of a transformation leader is protecting teams from initiative overload. When every new priority is positioned as urgent, employees are left navigating competing demands with limited capacity. Strong leaders create discipline around prioritization, helping organizations determine what matters most, what can wait, and what may need to stop altogether. Saying “not yet” can be just as important as saying “yes.”
The role of the CX leader is not simply to accelerate change. It is to create the conditions where the right changes can succeed.
Trust as the Foundation for Transformation
Trust isn’t a soft metric you check at the end of an engagement survey. It’s the operating condition that determines whether every other part of your transformation plan will work.
Think about what you’re asking your frontline teams to do. Learn a new tool while still hitting service levels. Adopt a new process while the old one hasn’t fully been retired. Trust that the leadership team asking for this has their best interest in mind, even after the last three initiatives asked the same thing and delivered mixed results at best. That’s the emotional backlog that happens when employees are managing overlapping, concurrent transitions, not a single clean change.
What would it take for your frontline team to believe the next initiative is different?
Building that belief isn’t about a better internal communications plan. It’s about consistency between what leadership says and what leadership does when the transformation gets uncomfortable. Does the organization actually reward the behaviors it’s asking for, or does it quietly keep measuring people against the old model while asking them to act on the new one? Employees notice that gap faster than any dashboard will show it to you.
Keeping Customers at the Center During Change
It’s easy to lose sight of the customer when the internal work of transformation gets hard. But the connection between how your employees are experiencing change and how your customers experience your brand is not theoretical.
Harvard Business Review’s reporting on this connection is worth sitting with. Research that traced Glassdoor employee satisfaction scores against the American Customer Satisfaction Index found a direct statistical relationship: a one-star improvement in employee satisfaction correlated with a meaningful improvement in customer satisfaction,6 and the effect was more than twice as strong in service-heavy industries like retail, travel, and financial services, where employees and customers interact constantly.
That’s the part of transformation planning that’s easiest to skip and most expensive to skip. A confused, exhausted, undertrained employee cannot deliver a great customer experience no matter how good the new platform is. Customer experience has also stopped being the sole property of the CX team. Cross-functional ownership of CX makes the case that standout experiences today are built through collaboration across departments that used to operate in silos, not through a single team’s heroics. If engineering, operations, and frontline service aren’t aligned during the transformation itself, the customer will feel the seams.
Lessons from Organizations Getting It Right
The organizations pulling this off share a pattern, and it isn’t a bigger technology budget.
McKinsey’s research on successful transformations found that companies willing to move people, not just process and technology, saw dramatically better outcomes. Organizations where senior leaders replaced team members who weren’t genuinely committed to the change saw a 29% success rate, compared with just 6% where leadership kept uncommitted people in place.7 The same research found that dedicated change agents, employees given real time and mandate to model new behaviors for their peers, had an outsized impact on success, and were twice as likely to report success in shifting organizational culture specifically.
Notice what’s missing from that list. No mention of the technology stack. The differentiator was leadership’s willingness to address the human side of the equation directly, even when it was uncomfortable.
level with their teams about that, and then help them get good at it, build organizations that bend instead of break.
Senior Vice President and Global Head
of Member Services at Travelzoo
Turning Strategy into Action
While every transformation journey looks different, successful organizations tend to share a few common practices.
Begin by taking an honest assessment of where your organization stands today. Identify the operational, cultural, or technological barriers preventing progress, and determine where meaningful change will create the greatest impact. Effective transformation starts with a clear understanding of the gap between the current state and the future vision.
Next, broaden the conversation beyond internal teams. Customers, partners, suppliers, and other stakeholders often provide valuable perspectives that strengthen transformation efforts. Bringing these voices into the planning process creates greater alignment and increases the likelihood of long-term success.
Finally, never overlook the employee experience. Every transformation ultimately succeeds or fails through the people responsible for delivering it. Organizations that invest in listening to employees, addressing persistent pain points, and creating an environment where teams feel supported are better positioned to sustain change long after the initial rollout.
Building a Culture That Embraces Change
If change is now permanent, culture has to be built for it, not retrofitted after the fact. That means training people’s instincts, not just their task lists. Gartner’s framework calls these “change reflexes,” core skills practiced often enough that they become second nature rather than a special skill deployed only when a big initiative launches. Recent research identified six of these reflexes as having the greatest impact on healthy adoption, and found that employees build them through small, everyday practice, not through a single training session tied to a single rollout.8
For CX leaders, this reframes the job. Building a change-ready culture isn’t a project you launch alongside the AI rollout. It’s an ongoing discipline, closer to how you’d think about coaching a team’s fundamentals than how you’d think about a change management checklist attached to a single initiative.
What would your organization look like if adapting to change was simply part of the job description, for everyone, all the time?
The New CX Leader Skill Set: Building the Capacity to Lead Through Change
Leading transformation requires more than a strong strategy. It requires leaders who are willing to continuously evolve themselves. The pace of change, particularly around AI, means yesterday’s expertise is not enough. CX leaders must become lifelong learners, actively building their own understanding of emerging technologies, evolving customer expectations, and the capabilities their organizations will need next.
That starts with investing in themselves. Leaders do not need to become technical experts in every new tool or trend, but they do need enough knowledge to ask better questions, challenge assumptions, and make informed decisions. Staying curious and informed allows leaders to distinguish between meaningful innovation and short-lived hype.
They must also create systems for knowledge sharing across their organizations. Transformation cannot depend on a handful of experts or a single innovation team. Leaders need to build environments where teams can learn from one another, share what is working, surface challenges, and develop new skills together. This may mean creating communities of practice, identifying internal champions, investing in training, or bringing in outside expertise when needed.
At the same time, successful transformation requires leaders to remain nimble without becoming reactive. The organizations that thrive will not be the ones that chase every new development, but the ones that can quickly evaluate change, make thoughtful decisions, and adapt when circumstances evolve. Speed matters, but speed without direction creates confusion and change fatigue.
This is where community becomes an invaluable resource. No CX leader is navigating this level of disruption alone, and some of the most valuable insights come from peers who are solving similar challenges in real time. Engaging with industry communities, exchanging perspectives, and learning from others’ successes and missteps can help leaders make better decisions while avoiding the temptation to operate in isolation.
The future of CX leadership will belong to those who can balance curiosity with judgment, urgency with intention, and innovation with the human needs of the teams they lead.
‘why,’ listen to concerns, and show employees how change helps them better serve customers and grow professionally, people move from feeling impacted by change to becoming advocates for it.
Vice President, Customer Service
at Michael Kors
The Future Belongs to Adaptive Organizations
The organizations that will win the next decade of CX aren’t the ones with the most advanced technology stack. They’re the ones whose people can absorb the next change, and the one after that, without burning out or checking out. Technology will keep accelerating. The half-life of any given tool or platform keeps shrinking. The only durable advantage left is an organization that can metabolize change faster than its competitors, without sacrificing the trust of the people doing the work or the customers on the receiving end of it.
CX leaders don’t get to opt out of transformation. The technology will keep coming, the reorganizations will keep coming, and customer expectations will keep rising regardless of what’s happening internally. The leaders who separate themselves aren’t the ones with the cleanest roadmap. They’re the ones who understood, going in, that the roadmap was never really the hard part. The technology was always going to arrive. The only real question was whether leadership had built enough trust to ask people to carry it.
Article Links
- https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/organizational-change
- https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-07-08-gartner-hr-research-finds-just-32-percent-of-business-leaders-report-achieving-healthy-change-adoption-by-employees
- https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/transformation/our-insights/perspectives-on-transformation
- https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/adopting-change-in-the-workplace
- https://hbr.org/1995/05/leading-change-why-transformation-efforts-fail-2
- https://hbr.org/2023/04/engaged-employees-create-better-customer-experiences
- https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/successful-transformations
- https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-10-09-gartner-hr-research-finds-less-than-half-of-employees-achieved-the-change-goals-set-by-their-organization