Customer Experience Magazine is profiling the top 10 Professionals and Influencers from our Top 50 CX Stars list.
Here we look at Number 5 in each category. Alison Lawrie of AkzoNobel, is today’s featured Professional, and our Influencer is Clare Muscutt, founder of CMXperience.
We welcome feedback on our CX Stars list, and all correspondence should be sent to paul@cxm.world.
Number 5
Alison Lawrie
Head of Customer Experience at AkzoNobel
Oxford-based Alison Lawrie has enjoyed a fantastic few years, which has seen her earn her Certified Customer Experience Professional qualification, and take home one of the most sought-after honours at the UK Customer Experience Awards in 2018 – Professional of the Year.
Alison is Head of Customer Experience, Quality & Continuous Improvement at AkzoNobel Decorative Coatings – the firm behind the world’s best-known paint brands, including the iconic Dulux.
Responsible for guiding the firm along its Customer Experience transformation roadmap, Alison lends her instinct for customer centricity to AkzoNobel’s full multi-channel experience, ensuring the Voice of the Customer remains at the centre of what they do.
Her talent was solidified during a successful, lengthy stint as the firm’s Customer Service Manager, before she moved up to the current role that led to awards success. Alison’s influence also ensured recognition in another category at the 2018 UKCXAs, with AkzoNobel winning the Bronze title for Best Business Change and Transformation at that same event.
Meanwhile, before Alison and colleagues were collecting gongs at Wembley Stadium with fellow UKCXA finalists in 2018, they were enjoying well-earned awards success at the British Coatings Federation Awards 2017.
At that event, Alison helped secure a win in the Customer Service Award for Transformation of a Paints Business category, which recognises the growing importance of customer service as a differentiator in the coatings industry.
Alison says: “I am hugely passionate about Customer Experience and truly believe it to be the single biggest differentiator a brand or business can have.”
Motivated and inspiring, Alison continues to place the customer at the heart of AkzoNobel’s operations, at a time when doing so is more important than ever before.
Number 5
Clare Muscutt
It’s been a rapid – but well-deserved rise to the top for Clare Muscutt, who two years ago turned the skills honed in senior CX leadership roles at big-name brands including Sainsbury’s towards founding and developing her own consultancy, CMXperience.
From its humble beginnings in her kitchen in Hackney, CMXperience has grown to become a trusted name in customer service transformation, while Clare’s own profile has also increased, with many recognising her as the inspirational CX Nomad, who blogged about her experiences traversing the globe as a digital nomad running a successful consultancy.
This, along with her popular social media output and keynote speaking engagements has led to Clare becoming one of the most prominent and valued millennial voices in CX today.
A winner of numerous awards over the years, including UK Customer Experience Professional of the Year, Clare is someone who believes in giving back, and in true millennial ‘pay it forward’ fashion, is helping more women follow her lead through free coaching.
That desire to help make CX a welcoming and fulfilling sector for women professionals was inspired by, among others, Maya Angelou, the hugely influential writer, poet, and civil rights activist, who Clare says taught her to “constantly bring my authentic self to everything I do”.
Clare says: “I founded my own consulting business on design thinking, and have seen it work in practice for every shape and size of organisation. Design thinking enables you to truly put people at the heart of everything!”
2020 looks set to be another exciting year for Clare, with a new book in the pipeline, among other projects, while CMXperience goes from strength-to-strength thanks to Clare’s dedicated team and her valuable past experience at the forefront of CX strategy delivery for various organisations.
Click here for profiles of our Number 6 Professionals and Influencers.