What the Best CX Leaders Are Doing Differently in 2026: Lessons From 50 Executives Transforming Customer Experience

CX Current's 2026 Top 50 Leaders Transforming CX list honors executives at Delta, UPS, Bank of America, United Airlines, CVS Health, Airbnb and more than 40 other companies. Taken together, their profiles describe a short list of shared practices. Most of these leaders let AI absorb routine work and save their people for the conversations that call for judgment. Many mine customer conversations for evidence of what's broken elsewhere in the business. And the ones with the strongest results tended to clean up their workflows and knowledge before they automated anything.

CX Current named 50 executives to its Top 50 Leaders Transforming CX list this year. They run contact centers, customer operations, member experience and brand for airlines, banks, insurers, health plans, telecom and energy providers, and retailers. The scale varies enormously, from TD's North American customer operations group, which handles close to 60 million calls a year, to Great Lakes Credit Union and its roughly 110,000 members.

The list groups honorees into five categories. Catalysts use AI to take repetitive work off people's plates so they can bring judgment and empathy to customers. Operating Architects redesign workflows and operating models. Interpreters turn what customers say into signals for change, and Pathfinders connect channels, teams and technology so the journey feels simple from the outside. Trust Builders focus on consistency, accountability, access and culture.

The categories show where each leader puts most of their energy, though the profiles share more than the labels let on. A bank operations chief and a pest control marketer describe the same frustration with avoidable calls, and an airline brand executive talks about trust in much the same language as a credit union's experience officer. What follows are the practices that turned up most often across the 50 profiles, told largely in the honorees' own words.

Seven practices the 2026 honorees share

1. Dividing the work between AI and people

Nearly every honoree who discussed AI described the same division of labor. Srikant Narasimhan, who leads enterprise customer experience and insights at CVS Health, has said that "AI takes the stupid out of work." CVS uses Cresta's call summarization to cut after-call work, and Narasimhan has made the case that "human plus AI is better than human without AI."

Wes Griffith, who joined HealthEquity as vice president of member experiences in July 2026, calls it "AI handling scale and humans handling significance." During his five years at Coinbase, automation handled close to 80% of contacts, yet his team deliberately pulled emotionally charged cases, such as irreversible blockchain errors, out of the automated flow and sent them straight to specialists.

Brandon Peterson runs client experience and operations at Achieve, where conversation intelligence shapes how managers coach and gives agents live assistance and automatic post-call summaries. Using Cresta, the company cut after-call work by 75% and hold times by 50%. Peterson describes the aim as "helping them with their jobs instead of replacing their jobs." At Truist, Dontá Wilson's teams break the client journey into individual moments and decide whether each one calls for a person, a machine or both. He describes the bank as "digital-first, but not digital-only."

2. Listening to every conversation

The Interpreters on the list listen to customer conversations at scale and use what they hear to change things well beyond the contact center. Rachel Walker, managing director of service transformation at United Airlines, describes the contact center as the place "where we hear the voice of the customer." With Cresta, United moved past anecdotes about why people call. Real-time conversation analytics now show the airline recurring needs, points of friction in its policies and digital tools, and whether a fix actually worked. One redesign cut live contacts for a particular inquiry by 50%.

"Data is what we live and breathe. Everything is based off data today," Veronica Moturi, chief customer officer at Brinks Home, has said. After Brinks Home brought in Cresta to move quality assurance from a sample of calls to every interaction, the company reported a 30-point jump in NPS, 73% fewer transfers and a 50% drop in quality management costs.

Douglas Kramon, who heads customer care and fan support for ESPN at Disney, uses what he calls "catharsis scoring" to track whether a frustrated fan ends a conversation feeling relieved. In hard-to-resolve situations, conversations shaped by those patterns have scored 20% to 40% higher on CSAT. Rogers applies the same discipline across a national carrier. Under Mahes Wickramasinghe, president of group operations, the company made more than 320 customer-led process improvements in 2025, 174 of them to internal tools, according to his profile.

3. Removing the reason customers call

Andrea Halverson spent nearly a decade working on contact elimination at Amazon before becoming head of contact center experience and innovation at Alaska Airlines, and the goal followed her there. "The best guest experience is one where they don't have to contact us in the first place," she says. She still reviews calls and transcripts herself. Through Alaska's work with Cresta, she can get from a question to an answer in minutes without waiting on a report. When the airline changed its baggage fees, she could see how customers were taking the news in the conversations themselves.

Several honorees can point to hard numbers from prevention work. At Verizon, Henry Adamson, now vice president of customer service at TDS Telecom, eliminated 35,000 truck rolls a year by stopping technician dispatches that weren't needed. April Anslinger, chief marketing and experience officer at Aptive Environmental, built a Pest Intelligence Center that analyzes more than 500 million data points across 76 markets. "We're using intelligence and predictive data to know where pests are heading before homeowners ever see them," she says. Aptive brings the same predictive thinking to its contact center, where it uses Cresta to surface conversation insights and guide agents in real time.

Jenifer Robertson, who runs AT&T's consumer business, pushes her teams to look past averages to the individual customer. "If one customer is in trouble, needs help, or leaves us, that's one customer too many," she says.

4. Cleaning up knowledge and workflows before automating

Before any AI goes in, Emeline Gwet Simeze wants to know where M&T Bank is losing time, money, control or customer value. As the head of CX transformation puts it, "If you transform and you don't satisfy the external customer need, then what did you transform for?" Tewana Ramseur, vice president of customer experience at Bath Saver, likewise redesigns the work before adding technology to it. Her team now schedules or resolves 91% of service calls in a single interaction.

Kramon's team reworked more than 25,000 knowledge documents before expanding generative and agentic support at ESPN, reasoning that AI can be no more reliable than the knowledge it draws on. At GE Healthcare, Burgoyne Hughes turned complex procedures into decision trees that agents can follow while a clinician waits on the line. Hold times fell 60%, and the error rate dropped from 1.6% to 0.04%. Hughes sets a high bar for automation, too. "You have to create an automated experience that is so smooth customers will prefer it over talking to a live person," he says.

Charl Lombard, chief client experience officer at Goosehead Insurance, warns against waiting for perfect data. The teams that come out ahead, in his words, are "building models that work with 80% accuracy today while incrementally improving data quality."

5. Treating the employee experience as part of CX

Tammy Williams is both chief experience officer and chief culture officer at Capital Credit Union, and she treats the two roles as a single job. "When you create a caring workplace, people and performance thrive," she says. Employee turnover at the credit union fell from 23% in 2021 to 15% in 2024, while engagement climbed from 60% to 86%.

Eric Strom, senior vice president of the service center at bswift, championed agent assist and a knowledge system that brings up the right information and workflow during a live call. "We've always had great people. Now they have great technology too, and that's where the magic has happened," he says. At Snap Finance, Mike Mossman, executive vice president of global operations, rolled out Cresta Agent Assist and then asked employees in five countries how it was going. They told him the work had gotten easier and they felt more confident on calls. "Cresta allowed us to hit our ROI, which our business case was built upon, quicker than we had anticipated," Mossman said.

Moturi has given agents at Brinks Home broader responsibilities, clearer career paths and fewer systems to juggle. Mike Gomes, chief customer experience officer at Hertz, argues that no company can deliver a great customer experience without an equal commitment to its own people.

6. Measuring resolution and loyalty ahead of speed

Several honorees have stopped treating handle time as the number that matters most. Moturi doesn't use it as a frontline KPI at Brinks Home and gives first contact resolution priority instead. John Samuel McCahan, who became chief customer experience officer at Fellers in July 2026, judges success by resolution, loyalty and lifetime value. At FTD, he consolidated eight systems into one, and customer lifetime value more than doubled. He tries new capabilities in small, contained settings before scaling them, a habit he sums up as "fail fast, fail early, fail small."

Narasimhan's team at CVS Health stopped relying on satisfaction surveys, which reached only about 5% of customers, and now uses predictive CSAT on every call. At UPS, Olga Sulyagina, president of customer experience and customer service, tracked Customer Effort Score alongside NPS and CSAT while the company rebuilt its app. CSAT rose from 2.5 to 3.7 and NPS from 21.5 to 39.5, according to her profile.

Strom sees savings as a byproduct of better service. "We're going to improve the customer experience, and that will save money," he has said. The payoff can show up as growth, too. After Amplify Credit Union introduced instant payments, individual accounts grew 12% faster than the overall portfolio and business accounts grew 25% faster.

7. Backing promises with accountability

The Trust Builders return again and again to the distance between what a company promises and what customers actually experience. Cliff Hagan, executive vice president of customer operations at Charter, helped design Spectrum's Customer Commitment, which backs reliability with service credits and money-back guarantees. "Our customers pay for our service, so it should work, all the time," he says. At Southwest Airlines, Tony Roach made rebuilding trust his first priority after the 2022 holiday disruption, with open communication and visible fixes to the operational problems behind it.

Stacy Armijo, Amplify's chief experience officer, spent 17 years in public relations and came away convinced that "reputations are built on experiences, not intentions." Evette Hollins, chief customer officer at DTE Energy, counts affordability as part of the experience and connects vulnerable customers with more than $125 million in energy assistance a year. Van Do-Reynoso, who led Santa Barbara County's public health response through the Thomas Fire and COVID-19 before joining CenCal Health, has said that "we can only move at the speed of trust."

What other CX leaders can take from the list

The honorees work in industries as different as cruise lines and pest control, so few of their programs would transfer intact to another company. The reasoning behind those programs is easier to borrow, and it suggests a handful of questions worth asking of any customer experience operation.

Start with the line between automation and people. Griffith and Wilson both drew it deliberately, case by case, before automating anything, and teams that skip that step tend to automate the very moments customers care most about. Then consider how much of the customer conversation you actually hear. CVS Health and Brinks Home went from sampling calls to analyzing all of them, and the evidence gave them standing with product, policy and operations teams.

It's also worth asking what it would take to prevent your three biggest contact reasons, the question Halverson, Adamson and Anslinger keep asking in their own operations, and whether your knowledge base could support AI today. ESPN's document cleanup and GE Healthcare's decision trees came before their automation gains and made those gains possible.

The frontline job and the scorecard deserve a hard look as well. At Capital Credit Union, Brinks Home and Snap Finance, customer results improved as the agent's work got easier. The leaders reporting the strongest numbers put resolution, effort and loyalty ahead of handle time and trusted efficiency to follow. Little of this requires a big budget to start, especially for teams that take McCahan's advice and test small before they scale.

FAQ

Who is on CX Current's Top 50 Leaders Transforming CX list for 2026?

The list includes customer experience, operations and brand executives from companies such as Delta Air Lines, UPS, Bank of America, United Airlines, Alaska Airlines, Southwest Airlines, CVS Health, Airbnb, AT&T, TD, Truist, Charter Communications, Hertz, GE Healthcare and DTE Energy, along with credit unions, insurers and regional providers. The full list links to a profile of each honoree.

What are the five categories on the list?

Honorees are grouped as Catalysts (AI and automation), Operating Architects (operations and workflow), Interpreters (customer insight), Pathfinders (connected journeys) and Trust Builders (trust and accountability).

What do the best CX leaders have in common in 2026?

The honorees tend to let AI handle routine contacts while routing sensitive cases to people, and they analyze customer conversations at scale to find problems upstream. Many work to prevent avoidable contacts and fix their knowledge and workflows before automating. They also invest heavily in the employee experience, judge success by resolution and effort more than speed, and back their service promises with clear accountability.

How are leading CX executives using AI in the contact center?

The uses that come up most often in the profiles are call summarization to reduce after-call work, real-time agent assist, automated quality assurance on every interaction, conversation analytics to find the root causes of contact, and predictive satisfaction scoring. Achieve reported 75% less after-call work and 50% shorter hold times, and Brinks Home reported 73% fewer transfers.

Which metrics do top CX leaders prioritize?

Many honorees put first contact resolution, customer effort, NPS, CSAT and customer lifetime value ahead of average handle time. Brinks Home does not use handle time as a frontline KPI, and UPS tracked Customer Effort Score alongside NPS and CSAT during its app rebuild.