Organizing CX around what matters

Angelique Wyszynski (Angie), Global Head of Insurance Innovation and Customer Experience (CX) at HSB, shares how she successfully established customer experience as a strategic priority at a 150-year-old insurance company. Her approach offers valuable lessons for CX leaders looking to drive transformative change in legacy organizations.

Key Insights from the Conversation:

Start with Stakeholder Insights, Not Prescriptive Solutions

When Angie joined HSB as their first-ever CX leader, she resisted the urge to come in with a pre-defined roadmap. Instead, she spent her first three months conducting a "CX diagnostic"—interviewing over 45 leaders across the organization to understand their perspectives on customer experience maturity."I think there's kind of two different ways that people can approach leading CX in any organization," Angie explains. "One can be that you come in with all the discipline and skill set, and you lay out, here's what needs to happen in this order of operations and here are the resources I need. The other way is to spend time really understanding and engaging with leaders, with management, with the frontline to understand what's driving the business, where the gaps are, what their priorities and goals are, and then attaching yourself to help support and steward the achievement of those goals."By letting stakeholders shape the CX agenda, Angie gained critical buy-in and ensured her efforts were aligned with business priorities from day one.

Focus on Incremental Wins That Demonstrate Value

Rather than attempting a massive CX transformation overnight, Angie took an incremental approach to build credibility. She identified research as a universal need across the organization and quickly established a dedicated insights function within her team."The way you get traction is through those incremental demonstrations of value," Angie notes. Her team focused on producing high-quality, actionable research that prompted other departments to engage them for validating assumptions and shaping proposals.

Translate Insights into Business Impact

A key differentiator in Angie's approach is her relentless focus on tying CX efforts to tangible business outcomes. She emphasizes that high-quality output means going beyond reporting metrics to "translating findings into actionable implications and recommendations."Critically, Angie's team partners closely with finance to quantify the impact of their work in financial terms—whether that's operational savings, risk mitigation, or revenue generation. This financial partnership has been crucial for demonstrating the value of CX and maintaining support from leadership.

Build a Multi-disciplinary CX Team

Angie has built a diverse 20-person team that spans research, marketing, innovation, and operations. This mix of skills allows them to drive impact across the organization—from generating customer insights to prototyping new products.When hiring, Angie looks for people who are "interested in driving business impact and value, execution-minded, and collaborative." This ensures the team stays focused on outcomes, not just insights.

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