How Philips turned customer experience into a strategic advantage - with Tina Lilje

Tina Lilje, former Global Head of Customer Experience at Philips, joins Jochem van der Veer to share her two-decade journey transforming customer experience from a service function into a company-wide strategy spanning 75,000 employees, 22 business units, and over 100 countries. With a career that began as an assistant and evolved through marketing, service leadership, and M&A before landing in CX, Tina reveals the organizational mechanics, budget negotiations, and cultural shifts required to make customer experience changes that actually stick.

Here's why you don't want to miss this episode

Fix root causes, not symptoms

Tina's pivotal moment came while leading global customer service when she kept fixing the same problems repeatedly—like an award-winning detector without a proper handle that kept slipping in emergency rooms. She realized that lasting impact requires getting involved at the design stage, not just responding to complaints. This insight shaped her entire approach: embed CX at the beginning of processes to prevent issues rather than continuously treating symptoms.

Humans remain at a premium in healthcare

While AI is transforming administrative work and clinical diagnostics, healthcare is fundamentally different from other industries. When a patient is on the table and equipment malfunctions, you need a human immediately—not a chatbot. Tina explains why regulated industries move slowly with new technologies and how the best innovations often focus on unsexy backend improvements like scheduling algorithms and parking notifications rather than flashy clinical features.

The KPI disaster that worked out perfectly

When Philips added NPS to performance targets, the score jumped eight points in one quarter—and Tina knew immediately it was being gamed. Employees were cherry-picking who received surveys and inflating numbers for bonuses. What could have been an awkward confrontation became a teachable moment when the CEO saw the data and started laughing, instantly recognizing the sub-optimization. This led to a complete rethinking of how to measure and incentivize customer-centric behavior.

Budget battles are won by collective commitment

Rather than fighting over which business unit would fund CX initiatives, Tina's team instituted a collective funding model where everyone contributed to a central pot. This eliminated the endless debates about who should pay for pilots and proof-of-concepts, allowing the team to focus on impact rather than internal negotiations. But she's clear: if you're trying to do CX with no budget, it won't fly.

Journey maps on the wall create unexpected catalysts

When Tina's team put a large-scale radiology journey map on a boring office wall in Amsterdam, something unexpected happened. Within a week, employees from across the organization were coming to the 13th floor to take pictures, pointing at different stages, and having conversations about customer impact they'd never connected to their work before. This simple visualization became a tool for helping everyone see their role in the customer experience.

The customer speaks—not you

One of Tina's core tactics for overcoming resistance was letting customers speak directly to internal teams through video recordings. When she personally criticized a process, people got defensive and explained why everything was necessary. When a customer explained the same issue, no one could argue. This approach removed the heat from conversations and united teams around shared customer needs rather than internal politics.

From artifacts to action

This episode offers a masterclass in organizational change management disguised as a customer experience conversation. Tina's emphasis on fixing root causes, aligning incentives with desired behaviors, and meeting people where they are provides a practical blueprint for CX leaders who want to move beyond reports and presentations to create lasting organizational change.

Her career path—from assistant to secretary to marketing to service to M&A to global CX leadership—demonstrates that understanding multiple functions isn't just helpful for CX roles, it's essential. You can't fix systemic customer problems if you only understand one piece of the organization.

For leaders struggling with executive buy-in, teams that can't agree on priorities, or CX programs that feel stuck in perpetual planning mode, Tina's honest reflections on what worked, what failed, and what she'd do differently next time make this essential listening. Her message is pragmatic: customer experience transformation is possible in large, complex organizations, but it requires patience, political savvy, and the courage to change how people are measured and rewarded.

The question isn't whether customer experience matters—it's whether you're willing to embed it into the organizational fabric deeply enough to survive leadership changes, budget cuts, and competing priorities.

Want to hear the entire conversation? Watch or listen to the podcast with Tina and Jochem on The Experience Edge.

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