A Framework for CX Transformation
Summary
Key Insights
-
•
Verizon’s design group is positioned within marketing, influencing how design interacts with business units and leadership.
-
•
Differentiating CX from UX is crucial; CX encompasses all brand interactions, not just digital interfaces.
-
•
Design maturity spans from evangelism (raising awareness) to operations (embedding design in decision-making). Verizon sits between these stages.
-
•
A well-articulated purpose and guiding principles are foundational for elevating design impact within large organizations.
-
•
Experience principles should reflect company values, customer needs, and baseline industry best practices.
-
•
Using simple, familiar language for principles broadens adoption beyond design teams to non-design employees.
-
•
Leadership buy-in, especially from the CMO, can unexpectedly propel principles into company-wide brand strategy.
-
•
Piloting customer surveys that directly map experience principles to metrics enables tangible measurement of design impact.
-
•
Operationalizing principles requires creating practical tools like evaluation checklists and workshop activities for teams.
-
•
Cross-functional collaboration between design leadership, design ops, and other stakeholders is key to successful CX transformation.
Notable Quotes
"Customer experience refers to the collection of interactions someone has with the brand, agnostic of channel or touchpoint."
"Our design group is positioned under marketing, which informs who champions and promotes design within the company."
"Design maturity shifts focus from evangelism to operations as organizations strengthen their design impact."
"We realized we didn’t have a well-articulated purpose or guiding principles for the types of customer experiences we aspired to deliver."
"Experience principles are meant to align business goals with customer needs for everyone, not just designers."
"Using language that’s already common within the company helps principles feel natural and easy to adopt."
"Our CMO incorporated our experience principles into the brand strategy, which was a huge and unexpected boost."
"We’re piloting surveys that ask customers how honest, simple, or reliable their experience was, then turn that into a score."
"Principles at this level act like a company mission that product teams can translate into their own more specific design principles."
"Creating experience principles helped democratize design decision-making across teams inside and outside the design group."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"The Workshop is an outlet for innovation, pushing designers out of their day-to-day to solve problems quickly."
Meredith BlackScaling Design Culture
November 6, 2017
"We asked our employees if they wanted to come back and 95% said no to regular office attendance."
Jennifer Bolduc Diane Gregorio Emily DayWhat's involved with getting people back to work?: A panel discussion
July 1, 2021
"Leaders getting out of the way and letting teams make decisions with the immediate knowledge they have is key to agile at scale."
Jackie HoLead Effectively While Preserving Team Autonomy with Growth Boards
January 8, 2024
"Many new ways of doing things today were originally invented to enable people with disabilities."
Samuel ProulxFrom Standards to Innovation: Why Inclusive Design Wins
November 19, 2025
"The designer of the future will be really great at mining data, analyzing it, and telling the story with it."
Jose Coronado Julie Gitlin Lawrence LipkinPeople First - Design at JP Morgan
June 10, 2021
"Instead of prescribing a meeting, we focused on how people should feel at the end and what outcomes to achieve."
Bianca JeffersonFrom Sprints to Systems: Operationalizing Continuous Discovery Through DesignOps
September 10, 2025
"Buddy systems create leadership opportunities and a support network without changing org charts."
Russ UngerOnboarding: The Ecosystem, not the Afterthought
November 7, 2017
"If you don’t continually check whether people are benefiting, the system’s reputation can quickly suffer."
Dan DonaldDesign Systems as a Vehicle for Systemic Change
June 1, 2023
"Trying to be perfect is exhausting. We don’t have to live this way."
Kat VellosOpener: The Other L Word
January 8, 2024
