Customer-centric IT: Strategies for delivering winning customer experiences

Instead of discussing technology, IT exec Aaron Taylor talks about getting rich context to the call center, taking an omnichannel-first approach, and making it easy for customers to do business with his company.

Taylor, principal and divisional CIO for the US personal investor business at Vanguard, believes attention to those issues is critical to ensuring his IT team can create exceptional customer experiences that will differentiate and grow the firm.

“We spend a significant amount of time on client experience, understanding the expectations and needs of our clients, how they’re changing, how we want to meet them, and how do we improve,” Taylor says.

That customer-centric mindset is a must for CIOs today.

“The traditional role of CIO as manager of technology and the organization’s data state are table stakes. Now CIOs have to enable business growth, so they have to have more focus on revenue, hence more focus on the customer and the customer experience,” says Chad Seiler, consulting industry leader for technology, media, and telecom at professional services firm KPMG.

According to Foundry’s 2025 State of the CIO survey, improving customer experience (CX) has become a top CEO priority for IT leaders this year, cited No. 2 behind researching and implementing AI.

Here, IT leaders share key strategies for improving IT’s aptitude to deliver winning customer experiences.

1. Establish a customer-focused North Star

When Taylor and his team work on customer experience initiatives, they’re clear on what they’re expected to achieve: CX Alpha, or as Taylor describes it, “an alpha experience where we help you be a better investor. CX Alpha is a north star for us.”

The “alpha” title comes from Vanguard Advisor’s Alpha, which the firm defines as a service model aimed at helping its advisors “foster trust, cultivate long-term relationships, and build a sustainable, successful practice.”

Similarly, CX Alpha aims to create an intuitive and personalized experience for each client, help each client make better decisions to obtain the best outcome, and deepen the relationship the firm has with the client as a result, Taylor says.

“For us it’s how do we bring things together so, when a client is interacting with us, we can intervene digitally [to help them] achieve their financial goals,” he adds.

Having that kind of polestar is vital for driving customer-centric solutions.

2. Fuse business and IT teams together

To build experiences aligned with that North Star, Vanguard adopted a product team model. This full-stack team of eight to 12 workers includes software engineers, a user experience designer, a business product manager, sometimes a data analyst and any others needed to identify, understand, and assemble all the components for a customer service, such as opening an account or automating online investing.

“This product team model allows us to really blend business and technology,” Taylor says, explaining that the approach ensures the team has a holistic view as it develops an experience.

Others endorse this product-based approach.

Sumeet Gupta, senior managing director and leader of the digital transformation and AI transformation teams at FTI Consulting, advises fusing business and IT teams together into what he calls digital squads or digital product teams. Like Taylor, Gupta says this helps workers to align on customer needs and business objectives from the start.

“It’s breaking the business-IT divide,” Gupta says, noting that in this model both sides have the same KPIs.

3. Create a customer-centric IT culture

KPMG’s Seiler says CIOs at advanced organizations have created a customer-centric culture in their IT departments.

There, CIOs have shifted IT staffers from thinking their jobs center on technology to thinking they’re centered on servicing customers through technology.

“To do that CIOs have to identify what that means, explain why it is important, and how each team member plays a role. That provides clarity and direction to the team, so those on the team understand their contributions,” Seiler says.

Schneider Electric has introduced a couple of programs to help its IT team better understand the customer, says Bobby Cain, senior vice president and CIO for North America.

The company has a “power couple model” where it partners a digital team member with a business-side employee so they’re working together on end-to-end processes. “It gets the digital people to the point of the spear as it pertains to the problems, the friction, what we’re trying to solve for the customer,” Cain says.

He also pairs IT senior leaders with technical leaders at the company’s distribution partners. “This establishes a rapport and helps us collaborate. We also get direct feedback from them so we better understand their problems and how to solve them,” Cain adds. “We get to the point where we know what the friction points are and we can work with them to co-invent to solve those problems.”

4. Collaborate early and often

Stevan Fickus, CTO of The Amenity Collective, a full-service facilities management company for the fitness, aquatics, and recreation industries, is thoughtful not only about partnering his IT team members with the right stakeholders for the company’s CX work but is attentive to when he engages them.

“Everyone understands the concept of stakeholders and user groups, but IT often engages them too late. So we work to identify the right stakeholders and users early on and then truly engage them throughout the process,” says Fickus, who as CTO oversees IT.

He continues, “We want to bring people in so they have a positive impact on the product. Developers might think they know what they want to deliver, but there is always something in the process we don’t understand as much as [the stakeholders] do, and so by them sharing that understanding with us, we can provide something that’s optimized from the start, even if we’re doing iterative improvements [post-deployment].”

Similarly, Dave Gordon, chief digital and information officer for Northwestern Mutual, credits collaboration across multiple stakeholders — employees, financial advisers, and clients — for ensuring his company delivers the right experiences.

“For example, we leverage our important Field Committee that identifies and sets priorities for a network of over 22,000 financial advisors and their team members, as well as our business and product teams, to identify the features and desired experiences of our clients,” he explains. “This has led to investments in our proprietary digital planning platform, which our advisors use to bring together holistic client financial planning across wealth management investments and insurance, as well as through different client life stages. By incorporating the input across our business and adviser ecosystem, beyond planning, we are also investing in our client data quality to ensure clients’ information is consistently and accurately populated across their digital and financial adviser interactions.”

5. Improve your data state

Enabling greater personalization is a top objective for nearly all customer experience initiatives, yet many organizations have data environments that create fragmented pictures of each customer, says Calvin Cheng, a partner at digital services firm West Monroe.

“Many times, organizations have a customer experience that is a result of constrained and siloed environments and data, and what stumbles out is a customer experience that is disjointed. Customers are not known across platforms as they move from one to another,” Cheng explains.

The only way to overcome that is for the CIOs to improve the organization’s data state, building one that can aggregate customer data from myriad internal sources such as order and fulfillment histories and external sources, including social media, Cheng says. He says CIOs are increasingly implementing customer data platforms, which collect, unify, and manage customer data from various sources, to create that unified view of the customer necessary to deliver the personalized experiences customers now expect.

6. Modernize your tech stack

It’s not just the data environment that needs an upgrade. Many organizations also need to modernize their tech stack to deliver the kind of experiences customers demand — and deliver those as fast as the market requires.

“If you want to supercharge your ability to improve customer experiences, you have to combine how you work with a technology stack that unleashes that,” Vanguard’s Taylor says.

Taylor knows that firsthand. In the past he would assemble a team, ensuring they have the right skills and a clear agenda, only to have them slowed by a technology that couldn’t keep pace.

But he has been bundling tech modernization work with other initiatives to ensure he’s shedding legacy tech that could slow his IT team’s innovation and delivery capabilities. His engineering teams can now deploy new features within minutes.

That modernization work has paid off: “We’re finding we can be faster and more responsive to our clients,” Taylor says

7. Speed AI adoption

CIOs should also be accelerating adoption of all variations of artificial intelligence, such as generative AI-powered chatbots, to create better customer experiences, West Monroe’s Cheng says, noting that agentic AI in particular shows potential as a powerful tool for delivering efficient, effective customer experiences.

Whether the agentic AI is enabled to execute decisions on its own or designed to require a human to approve certain actions, the technology is demonstrating that it can resolve customer needs faster and more accurately than humans can, Cheng explains.

Likewise, Seiler says adding more automation and AI — from chatbots to virtual assistance — throughout the customer journey is essential to meeting rising customer expectations.

KPMG, in its 2024 Global Customer Experience Excellence report, says that leading organizations “are humanizing their AI interfaces, making them more engaging and relatable through anthropomorphism — that is, attributing human traits to non-human things — to create more engaging and relatable experiences. This approach taps into our innate tendency to connect with human-like characteristics, enabling AI bots, like Microsoft’s Cortana and Apple’s Siri, to offer more personalized, emotionally resonant experiences with their distinct personalities and conversational styles.”