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Dr. David Doležel, CCXP, is one of the most experienced CX/EX consultants in the Czech Republic, and we’re delighted he took the time to speak with us. He spent over 20 years in the corporate world, at Philip Morris, AIG and Generali, where he didn’t just build processes and teams but also set up his own call centres serving hundreds of thousands of customers across several countries. Today he passes on that experience as founder of the CXX Academy & CXX Institute, a member of the CXPA Europe Council, a judge for the International Customer Experience Awards, and a university lecturer.
And since he doesn’t deal in vague generalities but speaks concretely from his own experience, let’s get straight into the interview.
David, before you became the face of CX in the Czech Republic, you spent over 20 years at Philip Morris, AIG/Colonnade and Generali. What exactly happened that made you one day say, “I’m done with my corporate career, I’m going to teach companies about customer experience”?
It wasn’t one particular day, and it wasn’t an escape from the corporate world. It was more that I gradually realised that a lot of what I’d already been doing in marketing, insurance, IT, operations and running regional teams was, in fact, already customer, employee and partner experience — we just didn’t call it that.
At AIG, for example, I built my own in-house call centre, and we tackled retention, churn, cross-sell and upsell in a very hands-on way. It wasn’t about a nice-looking score for a slide deck; what mattered to me was how many customers stayed, and what impact that had on the business. And that’s where I saw that a well-designed service and a deliberately managed experience can directly generate revenue.
After more than twenty years in the corporate world, it started to make sense to bring these experiences together, put a name to them, and pass them on. So I wouldn’t say “I’m done with corporates” — I still work with them — it’s more that “what I learned inside companies, I now want to apply across companies, while also teaching it to the next generation.”
Your bio lists no fewer than five acronyms side by side — CX, EX, TX, MX, PX. X Pulse readers already know what CX and EX mean, but where do you think the real line sits today between these disciplines in practice — in other words, when is a company actually dealing with TX or MX, rather than “just” CX?
I think of these acronyms mainly as different perspectives on one single system, rather than five separate disciplines. CX looks at the customer’s experience, EX at the employee’s, PX at the partner and the wider ecosystem, and so on.
With MX, I’m looking at management’s experience and role — how their decisions, goals, metrics and priorities create the conditions for CX and EX. I always say a fish rots from the head, and management is always ultimately responsible for the customer and employee experience, because it’s management that shapes the company’s culture. Above all, you can’t rely on a “random” positive experience — it has to be genuinely managed and deliberate. And here I always ask: is management giving employees all the tools they actually need?
And the line between them? It’s simple: it doesn’t really exist, because everything overlaps across the whole company (yes, including finance, operations and so on — the very departments that always insist “this doesn’t apply to us”. That’s a big mistake. It really does apply to everyone.)
In a study for Foxentry, you said that if a brand is a customer’s “number one”, it doesn’t need to worry so much about acquisition tools like PPC. Can the strength of a brand actually be measured, or is it more of a feeling a company either has or doesn’t?
You want to be your customer’s number one.
You want them to come to you automatically, without even thinking about going anywhere else.
For a lot of things, I automatically go to Alza [a Czech e-commerce retailer] — I can rely on the delivery (and if something does go wrong, I know it’ll be sorted out), and pickup and returns are simple. Alza isn’t the cheapest, but that reliability is worth something. So Alza saves a huge amount on expensive acquisition costs when it comes to me — a customer who automatically comes back is a major source of profit, and that’s exactly the point. In my insurance business, acquisition had an ROI of roughly four years; a returning customer buying further products could cut that payback period in half, or even less. Of course it cost something, but it brought back far more than it cost.
And measuring it? In American companies, it’s simple: money in the bank. All the other metrics are just there to help you get to that goal.
You used to build and run IT systems for hundreds of thousands of customers across several countries. How does that “behind the scenes” experience with companies help you today when advising businesses? Do you see things that someone without an IT background simply wouldn’t?
Absolutely. My IT background taught me that the customer only ever sees the tip of the iceberg. Underneath it are processes, data flows, integrations, permissions, responsibilities, SLAs, and dozens of decisions the customer will never see — but will feel the consequences of immediately. That’s why, in CX projects today, I never start with “which tool should we buy?” — I start the other way round: what is the customer trying to achieve at this point in the journey, what process enables that, and only then, what technology should support it. Very often the problem is simply that the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing: sales doesn’t see support tickets, the call centre doesn’t see the history of digital interactions, or the customer ends up repeating the same information to three different departments. Someone with an IT background has the advantage of being able to connect the “frontstage” with everything happening behind it, and translate between business and technology. For me, technology is a tool for a better experience, not an end in itself.
Companies often decide which system or tool to buy first, and only afterwards work out how it’ll actually be used. Then the people who have to work with it discover it doesn’t support everything they need — and a reliable sign of a poor implementation appears: new spreadsheets popping up everywhere. That process should run the other way round: start with a thorough, in-depth analysis of needs, wants and expectations, and only then put technology out to tender.
As a judge for the International Customer Experience Awards, you must have seen dozens of projects from different countries. Is there a story or project that’s stuck in your mind as completely unexpected, or brilliantly simple?
I’m careful about discussing specific competition entries, because as a judge you often see information and figures that aren’t meant for public release. But generally, the projects that stick with me most aren’t the ones that win on the size of their budget, but on how precisely they understood the problem. A typical example is a company struggling with low renewal rates, where everyone goes looking for complicated explanations around price or product — only to discover that some customers simply don’t even realise they need to renew their contract. A well-timed reminder and a simple renewal process can have a huge impact, both for the customer and for revenue. That, to me, is what brilliant CX looks like: removing unnecessary friction rather than adding another layer of technology. And what I also enjoy about international competitions is just how broadly “experience” can be understood — from banks and e-commerce through to public institutions (the Middle East, for instance, could teach our own public bodies a thing or two) and infrastructure. You realise that CX isn’t some luxury discipline reserved for “love brands” — it’s a way of thinking about any service at all.
But I do have one example: around 46 million people live in rural areas of the US. One very well-known company set up several hubs of technicians who started servicing people’s appliances — fridges, air conditioning units — over huge distances, covering more than 300 kilometres a day on average, or even flying over 500 kilometres by plane, just to service a fridge. Any manager would dismiss that outright — high costs with no visible ROI. But they didn’t. They focused on the customer, and what happened, of course, over time? That brand now dominates those regions without any real competition.
On LinkedIn, you’ve described managers who insist “customer experience has nothing to do with us — we’re finance, HR, or IT”. What’s your most effective argument for showing them they’re wrong?
My most effective argument is: show me one decision in the company that can’t, sooner or later, feed through into the customer’s experience. Finance sets payment terms, invoicing, refunds and partner rules. HR decides who gets hired, how people are evaluated, and whether they actually have the authority to help a customer. IT decides on availability, speed, data, and how many times a customer has to enter the same information again. You never have to speak to a customer directly, and you can still dramatically improve or damage their experience. In insurance, I even heard the finance argument that “we never meet customers” — only to find out shortly afterwards that they were in constant contact with partners and setting the very terms that flowed straight into the customer journey. So CX isn’t one department’s job. It’s the outcome of the company’s entire operating model. And if that argument doesn’t land, I translate it into money: complaints, repeat contacts, churn, rework and unnecessary costs tend to speak a very clear language of their own.
That’s exactly what I was told in insurance finance, and in the end I managed, in a fairly simple way, to save a full month’s work for two out of five people, plus the work of thirteen people in my own team, plus a good deal of work on the partners’ side too. Again — less friction, and substantial cost savings.
You founded the “CX/EX Professionals and Enthusiasts” community and you also teach at university. What surprises you most when you meet students or practitioners? And is there anything about how they see CX that differs from what you expected?
I’m often surprised by how students think before they’ve been weighed down by the phrase “that’s just not how it works here”. They tend to ask exactly the right questions: why does a customer have to enter the same information twice, why do they have to call when it could be self-service, why isn’t this in the app, or why does a company measure something it never acts on? Practitioners, on the other hand, bring knowledge of regulation, systems, budgets and real-world trade-offs. Ideally, you bring the two worlds together.
At the same time, I’m still surprised by how much confusion there is around the basic terms themselves — CX still gets mixed up with customer service, and that’s not just a Czech problem.
One more thing: today’s customer doesn’t just compare a bank to another bank. They compare it to the best e-commerce site, app, delivery service or restaurant they’ve just used — they simply measure it against their best experience overall. Students pick this up almost automatically, whereas for companies it’s sometimes harder to step outside the boundaries of their own industry.
As a member of the CXPA Europe Council, you have visibility across Europe. How is the Czech approach to customer experience markedly different from, say, Western Europe — and is that more of an advantage or a disadvantage?
I don’t think it’s simply a case of the Czech Republic being “behind” and Western Europe being “ahead”. In some sectors we’ve made huge leaps forward — you can see it beautifully in gastronomy, e-commerce or digital services. We’ve got pragmatism, technical skill and a real appetite for learning. The difference I see is more in how institutionalised the discipline is. In more mature markets, responsibility, governance, customer journey work and the link between CX and business results tend to be more clearly defined. Here, CX is still fairly often narrowed down to customer service, marketing, an NPS survey, or a one-off project. That’s a disadvantage. The advantage is that we don’t carry as much historical dogma, so we can skip certain stages — take the best of what’s out there and roll it out faster. And, incidentally, Western Europe hasn’t got it all figured out either: even in the UK in 2026, people are still explaining the difference between customer service, customer experience and customer centricity. So I wouldn’t turn this into a competition between countries — it’s really a question of the maturity of individual organisations.
At the moment, for my students on a brand-new subject, Customer Experience Management, I’m filming interviews with top global experts in the field, and they only confirm this. But did you know that Czech CX work has repeatedly won European and global awards?
If you had to recommend just one first step to a company that’s only just starting out with CX — something it could do this very week — what would it be?
This week, I’d go straight to wherever the customer actually is, and listen. Not a workshop about CX, not buying a platform, and definitely not a new survey. Sit in the call centre, talk to the operators, go through complaints and grievances, spend time at a branch, look at the real digital journey, or talk to five or ten customers… Only after that should you run a CX/EX workshop.
I always recommend to management: become anonymous customers of your own company and products — you’ll often be surprised at how different it looks from how it appears in a PowerPoint.
Then pick one recurring friction point and ask: why does it actually happen, and can we remove its root cause? And then the next one, and the next.
One of the best pieces of advice you’ll hear in CX is very simple: why ask the customer again if you haven’t yet fixed what they told you last time?
So, for me, the first step is contact with reality, and one specific problem the company actually starts to fix. Then close the loop with the customer and tell them what changed as a result of what they told you. That builds more trust than ten slides on customer centricity.
Over 20 years in the field surely means plenty of mistakes and dead ends too. Is there a decision or piece of advice from your past that you’d now say, “I’d advise completely differently today”?
I used to believe that once we had the right data and could see the whole problem, the best thing to do was present the entire solution and launch a big transformation. Today, I’d pay far more attention to the pace an organisation can actually absorb. CX people tend to be passionate advocates for the cause, and can easily bring thirty initiatives, a new framework, journey maps, NPS, a platform and a culture change all at once.
But a company can usually only handle, say, two real shifts at a time. So today I recommend: pick one important problem, give it an owner, connect the customer impact to a business outcome, fix the root cause, and only then scale it up.
The second thing is metrics. In the corporate world, I learned very quickly that leadership, in the end, cares about revenue and costs. CX metrics are useful, but they must never become a goal in themselves. A score is nice information, but it has to be turned into value — and that value only comes from a change in behaviour and process.
AI is now changing customer experience faster, perhaps, than anything before it. Where do you see the biggest risk of companies overdoing or getting AI in CX wrong — and, conversely, where’s the opportunity most companies are still missing?
I see the biggest risk in AI being deployed as a technology and cost-cutting project: “let’s remove people, automate contact, and save money.” If that’s the primary motivation, the customer often ends up with a cheaper but worse experience.
First, I need to understand what the customer is actually trying to do and where the friction lies; only then does it make sense to ask what AI can improve. In other words, technology comes last.
The biggest untapped opportunity, on the other hand, is proactive, hyper-personalised work with customer intelligence. Agentic AI can already track relevant signals continuously, recognise when a customer is stuck, and offer them the right help at the right time, through the right channel. In my view, AI should be reducing customer effort and increasing value — not just cutting a company’s costs.
If your younger self — fresh out of Philip Morris, with no idea yet where fate would take him at AIG and then in his own company — met you tonight, what one sentence would you tell him about customers that he didn’t know back then?
Focus on value for the customer — find out (don’t guess!) in real depth what their needs, wants and expectations actually are.
