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Ondřej Borovička is one of the most experienced CX professionals on the Czech market. Over eighteen years, he built customer experience from within large companies such as Avast, ČSOB, Air Bank and T-Mobile.
Today, he works as a fractional CXO and CX partner for companies across the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and abroad, helping leadership make decisions that genuinely translate into business results, not just presentations. After years in corporate roles, he co-founded SentricityCX with former colleagues, where they help companies make the right decisions that drive growth through happy customers. They work across Europe and in Africa. He personally acts as a fractional CXO and CX partner for company leadership, helping them turn customer experience into real business impact, not just slide decks.
Alongside his consulting work, he mentors younger CX professionals and is one of the voices in the Czech Republic pushing to turn CX into a genuine business discipline, rather than just a stack of questionnaires.
Ondro, as someone who’s spent years listening to customer complaints and feedback across industries, has there been a “customer experience” from your own everyday life that really got under your skin as a professional?
I’ve got a fresh one. Last week I signed up for a race, and it was a terrible experience an unresponsive website, nothing made sense, an absolute nightmare. But I actually prefer the positive stories. And I love the everyday, ordinary ones. Small bakeries, restaurants, little shops that don’t think of CX as a “discipline” they just have it in their bones. It’s a joy to watch all those marketing and CX principles become reality in front of you. Take the Hvězda bakery in Petřiny, Prague, as an example. People are happy to queue there, pay a noticeably higher price, and then tell everyone about it afterwards. I even bring their bread home as a gift! I love seeing that play out for real I’m genuinely happy for them.
You’ve been through Avast, ČSOB, Air Bank and T-Mobile where did you get that best possible feeling of “we really nailed this for the customer”?
Each of those companies was, or still is, in a somewhat different situation. Avast was growing rapidly, ČSOB was a dominant player, Air Bank was the challenger. Air Bank was built around the customer from day one, and that made it different — and probably simpler in some ways too. I definitely had “this is brilliant” moments at every one of those companies. But Air Bank is probably the only place I could point to a mobile onboarding project that got delayed and dragged on, purely because the solution we had wasn’t good enough for customers. So we had to be honest with ourselves and stop making things easy for us at the customer’s expense. Internally, it cost us more effort, but it turned out to be a huge success with customers.
Your profile mentions “CX Program Setup & Restart” can you describe a specific moment when you joined a company and realised you had to start completely from zero?
Joining a company that’s starting completely from zero doesn’t really happen much these days. Most organisations already do some form of CX — collecting feedback, measuring NPS, or running individual customer initiatives. So the starting point usually isn’t zero.
You spot the real “zero point” a different way. Ask members of the leadership team what good customer experience means to them, or what customer promise their company actually makes. You’ll get five different answers. That’s when you know the problem isn’t that the company doesn’t measure or listen to customers it’s that they have no defined direction. And that’s what leaves the poor CX manager, if there even is one, in a tough spot. When we run these “alignment” workshops, there really are a lot of “aha moments”!
If you had to name one thing companies almost always underestimate when they start out with CX, what would it be?
Exactly that — aligning expectations and direction, and understanding what CX actually is and what it means for that particular company. It’s not NPS, it’s not customer support, it’s not a keyring given away as a gift. And then there’s the trap of creating a CX role tucked away “in the basement” and ticking the box that says “we’re customer-centric” except nothing actually changes, and that CX team just ends up having a really hard time. Really, the ultimate goal of a CX team should be to eventually make itself redundant — to reach a point where it’s no longer needed. Sounds strange, I know, but it’s true.
Fractional CXO is still a fairly unusual role in the Czech Republic. How did you end up in it, and what do you enjoy about it more than a standard employed position?
The title itself is still fairly unusual in the Czech Republic, but the need it addresses has been around for a long time. I know colleagues who work as interim CX leaders, and it’s a great model when a company needs someone to run CX on a day-to-day basis.
Fractional CXO is a bit different. In short an interim CX leader runs CX, while a fractional CXO helps leadership make the right decisions about CX.
What I enjoy is exactly that combination of strategic perspective and hands-on execution. The great thing about it is that the company gets a senior perspective for a fraction of a full-time cost (I don’t need to be there every day say, two days a week is enough). Another advantage is that you can get started very quickly and build momentum fast. And last but not least, being fractional is an interesting hybrid of “deeply embedded, but still an outsider” a bit like being the scooter queen of the situation. I’m close enough to the business to understand its people, its data and its everyday reality, while still keeping enough distance to raise sensitive topics, mediate discussions between teams, and bring an objective view. I don’t have that sword of “what will they think of me” hanging over my head.
SentricityCX works with an AI dashboard for tracking the customer journey was there ever a moment when you were genuinely surprised by something AI uncovered that a person wouldn’t have found?
It’s less about what a person wouldn’t have found, and more about the speed at which it’s found. The tool works by analysing feedback and identifying friction points in the journey. What it’s really good for is helping you get your bearings quickly, and tracking changes and drivers over time. That said, I’d always recommend that once you find an area that genuinely hurts, you go deeper and do a detailed “manual” map and analysis. AI only gives you back what you put into it and the insights, policies, processes and relationships that go in are still often flawed.
What does a conversation with leadership look like when you have to defend the idea that CX isn’t just a “nice-to-have” extra, but something that actually pays back?
Imagine you’re presenting to the board a perfect customer journey, clearly identified moments of truth, you know exactly where it’s going wrong and where to improve the experience. The moment you finish, there’s a 100% chance you’ll get that tricky but entirely fair question: “so what?” Nobody really wants to hear that!
But if you can answer it, people start taking you seriously. At one company, we managed to answer it. Working with the CFO’s team, we were able to put a value on CX growth it came out to several million dollars for every point of improvement. That’s when we had everyone’s attention. If you combine that “strategic” figure with good discipline around costing out each individual pain point, life gets a lot easier. Companies’ prioritisation processes are often ruthless, and as a CX person you need a number whether it’s positive (revenue) or negative (cost). On top of that, it’s essential to know not just what your NPS score is, but what’s driving it, where it originates, and what’s causing it. Then you can say that removing a particular issue will save customers from having to call support — and that’s something you can measure easily. That’s the language leadership speaks and wants to hear. They’ll understand what they’re actually deciding on, and that gives you real power.
You’ve worked in both banking and cybersecurity where did you notice the biggest difference in how people thought about customers?
Surprisingly, I wouldn’t say the industry itself is the deciding factor. In both banking and cybersecurity you’ll find people with a real feel for the customer who fight their corner, and people who honestly couldn’t care less.
Other factors have a much bigger influence whether the company is growing fast, defending its market share, or under pressure to hit quarterly results. That’s what really shapes its priorities and how much room customer experience gets. CX simply isn’t a discipline you can run for a month, or even one quarter.
If I had to point to one real difference, though, it would be scale on a global level. At the largest Czech banks, we’re talking about a few million customers. At Avast, it was over 500 million users worldwide. That’s where cultural differences come into play. What one nation sees as a great experience, another might view completely differently. I remember how much this confused us with NPS — the same product had a negative NPS score in Japan, while in Brazil it was over +60. You quickly realise the number alone tells you nothing. You need to understand the context first, and only then can you make the right decisions.
What advice would you give yourself today if you went back to the start of your CX career?
That’s a lovely question, and my answer to it keeps changing as I gain more experience. I’d probably have told you something different a year ago compared to today!
- Don’t become an AI fanatic it’s great for inspiration, not always for facts.
- Start small, grow big. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Don’t try to change everything at once.
- Getting management support and alignment is essential without it, you’re stuck, and you often end up just collecting feedback.
- Don’t be a champion of dead ends find a mentor who’s already been through it. AI isn’t that.
- People love stories put together your CX story, your plan/direction, and your answer to “so what?”
As a mentor, you probably hear similar questions from younger people in the field all the time which one do you enjoy answering the most?
I wouldn’t really say there’s one question that keeps coming up. Everyone’s dealing with something different during mentoring we focus on specific areas, dig deep, and then work our way back out. Classic analysis and synthesis. That’s why the topics vary so much from how to set up satisfaction measurement properly, to embedding CX into the company, to storytelling in presentations.
Where do you think CX is heading in the coming years, and is there anything about that direction that worries you more than it excites you?
That’s a tough question, one I usually save for dog walks in the woods. So far I haven’t found that crystal ball out there, though.
Just a few years ago, the hardest part was getting good insights and data. Today, thanks to AI, you can get them within minutes. That’s great news, but it’s also a risk. More data brings more noise, and it’ll become increasingly important to be able to tell a real signal from the noise. You don’t want to invest millions in a change based on a hallucination from a single prompt.
I think CX will move over the coming years from “knowing” to “doing.” Almost every company can listen to its customers these days. But only a fraction of them can actually turn those insights into real change — and that’s exactly where the value lies. I see it in what companies are asking for today. They no longer want another survey or dashboard. They want to know how to set up their organisation so that change actually happens.
That’s why I’m curious what role AI will play here not in gathering insights, but in decision-making, prioritisation and driving through change. If it can one day help tame human entropy within organisations too unwritten rules, conflicting goals, internal politics that, to me, would be a far bigger revolution than data analysis on its own.
