Marketing Week launches the first of five sector lists in this year’s CX50 – our rundown of the UK’s top customer experience professionals – with a look at how AI enhances human interactions at manufacturing, logistics, energy and utilities companies.
Be it unlocking insights from complex customer data, streamlining self-serve portals or providing speedy support via AI-enabled chatbots, there are myriad ways in which technology is being used to elevate customer experience (CX) in both B2B and consumer-facing organisations.
In the first of five featured sectors in this year’s CX50 list, Marketing Week is proud to reveal the names of 10 professionals delivering outstanding CX within manufacturing, logistics, energy and utilities (MLEU) companies. And in our analysis below, we look at how two of these – Volkswagen Group’s Nick Ratcliffe and SmartestEnergy’s Hayley Thompson – are putting the principles of great CX into action, in particular by using AI to enable higher-quality human interactions rather than replace them.
Compiled by Marketing Week in partnership with Cognizant, Google Cloud and Salesforce, the CX50 list celebrates those who are excelling at customer service, digital innovation, data-driven insight and more in a variety of organisations across the UK.
How top CX brands balance tech with the human touch
The Marketing Week CX50, in partnership with Cognizant, Google Cloud and Salesforce, is the pre-eminent annual list of the UK’s top 50 customer experience professionals. In 2025, we are repeating the sector-focused approach to choosing the list’s members first adopted in 2024, representing the variety of customer experiences provided by B2C, B2B and public sector organisations.
The CX50 2025 is divided into the following five sectors, each featuring 10 professionals:
Jude
Colette
Lee
Kelly
Nick
Mark
Hayley
Gillian
Amy
Nigel
Director of Customer Solutions and Technology
Marketing Director, UK
Vice-President, Global Marketing and Communications
Group Marketing and Communications Director
Customer Experience Director, UK
Sales and Marketing Director
Vice-President, Global Marketing
Group Chief Data and Digital Officer
Vice-President, Digital Operations and Systems Integration
Chief Information Officer
The CX50 2025
Burditt
Healy
Nelson
Ralph
Ratcliffe
Rose
Thompson
Tomlinson
Turnbull
Watson
Severn Trent
BMW Group
DHL eCommerce
Peel Ports Group
Volkswagen Group
TotalEnergies Gas & Power
SmartestEnergy
Weir Group
Wood
Northumbrian Water Group
MANUFACTURING, LOGISTICS, ENERGY AND UTILITIES
IN PARTNERSHIP WITH
Technology gains traction in CX
As Cognizant’s ‘New Work, New World’ report indicates, nearly half of companies could be adopting generative AI within the next decade. Moreover, according to Cognizant’s companion report ‘New Minds, New Markets’, it’s thought that customers who embrace AI could drive up to 55% of spending by 2030.
That includes leading organisations within the MLEU sector, many of which are proactively embracing the opportunities such technologies provide. At energy supplier SmartestEnergy, for example, tech has been a critical part of attracting its growing roster of SME customers. Many of these are on shorter, fixed-term contracts with a higher degree of churn compared to larger corporates, explains Hayley Thompson, the company’s vice president of global marketing and a member of 2025’s CX50 list.
“Taking on that SME business – really focusing more on the small customer lens and how transactional they are, how important self-service is for them, and just how competitive it is for us to enter that market – has really driven our focus on technology, innovation, and the capability and potential of AI,” says Thompson.
Last year SmartestEnergy launched its SmartSwitch tool, for example, enabling those SME customers to transact their own energy contract online, rather than wait to liaise over the phone or bring in brokers, as might be appropriate for larger, more complex contracts. “For a small business – a flower shop, a news agent or a local supermarket – that tool has been really transformational,” says Thompson. It also allows the brand’s marketing team to better attribute their commercial impact. “We can clearly see how that upfront advertising campaign or initiative has got the individual to the site to then transact it.”
Technology is also elevating the offer for SmartestEnergy’s large commercial and industrial (C&I) customers by automating access to its huge volumes of data. For example, last year the company launched a tech-enabled, traceable renewable supply product. This means that, rather than C&I customers waiting for the team to manually issue labels verifying their renewable energy procurement once per year, they can log onto the system and pull a live report at any point.
For all these innovative use cases being trialled and rolled out, each application must be considered and designed “through a human lens, with experienced team members playing a key role in leveraging tech and AI to deliver CX, but not letting them take over”, insists Thompson.
For example, for its C&I customers, some of which have been with the company since it first launched in 2000, “we’re dealing with customers that want more of that handholding through a contract decision and where it’s very conversational”, Thompson explains. As a result, “maintaining that account management focus – and that ability for them to feel like they can talk to an individual any time they need, who they can consult on the future options for their contract – is critical”.
Our criteria and methodology for determining the CX50’s members remain the same as in previous years. In order to create a pool of candidates, we combine nominations from Marketing Week and Cognizant’s professional networks with research into independent measures of organisations that perform highly on CX. To select the final list, we then assess individuals’ achievements in the past year and over the course of their careers against the three criteria of impact, innovation and influence.
The CX50 members possess an eclectic set of skills and responsibilities, all crucial in the effort to deliver exceptional customer experience.
“If customer interactions can be less of a memory test for the person delivering for the customer, they can then spend their time doing what only a human being can do, which is create a real empathetic, specific, personal relationship and engagement with that customer,” he adds.
This runs through Volkswagen Group’s overarching strategy around technologies like AI in CX. “For pretty much every aspect of the journey, we can see opportunities for AI to make a difference,” says Ratcliffe. “But in almost every case I'm talking about AI helping a person do a job for a customer. There are exceptions where it's simple information retrieval, where you don't necessarily need a human involved, but in most cases this is about enabling humans to offer a better service to their customers rather than taking humans out of the equation.”
For example, Skoda’s Human Touch initiative has been designed “to make sure that, in a complex business with complex products and lots of technology, people don't lose sight of the fact that the biggest thing that will drive engagement with a brand is that personal interaction”.
“We’re still in the early stages of this,” adds Thompson, speaking of the race to embrace new technologies in MLEU – and all other sectors. “And obviously, there are reams of benefits. But it’s about weighing up the options for where AI capabilities and tech tools are going to be the most useful.” And that still includes plenty of areas where it’s far better to leave the most important work to people, but with tech at their fingertips.
“[Customers] feel like they can talk to an individual any time they need.”
— Hayley Thompson, SmartestEnergy
“For pretty much every aspect of the journey, we can see opportunities for AI to make a difference.”
— Nick Ratcliffe, Volkswagen Group
AI enabling human relationships
This role of technology as an enabler also reflects the approach at Volkswagen Group UK, customer experience director Nick Ratcliffe explains. “The opportunities are really about AI and people rather than AI instead of people,” he says.
There are many touchpoints in the automotive customer journey where tech has the potential to improve and simplify CX, he agrees. Take the customer research stage for example. “The Audi Q4 is one of our most simple product offerings,” he says. “But there are three different powertrains. There are three different trim levels. You can have rear-wheel drive or four-wheel drive, and you can have seven colours. So that's 126 combinations already. [Using technology] to help a customer navigate that paradox of choice is definitely an opportunity.”
But with Volkswagen Group’s 600 UK retail outlets often remaining the first point of contact, it’s just as important for tech to simplify that in-person interaction between a salesperson and prospective customer. “The salesperson's got to be absolutely fluent on all the new products and all of the competition and the customer's own car, which is why enabling salespeople to effectively have a copilot agent alongside them with all of that knowledge is something we've got the brands piloting on iPads,” points out Ratcliffe.
Read the CX50 members' profiles
More sector lists and analysis
Manufacturing, logistics, energy and utilities
Public sector
Financial services
Retail, consumer goods, travel and hospitality
Life sciences
METHODOLOGY
The human element remains essential, particularly in corporate relationships where trust is built through personal engagement.
The most innovative MLEU organisations aren't replacing human interaction, but augmenting it, enabling teams to have more meaningful conversations by handling routine tasks in the background. The ideal is using technology to elevate human capabilities, combining efficiency with genuine connection.
Rohit Gupta, Managing Director, UK and Ireland, Cognizant
In complex industrial sectors, technology works well when enhancing existing human expertise. MLEU organisations are increasingly using AI to analyse operational data, enabling more proactive, predictive customer services. However, successful implementations have the ability to maintain a pathway to human expertise, particularly for high-value corporate relationships where nuanced understanding of business context is essential.
Google Cloud
The personalisation capabilities that technology enables are particularly valuable in MLEU sectors, where customer needs vary dramatically. By analysing interaction patterns and consumption data, organisations can create tailored experiences that feel remarkably personal, even at scale. The most forward-thinking companies are balancing automation for routine interactions while enhancing the human touch for complex situations, delivering both efficiency and relationship depth.
Salesforce
Severn Trent
BMW Group
DHL eCommerce
Peel Ports Group
Volkswagen Group
TotalEnergies Gas & Power
SmartestEnergy
Weir Group
Wood
Northumbrian Water Group
Read the CX50 members' profiles