Peter Cross

Why organisations work with Peter Cross

• He has held the customer experience seat at one of the UK’s most service-known retailers. As Customer Experience Director at the John Lewis Partnership, he was responsible for the customer agenda across both John Lewis and Waitrose at a moment of acute pressure on British retail.
• His thinking is now codified in book form. Start with the Customer, published by Pearson in 2025 and called “the essential text on customer experience” by The Grocer, gives audiences a usable framework, including a “lexicon of customer needs” that distinguishes transactional, interactional, core and higher-level requirements.
• As Vice President of the Institute of Customer Service, he sits at the centre of the national conversation about service standards, with sight of how the issue plays out across sectors rather than inside a single company.
• His career holds two seats most operators never combine: ten years inside the Mary Portas consultancy that worked on the 2011 Portas Review, and eight years inside the John Lewis Partnership. He has built the strategy and lived with the consequences.

Biography highlights

• Former Customer Experience Director at the John Lewis Partnership, with the brief extended to cover Waitrose
• Co-author of Start with the Customer (Pearson, 2025), called “the essential text on customer experience” by The Grocer
• Vice President of the Institute of Customer Service
• Ambassador for the Retail Trust and Leader in Residence at Leeds University Business School
• Ten-year business partnership with Mary Portas at her retail agency
• Earlier senior roles at L’Oréal, Burberry and Alfred Dunhill

Biography

Between 2017 and 2021, two of Britain’s most service-known retailers, John Lewis and Waitrose, were pressured by pure-play online players and a public mood shifting hard toward speed. Holding their character through that period was the customer experience brief, and it sat with Peter Cross.

Before John Lewis, he spent ten years as business partner to Mary Portas at her retail agency. Their work together included charity-shop reinvention and the 2011 Portas Review of the British high street, commissioned by government. Earlier still came senior marketing roles at L’Oréal, Burberry and Alfred Dunhill. He has occupied both the operator’s chair and the advisor’s chair.

Start with the Customer, his 2025 Pearson book co-written with Institute of Customer Service CEO Jo Causon, was called “the essential text on customer experience” by The Grocer. The book argues that service has been quietly reduced to process, and that technology cannot substitute for the cultural work of building a service organisation from the CEO’s desk down.

He now serves as Vice President of the Institute of Customer Service, Ambassador for the Retail Trust, and Leader in Residence at Leeds University Business School. The thinking he brings to senior teams centres on a framework from his book: the “lexicon of customer needs,” which separates requirements into transactional, interactional, core and higher-level categories. The standards he asks organisations to meet are ones he held himself, for eight years, on the customer agenda at the John Lewis Partnership.

Key speaking topics

• Customer experience strategy
• Service culture
• The lexicon of customer needs
• Customer behaviour and expectation
• Leadership in customer-facing organisations
• Employee engagement and frontline empowerment
• The future of retail

Ideal for

• Boards and CEOs setting the customer agenda for the next strategic cycle
• CMOs, Chief Customer Officers and Customer Experience Directors making the case for cultural investment alongside technology spend
• Retail and consumer-facing leadership teams under pressure from online competitors
• HR and people leaders responsible for service culture and frontline engagement

Audience outcomes

• A vocabulary for the different types of customer need (transactional, interactional, core, higher-level) and where each one surfaces across the customer journey
• The case, evidenced through John Lewis and Mary Portas-era examples, for treating service culture as a board-level discipline
• A way to test whether technology investment is enabling service or quietly substituting for it
• The “golden rules and cardinal sins” of service that separate brands customers stay with from brands they leave