Lior Arussy

Why organisations work with Lior Arussy

• He has the documented Mercedes-Benz USA case: a dealer network that moved from ninth to first in customer satisfaction, with 25,000 employees engaged through 80 full-day programmes.
• His method treats customer experience as an execution problem, not a brand or service problem. The deliverable is behavioural change at the frontline, tied to revenue and retention.
• He brings a published intellectual track. Seven books, including Next Is Now (Simon & Schuster) on building organisations for continuous change, and 300+ articles, with regular contributions to Harvard Business Review and Chief Executive.
• He has run more than 200 corporate transformations through Strativity, with clients including Mercedes-Benz, Royal Caribbean, Thomson Reuters, HSBC, SAP, FedEx, and Johnson & Johnson. The reference base is unusually deep for a CX speaker.
• His Generative AI keynote work addresses what the technology does to customer expectations and to the operating model of customer-facing teams. It is positioned as a strategic conversation, not a tooling demo.

Biography highlights

• Founder and CEO of Strativity Group, a global customer experience and strategy execution consultancy operating across multiple countries.
• Author of seven books, including Next Is Now (Simon & Schuster, 2018), Passionate and Profitable (Wiley, 2005), and Customer Experience Strategy.
• 300+ published articles, with regular contributions to Harvard Business Review and Chief Executive media.
• Led the Mercedes-Benz USA customer experience transformation, taking the dealer network from ninth to first in customer satisfaction.
• Named to the Global Gurus customer service and customer experience rankings; recipient of the CRM Magazine “Influential Leaders” award.
• MBA, Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University. Previously held executive positions at Hewlett-Packard.

Biography

Most customer experience programmes do not fail at the strategy stage. They fail when an engaged steering committee meets a frontline that has been trained to comply with policy rather than own a customer outcome. Arussy has spent two decades closing that gap inside large organisations.

He founded Strativity Group in 2003 and has since led more than 200 corporate transformations across customer experience, employee engagement, and strategy execution. The Mercedes-Benz USA work is the cleanest illustration: a dealer network that moved from ninth to first in customer satisfaction after 25,000 employees were engaged through 80 full-day programmes. A European logistics client he advised moved from 3% to 44% annual organic growth in two years. The work is consistently anchored in measurable commercial change, not in survey scores or brand language.

The published track behind the consulting is substantial. He has written seven books, including Next Is Now (Simon & Schuster, 2018) on building organisations that thrive under continuous change, and Passionate and Profitable (Wiley, 2005) on why customer strategies typically fail. He has published more than 300 articles, including in Harvard Business Review, and contributes regularly to Chief Executive media. His current keynote work extends into the implications of generative AI for customer expectations and the operating model of customer-facing teams.

For a senior buyer, the value is access to a CX practitioner who has done the work at scale and writes about it with the directness of someone who has watched it succeed and fail in real organisations. The references run from Mercedes-Benz and Royal Caribbean to HSBC, SAP, and Johnson & Johnson.

Key speaking topics

• Customer experience as commercial growth strategy
• Strategy execution and behavioural change at the frontline
• Customer-centric culture and employee engagement
• The generative AI-empowered customer
• Leading continuous change and organisational reinvention
• Personal agency and ownership in transformation

Ideal for

• Chief Customer Officers, CXOs, and Chief Marketing Officers leading enterprise-wide CX programmes.
• CEOs and COOs evaluating the gap between customer strategy and operating reality.
• Transformation and change leaders responsible for embedding new behaviours across large, distributed workforces.
• Boards and leadership teams in retail, financial services, automotive, hospitality, logistics, and B2B technology.

Audience outcomes

• A practitioner’s account of what separates CX programmes that move revenue from those that move only dashboards.
• A clearer picture of how generative AI is reshaping customer expectations and the work of customer-facing teams.
• The five steps from Next Is Now applied to the audience’s own change environment.
• Named case material from Mercedes-Benz, Royal Caribbean, and other Fortune 500 transformations.
• A direct challenge to the policy-and-consistency model of customer service, with the alternative framed in operational terms.