About - Customer Experience Group

We help premium and luxury brands transform experiences for meaningful impact.

Bring your brand promises to life

With a network of 170+ customer experience experts across 70 countries, we help brands evaluate the experiences they deliver, and work with them to develop programs that support a strong experience and business culture.

200+ luxury clients

Specializing in luxury and premium brands, we are experts in affluent customer behavior and insights.

We close the gap between your brand promise and your brand delivery

Many brands operate without understanding what their customers experience, how their teams are delivering the experience, and what they really want their customers to feel. Let us help you discover where your CX stands now, versus where you aim to be. Together, we can implement and achieve measurable results.

We provide a full CX solution framework.

We offer an end-to-end CX transformation framework, through our four in-house practices: research, consulting and transformation, measurement, and our academy.

Customer insights

Research enables brands to understand their customers’ expectations, behaviors, and perceptions.

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Measurement

Measuring CX enables brands to understand what works and what can be improved.

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Academy

We design and deliver training, coaching and mentoring to managers and frontline teams.

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Consulting and transformation

We partner with our clients as they transform their businesses to deliver more value.

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Bring your brand promises to life

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Our Global Presence

Founded in China in 2006, our story started with two entrepreneurs. Today, we’re very proud to be a global business: from Shanghai to Paris, we have 12 offices, we operate across four continents in 70 countries and are home to over 160 professionals from around the world.

15+

years of experience

200+

luxury clients

70

countries covered

160+

professionals

&

growing

Our People

Our business is built on people – our own, our clients’ and their customers. Our team has decades of experience in the premium and luxury industry, helping brands to understand people, elevate customer experience, and build strong, long-lasting customer relationships.

Christophe Caïs

Chief Executive Officer
Dubai Office

Fabrice Tavel besson

EVP Academy
Shanghai Office

Carole Vienne

EVP Customer Insights
Hong Kong Office

Thibaut Fromageau

Chief Customer Officer
Dubai Office

Georges Al Feghali

EVP Consulting & Transformation
Dubai Office

Clement Barthelemy

EVP Measurement
Paris Office

Craig Trevor Lee

EVP Thought Leadership
Dubai Office

Joanna Abou Jaoude

Chief Marketing Officer
Dubai Office

Didier Mahillon

Chief Financial Officer
Dubai Office

Marine Debatte K

EVP Community Engagement
Dubai Office

Anne Brumeaux

EVP Innovation & Solutions
Hong Kong Office

Ahmed Klabi

Chief Technology Officer
Tunis Office

Ariane Kamalodine

Chief People Officer
Dubai Office

The CXG Advisory Board is composed of five highly respected leaders in the luxury industry: Yseulys Costes, François Delage, Frédéric de Narp, François Léauté and Lina Ly. With their combined expertise and experience, our Advisory Board acts as an external voice, challenging ideas, supporting our strategy and opening doors through their influence and networks.

Yseulys Costes

CEO at Numberly (1000mercis Group)

Yseulys is the CEO of Numberly (1000mercis), a marketing technology company that operates in over 40 countries. In 2019, Costes was named as one of 40 French Forbes Women who embody success and excellence. Today, she is also a member of the Kering Board of Directors, Groupe SEB, and the Strategic Council of the City of Paris.

François Delage

Founder at Delage Private Office

François has more than 20 years’ experience in strategic leadership and brand development in the luxury industry. He has held executive positions at Louis Vuitton and De Beers. His strong branding, marketing, and omnichannel skills are bolstered by extensive financial and operational expertise.

Frederic de Narp

Co-Founder and CEO at LUXIMPACT

Frederic has three decades experience in the luxury sector as CEO of brands including Cartier, Harry Winston, and Bally. In 2020, he founded Luximpact to relaunch French historical luxury brands. Today, he leads the holding company in implementing its 360-degree sustainable and ethical strategy.

François Léauté

President at FLGA

François is an expert in customer experience and client satisfaction. He is a member of the advisory board of major brands including Barnes and Autobac. He worked with Publicis for 11 years and in 1997 founded DMS (Dynamic Mystery Shopping), a pioneer in customer experience measurement that was acquired by the BVA group in 2013.

Lina Ly

Managing Director Asia Pacific at L’Occitane Group

Lina is a retail change management and digital transformation specialist with over 20 years’ experience in APAC, including 12 years in China. As a native Chinese French national, she has a unique insight into both the European and Asian markets. Lina is an expert in the premium and luxury beauty sector and has worked with iconic brands including Chanel, L’Oréal Luxury and L’Occitane.

Our Story

We have come a long way since securing our first client in 2006. To understand the business we have become, it’s helpful to understand where we started – and what makes us into the business we are today.

2005

Chapter 1: Open for business – 2005-2006

Our story begins in Shanghai, China, in 2005. While shopping in a high-end mall, Christophe Caïs saw a gap between what the luxury brands were aiming to deliver and what was actually happening in the stores. He saw an opportunity to help luxury brands deliver a better customer experience through a deeper understanding of their customers. Albatross was born, specializing in CX measurement. In 2006, Albatross won its first client – Benetton Sisley.

2007

Chapter 2: Expansion in Asia – 2007-2010

After our first satisfied client, referrals and word of mouth grew. Albatross started winning contracts across China and APAC. We rapidly opened offices in Beijing and Guangzhou, followed by Hong Kong, Tokyo, Seoul, Taipei and Singapore.

2010

Chapter 3: Supporting CX implementation – 2010

Our CX measurement solutions provided many practical, actionable insights to our clients, but we noticed they sometimes had trouble implementing them. In 2010, we launched Face2Face, a specialist CX training business to help luxury brands deliver richer programs to enhance the CX competence of their retail managers and staff.

2013

Chapter 4: Global expansion – 2010-2013

By the 2010s, we were expanding into Europe to be closer to our clients’ key decision makers and their brands internationally. We opened new group offices in Paris, followed by London, Moscow and New York. A large on-going project in the UAE brought us to Dubai, where we discovered a vibrant, business-friendly city, ideally located between the North American, European and APAC markets. We decided to make Dubai our headquarters, where support functions and the executive team are based.

2016

Chapter 5: Deepening understanding – 2016

The closer we got to our clients, the more we realized that many do not fully understand their customers beyond the transactional interactions they have with their brands. We created Wisely Insights, a boutique consumer research agency, to help clients fully understand luxury and premium brand customers, highlighting potential gaps and providing practical guidance on how best to address them.

2017

Chapter 6: Customer Experience Group is born – 2017

As our client relationships developed, we realized we needed to unify our solutions into a stronger, more united proposition – the Customer Experience Group. We wanted to be seen as a strategic partner that could guide clients on their journey and help them find new solutions to the problems they were facing.

2021

Chapter 7: CXG – One name, one company, one brand – 2021

As the Covid-19 pandemic impacted the retail sector, we took the opportunity to strategically review our clients’ evolving needs, as well as our business and the way we operated. CXG was born. One name. One brand. One vision to become the preferred customer experience transformation partner for premium and luxury brands. Our journey continues.

Our brand

Transforming Experiences

In all we do, we are guided by four key brand principles. These drive our behaviors and enable us to achieve our purpose to transform customer experiences and create meaningful impact for our clients.

People

We believe the most impactful and memorable experiences are those that are most personal and human.

Partnership

We believe the best route to long-term success is through close partnerships with our colleagues, our clients and our communities.

Impact

We believe customer experience is the driver of high impact brands and high-performing businesses.

Simplicity

We believe in the power of simplicity as the secret to sustainable, high quality performance.

Our Latest News

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