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This article was originally published on The Currency on 07 February 2025.
The way businesses interact with their customers is undergoing a seismic shift. Richard Hepworth, a partner at EY, explains why front-office transformation is now a matter of survival and gives practical advice on how companies can embrace the change.
Richard Hepworth has spent his career helping businesses navigate change, but even he admits that the pace of transformation today is unlike anything seen before.
Sitting in the Dublin headquarters of the professional services firm EY, Hepworth likens it to the industrial revolution. And the way he sees it, how companies adapt to this unfolding revolution will determine their future success or failure.
For Hepworth, the battle is being fought in the front office—the crucial space where businesses interact with their customers.
In the past, this meant physical stores, call centres, and face-to-face interactions. Today, it’s dynamic and often digital-first. Customers expect seamless, personalised engagement, whether online, over the phone, or in-store.
Hepworth, the lead partner for Innovation Design and Customer Transformation with EY in Ireland, has seen this shift unfold firsthand.
Recently, he spoke with a retail CEO who lamented the erosion of their once-loyal customer base. The problem? Customers expected personalised and consistent interactions across channels of their choice, including digital, but the company was still relying on outdated, one-size-fits-all engagement tactics.
“Our customers love us in-store,” the CEO admitted to Hepworth, “but online, we’re just another option.”
The winners, according to Hepworth, are those who understand their purpose and execute on it relentlessly. “Take discount retailers—customers know exactly what they’re getting. The same goes for premium brands. But the businesses caught in the middle, the ones without a clear identity, are the ones struggling,” he says.
These are precisely the kinds of customer experience challenges Hepworth and the EY Customer Transformation team help businesses address.
It is a fast-paced environment – new technologies and trends such as automation, artificial intelligence, and hyper-personalisation are evolving, forcing companies to rethink customer interaction like never before.
The customer experience is changing, and the expectations from customers are growing. It puts significant pressure on companies and the executives leading them.
“Unless businesses change and evolve, they’re in danger of dying,” Hepworth says. “Their competitors will do it first, and the competitive advantage will belong to those who embrace transformation.”
Why digital transformation is no longer optional
Hepworth has spent more than two decades helping companies transform their CX capabilities. It is a job that requires him to challenge thinking and ask hard questions of management and marketing teams.
Central to his thinking is the “front office”. It is a phrase he uses often.
According to Hepworth, the front office represents “everything to do with the interface between an organisation and their customers.”
The days of a single-channel interaction are gone. “Nowadays, it’s across multiple channels,” he says. “You hear the direction of the word ‘omnichannel,’ which essentially means that customers expect consistency of experience whether they start the conversation online, go to a telephone centre, or actually go into a store.”
At its core, the front office encompasses sales, marketing, and service functions—the fundamental aspects of how businesses engage with their customers. But that engagement is radically changing.
Hepworth points to retail. “Seventy-nine per cent of retailers are investing in AI and chatbots to improve customer engagement,” he says. “And digital signage is being deployed in stores to make the entire experience feel more tailored.”
But it’s not just about retail, he says. B2B companies, once more insulated from the pressures of direct consumer relationships, are being forced to rethink their entire approach. “The old model, where manufacturers sold through intermediaries, is breaking down. More and more businesses are engaging customers directly,” Hepworth says.
EY advises clients across industries—from B2B enterprises to consumer-facing businesses and believes the biggest shift may come in the B2B space.
“I can’t overstate the importance of delivering differentiated branded experiences, because the organisations that are performing the best in any sector right now are the ones that have a clear purpose and they execute that purpose through every interaction with their customer,” he says.
“I was struck just the other day that Henry Ford once said, ‘Customers can have any vehicle as long as it’s black.’ The impact of digital is the opposite. Car manufacturers are now investing in plant works that can actually personalise the paintwork of the vehicle to specific customers’ needs.
“And I think that may have Henry Ford spinning in his grave a bit, but that is the advent of digitalisation and change that means that customers are beginning to expect hyper-personalisation in all their transactions.”
The expectation paradigm has shifted – customers expect more. This level of hyper-personalisation is quickly becoming the standard, and Hepworth says businesses must either keep pace or risk irrelevance.
Yet transformation isn’t just about customers, and he argues that employees also need better tools to serve customers effectively.
“I think very long and hard about the employee experience,” Hepworth says. “How do we support employees in their day-to-day interactions, providing them information and insight so they can fulfil the customer request in that first instance?”
The What: Experience as the differentiator
Hepworth is passionate about the role of people in the new process. “Digital transformation is not just about technology—it’s about people,” he tells me.
Too many organisations, he argues, pour money into systems like CRM and MarTech, only to find they don’t deliver the expected results. “The real game-changer is human-centred design,” he explains. “It’s about rethinking how employees engage with customers.”
He recalls working with a luxury hotel brand known for its impeccable customer service. “They had a simple philosophy: the last person a customer interacts with is the most important person in that relationship. Every team member was empowered to make sure that guest experience was flawless,” he says.
That same principle, he argues, can be applied anywhere. “Retail, financial services, automotive—you name it,” he says.
Hepworth believes that the most successful companies are those that create unique, branded experiences. “The organisations that are performing the best in any sector right now are the ones that have a clear purpose and execute that purpose through every interaction with their customer.”
How businesses can implement change successfully
The way Hepworth and his team at EY sees it, artificial intelligence is not only accelerating digital transformation but also reshaping the front office itself.
Hepworth acknowledges that while AI is often associated with automation and efficiency, he says its greatest potential lies in enhancing personalisation.
“All organisations have policies and terms and conditions,” he explains. “We created a large language model for an organisation and loaded the policies of that organisation onto it. The AI functionality was able to take an inbound email, summarise it for the agent, and then compose a first draft of a response back to the customer.”
The benefits were twofold: improved accuracy—since the AI-generated response aligned with company policy—and led to a reduction in processing time. But the real impact was freeing up employees for higher-value tasks.
“If you’re going to talk to a human, let them do what they’re great at: personalisation and empathy,” Hepworth says. “That’s the way you’re going to deliver differentiated brand experiences.”
On the topic of AI, Hepworth adds: “The businesses that will benefit most from technology like AI are the ones that equip their staff to ask better questions and interpret the answers more effectively on the data they’ve got. That’s the way you’re going to deliver a differentiated brand and get your people to focus on the things that really matter to customers.”
While the potential is enormous, many organisations struggle to execute large-scale transformation. Hepworth believes that only about 20 per cent of companies meaningfully transform their customer experience in a given year.
“Organisations must be clear about their purpose and what they provide to consumers,” Hepworth states. “Consumers know that you’re there to make money, but they want to know what else you’re doing in society.”
Adopting new ways of working isn’t easy, and Hepworth acknowledges that resistance to change is one of the biggest hurdles businesses face.
“Many leaders see transformation as a massive undertaking, but the truth is, meaningful change can happen in as little as eight to twelve weeks. But to transform successfully, organisations need to bring in the skills of a broad spectrum of capabilities, ranging from optimising a company’s sales and marketing strategy, to creating customer experience design that can unlock hidden value, to delivering the right technology in the right way for the people who use it the most.”
He lays out a number of key ingredients for success:
- Clear Strategy – “Does everyone understand the vision?”
- Employee Readiness – “Are staff equipped to deliver on the new experience?”
- Integrated Capabilities – “Are technology, data, and processes all aligned?”
Hepworth is the first to admit that the AI revolution is raising big questions about jobs, skills, and the future of work. But he believes the solution lies in education. He argues that the businesses that thrive will be the ones that train their people to ask better questions, interpret data effectively, and use AI as an enabler, not a replacement.
The road ahead
If the past decade has been defined by digital adoption, Hepworth argues that the next will be defined by digital transformation.
“I’ve come through the e-commerce period, the omnichannel period, and now into the next wave—generative AI and beyond. What excites me most is that we can finally do what we’ve always envisioned. The barriers—data quality, channel integration, organisational silos—are breaking down,” he says.
He acknowledges that consumers know that companies are looking to make a profit. But, he also argues that they now want to know what companies are doing for society – “their broader purpose”.
“All those elements need to be present in your transformation programme. And what I fear is sometimes people just do a rebranding and don’t think about the more fundamental elements that need to be present in the customer experience,” he says. “
After decades in the field, Hepworth is more optimistic than ever.
“I am more excited about my career today than I’ve ever been,” he says. “Our imagination is the only limit to where these things are going. It’s going to be completely transformative, and it’s going to happen faster than people realise.”
To discover more about EY’s Customer Transformation, visit ey.com/ie/customer