December 09, 2025

Interview: International Customer Experience Awards’ CX Leader of the Year, Claire Bristowe

By Geoff Spick

While we’re starting to look forward to next year’s awards, the after glow of the recent ceremonies is still bright.

CXM sat down with Aegon UK’s Claire Bristowe who looked in complete shock when named as CX Leader of the Year. The International Customer Experience Awards took place at London’s Riverbank Park Plaza hotel in November, giving Claire time to think about her success and role.

Thinking back to the Awards night, what was your reaction to winning CX Leader of the Year?

Honestly, it was total shock. I was up against tough competition, I felt I hadn’t delivered my presentation as well as I had hoped and I feel I am still fairly new to the CX world so I was so surprised, but obviously pleasantly surprised. (Catch up with the emotions of the night here.)

How long have you been at Aegon, what was the situation like when you started and what were your first “day 100” objectives?

So, taking away a year mid-employment I have been with Aegon for 10 years, but always worked in pensions. When I took this role we did not have a programme focused on improving our customer culture, through understanding and improving customers’ experiences, so my first 100 days was to understand the need of the business.

By this, I mean not holistically, but at department levels so I understood the bigger picture. This resulted in 63 discovery sessions which varied from teams, seniority and much more but it was important I understood where we are now and what people would respond to, what are our gaps and work from there.

Tell us about the Team?

Our CX team as a whole is made up of 12 people and we joke that we could do our own Eurovision song contest with the mix of nationalities!

We have insight and experience specialists, behavioural insight specialists, customer experience and journey mapping and the connecting with customers programme – so a really good spread to cover what both customers are saying now and what they need from us to deliver exceptional customer experiences.

Sometimes words don’t do these events justice, here’s Claire’s reaction from night.

What have you been driving behind “Connecting With Customers” within Aegon to drive CX progress?

For me it’s the relatability element of ensuring everyone truly understands their impacts and the part they play in CX whether they are in a direct to customer role or not. Providing content and hosting sessions which makes this so clear and builds the human story of how we influence peoples future lifestyles in retirement and their financial security, plus the emotions attached to this.

I want to drive that you shouldn’t need someone from CX or an actual customer in the room to consider and prioritise customers needs. I want colleagues to be referring back to previous learnings and saying “well CWC told us customers didn’t like X, so lets do some user testing before coming to our conclusion”.

Tell us a little more about the “live events” and focus on real world contact?

Live events are always a big engager for our Aegon colleagues so we have done a number of these this year, including as much as possible, physical customer presence. I hosted an in-person customer roundtable with three Aegon customers discussing what customers want and need from us, as well as sharing our simplification plans and getting their views if priorities align.

We had this recorded and then created the Aegon cinema, where we had a red carpet, cinema themed goodies, watched the video as a group and then had a “meet the star” feature where a customer came back and answered any questions colleagues had. These were really successful and fun – it shared important customer messages that we should consider in design and build of future processes etc but in an engaging way.

We also did complaints LIVE this year – which were initially delivered in office where we went through the trends, how everyone at Aegon can reduce complaints, but then turned our colleagues into the complaints handlers and had them listen in to real complaint calls and work out what we did wrong, how we could improve and what the resolution should be.

This then went one step further and we delivered tailored sessions to specific departments, such as legal and technology, where we made the complaints relevant to legal or technology. So it was really clear that their areas can also dissatisfy customers, but work can be done to improve these situations for future interactions.

How has your role changed? And what are your future plans around the “Connecting colleagues with your digital ambitions” theme

My role really does change very regularly. Every quarter I meet with each of our executive team and discuss what their CX priorities are and what work is being done and ensure we are including key deliveries from across the business in our programme to showcase all the good work being complete for our customers.

A big part of this recently has been working closely with our simplification programme leads (a three-year improvement programme within Aegon) to ensure that everyone understands the processes being improved, the customer and colleague benefits of these changes and the sheer amount of work being done.

This is heavily focused on improving digital and online processes, but also making our platform more user friendly and simple to use and so we will continue buddying up with this programme and highlighting all the work we are doing to become the UK’s leading digital savings and investment provider.

As a finalist, what did you think of the process, and do you have any tips for would-be entrants?

For me the UKCX awards and the IXCA awards are the ones I enjoy the most as I do feel having a written entry PLUS a presentation is the right thing to do.

Presentations allow for you to really get the message across, show your passion for what your working on and build that human connection to build on the written entry and showcase your key points.

My tip would be to make sure you invest time to fully understand each part of the journey. Part of the reason I felt like I hadn’t delivered my presentation well was timing, in that I hadn’t realised though 30 minutes allocated only 15 was for presenting, but luckily for me my structure allowed me to get key points across at regular intervals which helped me with the final result.

And are there any top-of-mind statistics you can drop in that highlight your success?

Since launch, the programme has had over 30,000 points of engagement. Which is fantastic for a non-mandatory programme and a work force of circa 2,750 people. Highlights content is relatable, fun and people want to invest time to improve their own customer centric mindsets.

On top of that in 2025 alone, myself, Lissie (the other person on CWC programme) and our CWC promoters have delivered 284 sessions within and across our business – sometimes holistic roll outs, others tailored sessions for specific departments.

Finally, is there one “joyous” personal or team moment that you felt encapsulated your year or the team’s CX progress?

For me this award was huge. It was reassurance that doing things differently by introducing cartoons, live panels, coffee mornings and days in the life of is seen as a good idea by other CX professionals.

I LOVE my job, I get excited by the work we do and care about the results and so this award meant something to me, which is also why you may have seen me wiping away a quick tear before I got on stage too!

However, I think the best team moment is easy but its more a change of behaviour. The programme has been running for 4.5 years now but this year a lot of our content and delivery has been done because WE have been approached to get involved, rather than us asking.

For me this highlights what Aegon colleagues think of the programmes reach, the deliveries we have already done and the benefit of sharing with us the good work being done to ensure our colleagues learn about it. So feeling like we do play a key part in celebration and showcasing of improved CX has been amazing.

Looking Forward to Awards Season 2026

Thank you and goodnight!