March 20, 2026
Retail vs. Healthcare vs. Tech: How CX Challenges Differ Across Industries (And What We Can Learn)
The CX profession loves universal principles: journey mapping, closing the loop, and proving ROI. But spend time with leaders actually doing the work, and the industries that share the same language are fighting very different battles underneath. Here’s what three sectors reveal, based on the leaders’ insights from the CXM Stars 2026 list.
Retail and Hospitality: The Complexity Tax
The defining challenge in retail CX right now is coordination. Systems, channels, teams, and metrics all pulling in slightly different directions while customers expect a seamless whole.
Shetal Bhatt, Global Head of Digital Marketing, Loyalty and Consumer Engagement at Costa Coffee, says: “The biggest CX challenge is not a single technology or tactic — it’s orchestrating complexity. CX leaders must unify diverse systems, turn AI into usable capability, deliver continuous omnichannel experiences, personalise without overwhelming, and maintain customer trust — all while meeting rising expectations.”
At Whitbread, owner of Premier Inn, Katy Jess is dealing with the structural version of the same problem. The insight tools exist, the data flows, but organisational siloes mean operations sees its slice of the journey, support sees theirs, and nobody has a complete picture. Her challenge for 2026 is integrating an XM platform into a business with its own established systems — and shifting culture toward seeing the journey as the customer experiences it, not as internal departments have divided it up.
Jon Horrie at Marshalls PLC is navigating a similar tension from the manufacturing-retail side. His challenge for 2026 centres on scaling an insight-driven experience across a growing, diversifying business without losing coherence: “Marshalls has a strong Voice of the Customer programme and digital self-service initiatives, but the challenge will be ensuring that insight from NPS, CSAT, NetEase, and panels continues to drive measurable improvements across all touchpoints, especially as product lines and customer segments expand.”
Jess says most CX teams don’t own the systems that shape the experience. Product owns the tooling, ops owns the workflows, while CX is left to advocate without authority.
Healthcare: When the Stakes Are Existential
Healthcare CX operates in a different moral register. A poor experience here is a delayed treatment, eroded trust, or a communication failure at a moment of genuine vulnerability.
Nawal Alkhormi spent 2025 building CX governance frameworks across hospitals and primary healthcare centres in the Riyadh First Health Cluster. Her challenge for 2026 captures the sector’s specific anxiety: “Rapid digitalisation and automation risk creating fragmented or impersonal experiences if not guided by strong CX governance.” In healthcare, deploying automation without proper oversight has clinical and ethical implications.
Gratia Carver at Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City is navigating a three-way tension. She is personalising experiences while complying with HIPAA, maintaining financial sustainability under rising costs, and rebuilding trust in a sector where it is currently fragile. These pressures actively pull against each other. Personalisation requires data; regulation limits what you can do with it. Efficiency saves money, but efficiency without empathy in a claims environment is exactly what generates backlash.
Rachel Crimmins at EBOS Medtech adds a dimension that the other sectors underestimate, that is the pace mismatch. “The biggest CX challenge is the widening gap between how quickly customers are changing and how slowly organisations are able to innovate in response. Healthcare and medtech remain constrained by legacy systems and regulatory frameworks that struggle to keep up.”
Customers who experience seamless digital experiences in retail arrive at healthcare expecting the same, and find processes designed for a different era.
Technology and Telecoms: The Frontline of AI Adoption
Tech companies are both building AI tools and deploying them in their own customer experience. The dual position gives their CX leaders clarity about AI’s practical limitations that other sectors haven’t yet earned.
Davor Bozic, Senior Strategy and Planning Manager of AI Execution Operations at Cisco, spent 2025 building an AI tool embedded into the workflow of technical support engineers to make them more capable. His challenge for 2026 is of an ethical nature: ensuring AI is transparent, auditable, and doesn’t cross from personalisation into intrusion.
Rachael McBrearty, Chief Customer Officer at Workday, argues the industry is measuring the wrong things: “For decades, CX has been optimised for deterministic software — asking ‘How is the customer feeling?’ In 2026, that’s no longer enough. We must transition to system-level signals: what is the telemetry telling us about outcomes?”
As AI handles more interactions, human-gathered sentiment data becomes insufficient. You need to instrument the systems themselves.
What Each Sector Can Teach the Others
Retail has learnt where the personalisation boundary is, while healthcare has built governance disciplines under regulatory pressure that every sector now needs. Tech is furthest along in AI deployment, and its leaders are the most honest about what doesn’t work.
The lesson that travels across all three is fixing the process before you automate it. The organisations that get CX right in 2026 are the ones that design their systems, governance, and human-AI handoffs before deploying anything.
