Sterling Anderson
EVP & Chief Product Officer, General Motors | Co-Founder, Aurora Innovation | Former Tesla Autopilot Lead | MIT PhD in Robotics
Annette Franz
Founder & CEO, CX Journey™ | CCXP | Customer Experience Strategist | Author of Customer Understanding, Built to Win & Employee Understanding
Annette Franz is the voice organizations turn to when customer experience must become competitive advantage. Founder and CEO of CX Journey™ and a Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP), she has spent three decades helping companies build customer-centric cultures. Author of the trilogy Customer Understanding, Built to Win, and Employee Understanding, she shows audiences how to link culture, employee engagement, and business results.
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Annette Franz biography
Customer experience speaker Annette Franz is one of the most recognized voices in the global customer experience field, a practitioner, strategist, and author who has spent more than three decades helping organizations stop guessing what customers want and start building cultures that consistently deliver. As Founder and CEO of CX Journey™, she aligns employees, processes, and strategy around the customer, turning abstract CX principles into operational change that lasts.
Franz earned her Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP) credential, the industry’s most respected certification, and was among its earliest recipients. Through CX Journey™ she advises and coaches Fortune 500 companies, mid-market firms, and startups alike. Her work rests on a deceptively simple but often overlooked truth: customer experience transformation fails when organizations fixate on the experience without first attending to the people who deliver it. In her methodology, employee experience is the precondition for customer experience excellence.
A Trilogy on Understanding Customers and Employees
That conviction runs through the three books that have made Franz a go-to author for CX practitioners and business leaders. Customer Understanding: Three Ways to Put the “Customer” in Customer Experience shows how organizations can genuinely know their customers through listening, characterization, and journey mapping. Built to Win: Designing a Customer-Centric Culture That Drives Value for Your Business turns to organizational design, arguing that durable CX improvement is built from the inside out rather than patched on from the outside in. Her most recent book, Employee Understanding: A Three-Pillar Framework for Designing a Great Experience and Driving Business Success, completes the arc, drawing on culture, insight, and empathy to build workplaces where people feel valued, heard, and engaged.
Franz has been named one of the top CX influencers and thought leaders worldwide by multiple industry publications and research firms. She writes regularly for platforms including Forbes, MarTech, and CustomerThink, and contributes steadily to the wider conversation about what it means to put customers, and employees, at the center of business strategy. Her perspective is sought after precisely because it is operational rather than aspirational: she knows what actually breaks inside large organizations and how to fix it.
As a speaker, Annette Franz brings rare clarity and candor to audiences that have sat through too many CX keynotes heavy on buzzwords and light on substance. Her talks are research-grounded, practically structured, and immediately applicable, whether she is addressing a C-suite leadership team, a conference of HR and operations leaders, or a room of customer success professionals. Attendees leave with a sharper understanding of how culture, employee engagement, and business outcomes connect, and with concrete tools to accelerate their own transformation.
Annette Franz Speaking Videos
Annette Franz
Annette Franz - Putting the Customer into Customer Experience
Annette Franz Keynote Topics
Most CX initiatives stall not because the strategy is wrong but because the culture has not caught up. Annette Franz challenges leaders to look past journey maps and dashboards to the deeper organizational shifts that lasting customer-centricity requires. Drawing on three decades of advisory work, she lays out the principles, leadership behaviors, and structural changes that separate companies that talk about the customer from those that are genuinely built around one.
Customer experience and employee experience are two sides of the same coin, and organizations that invest in one while neglecting the other consistently fall short. Drawing on her book Employee Understanding, Franz makes the case for treating employees as the primary engine of CX outcomes. She introduces a practical framework built on culture, insight, and empathy for diagnosing where workplaces break down and for designing environments where people are equipped and motivated to deliver exceptional service every day.
Most organizations believe they understand their customers. Few actually do. Drawing on her book Customer Understanding, Franz walks audiences through three concrete methods, listening programs, customer characterization, and journey mapping, that turn assumptions into evidence-based insight. Attendees leave knowing how to gather the right data, make sense of it, and translate it into decisions that measurably improve the customer experience.
Inspired by her book Built to Win, this keynote frames culture not as a soft HR concern but as a strategic capability that decides whether a company can compete over time. Franz outlines the design principles behind customer-centric cultures that endure, from leadership alignment and shared values to employee empowerment and closed-loop feedback, and shows audiences how to assess where their own organization stands and what to prioritize next.
FAQs on Booking Annette Franz
Why Annette Franz?
Booking Annette Franz means bringing one of the world's most credible and operationally grounded customer experience experts to your stage. As Founder and CEO of CX Journey™ and a Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP) with more than 30 years of hands-on advisory experience, she delivers frameworks that work rather than inspiration that fades. Her sessions resonate with C-suite leaders, operations teams, HR executives, and anyone responsible for building organizations that compete on experience. If your audience is navigating culture transformation, employee engagement, or CX strategy, few investments will do more. Contact Aurum Speakers Bureau to check her availability and bring Annette Franz to your stage.
What is Annette Franz's book Employee Understanding about?
Employee Understanding: A Three-Pillar Framework for Designing a Great Experience and Driving Business Success is Annette Franz's most recent book and the completion of a trilogy that began with Customer Understanding and Built to Win. It argues that a great customer experience is impossible without a great employee experience, and it lays out a three-pillar framework built on culture, insight, and empathy. The book gives leaders a practical path to understand their employees, design an experience worth showing up for, and connect that experience directly to business performance.
What is a CCXP and why does Annette Franz's certification matter?
The Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP) designation is the gold-standard credential in the CX industry, awarded by the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA) to practitioners who demonstrate mastery across CX strategy, metrics, organizational adoption, and customer insights. Annette Franz is one of a relatively small number of practitioners worldwide to hold it, and she was among its earliest recipients, a reflection of both her depth of expertise and her long-standing role in professionalizing the field.
What topics does customer experience speaker Annette Franz cover?
Annette Franz speaks on customer experience strategy and culture transformation, employee experience as the foundation for CX excellence, customer journey mapping and persona development, voice-of-the-customer programs, and the leadership behaviors required to build and sustain customer-centric organizations. Her sessions are tailored to executive audiences and well suited to leadership summits, operations conferences, HR forums, and customer success events. Reach out to Aurum Speakers Bureau to discuss which program best fits your event and to bring Annette Franz to your stage.
How to book Annette Franz as a keynote speaker?
Aurum Speakers Bureau can help you book Annette Franz as a speaker for your next event, conference, or board meeting. Simply fill out our contact form to inquire about Annette Franz's availability for a speaking engagement. One of our booking agents will respond to your request immediately and contact the speaker to let them know you want to hire them. We will assist you with obtaining speaking fees, booking information, and confirming availability for Annette Franz or any other top keynote speaker or celebrity of your choice.
How much is Annette Franz speaking fee?
Annette Franz speaking fees are determined by several factors, including the event's date, whether it's a virtual or in-person event, the duration, format, preparation required for their speech, and more. The same applies to the cost to hire any other top expert speakers and celebrities. The Speaker Fee Range listed on our website is simply a guideline and is subject to change without notice. If you would like to hire Annette Franz to deliver a keynote speech for your event, please fill out the contact form or email us at info@aurumbureau.com with as much detail as possible. One of our experienced agents will get in touch with you and let you know exactly how much it will cost to book Annette Franz.
How can I contact Annette Franz?
We only work with Annette Franz on paid speaking engagements. Aurum Speakers Bureau can assist you in booking Annette Franz and will handle all negotiations, contracts, and logistics associated with having Annette Franz speak at your event. We will be your sole point of contact throughout the process. Get in touch with Aurum Speakers Bureau today, and we will reach out to any motivational speaker or celebrity you want to enquire about speaking at your event. If you wish to contact Annette Franz for any other reason, we will be unable to assist you as we are not authorized to provide personal contact information.
Can I book Annette Franz for a virtual keynote?
Yes, Annette Franz is available for virtual keynotes and webinars. To book Annette Franz for a virtual event, please complete the contact form or send us an email to inquire about the special fees for virtual engagements.
