Sarah West Keogh

Head of CX and Digital at Vhi (1-5k employees)

Sarah West Keogh is a senior Customer Experience and Digital leader with a strong track record of delivering transformation in complex, highly regulated environments. As Head of CX & Digital at Vhi, she leads the organisation’s enterprise-wide customer experience strategy, digital channels, and insight capability through the Voice of the Customer function. She is responsible for shaping and delivering end-to-end customer journey transformation, ensuring that customer insight translates into measurable improvements in experience, performance, and business outcomes. With nearly three decades of experience in the insurance sector, Sarah’s career spans CX strategy, digital transformation, service design, innovation, and operational leadership. This breadth gives her a distinctive ability to connect customer needs with commercial priorities, and to mobilise organisations around meaningful, sustainable change. She leads large, multidisciplinary teams and holds accountability for CX performance across the organisation, including customer metrics, digital engagement, and experience outcomes across all channels. Sarah is particularly focused on harnessing CX and digital as strategic levers to enhance customer engagement, improve operational efficiency, and strengthen organisational performance ensuring that customer-centricity is embedded at the core of how the business operates.

9:30 - 10:00 am

Wednesday 14 October 2026

The Best CX Teams Work Towards Their Own Obsolescence

Sarah West Keogh challenges one of the core assumptions of the Customer Experience profession: is the goal to build stronger CX teams, or to build organisations that no longer need a CX team to advocate for the customer? The session explores the provocative idea that the existence of a CX function is not always a sign of organisational maturity. In many cases, it may indicate that customer-centricity has yet to be fully embedded across the business. While organisations have long recognised that customer-centricity should be everyone's responsibility, many still rely on specialist teams to represent the customer in critical decisions. This question is becoming increasingly important in the age of AI. As AI takes on a greater role in shaping customer journeys, recommendations and interactions, the experiences customers receive will increasingly reflect the decisions, priorities and assumptions embedded across the organisation. AI is not making customer-centricity everyone's job; it always was. What AI is doing is making the consequences of failing to embed it across strategy, product, technology, operations and leadership impossible to ignore. Drawing on experience leading Customer Experience, Digital and enterprise transformation, Sarah will explore why the endgame for CX was never to create a permanent team responsible for representing the customer. It was to build organisations where customer thinking is so deeply embedded that it no longer requires a dedicated function to keep it alive. The session will challenge leaders to rethink how customer-centricity is created, sustained and scaled, and ask a simple but powerful question: Are we building stronger CX teams, or organisations that no longer need one?