About
Explore my writing on customer experience, organisational strategy and decision-making.
I'm Elena Marcelle, a customer experience, product and digital strategy leader with more than twelve years of experience across regulated industries and European markets.
Throughout my career, I kept seeing the same pattern.
Customer experience was often treated as something separate from how organisations made decisions. Yet the experiences customers had were consistently shaped long before they reached a journey, a channel or a touchpoint.
That observation changed how I understood customer experience.
Experiences and decisions
Long before my career began, I was asking similar questions.
As a student, I was drawn to law, politics and history because I wanted to understand the structures that shape life in society. Later, I found the same questions inside organisations.
Two ideas have shaped much of how I see them: experiences and decisions.
Not only at work, but in life. The experiences we remember, the ones that change us, and the decisions that quietly shape our lives long before we understand their consequences.
Over time, I realised organisations are not so different.
A recurring pattern
The experience customers have is rarely the result of a single initiative. It is the visible consequence of countless decisions about priorities, trade-offs, ownership and governance.
When I moved from retail into financial services, I expected to encounter entirely different challenges. Instead, I found familiar ones. Different products, different regulations, different terminology, but the same underlying tensions between customer needs, operational constraints, commercial objectives and organisational silos.
Working across multiple European markets reinforced that observation. The context changed. The pattern did not. Experiences rarely fail on their own. They break where decisions, incentives and ownership stop aligning.
Decisions behind the experience
Today, I approach customer experience as a discipline of organisational decision-making rather than experience design alone.
The visible journey is usually the symptom. The cause sits earlier, in how an organisation allocates capital, governs risk and designs its operating model.
My work is to make those decisions visible, align them across functions, and give them an owner before customers feel the gap, so customer outcomes become the consequence of deliberate decisions rather than disconnected ones.
Different contexts. Similar patterns
The questions that continue to interest me are the same ones that first drew me to law and public affairs: how organisations make decisions, why they lose coherence, and what allows them to create value consistently over time.