M&S names Waitrose veteran Alan Hoe Head of CX & Operations

What happened

Alan Hoe, a long-serving veteran of Waitrose, has taken on the role of Head of Customer Experience & Operations at Marks & Spencer's Retail Technology Innovation Hub, according to reporting from Retail Technology Innovation Hub.

The appointment links two disciplines that are often managed separately: customer experience and day-to-day operations. Placing both under one leadership title within a technology hub suggests that M&S sees the customer journey and the systems behind it as a single design problem.

The available coverage is brief. It does not set out Hoe's remit in detail, the size of the team he will lead, or how the role will interact with the hub's existing technology programmes. Those details will determine how much the appointment changes in practice.

Why it matters

Retail technology investment is often judged on platform capability: new tools, data models and automation. Experience outcomes depend just as much on how those tools are run. A senior leader who owns both the customer-facing standard and the operational processes that deliver it is well placed to catch the points where a digital change improves one measure while quietly degrading another, such as faster checkout that increases failed collections.

For leaders in experience, AI and digital transformation, the signal is about accountability. As retailers add more automated and AI-enabled services, the question is no longer only what a system can do, but who answers for how customers experience it end to end.

The Renascence take

Most readers will focus on the name and the title. The more useful question is where Hoe's remit ends and the technology roadmap begins. The behavioural principle underneath is simple: customers do not experience channels, teams or platforms; they experience the sequence of moments between them, and that sequence is rarely owned by one person.

A combined customer experience and operations role is only valuable if it has authority over the handoffs, not just the dashboards. Retailers should test whether their technology hubs measure customer effort and service recovery alongside uptime and delivery to the minute. If the hub can ship a feature without a clear owner of the customer outcome it creates, the appointment is a title change rather than an operating change. Customer-obsessed operators should ask this question of any new leader before they celebrate the hire.