The Customer Experience World Games 2026 with Qaalfa Dibeehi

Welcome to the Business Transformation Pitch. I am Greg the CX Goalkeeper, bringing you conversations where transformation, leadership and customer experience meet to create real impact. Did you know 80% of regular listeners haven't subscribed yet? If you enjoy the show, support us by hitting the subscribe button.

I promise we will keep raising the bar with the guests ideas and strategies that really matter to you. Because in business, just like in football, this conversation could be the game changer. I am Greg's AI based assistant. In this episode, Greg had the pleasure of chatting with Alpha, last year's world champion of the Customer experience World game.

They discussed about his role as a team captain and discussed the rewarding aspects of participating, such as giving back to charities and collaborating globally. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Business Transformation Pitch with the CX Goalkeeper. Today I'm really thrilled because it's. Today it's again an episode about the Customer Experience Wargame 2026.

They started a few days ago and today I have the opportunity to speak with the last year world champion, Alpha. Hi Alpha, how are you? Very good to be here. Before I ask you a few questions about the customer experience War Game and about your experience, could you please quickly introduce yourself?

Yeah. So, Alpha Debay, I'm a partner with a firm called Human to Outcome. We basically focus on the people side of transformation and usually what that means is customer experience. We do three things.

Corporate education, customer experience, employee experience, and executive mentoring and. And coaching. Previously I ran the Leadership Institute at Medieval Fontaine and before that ran Global CX Consulting at Forrester. And so that's my general background.

Thank you very much. Super thrilled to discuss with you again because you already were on my podcast, we had a long discussion and you shared incredible insight. But today is about the customer experience Wargame. What is your role in the customer experience War game and what motivated you to join?

So the. This is my third year participating. I joined initially for the obvious reason it's a very rewarding thing. So basically helping charities, it's one of the simplest, easiest, most interesting ways to give back.

With our expertise in our areas, do it in a global fashion. Two, it's a easy way to network and work with people from around the globe. I mean, you can of course connect with people on something like LinkedIn, but this gives you an opportunity to literally kind of work with them and to see the get the perspectives. So participated in the first year we won a couple of group rounds.

Second, last year we won a couple of group rounds and of course we, we won the overall thing. And this year I was asked if I would be a captain of a team, which basically is a kind of coordinating role is really what that means. And we have people on the team initially from, you know, as wide as us, all the way over to Vietnam, with everything in between. So one from Uganda, some from the Middle east, some from Central Europe, West Europe and so forth.

So it's exciting. But basically the ultimate aim is to help these charities. And what do you like the most about the Games? Say it again.

What do you like the most about the Games? Yeah, so I mean, as I said, it's really the idea that you're giving back. And you see these, you're working with organizations, some of them, many of them don't really have much experience with customer experience. Maybe they've heard of something.

And so it's a challenge for us. And it's interesting in the sense that many of us are maybe accustomed to working with sophisticated organizations. Even if these sophisticated organizations don't know cx, you know, they have their processes and other kinds of things and they have resources to go to. Many of these charities are relatively small, not all, but many of them are relatively small, which means it forces you to kind of put what you're suggesting to them in a context that's practical for them to do the things that they, that they do.

So it's very interesting. And at the end of the day, you really get drawn into the mission of those charities. And that's, again, super compelling and rewarding. Thank you.

How do events like the Customer Experience War Game to contribute to the global CX community? Well, I think one of the things, you know, as a, as a CX practitioner, you know, we find ourselves in what roles, and I think for many people. How do you, how do you give back as a consultant, you know, an individual consultant, maybe you participate in CSR if you're part of a large organization. But I just think ultimately we have some expertise which really helps.

And that expertise may be expensive for some of these types of organizations to actually employ. And if you're not physically next to one, it may be difficult for them to gain access to this type of expertise, especially with the group of people that we handle. So I think that the idea is to just basically to help and to move forward. So that's, that's really how it works.

Thank you. You mentioned that you are coordinating a team. You are a captain this time. And I often see that companies, customer experience, team in organizations need a lot of tools, need a lot of organization and preparation before being ready to deliver Value.

And I know from the experience that after the first day in the team, where no people knows each other and so on, the team is already performing. How are you organized and why is that possible? So I think the interesting thing is practitioners have a kind of inbred point of view of collaboration and outside ed point of view. So everyone is curious to everyone else's point of view.

We want to hear everyone's point of view. So the ramp up is relatively quick. What we did is of course we have a brief intro. You know, everyone tells their background and kind of has their thing.

You know, I'm, I'm. A person might say they're more ux. Another person is more strategy, more person, more hr, more people oriented, another person, more tech, more whatever else. So you kind of get these, these various ex bits of expertise and geographical and industry expertise and other kinds of things.

So the first thing is you kind of appreciate the background of the people on the team. The second thing is maybe it's something that's part of the games, but also I think it's just in the CX community, very open to the new ideas and perspectives and people want to hear those perspectives. So there's a lot of kind of give and take. But we also understand that just by the structure of the competition, part of this, that your submission is, this is limited, you know, slidewear that you can get.

We're not producing 100 deck, you know, fully formed proposals and things. So to get to that final submission, you know, there's, there's some give and take, but the give and take is more like, feels more like learning and then challenging and conflict and competition. It's really more collaboration and learning than anything else. And you participated already twice and now it's the third time that you are joining.

What's the one thing that you take with you after the games? So professionally I like to see people's approaches. So just to make something very simple, you might be doing a challenge and usually there's some version of a journey map or something that goes along with it. Right?

You don't have time to do a full journey map obviously, but some version of a journey map. And it's very interesting how you might have constructed say that journey map and see how somebody else constructs that journey map and what they highlighted and other kinds of things. And I think that goes throughout what people find as the, even the definition of the problem and how different perspectives kind of give you insight into. Okay, I haven't thought of that.

And just the innovations that come out of it. So those things professionally are the things that stand out for me. And even previous submissions. Every once in a while I'll look at those.

I created a little video last year of our team as a kind of a remembrance of what that experience was like again professionally. So that's the first bit. And then there's the thing of understanding what you've suggested, especially when you. In the.

In the games themselves are kind of two types of awards. There's the expert award, if you will. So some CNX practitioners will judge and say this is the best submission. And then there's the charity award where the charity itself says, you know, based on, from our point of view, this is the one we like.

And when the charity chooses your idea and kind of, kind of explains this is what we liked about it, again, it's super rewarding. But it's also like, you know, you've actually put something together that they think they can use and so once you kind of that connection is made, that's also very memorable. So thank you. And now we are coming to the last three questions.

They are one word answer. If you could describe your customer experience Wargame experience in one word, what would it be rewarding? If you could describe the customer experience community in one word, what would it be? Diverse.

Are you planning to participate also in the future Customer Experience War Games? Alpha, thank you very much for the time that you're dedicating to the customer Experience War Games. What you did in the past, but in particular what you are doing now and what you're doing in future. For the customer Experience War Game, we suggest to the audience to join the Customer Experience War Games.

You will find all the links in the show notes. Alpha, please stay with me for the audience for today, it's everything. Enjoy the day. Talk to you next time.

Bye bye. Thank you. See you. Bye.

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Thank you.