I’m pleased to announce the winners of Forrester’s 2025 Customer-Obsessed Enterprise Award for EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa). In the past, we’ve named a single winner, but our judging panel decided to honor two outstanding organizations this year. The winners have very different approaches to customer experience (CX) excellence — Brenntag focuses on business-to-business use cases, and e& focuses primarily on business-to-consumer use cases.

Congratulations To Brenntag And e& For Their Customer Obsession Achievements!

Forrester’s annual Customer Obsession Awards recognize organizations that place their customers at the center of their business strategy to accelerate growth, customer loyalty, and employee engagement. The Customer-Obsessed Enterprise Award honors exceptional achievements in leadership, strategy, and operations — areas where Brenntag and e& stand out among tough competition from diverse industry sectors across the region.

Brenntag Stands Out Among EMEA B2B Companies

Brenntag is the global market leader in chemical and ingredients distribution, with a comprehensive portfolio of products and services for both the industrial sector and the consumer sector (specialty ingredients for food and nutrition, cosmetics, personal care, pharmaceuticals, and more). Brenntag serves a range of B2B organizations from small- and medium-sized enterprises to large multinational corporations.

Brenntag impressed our judges with its holistic CX approach that cultivates a culture of proactive engagement — combining employee empowerment, collaboration with partners and suppliers, external insights, and voice-of-the-customer (VoC) feedback. A core initiative is its CX Ambassador Program, which has trained over 500 employees as internal champions of CX excellence. Ambassadors don’t just advocate; they actively coach teams, embed best practices, and ensure CX prioritization in all decision-making. In addition, Brenntag has created a WOW App to enable real-time peer appreciation for colleagues who exemplify CX values.

Brenntag’s CX War Room is a dedicated cross-functional task force designed to rapidly identify and resolve systemic customer pain points. Every month, senior executives dedicate time to listen to customer feedback, understand what it’s telling them, and take action. This ensures that internal priorities stay fully aligned with what matters most to Brenntag customers. To stay ahead of potential issues, Brenntag has further implemented the first stages of an early warning system that flags issues based on Net Promoter Score℠ (NPS) changes.

From its UK launch in 2017, Brenntag’s CX program has evolved into a global strategy spanning 72 countries. In 2024, its global NPS has surpassed 50, and the company reports the following metrics:

  • 93% of its customers report being fully satisfied.
  • 90% say Brenntag is easy to do business with.
  • Issue resolution times have been reduced by 40%.

e& Stands Out Among EMEA B2C Companies

Earlier this year, Brand Finance named e& the world’s fastest-growing brand. With roots in telecommunications, e& has evolved into a global technology group, serving both consumers and businesses across the connectivity and digital innovation landscape. Its leadership has been dedicated to fostering customer centricity through a comprehensive three-year culture transformation program, now in its final phase.

Senior leaders including the CEO participate in a monthly Customer Hour to systematically address customer issues and escalations. The executive team also engages in what they call beyond-the-desk activities to better understand customer needs by experiencing frontline roles (such as in the contact center) firsthand.

e& aligns corporate and functional strategies with customer journeys based on strategic pillars for trust, reliability, and a flexible, digital-first approach that doesn’t force customers to adopt digital channels. It establishes and measures journey-specific goals, and CX strategy partners drive cross-functional collaboration based on VoC insights and experience design principles. For example, CX team members transformed the customer’s “first 100 days” journey, streamlining customer communications across marketing, sales, billing, logistics for delivery, engineering for installation, and the contact center for new customer queries.

e& excited this year’s judging panel with the tremendous results it has achieved with its CX Change Factory — an initiative responsible for cataloging issues, performing root-cause analysis, and ensuring accountability. On top of a 20% year-on-year increase in its overall NPS, e& has created a predictive model that links NPS to financial outcomes such as customer lifetime value. This model, with an accuracy of 88%, not only forecasts NPS but also demonstrates its influence on increased average revenue per user, cost reductions, and extended customer tenure.

Join us at Forrester’s CX Summit EMEA this June 2–4 in London to meet with Brenntag and e& executives, who will share their stories firsthand.