Organizational Excellence for Customer Engagement: The Role of the Customer Engagement Transformation Office (CETO)

In today’s digital-first world, customer engagement is the linchpin of business growth and competitive advantage. Yet, as organizations invest in advanced platforms like Salesforce and embrace the promise of agentic AI, many find themselves grappling with a persistent challenge: fragmented efforts, siloed teams, and a lack of alignment between technology investments and business outcomes. The result? Disconnected customer experiences, operational inefficiencies, and unrealized value from even the most robust digital tools.

The Case for a New Model: Beyond Traditional Centers of Excellence

While Centers of Excellence (CoEs) have long provided governance and best practices for technology adoption, they often fall short in orchestrating the end-to-end customer engagement journey. The complexity of modern customer expectations—spanning personalization, omnichannel experiences, and real-time responsiveness—demands a more holistic, cross-functional approach. Enter the Customer Engagement Transformation Office (CETO): a strategic governance entity designed to unify, accelerate, and sustain enterprise-wide customer engagement transformation.

What is the Customer Engagement Transformation Office (CETO)?

CETO is the operational and strategic heart of organizational excellence for customer engagement. It is not just a committee or a project management office; it is a cross-functional governance structure that:

Breaks down silos by fostering collaboration across marketing, IT, operations, and business units.
Aligns technology initiatives with business outcomes, ensuring every investment in platforms like Salesforce and AI is directly tied to customer engagement and growth objectives.
Transforms disconnected activities into cohesive strategies, unifying technology, data, and operations under a single framework that drives customer-centric business results.

The CETO Framework: Structure and Governance

A successful CETO is built on a robust governance model that brings together executive leadership, operational teams, and technical experts. Key elements include:

Executive Steering Committee: Sets strategic direction, prioritizes investments, and ensures alignment between customer engagement, AI initiatives, and business goals.
Customer Engagement Transformation Office (CETO): Drives execution, cross-cloud collaboration, and continuous innovation. CETO is accountable for embedding agentic AI capabilities within both customer-facing strategies and operational plans.
Technical Enablement Teams & Project Pods: Provide the technical foundation and agile delivery needed to execute the strategy, ensuring all technologies are aligned with business outcomes. These teams implement use cases defined by CETO, leveraging agentic AI to enhance both customer experiences and internal operations.

Embedding Agentic AI: From Reactive to Proactive Engagement

Agentic AI is a cornerstone of the CETO model, moving organizations from reactive, manual processes to proactive, intelligence-driven engagement. Within CETO, agentic AI:

Enhances customer engagement by powering AI-driven agents that identify and execute high-impact strategies, ensuring automation aligns with business objectives.
Drives operational efficiency by automating routine tasks, serving as a co-pilot for cross-functional teams, and enabling project pods to focus on strategic priorities.
Enables continuous learning and optimization by integrating real-time insights and feedback loops into both customer-facing and internal workflows.

Practical Guidance: Building and Sustaining CETO

To establish a high-impact CETO, organizations should:

Define clear objectives and success metrics that tie customer engagement initiatives to business value—such as increased customer lifetime value, higher retention, or new revenue streams.
Establish cross-functional teams with representation from business, marketing, technology, and data functions. Agile pods can rapidly test, learn, and scale new engagement strategies.
Implement robust data governance to ensure unified, high-quality customer data across all touchpoints, enabling seamless personalization and compliance with privacy regulations.
Prioritize value-driven use cases for Salesforce and AI, focusing on quick wins that demonstrate impact and build momentum for broader transformation.
Foster a culture of continuous improvement by embedding feedback loops, ongoing training, and change management into the CETO operating model.

Real-World Impact: CETO in Action

Organizations that have adopted the CETO model have realized significant business benefits:

A global medtech firm established a formal governance layer through CETO, aligning strategy, execution, and cross-cloud operations. The result: teams moved from rework and duplicate efforts to shared roadmaps, clearer accountability, and sustained momentum beyond the pilot phase.
A leading quick-service restaurant unified its customer data and marketing operations, enabling hyper-personalized campaigns and real-time insights. This transformation, orchestrated through a CETO-like structure, drove a $470M potential revenue uplift over three years and enhanced customer loyalty across 1,500+ locations.
A global retailer leveraged CETO to break down organizational silos, align technology and business outcomes, and accelerate the rollout of a new customer engagement platform. The business impact: over $5 billion in incremental revenue growth opportunity and $1 billion in EBIT growth.

Maximizing Value from Salesforce and AI Investments

CETO ensures that every tool—whether Salesforce Data Cloud, Marketing Cloud, or agentic AI automation—contributes to a unified, value-driven strategy. By viewing these platforms as interconnected components of a single engagement ecosystem, organizations can:

Drive business growth through targeted, data-driven campaigns and new revenue streams.
Increase operational efficiency by reducing redundancies, improving decision-making, and automating routine processes.
Deliver personalized customer experiences consistently across all touchpoints, building loyalty and competitive differentiation.

Why Publicis Sapient?

Publicis Sapient is a leader in digital business transformation, with deep expertise in customer engagement, organizational design, and the Salesforce ecosystem. Our CETO framework is proven to help organizations break down silos, align technology and business outcomes, and realize the full value of their Salesforce and AI investments. We guide clients through every step—from strategy and governance to agile execution and continuous optimization—ensuring sustainable, enterprise-wide impact.

Ready to transform your customer engagement strategy? Discover how the Customer Engagement Transformation Office can help your organization achieve seamless, scalable, and value-driven engagement. Connect with Publicis Sapient’s experts to start your journey toward organizational excellence.