Alan Hoe Leaves Waitrose for M&S Customer Experience Role
Waitrose veteran Alan Hoe has joined Marks & Spencer as Head of Customer Experience & Operations, signaling M&S's push to tie service quality to operational discipline across stores and channels.
Alan Hoe, a longtime Waitrose executive, has moved to Marks & Spencer to take up the newly reported role of Head of Customer Experience & Operations. The appointment places a retailer veteran with deep grocery-sector experience inside M&S's customer operations function, signalling a continued push by the retailer to sharpen how it manages service delivery across its stores and channels.
Details of Hoe's remit, start date and reporting line have not been disclosed beyond the confirmation of the title and move itself. The appointment follows a pattern of UK retailers recruiting experienced operators from rival grocery chains to lead customer-facing transformation efforts.
Senior appointments in customer experience and operations are a leading indicator of where a retailer intends to invest next. Bringing in a Waitrose veteran suggests M&S wants operational discipline and service consistency credentials — qualities Waitrose has long been associated with in UK grocery — applied to its own store and operations network.
For leaders watching the retail CX space, this is a reminder that experience leadership is increasingly treated as an operational function, not just a brand or marketing exercise. Pairing "customer experience" with "operations" in a single job title reflects a broader industry shift: service quality is now expected to be engineered into supply chains, staffing models and store processes, not bolted on afterward.
Hiring announcements like this rarely come with detail, but the title itself is the story. Merging CX with operations in one mandate tells you where the real friction in retail experience actually lives — not in sentiment surveys, but in stock availability, staffing rotas and store execution.
The instinct to recruit a "safe pair of hands" from a trusted rival is itself a behavioral signal: boards reach for proven operational credibility when they suspect their experience problem is really a reliability problem. The risk is that CX becomes shorthand for operational clean-up rather than a genuine redesign of how customers are treated at each touchpoint. A customer-obsessed leader in Hoe's seat should resist the temptation to simply import Waitrose's playbook wholesale — M&S's customer base, store estate and brand promise are different enough that success will depend on translating operational rigor into decisions customers can actually feel, not just metrics the business can report.