Since coming on board as a member of American Modern Insurance Group’s Customer Experience team and subsequently advancing to Vice President of CX, Brandon Cagnon has led the company’s efforts in this space. His impact has earned him the distinction of Top 10 Customer Experience Leader 2025. We recently sat down with Brandon to learn more about what he and his team are doing to drive the agent and policyholder experience at American Modern.
First off, can you share your background with us?
Sure! I have more than 15 years of experience in the CX discipline across automotive, manufacturing, home fixtures, and insurance. I’ve been at American Modern for the past seven years, with a little over four of those actually leading the CX strategy for the organization.
How does having experience in multiple industries benefit your perspective? Do you find it difficult at all to apply CX principles when changing industries?
I feel that working across multiple industries gives me a broad perspective on customer experience and how it drives both customer satisfaction and business outcomes. Also, having experience leading CX functions in services, sales, and operations has taught me the importance of aligning teams, processes, and technology to consistently deliver value. The thing about CX is that while 75 percent of the work is the same no matter what, the difference – and ultimately your success as a CX professional - lies in the remaining 25 percent, where integration into an organization’s DNA determines effectiveness.
Real progress comes from humility, partnership, and walking alongside colleagues to embed customer centricity into the way the business operates.
Let’s talk a little about your current role at American Modern. What type of work do you and your team do for the organization?
I define the organization’s CX strategy, and my direct team supports that strategy in multiple ways: we gather insights through voice-of-the-customer programs as well as primary and secondary research, and we also oversee experience design—including UX, UI, journey mapping, and service blueprinting. Beyond design, I manage programs that equip employees at all levels to apply CX thinking in their daily work, ensuring that customer-centric practices are embedded into the company’s operations and decision-making. This role allows me to connect strategy with execution, fostering meaningful experiences for customers while creating measurable business impact.
Several years ago, American Modern made a significant digital investment by building and implementing a unified policy management platform. How is the organization ensuring that customers have a good experience when using that system?
When we transitioned from multiple systems to a single platform, we were able to streamline processes and create consistency for our agents. This also gave us the ability to continually enhance the platform, including the launch of a one-stop-shop site where agents can access everything they need in one place. Through research, my team now helps the organization identify pain points in that customer experience; then, the UX designers develop the new experience based on that research. For the new one-stop-shop site we’ve deployed, we’ve achieved the best initial customer effort scores we’ve seen in any new technology released over the past several years, a testament to the impact of customer-centricity.
In the CX discipline, turning customer understanding into actionable insights can be a challenge. How does your team manage that at American Modern?
Our voice-of-the-customer program is central to how we translate insights into action. We listen to both policyholders and distribution partners across the entire journey, using multiple listening posts, including relationship surveys. We share these insights quarterly with a wide group of stakeholders, including our executive team. In some cases, we use closed-loop feedback to detect specific service challenges and invite respondents to interact directly with us. This allows us to address individual concerns in real time while also identifying broader trends that can be solved for multiple customers.
Beyond surveys, we invest in research and present findings in clear, accessible formats such as infographics and one-pagers so the organization can easily understand them. With designers on the team, we can turn insights into improved experiences, partner with business areas to build requirements, and build new interactions, then measure the impact once those solutions reach the market.
You’re obviously making an impact on the external customer. Do you have internal customers as well?
Absolutely. Customer experience works best when the entire organization is aligned. At American Modern, we have built the Experience Collective, a program that equips employees at all levels to apply CX thinking and tools in their daily work.
At the leadership level, our Experience Champion Roundtable brings functional leaders together monthly to align on strategy, challenges, and upcoming initiatives impacting the customer experience. Immersion programs walk employees through our tools and practices—sometimes in the form of day shares—to help them understand how to apply CX thinking in their roles. We also run a rotational program that allows employees to join the CX team for a short assignment, solve real-world challenges, and return to their functions with new skills and customer-first perspectives. This model makes CX part of the company’s DNA rather than a stand-alone function.
In closing, do you have any advice for other CX professionals?
My advice to CX leaders is to stay focused on value. Whether customer value, business value, or colleague value, you must be able to quantify outcomes and show ROI alongside strategic benefits. A common mistake to avoid is approaching CX with an “I know better than you” mentality. Programs fail when leaders try to impose change instead of collaborating. Real progress comes from humility, partnership, and walking alongside colleagues to embed customer centricity into the way the business operates.
