Aileen Day is the owner of Aileen Day Advisory in Pakenham, Victoria, a customer experience advisory that runs the CX in Concept and CX in Action programs for organisations from small business to enterprise. She is the author of The Joy of CEHX: The Casual Hookup to Understanding Customer, Employee, and Human eXperience, a Board Director of the XMGlobal Collaborative, Global Editor of Sage CX Case Studies, and a Top 50 Global CX Leader 2025, awarded by CX Network. She is also a qualified clinical psychotherapist and hypnotherapist, which she says is why she listens to the words leaders choose rather than the slides they present. Her idea fits in one line from her book: design each touchpoint on purpose with purpose.
The Panel
Not long after Aileen Day left a large organisation and went into business on her own in 2020, the City of Casey’s Economic Development team asked her to sit on a panel about leadership. The other chairs were filled by consultants who worked in leadership for a living, and by professional public speakers.
“I remember looking sideways and reviewing each of the other speakers and thinking, how did I get here?” she says. “I don’t know that I have anything better to add than these amazing humans.”
She has since called that afternoon, in a public post thanking the Casey team, “perhaps my first instance of imposter syndrome.” What ended it was arithmetic. She had 16 years in leadership behind her. The other panellists were heavily credentialled, but none of them had her experience, and she had none of theirs. “It was that diversity of experience that made me realise, I am where I need to be and I need to share my experience and insights,” she says. She carries the same reasoning onto every stage since.
“No one has experienced life the way I have, and no one shares those experiences quite the way I do.”
Leadership First, Letters Later
Day’s public profile begins in the middle of her career. She spent 16 years in leadership at what she describes only as a major organisation, and completed a Bachelor of Social Science in Public Relations and Marketing at Swinburne University of Technology between 2013 and 2015, while still in that world.
She left it in September 2020 to open Aileen Day Advisory, and had already started a podcast, The Value Driven Brand, that May. Her LinkedIn profile describes the practice as helping organisations “deliver experiences worthy of your customer’s loyalty,” using “neuroscience, and human-behaviour insights to predict consumer trends.”
The unusual credential came next. From July 2021 to July 2022 she completed an Advanced Diploma in Clinical Hypnotherapy and Psychotherapy at the Australian Hypnotherapy College, and in August 2022 opened a second practice, Value Driven Life, a therapy clinic. Two businesses, one owner, and a habit of reading people that she now brings into boardrooms.
The Assumption That Cost Her Clients
The first lesson of solo practice was not about customers. It was about her.
“I truly believed coming from a major organisation that EVERYONE in business knew what I knew and I went into business on my own believing that I would be speaking to people like me,” she says. It happened more than once. “I went in with assumptions rather than curiosity and in doing so put decision makers in a position of feeling mediocre and defensive, resulting in them not wanting to work with me.”
The correction became her method, and for a while her LinkedIn headline. “At one point, I even changed my LinkedIn by-line to say ‘Asker of Great Questions’,” she says.
“It is better to assume no knowledge and just be the asker of excellent and considered questions after listening and analysing their responses and reactions (two very different things).”
The therapy training sharpened it. “Becoming a therapist has made me become a very good listener, rather than just a good speaker,” she says. In a room with an experience problem she reads what a conventional consultant is not trained to read. “I can read personalities and tensions, connections and incongruences and use these insights to ask very vulnerable and candid questions where my clients have been given the space and comfort to feel like transparency is the only way to gain momentum.”
The blocks she finds are often older than the business. She describes founders whose parents feared entrepreneurship, now unable to scale a start-up that has already succeeded, and a candidate for a C-suite promotion told through her career never to expect the top, and if she got there it was as a DEI hire. “Being a therapist in a business advisory role really has led me to break down barriers for leaders that just never grasped where their issues stemmed from in the beginning,” she says.
She is candid about why organisations need the third letter in CEHX at all. “I added the H for organisations to remember that at least for now, their customers, and their employees are human beings,” she says. “Where we forget that a human is at the centre of everything we do, we find organisations misusing technology, mistreating their employees, and missing the mark on delivering what authentically matters to their customers.”
Her evidence for the gap is a perception figure rather than a failure rate. “Medallia in 2026 reported that whilst 66% of CX Practitioners would say that CX has improved in their organisation, only 17% of their consumers on average agree,” she says. She traces that gap to no central knowledge system, siloed data, misaligned teams, CX not collaborating with UX, and budgets that expect more than delivery can give.
For what works, she points past the obvious. “We have seen CEHX work in the usual places such as Apple, I loathe bringing them up,” she says. Her preferred case is Guzman y Gomez, the Australian fast-food franchise. “They have designed each touchpoint on purpose with purpose so that each location delivers a flawless experience no matter where you are.” Agility in the menu, autonomy in the teams, and a brand that knows exactly who it serves; that, she says, is how it became a household name in a short time.
The proof closest to home is the relationship that began on that panel. Over eight years the City of Casey has had her mentor businesses through what she calls the “spicy cough era,” lead career and personal branding training for its Future You program, judge the Casey Business Awards, and return this year to mentor the judges. This September she is back to teach Casey businesses how to map a customer journey. “Seats are limited, learning is not,” her post reads.
The Book and the Stage
Five years into advisory work, Day decided the education she wished existed would have to be written by her. “What education did exist was normally revolving around the North American markets and it would gloss over CX and not go into any helpful detail as to the ‘what, why, or how’,” she says. “I realised that if I wanted to see that change, I had to create it.”
The result is The Joy of CEHX, and the subtitle, the casual hookup, is a warning as much as a joke. “Albeit the book goes into much detail, it’s not all of it,” she says. It leaves service delivery, conflict resolution and succession for later. “This book was the education piece for those in business that needed a starting point.”
If a reader takes one idea from it, she wants it to be this: “the importance of designing each touchpoint on purpose with purpose is the first major step in customer and employee advocacy which can be doubled down in returns when you get to know those people as valuable humans and understand what makes them WANT [not need] to keep you in their lives.”
The argument she wants to make from stages is about accountability. “True and strategic CEHX is the responsibility of every person in the organisation and not enough leaders understand this or deliver their CX that way,” she says. It falls to a CX manager or a team; it rarely shows up as a metric on everyone. And too many leaders still misread the discipline. “They mistake it for customer service or marketing and rarely comprehend how big it can be and how it can genuinely deliver trust, loyalty, and commercial gains.”
That is the work of Aileen Day Advisory today: keynotes and panels, the CX in Concept course built on the CXPA’s five disciplines, and CX in Action, a five-month program in which participants complete a CX project inside their own organisation. She is booking stages for Customer Service Week and Global CX Day in the first week of October, and was recently one of six winners of a speaker coaching prize from Leanne Christie’s Standing Ovations, which she noted broke a lifelong streak of never having won anything.
Beyond the practice, she is a Board Director of the XMGlobal Collaborative, Co-Chair of its conferences and President of its Australia and New Zealand chapters, and is currently recruiting APAC organisations into the association’s annual study of 15 experience management competencies, so that the data is not, as she put it in a post, always based on the US. As Global Editor of Sage CX Case Studies she commissions double-blind, peer-reviewed business cases from practitioners. In September she joins Peter Ryan and Mark Hillary on the CX Files podcast, after a first conversation with Ryan that was meant to take a few minutes and ran over an hour.
What audiences report back, she says, is recognition. “My therapist work has allowed me to speak to the challenges people only discuss in their own head.”
“People regularly comment with gratitude about how I say the quiet part out loud, helping them to realise they’re not alone in their thoughts.”
Where Aileen Is Now
Day lives in Pakenham, on Melbourne’s south-eastern edge, and still runs both the advisory and the therapy clinic. She has spent a career in rooms where she was the one without the expected credentials, and now holds a few. Her closing line on the City of Casey relationship is the one she seems to mean most: that it lets her “keep seeing the human experience thrive.”
Playbook
- Assume no knowledge. Ask considered questions, then listen and analyse the answer; those are two different acts.
- Design each touchpoint on purpose with purpose. It is the first step in advocacy, not the last.
- Make CX every person’s accountability, with a metric attached, not a manager’s job title.
- Measure the customer’s perception of improvement, not the practitioner’s. The 66/17 gap is where projects fail to land.
- Build a central knowledge system before any AI project; without it, nothing downstream works.
- Learn what makes people want, not need, to keep you in their lives, and then earn it consistently.
Aileen Day, CCXP is the owner of Aileen Day Advisory and of Value Driven Life, a clinical hypnotherapy and psychotherapy practice, both in Melbourne, Victoria. She is a Member of the Board of Directors of the XMGlobal Collaborative, Series Editor of the Sage CX Business Case Series, host of The Value Driven Brand podcast, and author of The Joy of CEHX: The Casual Hookup to Understanding Customer, Employee, and Human eXperience, available at aileenday.com.au/book. She holds a Bachelor of Social Science in Public Relations and Marketing from Swinburne University of Technology and an Advanced Diploma in Clinical Hypnotherapy and Psychotherapy from the Australian Hypnotherapy College, and is an Accredited Family Business Advisor with the Family Business Association (AU). She was named a Top 50 Global CX Leader 2025 by CX Network.
