Ladislau Batalha was inducted into the CX Hall of Fame for the work he has done at the standards level on what customer experience excellence actually means, and for resisting the easier monetization paths the category invited him to take.

Over thirty years across telecoms, contact centers, and now consulting practice, Batalha has held a sharper position on what service standards are for than the category’s defaults. A standard is a benchmark. It is not a certificate. The work is to define what excellent customer experience looks like in instrumented terms, and to give organizations a credible way to measure themselves against the definition. The certificate that ends up on the wall is downstream. His standards work has the most operational traction in the Middle East, where government-led citizen experience standards already exist.

His current push extends the standards work to small and medium enterprises, in collaboration with the broader Alliance ecosystem. SMEs make up ninety to ninety-five percent of customer experience in any economy. They are also the segment chronically locked out of the usable CX frameworks the enterprise category produces. Building standards SMEs can self-assess against, paired with frontline call center agent certifications, makes the discipline operable for the parts of the economy where most customer experiences actually happen.

What earned Batalha induction is the operating discipline of holding standards rigor while extending the work into the parts of the economy where most customer experiences actually happen.