Eline Koorndijk was inducted into the CX Hall of Fame for the unsentimental view of innovation she has carried into a sector that often resists it: life insurance.

Koorndijk leads customer experience management and innovation for a Swiss life insurer, after thirteen years building a career in the insurance industry following her move from the Netherlands. Her core argument cuts against the rhythm of most innovation programs. Innovation has duration, she argues, not just direction. The discipline is not the launch event. It is what happens in the eighteen months after, when the new product or process has to integrate with the people doing the work, and the call center agent who has no visibility into what the customer just did online starts to fail in plain view of the customer who assumed the company knew.

Her practical operating principle is to connect the dots between departments. The customer’s online experience and the agent’s call center experience have to be designed together, or the integration breaks at the moment the customer needs it most. In a category structurally organized around silos, this is harder than it sounds. The fix is rarely technology. It is the operational architecture that gives the agent visibility into what the customer just did.

What earned Koorndijk induction is the steadiness of holding this position across a long tenure in a sector that does not reward it loudly.