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Harald Fanderl

Senior PartnerRiyadh

Helps companies in sectors such as insurance, banking, energy, automotive, and retail become more customer-centric and achieve higher financial impact, customer satisfaction, and employee morale

Harald leads McKinsey’s global customer-experience work. He is a core member of the leadership teams within the firm’s Marketing & Sales and Electric Power & Natural Gas Practices as well as its insurance work.

Harald helps clients formulate bold aspirations and target pictures for the future of their businesses. To turn the visions into reality, he helps clients transform customer journeys and set up agile new ways of working. He has deep expertise in customer-experience measurement and supports clients in tech-enabling their omnichannel customer experiences.

Additionally, Harald advises clients on how to evolve their customer-experience strategies from focusing on single touchpoints to delivering full customer journeys. As these journeys encompass all customer interactions, they create a strong positive impact on customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction), and business growth (such as in cash flows, profit-and-loss ratios, and valuation metrics).

Harald has extensive experience in serving companies on customer centricity, primarily in industries such as insurance, banking, energy, automotive, and retail. In this work, he focuses on supporting clients both in setting bold aspirations for business performance and in following through meticulously—not only to put the customer at center stage but also to enable the organization to execute flawlessly in delivering value to the customer. Achieving all this involves applying McKinsey’s latest thinking on issues such as transformation, customer experience, branding, marketing return on investment, design thinking, agile methodology, service operations, digital and journey analytics, product management, and customer-experience measurement.

Examples of Harald’s recent client engagements include the following:

  • driving a leading energy company’s customer-centric transformation, which included setting the aspiration, designing the transformation program, developing a customer-experience-factory approach, and applying the approach in multiple countries across Europe, with significant financial, customer- and employee-satisfaction impact
  • acting as interim chief marketing officer for a leading European organization and defining its future go-to-market approach, brand strategy, and personalization strategy
  • developing for a leading insurance business a customer-experience program worth more than €100 million that delivered savings averaging 20 percent across the organization (in more than 30 waves) and resulted in gains of at least 15 percent in both customer and employee satisfaction in year three
  • building a leading omnichannel healthcare player that is the first in its market to provide distinctive customer experience
  • developing, with McKinsey Digital Labs and other McKinsey-affiliated specialists, the full digital channel for a global leader in fashion retail in a nine-month effort
  • building a complete digital bank that delivers a superior customer experience
  • transforming a healthcare company from having a bottom-quartile customer-satisfaction performance to being an industry leader in customer satisfaction, including having significant new customer acquisition, within three years

Before joining McKinsey, Harald worked for a leading German bank and a retailer. He is a frequent speaker at conferences around the world and an editor and coauthor of two compendiums on customer experience, with a third in progress.

Published work

Building a superpower: What can we learn from the Magnificent Seven?,” McKinsey & Company, June 2024

Experience-led growth: A new way to create value,” McKinsey & Company, March 2023

How the operating model can unlock the full power of customer experience,” McKinsey & Company, June 2022

Driving the automotive customer experience toward the age of mobility,” McKinsey & Company, March 2019

Digitizing customer journeys—making a radical, but valuable move in EPNG,” McKinsey & Company, July 2018

Why the customer experience matters,” McKinsey & Company, May 2016

The growth engine: Superior customer experience in insurance,” McKinsey & Company, April 2016

Do you have the right stuff?The Economist, January 2014

Don’t let data paralysis stand between you and your customers,” Harvard Business Review, November 2013

Education

Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich
PhD, communications science, marketing

ESB Business School, Reutlingen University
MBA

Middlesex University
BA, marketing and international management