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Most organisations have a channel strategy. Very few have a journey strategy. And that gap — invisible from the inside, painfully obvious from the outside — is quietly undermining customer experience in banking, telecoms, retail, and beyond.
In this episode of The CX Algorithm, Dr Eslam Afifi sits down with Oleksandr (Sasha) Zablotskyi, Head of Digital Channels at Openbank (Santander), to challenge one of the most deeply embedded assumptions in CX design: that channels are the right unit of measurement, investment, and organisational structure.
Sasha's argument is direct. Customers have never thought in channels. They think in tasks, in needs, in moments. The channel is a delivery mechanism — invisible when it works, painful when it doesn't. The journey is the product. And until organisations restructure around that idea — not just in strategy decks, but in their org charts, their metrics, and their AI roadmaps — the gap between intent and experience will persist.
In this episode, we explore:
- Why customers have never thought in channels — and why organisations still do
- How the org chart is the real obstacle to journey-centric experience
- Why channel metrics are necessary but not sufficient — and what journey metrics actually look like in practice
- How cross-functional squads change not just how teams work, but what questions they ask
- Why AI is accelerating the death of channels — and the risk of automating fragmentation instead of solving it
- What leaders should stop designing immediately, and what they should start
Whether you lead CX, product, digital, or customer strategy — this episode will challenge how you think about the systems your organisation has built, and who they were actually built for.
About the Guest
Oleksandr (Sasha) Zablotskyi is a digital experience and transformation leader with deep expertise across e-commerce, telecommunications, and financial services. Currently serving as Head of Digital Channels at Openbank — Santander's digital-first banking platform and the largest European digital bank by deposit volume — Sasha leads the evolution of customer journeys across operations in Spain, Germany, Portugal, the Netherlands, the US, and Mexico.
His career spans the full arc of digital transformation: from building omnichannel commerce at Eldorado in Ukraine, to launching the country's first eSIM solution at lifecell (including a cross-company one-minute activation flow in partnership with Monobank), to shaping digital channel strategy at one of Europe's most ambitious digital banks. He holds an Executive MBA from IE Business School in Madrid.
Passionate about simplifying complexity, Sasha designs digital experiences around customer outcomes rather than organisational structures — and believes the future of banking is a single intelligent interface where the channel becomes invisible and the journey becomes everything.
Connect with Sasha on LinkedIn — link in the comments.
About the Host
Dr Eslam Afifi is a customer experience and data leader whose work sits at the intersection of human behaviour, technology, and decision-making. He currently serves as CX, Data & Insights Senior Manager at Acenda (MLC Life Insurance) and holds a PhD in Human-Centered Design & AI and an Executive MBA from IE University.
Eslam created The CX Algorithm to explore how customer-centricity actually works in practice — not in theory. Through conversations with leaders from different contexts and industries, the podcast unpacks the choices, trade-offs, and design decisions that quietly shape customer experience over time. Every episode is built around a single, sharp idea. Because great CX is designed, not declared.
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