At a glance
Founded in 1986, Charles Tyrwhitt is one of the UK's most recognised menswear brands. With 58 stores worldwide and 1,100 employees, CT serves customers across the UK, Europe and North America.
HQ
London, UK
Industry
Ecommerce
Team size
Dixa features
Email, Voice, Chat, Agent Workspace
Email median FRT
Voice CSAT, best-in-class
Opened with built-in translation
The Challenge: Built for one stage of growth, ready for the next
Charles Tyrwhitt has been one of the UK's most recognised menswear brands since 1986. Today, the US is its biggest market, with customers also served across the UK, Europe and beyond. The business employs 1,100 people, operates 58 stores worldwide, and runs a contact centre handling email, voice and chat at scale.
It was working. But "working" isn't the same as winning.
"It was functional. We had a lot of legacy systems in place, we'd been working with our previous provider for 20 years. But it was quite a clunky experience. We had a different system for phone calls, a different system for emails and chats, our ERP, a different system doing surveys. It was kind of like lots of different systems stitched together." — Emily Powell-Kaluzna, Head of Change, Charles Tyrwhitt
Agents were system-hopping. Induction took three months. New hires couldn't get to the front line fast enough. And the business was about to add hundreds of thousands of new customers across new markets. Something had to change, and not just at the edges.
The decision came from the top. Mathis Wagner, Director of Customer Services, ran the data on service gaps, customer effort and operational inefficiencies, took it to the board, and secured the investment to rebuild: Sian J. as Head of Customer Services, and Emily as Head of Change.
Finding the right platform, and the right partner
Emily's team evaluated six contact-centre-as-a-service platforms. The shortlist spanned the obvious incumbents, telephony-first vendors, and the established ticketing systems.
Emily knew the ticketing space well, she'd worked with Zendesk before and liked the system. But CT's CX problem wasn't a ticketing problem. Ticketing systems work for long-term cases (furniture, complex returns) where conversations stretch out over days. CT wanted to resolve everything the first time. That meant a conversational platform, not a ticketing one.
Dixa stood out for its digital-first focus. "We wanted to focus on chats and emails. We thought the conversational methodology was more appropriate for us."
The agent workspace sealed it: extending responses, matching customer tone, surfacing answers from the knowledge base, built-in translation. But technology was only half the decision. The other half was the kind of relationship CT wanted with whoever they picked.
CT had been with their previous provider for 20 years. They were looking for something different the second time around.
"We were a very small fish. We wanted a company we were a big partner for, that we could help shape each other's tech roadmaps. We got that vibe from the Dixa team straight away." — Emily Powell-Kaluzna, Head of Change, Charles Tyrwhitt
Charles Tyrwhitt went on to help shape Dixa's survey suite, and was the first customer globally to go live with the new styling. That partnership instinct turned out to be the through-line of the whole project.
The Rollout: One pane of glass, 130 people
Charles Tyrwhitt went live on Dixa in May 2025, unifying email, voice and chat onto a single platform for the entire contact centre –including outsourcing partners Nutun in South Africa and Konecta in Turkey.
Dixa became the platform foundation for a wider transformation programme that also included DigitalGenius as the virtual assistant partner for chat, a redesigned people plan led by Sian, and a 1-month induction process to replace the old 3-month one.
End-to-end, from vendor selection to full launch: twelve months. UK first, then market by market.
It was also bold. CT was the first customer globally to go live with Dixa's new satisfaction survey styling, a function of the partnership Charles Tyrwhitt had insisted on from the start.
What Dixa unlocked
Email, voice and chat on one platform, across the in-house team – Nutun in South Africa, and Konecta team in Turkey.
For agents, that meant the end of system-hopping. Dixa's AI-powered workspace pulls answers from the knowledge base, suggests responses, matches customer tone, and translates between languages in real time.
"We launched in the Netherlands and we don't have any Dutch speakers. Dixa translates the customer's message into English, the agent writes in English, it translates back to Dutch, the customer won't know any translation has been used." — Emily Powell-Kaluzna, Head of Change, Charles Tyrwhitt
That's what enabled CT to open four new markets (Canada, France, Netherlands and Switzerland) without scaling headcount country by country.
For email, response times dropped from ~3h 45m to ~50m. For voice, the results spoke for themselves: 96 CSAT, consistently best-in-class. "No matter where you call, in-house, South Africa, or Turkey, you'll get the same service. I think that's really rare."
When every agent across every region works from the same platform, consistency stops being a goal and starts being the default.
Nine months in, on Dixa:
What the wider transformation delivered
With Dixa as the platform foundation, and combined with the DigitalGenius integration, the redesigned people plan, and the broader change programme, the transformation paid back across every dimension of the business:
Commercial impact
Customer experience
Operational excellence
External recognition
In late 2025, Charles Tyrwhitt walked away with four awards at the European Contact Centre & Customer Service Awards (ECCCSAs). Recognition for the breadth of the transformation Emily's team had led:
- Gold for Best Supporting Team for the Change Management team behind the project
- Gold for Best Customer Experience Redesign for the combined impact of the tech and CX work
- Silver for Greatest Impact of a Multi AI Approach recognising CT's AI partnership with Dixa, DigitalGenius and Feefo
- Bronze for Best Customer Experience for the contact centre's commitment to putting the customer at the heart of every decision
Four wins. One transformation programme. Nine months in.
What's next
Nine months in, Charles Tyrwhitt is already looking at where Dixa goes next in the operation.
Top of the list: more channels. "It would be really cool to explore more channels: social messaging, things like iMessage, WhatsApp. With Dixa having this omnichannel ability, it's definitely something worth exploring."
Also on Emily's radar: translation.
"The translation technology is really interesting because it means we can speak to customers in languages we don't necessarily have a human agent for. We launched in the Netherlands last year and we don't have any Dutch speakers. This kind of functionality is really useful. It means we can explore more markets, more languages."
For a brand looking to expand internationally, that's not a feature. It's an unlock.
Advice for any retailer still on the fence
For any retailer weighing up the same kind of change CT made – knowing the operation is working, but not yet winning. Emily has one piece of advice. It's a line she's shared on stage and in conversations with peers ever since the project closed:
"Innovation requires change. It might be scary or daunting to change something that's working but isn't the best it can be. Sometimes the best thing to do is to rip it out and start again. That's when you get the most effective and impactful change."
CTA
Charles Tyrwhitt chose Dixa because they wanted a partner, not a vendor. Nine months in, the numbers, the awards, and the team's ambition for what comes next speak for themselves.
If you're ready to stop stitching systems together and start building a contact centre that scales, let's talk. Book a demo here.