Pets at Home’s transformation story is not a straight line from “legacy retail” to “digital-first.” It’s a longer, more complex shift from a collection of adjacent businesses spanning retail, veterinary services, grooming, and soon insurance, into a more unified pet care ecosystem, designed around continuity of experience and a stronger understanding of each customer relationship.
That relationship is also inherently multi-dimensional, Simon Ellis, Head of AI Transformation and Enterprise Architecture at Pets at Home, explained to CX Today in an interview at Salesforce’s recent London AI center opening. Pets at Home doesn’t just serve “a shopper.”
“From a personalization perspective, you’ve got the personalized data about the pet—healthcare, what they want, what they eat—which you infer through what the pet parent buys. But there’s also the service layers you’ve got to have around that pet parent… the consumer ultimately is the one that’s doing the buying.”
Their needs can range from food and routine care to acute healthcare questions and financial protection. The transformation challenge, then, is about connecting data, service and empathy across channels and across lines of business smoothly without compromising trust, clinical integrity or regulatory requirements.
“What we’ve done over the last few years is effected a big digital transformation to bring everybody back together to get a single view of the customer,” Ellis said.
From Separate Units to a Connected Ecosystem
In the past, the organization operated less like a unified brand and more like a collection of distinct operations.
“If you go back at Pets at Home, probably five six years ago, it was almost like separate business units.”
That structure isn’t unusual for companies that have grown through expansion into new services, acquisitions or distinct operating models. But over time it can create friction: customers repeat themselves, teams hold different pieces of context and experiences vary depending on which doorway the customer chooses, whether a store, call center, website, app or vet practice.
Pets at Home’s transformation has aimed to reduce those seams. The goal is continuity as a customer outcome delivering better personalization, more consistent service and fewer handoffs that feel like starting again from scratch.
“The aspiration is always to create that seamless customer experience,” Ellis said.
In many retail transformations, physical stores become a cost center to rationalize, with digital channels expected to do the heavy lifting. Pets at Home’s model is different because its physical footprint includes “pet care centers.” More than a retail location serving as a distribution point, the store environment is often part of the service proposition.
That has consequences for omnichannel design. A pet parent might browse online, purchase in store, ask advice via customer service, book a grooming session, or visit a vet practice. Some points in that journey demand emotional intelligence and reassurance. The experience must feel cohesive even when the channel changes.
“Tone of voice, care, empathy, are absolutely critical to everything that we do. That authenticity, that empathy… that’s what AI can and should never replace.”
Pets at Home’s leadership has been explicit that the most valuable part of the brand, the authenticity of human interaction with pet parents and their animals, should not be eroded by automation.
The Technology Backbone: Salesforce, Service and a Regulated Future
Pets at Home has used Salesforce for several years, predominantly across customer service, retail and marketing. Over time, the company has expanded its use of the platform as its broader transformation ambitions have matured and as new business propositions, such as an upcoming insurance offering, have moved closer to launch.
“We’ve been using Salesforce for quite a few years, predominantly in customer service and retail and marketing, so that was our core,” Ellis explained.
Beyond its traditional customer service operations, which incorporate retail stores and online chat live, Pets at Home uses Salesforce’s Service Cloud for its veterinary business, which operates as a B2B model. The company provides a range of services to its more than 450 joint venture veterinary practices, for offering phone and live chat support. And in June, the company plans to roll out insurance services using Financial Services Cloud, incorporating claims management and service.
The use cases are straightforward but powerful: a better-connected service function, improved marketing relevance, and, crucially, shared context that can support more consistent experiences.
But what stands out is the architectural choice to avoid forcing everything into one monolithic setup. Instead, Pets at Home is designing for different operating models and constraints. “We’ve not gone for a big single instance… because the scenarios are very different… insurance is regulated. In terms of the business we’ve got vets, which is a B2B model, and then we’ve got a B2C model with marketing and Service Cloud,” Ellis explained.
“For a relatively small to medium organization, we’re quite a big user.”
This approach reflects a common reality in transformation programs, as “single view” does not always mean “single system.” It can mean a governed, joined-up view, delivered through integration and data design, while still respecting the reality of different business domains.
Reducing Friction With AI While Protecting the Human Moment
As AI becomes a default pillar in customer service transformation strategies, Pets at Home’s approach is notably careful. It is positioning AI as a way to reduce administrative burden and give colleagues better context rather than as a replacement for human care.
Ellis teased that the company is rolling out Salesforce’s Agentforce as part of its next phase, which introduce agentic capabilities into its service operations.
But the emphasis remains on guardrails, especially in healthcare contexts. For veterinary services, the prospect of ambient tools, such as digital scribe functionality that listens to a consultation and drafts notes, may promise time savings and a better clinician-patient interaction. Yet Ellis reinforced that clinical decisions require human accountability.
“The human is always in the loop… especially if it’s clinical care.”
This is also where the brand’s emotional mission intersects with its technology design. In pet care, anxiety and urgency can be high and customers often need reassurance as well as resolution. Pets at Home will draw “red lines” to ensure automation does not come at the expense of empathy and trust.
“We will have red lines when there’s a clinical decision… when anything takes away the fact a colleague interacts with a pet parent or a pet.”
“As the world evolves, who knows what happens in 20 years’ time, but for us, fundamentally, we are not an Amazon of the world, we’re not just about selling dog food. We’re about providing that care, that high-empathy touchpoint. If you need us, we have teleservices as well… the idea is whenever you need help with a pet, we’re there online or physically.”
Build vs Buy: Integrate the Commodity, Build the Differentiation
Pets at Home has framed its strategy in pragmatic terms, as Ellis put it: “Buy the commodity, integrate, build the differentiation.”
That approach that avoids reinvention for its own sake, while still acknowledging that differentiation often lives in the detail of workflows, data and service design.
“We built our own digital pet care platform… that is where we have built differentiation, because that’s unique to us… you can’t go out and buy a pet care platform. It doesn’t exist.”
In this case, the differentiation is closely tied to Pets at Home’s combined view. “One of the things we’ve got is that unique dataset between healthcare… veterinary and the retail side, and then soon insurance.” Few brands can credibly connect those datasets and touchpoints in a way that customers will recognize as valuable rather than intrusive, Elis noted.
Trust, Consent and Regulation
If retail and veterinary services create complexity, insurance introduces a different kind of complexity that comes with financial services regulation and customer expectations about confidentiality.
Ellis emphasized that even if the organization can technically connect data across the ecosystem, it will not do so automatically.
“Always take it back to permission and rights… we won’t share that [insurance] data with the rest of the Pets at Home ecosystem unless you explicitly grant permission.”
This is an important detail because it goes beyond compliance. It acknowledges the customer’s perception of “creepiness” and the risk of eroding trust if data is used in ways the customer doesn’t expect even if those uses are beneficial.
Ellis also pointed to the customer’s right to change consent over time, which adds operational requirements, as systems and processes must support permission management dynamically, not as a one-time tick-box. “The consumer always has the right… the right to add and right to remove.”
Behind the scenes, the organization must also manage multiple regulatory environments at once, Ellis noted—clinical governance and financial services compliance—making data governance and operational design central to the transformation, not an afterthought.
Building Employee Capability Through an AI Academy
Transformation programs often underestimate the “people layer.” Pets at Home has approached enablement with structure, describing an internal AI academy that supports different levels of training across the organization.
The logic is that AI literacy isn’t binary. A frontline colleague needs practical guidance and confidence; a manager needs to understand how to redesign work; leaders need governance, risk awareness, and a view of where value can be created. Ellis pointed out: “One size does not fit all… it’s almost like a pyramid—there’s layers and layers of training.”
This “pyramid” framing also aligns with a more strategic ambition to move teams away from narrow task execution and towards orchestrating work where humans supervise, guide and add judgment and empathy, while automation handles repetitive steps.
“We need to move to a world where we rethink process and rethink how we work… move colleagues away from focusing on a task to be orchestrators of work.”
Perhaps the most consistent through-line in Pets at Home’s narrative is the idea that customers shouldn’t have to think about the underlying technology. Customers get what they need quickly, colleagues have the right context and the experience feels natural.
“Technology done well is absolutely seamless… if technology’s done well, nobody knows about it,” Ellis said.
In-store, that philosophy becomes physical. The goal is not to turn colleagues into screen-focused operators; it’s to help them stay present with customers and pets, while the right information arrives at the right time.
“We don’t want them eyes down… we want them eyes up, speaking to pet parents.”
What other CX leaders can take from the Pets at Home approach
While every transformation is shaped by industry realities, several lessons in Pets at Home’s approach stand out for CX and contact center leaders:
- “Single view” is a governance outcome, not necessarily a single-system outcome. Joining up experiences across different business models often requires multiple platforms and instances, bound by clear integration and permission design.
- Differentiation comes from experience layers. Platforms can accelerate the basics, but unique value often lives in the data model, workflows and cross-domain experiences that reflect the organization’s real-world complexity.
- Guardrails matter most where trust matters most. In regulated or clinical environments, “human in the loop” is a design principle that protects customers and the brand.
- Enablement needs segmentation. Role-based training and internal academies can be the difference between AI adoption that sticks and AI pilots that stall.
- Empathy is a competitive advantage. Particularly in emotionally charged categories like pet care, automation should be used to create more space for human connection.
Pets at Home’s transformation is still evolving, especially as insurance comes into play and as agentic AI begins to move to operational reality. But the direction is clearly to connect the ecosystem, protect trust through consent and governance and use technology to enhance the human moments that matter.
