More than 25 years ago, Phil Prosser was running marketing for a billion-dollar retail business and asking a question that most people in his position weren’t asking: What is actually happening at the moment a customer decides whether to come back?
The answer came from an unlikely source: a book about the world’s top 100 service companies. Buried inside was a US business doing something almost unheard of at the time: measuring customer experience in the moment, not months later through a research report.
Phil rang the CEO cold, boarded a flight to Atlanta, and found himself at dinner with Walmart’s Head of Customer Experience and a table of US retail leaders who were rethinking how they understood their customers. That dinner changed everything.
What followed was three decades of building, running and reinventing customer experience programs across 74 countries, more than 300 clients and over 200 million moments of truth. Phil founded GAPBuster Worldwide in 1994, which grew into the largest mystery shopping company in the world with 300,000 shoppers. He then founded Feedback ASAP in 2010, taking everything he had learned and turning it into something faster, smarter and more directly connected to business growth.
Along the way, he has worked with some of the world’s most recognised brands, including McDonald’s, Apple, Shell, Starbucks, AT&T, UPS and STIHL. He led the customer experience program for the iPhone launch with AT&T across 2,000 stores. The largest program he has ever run was worth over $100 million and was recognised as central to that organisation’s turnaround.
WHAT PHIL ACTUALLY BELIEVES
Phil’s view on customer experience has always been the same, even as the tools around it have changed: a score tells you what happened. It doesn’t tell you why, or what to do next, or who needs to change their behaviour by next Tuesday morning.
What Feedback ASAP does, and what Phil has spent his career trying to build, is the thing that comes after the score. The insight. The action. The behaviour change that makes next month’s number different from this month’s. He calls it turning CX into a growth engine, and he means it in the most commercially literal sense.
BACKGROUND
Before customer experience became his life’s work, Phil spent more than a decade in marketing. He was the Marketing Director who launched the New Zealand Lotteries business, took it to $1 billion in today’s dollars, set up 750 franchised retail stores and won his country’s top consumer marketing award. He has also held marketing roles with Goodman Fielder and Dulux. That commercial and marketing background is still very much present in how he thinks: he has never seen customer experience in CX as a measurement exercise, only as a growth strategy.
Phil has been a board member of the International Customer Service Professionals for seven years and a member of the global Young Presidents Organisation since 2004, a network he values not just for the connections but for the quality of the conversations.
OUTSIDE WORK
Phil is a firm believer that the best business thinking tends to happen away from a desk. He is an enthusiastic hiker, the kind who books the difficult trail, does the research, and still manages to find a leadership lesson somewhere around kilometre 18. He wrote about it, actually. Look it up.