February Newsletter – an interview with Ben Phillips

We are delighted to present our first Newsletter of 2025, and it’s a cracker! Ben Phillips CCXP is a Certified CX Professional (CCXP) with almost 20 years working directly in Customer Experience (CX) roles for worldwide enterprise-grade organisations, both B2C and B2B.

He has held Director, Leader and consultancy positions in CX for market research agencies, financial companies and technology businesses.

He is part of an award-winning CX team and is the author of 3 books on the subject of CX, including “The CX Dictionary”. He is consistently ranked in the top #25 CX Influencers recognised by CX Magazine year on year. Ben presents keynotes, CX knowledge sessions and hosts events for companies worldwide.

He lives in the Midlands, UK with his family and is a passionate musician, Level 3 Personal Fitness Trainer and whisky enthusiast. We are grateful that he has taken the time to answer our questions and hope you enjoy this edition.

• Ben, you are currently Head of Customer Experience Performance Centre at Fujitsu, can you tell us what this entails?

 

Yes, I am effectively the CX Practice Lead for the European business, so my job is to ensure the company and our colleagues follow best practices and use all of the tools, methods and technologies at our disposal to ensure better Customer Experiences.

• You’ve got some fantastic experience across a wide range of sectors. Please can you tell us which role you’ve enjoyed the most and why?

 

I think it goes right back to my first role at a Mystery Shopping company where it all began – and the reason was not the subject material, but the start-up, hands-on, tightly knit feel & culture of the business. We all laughed together, cried together and I cut my teeth on market research, people management, account management, sales and a myriad of other things which have stayed with me ever since. Having said all that it was pretty nice travelling the world and learning about global CX culture working for almost 3 years at Nielsen, too 😊

• You have a lot of experience in Market Research and Customer Insight businesses, how do you think this has influenced your approach to CX as a discipline?

 

Market research & Insights are fundamental to a completely rounded CX experience and remit. Perhaps I didn’t even understand that well enough at the start, but actually as time has gone on I realise that you can’t make business decisions based on whim, anecdote, and supposition. You need data like lifeblood to support business recommendations. Tell the story first and get the interest, then support the argument using empirical data. And anyway, research is just interesting and always surprising.

• What has been your biggest success in terms of CX initiatives in your career to date?

 

Easily the way by which we set up a collaborative CX Team at Fujitsu, which was empowered to create whatever we needed to accelerate CX change within our organisation. We used untypical methods to create our engagements with country teams, ensuring that CX was not a “we’re going to do it for you” occupation but instead was one of “showing the way”. At the same time we were highly effective, very vocal and often showcased our progress on internal demo calls and Town Halls. We went on to win CX Team of the Year at Awards International’s European event in 2022 – so very happy with that!

• Not all CX initiatives go to plan! Have you ever had something not be as successful as you may have hoped and what did you learn from that?

 

Learn to fail in CX, I can tell you that on day #1 :-D. Seriously, this is something people don’t get, it really isn’t like any other business discipline. Most of the time you are fighting against disbelievers who can’t see the financial return for the effort and therefore aren’t necessarily interested. But then when the penny drops the rewards are so much more beneficial.

I can remember trying something with AR technology involving Mystery Shopping at Nielsen which didn’t grow any legs, and I can also recall investing time and effort into creating personas at a previous company that got very little traction. But the counter to all of that is that none of it was invaluable – you learn to improve, try something else, re-engage, and get a little bit better at it each time.

• What skillsets do you feel people wanting to pursue a career CX now need to really develop?

 

Today is always different to yesterday in fast-moving industries and CX is no exception, however I think storytelling is key in this business. I don’t mean making stuff up Hans Christiansen Andersen-style, I mean finding a way to make a business argument stick, and drill home the whole “What if we do, what if we don’t” positioning. You don’t have to be the world’s best presenter or speaker (although frequency of doing that helps a lot with just making it feel like another day on the job). What you need is to be able to look people in the eyes and have the confidence to express your most salient points and ensure sponsorship, budget, advocacy – whatever your goal might be.

• How important has professional networking been for your career development?  And how much of this has been virtual or in person?

 

This is another one of those things I didn’t realise was important until I was already doing it, but it’s been instrumental in the roles I have secured at all of my previous companies. I’m talking about a spread of activity across professional networking groups. Including using LinkedIn, talking to peers in WhatsApp communities, keeping busy on the awards/reviews/publishing circuit, even sitting down with folks that might have something in mind for you. I did that very thing at a research company and ended up going to work for a digital agency just through sharing similar thoughts on CX over a coffee.

• How do you see CX evolving in the future?

 

Well, I hope for all our sakes I am not the only one thinking it won’t be just because AI seems incredible and amazing and world-problem-solving. Because it isn’t. As long as AI is deployed as an evolved and complimentary service solution, then I have no problem with it. But I would 100%, any day of the week, expect (and nurture) human-to-human interaction and talent over and above any spend on automation or pseudo-service experiences. You go down that path, just because you think it’s clever and innovative, I think you’re asking for trouble. So – in answer to your question – capabilities for people to have the freedom to serve the customer any way that enhances the experience.

• How do you see AI influencing CX beyond the call centre?

 

Read my previous question! 😀

• If you had to describe the ultimate CX role for you – what would that look like?

 

Wow, good one. Okay, one that enables multi-cultural and multi-territory experience management, leveraging real-time data, creating and crafting solutions collaboratively, telling powerful and experience-changing stories, working with a great team and with top-down confidence and support that CX is exactly the right business area to invest in. There, what a mouthful.

• If you were setting up a CX team from scratch for an organisation where budget was no object, and nothing was in place –  what roles would your ideal team consist of?

 

As I have done more than once 😉. This all depends on context – what is the type of business, who is the customer, what does CX really mean where you are, etc. But I guess my experience tells me I’d build a dream team made up of:

–              Great business networkers (to cross channels & silos in the biggest orgs)

–              Confident storytellers & presenters (to relay key business information effectively)

–              A good number cruncher (statistical background most likely)

–              Great trainers (to embed best CX principles and find ways to do this with different personalities)

–              Creatives (comms, graphics, content, marketing etc – it’s all critical to getting the message out and across)

One of the most important things is to have those individuals report in together as one team; not proxy-managed elsewhere or dotted line into someone else. You lose the imperative sense of team and demands on those people’s time would get split or diluted. So centralised collaborative team-working is best, and you can then create a team culture everyone else will be envious of. And the work is damn fun, too 😊