Kia ora, I’m Alex Murphy
I’m a customer strategist, author, speaker, and founder of Experience Works.
I’ve spent more than a decade working out why customers do what they do, why organisations make it so unnecessarily hard for them, and what we can actually do about it.
I’ve built and led CX functions inside some of New Zealand’s biggest organisations, including The Warehouse Group, Mercury, 2degrees and LIC. I’ve worked on everything from customer strategy and behavioural science to service design, transformation, research and the occasional corporate process that really should have been put out of its misery years ago.
These days, I run Experience Works, helping organisations turn customer insight into actual decisions, better experiences and measurable business outcomes. Less theatre. Fewer frameworks for the sake of frameworks. More useful work.
I’m also the author of Have You Tried Turning the Customer Off and On Again?, a book about customer experience, behaviour and the slightly ridiculous things organisations do to the humans trying to buy from them.
And when I’m not consulting or writing, I’m usually on a stage talking about customer experience, behavioural science, loyalty, customer strategy and why asking customers what they want is not always the same as understanding what they’ll actually do.
I hold an MBA in Digital Transformation with First Class Honours, but I promise not to make you look at a 94-slide transformation deck!
At the centre of all of it is one fairly simple belief:
Behaviour is evidence. Sentiment is descriptive. And good customer strategy should change what happens next.
If you want to make customer experience more useful, more commercial and considerably less full of corporate nonsense, we should probably talk.
KEYNOTES
Customers. Behaviour. Business. And the questionable decisions we make in between.
I speak about why customers behave the way they do, why organisations so often misunderstand them, and how behavioural science can help businesses make better decisions.
My keynotes are practical, evidence-based and designed to make people think a little differently about the customer problems hiding in plain sight.
BEHAVIOUR DOESN’T CARE WHAT YOU THINK
Why what customers actually do matters more than what we assume they’ll do.
Businesses spend huge amounts of time trying to understand customers, then make decisions based on opinions, personas and what happened in the workshop.
This keynote explores the gap between what customers say and what they actually do, how context shapes behaviour, and why real customer behaviour is often the most useful evidence in the room.
Because personas are hypotheses. Behaviour is evidence.
AI IS THE ANSWER. WHAT WAS THE QUESTION?
What happens when organisations automate before they understand the problem.
AI can make organisations faster. It can also make them faster at producing the wrong things.
This keynote explores automation bias, the seduction of polished output, why organisations mistake speed for progress, and what happens when technology gets ahead of judgement.
The real risk isn’t that AI becomes too intelligent. It’s that organisations stop asking whether the thing being automated was useful in the first place.
THE PERFECTLY REASONABLE MISTAKE
How sensible business decisions quietly create terrible customer outcomes.
Most bad customer outcomes aren’t caused by one spectacularly bad decision. They’re built from dozens of perfectly reasonable ones.
A process gets tightened. A customer fix slips to next quarter. A feature with a cleaner business case wins. An exception becomes permanent. Every decision can be justified on its own. Together, they create an experience nobody would have deliberately designed.
This keynote explores the psychology, incentives and power structures behind organisational decision-making, and why smart people can keep making rational choices that produce irrational outcomes.
Because sometimes the problem isn’t that anyone made a bad decision. It’s that everyone made a reasonable one.
LOOKING FOR SOMETHING A LITTLE DIFFERENT?
Every keynote is tailored to the audience, industry and event.
If you’ve got a customer problem, a leadership challenge, or a room full of people who need to think differently, let’s talk.