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After working at almost every level of customer relations, from market stall to Head of Customer Innovation at HSBC, John advises global brands including Sky, BP and Volkswagen on customer-led growth, leadership and culture. With insights from frontline service to boardroom strategy, he helps leaders move beyond metrics to truly understand what matters to customers, and to turn human behaviour into sustainable commercial success.
John Sills is a customer experience leader and author. He helps organisations translate behaviourial insights into cultural values and commercial growth. As Managing Partner of the customer-led growth consultancy The Foundation, he works with global brands to bridge the gap between boardroom strategy and frontline experience.
John began his career on a market stall, an early experience that shaped his practical understanding of how customers think, relate, decide and behave. Over the past twenty-five years he has worked in and with organisations around the world to improve things for customers, from frontline roles delivering service, to innovation teams designing services and propositions, to leadership teams shaping long-term strategy and culture. He spent over a decade at HSBC, starting out in customer-facing roles and ultimately becoming Head of Customer Innovation globally. Since then, he has advised organisations including Sky, BP, Heineken, Vodafone, Bupa, Volkswagen, Morrisons, eBay and UNICEF, helping them create customer-led growth strategies based on real human needs rather than assumptions or misleading data.
Provocative, original and humorous, John challenges the 'Net Promoter Score epidemic' and the over-reliance on feedback metrics that aggregate rather that illuminate. Instead, he advocates seeing the world from where customers stand and building organisations that make customer-led decisions at every level, from CEO to software developer to shopfloor.
John is the author of The Human Experience, named Leadership Book of the Year by the Institute of Leadership. In it, he argues that organisations have become overly focused on functional efficiency at the expense of emotional experience, and that restoring humanity to business is not just morally right, but a commercially powerful advantage. Drawing on extensive research and case studies, he outlines how leaders can design cultures that consistently deliver both better experiences and stronger results. John's writing has been featured in the Financial Times, The Guardian and Management Today, and his newsletter reaches more than 10,000 readers. Alongside his commercial work, John supports Young Enterprise and mentors future business leaders.
Practical, insightful and grounded in real-world research and experience, John equips leaders with the insights to realise where opportunity lies, the tools to create meaningful differentiation, and the skills to build trust and turn customer understanding into competitive advantage.
