Category Archives: Customer Experience

Designing Agentic Customer Experience That Earns Trust

When AI Agents Act on Your Behalf

Designing Agentic Customer Experience That Earns Trust

by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia

From Answers to Actions: The Agentic Shift

For a decade, “AI in customer experience” mostly meant better answers: chatbots that deflected, assistants that summarized, copilots that drafted. Helpful, imperfect, and still largely conversational. The agentic shift is different. Systems are no longer limited to recommending what a human should do. They are beginning to do — refund, reschedule, rebook, reroute, update records, trigger fulfillment, and coordinate multi-step journeys across channels without waiting for a ticket to crawl through three departments.

That is not a feature upgrade. It is a change in the relationship. The brand now includes a non-human actor with authority. When an agent acts, it acts in the company’s name and, increasingly, on the customer’s behalf. Experience design can no longer stop at tone of voice and containment rates. It must account for delegated power.

Human-centered innovators should hear the signal underneath the hype. Customers are not primarily evaluating whether your AI sounds clever. They are evaluating whether your organization is safe to trust with unfinished business. Answering a question poorly is friction. Acting incorrectly — or acting opaquely — is a breach of the emotional contract.

Welcome to agentic customer experience: where loyalty is shaped less by what the brand says, and more by what its agents are allowed to decide.

Why Customers Will Forgive Slowness — But Not Betrayal

Customers have always traded time for confidence. Many will wait for a competent human. Far fewer will repeatedly educate a system that forgets context, loops through the same failed path, or blocks the exit to a person. Research across the industry keeps pointing to the same pattern: openness to AI rises when it resolves issues completely — and collapses quickly when it wastes attempts, hides escalation, or makes people feel trapped.

This is where leaders misread the risk. They optimize for speed and deflection, then wonder why trust erodes. People will often forgive slowness when they feel progress and respect. They will not forgive what feels like betrayal: decisions that seem optimized for the brand’s cost curve, recommendations that ignore stated preferences, silent policy enforcement with no explanation, or “self-service” that is really forced service.

Betrayal in CX is usually quiet. It looks like a denied refund with no rationale. An agent that “helps” by steering toward what is easiest to contain. A personalization engine that remembers everything except the customer’s dignity. The nervous system keeps score. So does the switching decision.

In the agentic era, the question is not only Did we resolve it? It is Did we resolve it in a way that still makes this relationship feel safe?

The New Experience Design Problem: Delegation

Most AI roadmaps are still framed as automation problems: what can we remove from the human queue? That framing is incomplete. From the customer’s side, agentic CX is a delegation problem. People are deciding how much unfinished business they are willing to hand to a system that can act without them in the room.

Delegation requires a different design brief. Customers need to know what is being done, why it is being done, what happens if it goes wrong, and how to reclaim control. Without those conditions, “autonomy” feels like abandonment dressed up as innovation.

Human-centered experience design therefore asks emotional jobs beneath the functional ones:

Do I feel represented — or processed?
Do I feel informed — or surprised after the fact?
Do I feel able to intervene — or locked out by design?
Do I feel the brand is on my side — or merely efficient at managing me?

This is why transparency is not a compliance garnish. It is part of the product. So is the handoff. An elegant agent that cannot escalate with context intact is not advanced; it is brittle. Agentic excellence includes knowing when not to act alone.

Four Trust Pillars for Agentic CX

If agentic systems will act in your name, trust needs architecture — not slogans. Four pillars help leaders design for loyalty rather than mere containment.

Clarity

Customers should understand when AI is involved, what it can and cannot do, and what just happened. Clarity reduces suspicion. Mystery breeds it. “Transparency by design” means visible agency, plain-language explanations, and no dark patterns that disguise automation as a person.

Competence

An agent that acts must finish the job. Partial resolution, lost context, and repetitive failure teach customers that delegation is unsafe. Competence is end-to-end: data continuity, accurate policy application, and the ability to complete multi-step work without making the customer re-narrate their life story.

Control

Trust grows when people can undo, override, confirm high-stakes actions, and reach a human without being punished for asking. Control is not the enemy of automation; it is what makes automation acceptable. The best agentic experiences feel powerful and reversible.

Care

The decisive pillar: whose interest is being optimized? If customers believe the agent is steering them toward what is best for the brand — upsell, denial, deflection — loyalty decays even when the interaction is fast. Care means designing decision logic that is fair, explainable, and aligned with the customer’s stated goal.

Clarity, competence, control, and care. Miss one, and agentic CX becomes a trust tax. Honor all four, and autonomy becomes hospitality at scale.

Orchestration Without Losing the Human

The winning model is not AI-only theater. It is orchestration: purposeful sequencing of agentic action, human judgment, and channel continuity so the customer experiences one coherent journey instead of a relay race of disconnected tools.

Agentic AI is uniquely suited to routine multi-step work — the operational choreography that used to create delay and handoff fatigue. Humans remain essential for ambiguity, emotion, ethical judgment, and exceptions that policies cannot pre-chew. CX leaders increasingly expect human interactions to become more complex as AI absorbs the simple. That is not failure of automation. That is the work migrating to where empathy and discernment still matter most.

Orchestration also includes the employee experience. If frontline teams inherit broken context, unexplained agent decisions, and no authority to repair trust, customers will feel that fracture immediately. Human-centered change treats agents and employees as one system: AI handles volume and velocity; people handle meaning and recovery.

Design the sequence, not just the bot. Decide what should happen before, during, and after autonomous action. Make escalation a first-class journey path, not a hidden defeat. In agentic CX, the brand is the conductor. The technology is the orchestra. Customers can tell when nobody is conducting.

A Human-Centered Playbook for the Agentic Era

Urgency without a playbook produces demos. Loyalty requires operating discipline. Start here.

Define decision rights before you deploy autonomy. Which actions can an agent take alone, which require confirmation, and which are human-only? Write it as policy customers can feel in the experience.
Design recovery as carefully as resolution. Every autonomous action needs an undo path, an explanation path, and a dignified escalation path with context preserved.
Measure trust outcomes, not only efficiency. Containment and average handle time matter. So do repeat contact, forced re-explanation, escalation friction, complaint themes, and whether customers say they would delegate again.
Prototype agent behavior on real journeys. Test the emotional arc of delegation: consent, action, visibility, completion, and repair. Bodies and language reveal failure faster than dashboards.
Govern for care in public. State how data is used, how models decide, and how you prevent brand-first bias. Trust compounds when principles are operational, not ornamental.

The future of customer experience will not be judged by how many agents you launched. It will be judged by what those agents did in your customers’ names — and whether people still felt human while it happened. Brands that treat agentic AI as a cost play will win quarters. Brands that treat it as a trust system will win relationships.

That is the human-centered mandate of the agentic era: give your systems the power to act, and give your customers every reason to believe that power is being used with them, not on them.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is agentic customer experience?

Agentic customer experience is when AI systems can take multi-step actions on behalf of the customer or company — such as refunds, rescheduling, routing, or journey orchestration — rather than only answering questions. It shifts CX from conversation to delegated action, which raises the bar for trust, transparency, and human handoff.

How can brands build trust in AI agents that act for customers?

Build trust through four pillars: clarity about when AI is acting, competence in completing work with context preserved, control through undo and easy human escalation, and care by optimizing for the customer’s interest rather than containment alone. Recovery design matters as much as automation design.

Will human agents still matter in an agentic CX model?

Yes. Agentic AI is best for routine multi-step work, while humans remain essential for complex, emotional, and exceptional cases. The winning model is orchestration: AI and people working as one system, with seamless escalation and shared context so customers never feel abandoned by automation.

Image credits: Gemini

Content Authenticity Statement: The topic area, key elements to focus on, etc. were decisions made by Braden Kelley, with a little help from Cursor to clean up the article.

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How to Calculate the ROI of Customer Experience

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Announcing the Launch of a Free CX ROI Calculator

by Braden Kelley

Most executive teams already believe that customer experience (CX) matters. Almost none of them can say, in dollars, what a specific improvement found in a Customer Experience Audit is worth — and that gap is usually the real reason a CX investment stalls before it reaches a budget conversation. Here’s a framework for closing it, backed by the research, plus a free calculator to run the numbers on your own business.

Why “CX matters” isn’t a business case

“Customer experience drives loyalty” is true, and it convinces almost no one holding a budget. What moves a budget conversation is a specific number: this metric, moved by this much, produces this many retained customers, worth this much revenue. Most CX teams never make that translation, so the initiative competes for funding against proposals that speak fluent finance while CX speaks fluent satisfaction score.

The good news is that the translation isn’t guesswork. There’s two decades of published research connecting experience metrics to financial outcomes — the trick is applying it to your own numbers instead of citing it as an abstract principle.

The research behind the number

Bain & Company, the originator of the Net Promoter Score, has found that NPS explains roughly 20% to 60% of the variation in organic growth rates between competitors in the same market, and that the NPS leader in a given industry typically outgrows competitors by more than double. In an early, widely cited analysis, Bain found that Dell’s detractors made up about 15% of its customer base and represented roughly $68 million in lost revenue — and estimated that converting just 2% to 8% of those detractors into promoters could add approximately $167 million in annual revenue.

7 pts → ~1%NPS increase → revenue growth (London School of Economics)

10 pts → 3.2%NPS increase → B2B upsell revenue (CustomerGauge)

5 pts → 25–95%Retention increase → profit increase (Reichheld / Bain)

A separate study from the London School of Economics found that a 7-point increase in NPS corresponds to roughly 1% revenue growth, while CustomerGauge’s research in B2B contexts found a tighter, more immediate link: a 10-point NPS increase correlating with a 3.2% increase in upsell revenue among existing accounts. Underneath all of it sits Fred Reichheld’s original retention research at Bain, which found that a 5-point improvement in customer retention increases profits by 25% to 95%, depending on the industry and business model.

The wide range in that last figure isn’t a weakness in the research — it’s the whole point. The financial return on a CX improvement depends on your margin structure, your customer lifetime value, and how much of the retained revenue is truly incremental. A generic industry number can’t answer that. Your own numbers can.

The four-step value chain

Here’s the framework that turns the research above into a number specific to your business:

Experience Metric — the number you already track: NPS, CES, or CSAT.
Behavioral Outcome — the specific customer behavior that metric predicts: renewing, referring, buying again, or churning.
Financial Outcome — that behavior’s dollar value: retained revenue, reduced cost-to-serve, lower acquisition cost.
The Intervention — what actually has to change to move Box 1 in the first place: a redesigned onboarding flow, a fixed billing process, a retrained support tier.

This is also the fastest way to diagnose why a past CX initiative didn’t show up in revenue: almost always, it moved Box 1 (the score) without a demonstrated effect on Box 2 (a specific behavior), so it was never going to reach Box 3. The fix isn’t more CX effort in general — it’s picking an intervention with a direct, traceable line to a named behavior, and measuring that behavior directly.

What “typical” looks like, by industry

Churn rates and cost-to-serve vary meaningfully by industry — and by methodology, which is worth naming honestly rather than smoothing over. Here are representative midpoints reconciled across several published benchmark studies:

Industry	Typical annual churn	Cost per service contact
SaaS / Software	5–14%	$18–$35
Retail / eCommerce	20–37%	$2.70–$12
Financial Services / Insurance	15–20%	$15–$25
Healthcare	7–9%	$50–$60
Telecom / Utilities	15–25%	$20–$30
B2B Professional Services	~10–13%	$30–$60

These are starting points for a company with no internal baseline yet — not universal constants. The strongest version of any business case replaces these with your own churn rate, revenue per customer, and service cost the moment that data exists.

Want to skip straight to your own number? Use the free CX ROI Calculator →
It runs this exact framework against your own customer count, revenue per customer, and churn rate, and gives you a business-case-ready total in under two minutes.

How to build the business case, step by step

1. Start with your own numbers

Current churn rate, average revenue per customer, and cost per service contact — pulled from finance or CS systems — will always be more persuasive than an industry benchmark. Use published figures only where internal data doesn’t exist yet.

2. Separate the well-established link from your company-specific estimate

The macro relationship between experience and growth (Bain, LSE, CustomerGauge) is well documented and easy to defend by name. The precise dollar impact for your company is always a modeled estimate — say so explicitly, and the business case gains credibility rather than losing it.

3. Model conservatively, then show the range

A single point estimate invites a single objection. A modeled range — conservative, moderate, optimistic — tends to survive scrutiny far better, because it demonstrates the thinking rather than just the output.

4. Tie the number to a specific intervention

Executives fund actions, not scores. Pair the projected financial impact with the specific initiative expected to produce it, rather than presenting the improvement as if it happens on its own.

Try it on your own numbers

The fastest way to see this framework in action is to run it against your own business. The CX ROI Calculator uses the same four-step chain described above — enter your customer count, revenue per customer, and current churn rate (or start from an industry benchmark), and it estimates the annual revenue and cost-to-serve impact of a defined experience improvement, along with a summary you can paste straight into a slide.

Get the CX ROI Benchmark Report — the full industry benchmark table with sources, the CX Value Chain framework, and answers to the five objections a CFO is most likely to raise. Enter your email and we’ll send it straight to your inbox.

If after exploring the ROI calculator you would like to explore unlocking revenue opportunities for your business with a Customer Experience Audit, contact me directly or call (206) 349-8931. I’m happy to have a no-obligation conversation about whether an audit makes sense for your current situation.

Image Credit: Gemini

Content Authenticity Statement: The topic area, key elements to focus on, etc. were decisions made by Braden Kelley, with a little help from Claude to clean up the article, add Gemini to add images.

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Showing Respect for Your Customer’s Time

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Showing Respect for Your Customer's Time

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

This article answers the question: How do you prove to customers that you value and respect their time throughout the customer experience?

A customer takes the time to buy a product, which could include research, visits to a store, calls to a salesperson, and many other tasks that go into a pre-purchase routine. So once they buy it, the work should be over. But sometimes it’s not. Something goes wrong, or the customer may have a question. Regardless of what it is, they are about to spend more time related to their purchase that isn’t just the actual use of the product.

My point is that when the customer has to spend more time than they should, make it so easy and reasonable that they have confidence that if there is ever another problem, you’re a company that is easy to do business with and respects the customer’s time.

Superhero Customer Service Shep Hyken

When you show respect for a customer’s time, it pays dividends in the form of repeat business, customer loyalty, and word-of-mouth referrals. So, how can you prove this to the customer? As I was preparing for an upcoming customer experience keynote speech, I created an acronym for the word TIME.

T is for Timely: Respect the clock and quickly respond. Return calls, emails, and messages when promised – or sooner. Fast response shows respect, and the longer the wait, the less customers trust you. Every unnecessary minute equals disrespect.
I is for Individualized: Make efficiency personal. Know and remember your customer. Use information and data on the customer to anticipate needs and create a more time-efficient experience.
M is for Minimal Effort: This is about being easy. Reduce transfers, logins, and redundant questions, and streamline processes. Two words sum this one up: eliminate friction.
E is for Efficiency: Efficiency is the combination of the T, I, and M. Solve issues in one interaction. Use technology to accelerate an experience, not complicate it. More efficient also means “more easier.” (I know, that’s poor English, but it makes the point.) Efficient means easy, and easy creates confidence.

Time is the one resource your customers can never get back. Every minute they spend navigating your phone system, repeating information, or chasing down answers is a minute stolen from their day. When you make things easy and fast, you’re not just solving a problem, you’re proving that your customers’ time matters to you.

So, here’s a homework assignment. Look at your customer touchpoints. Find if there is friction that’s wasting their time. What process can be streamlined? What one step can be eliminated? Create the experience that’s easy and saves your customer’s time. In a world where everyone is stretched thin, being the company that values time is more than just good service. It’s a competitive advantage.

Image Credit: Shep Hyken, Pexels

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Is Your Customer Experience Costing You Customers?

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A Free 12-Point Diagnostic

by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia

Most organizations don’t know they have a customer experience problem until it shows up as churn they can’t explain, growth that’s stalled despite strong acquisition investment, or a competitor quietly pulling ahead in a market they thought they owned.

By the time those signals are visible in the numbers, the experience failures causing them have usually been accumulating for months — sometimes years. The customers who left didn’t file complaints. They just left. The friction that drove them away wasn’t measured because nobody thought to measure it. The competitive gaps weren’t visible because nobody had walked the competitor’s journey recently enough to know they existed.

This is the fundamental challenge of customer experience management: the experiences that cost organizations the most are almost never the ones they’re already measuring.

How Do You Know If You Need an Experience Audit?

That’s the question I hear most often from leaders who are considering an Experience Audit — and it’s exactly the right question to ask before committing to any significant diagnostic investment.

The honest answer is that many organizations don’t need a full Experience Audit right now. Some have genuinely strong experience fundamentals, solid visibility into their journey gaps, and active improvement programs already addressing the right things. For those organizations, an audit would confirm what they already know — valuable, but not urgent.

Other organizations are flying blind — relying on satisfaction scores that measure the wrong touchpoints, competitive assumptions that haven’t been tested in years, and internal perspectives that have long since lost the ability to see what new customers and employees actually experience. For those organizations, an audit isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the prerequisite for every other improvement investment they’re considering.

The challenge is that it’s genuinely difficult to know which situation you’re in — from the inside.

Introducing the Free Experience Audit Readiness Checklist

I’ve developed a simple 12-point diagnostic — the Experience Audit Readiness Checklist — that helps leaders answer the “do we need an audit?” question honestly, in about five minutes, without any outside perspective required.

The checklist covers four areas:

Visibility & Awareness — Do you actually know what customers or employees experience, or are you relying on internal assumptions? When did anyone on your leadership team last go through your own journey end-to-end?
Performance Signals — Are churn, attrition, or satisfaction scores moving in the wrong direction despite investments meant to improve them?
Organizational Readiness — Do different departments have conflicting views of what the experience looks like? Have improvement initiatives failed to move the numbers you expected?
Strategic Stakes — Is a competitor improving their experience in ways starting to affect your market position? Are you considering a major investment and want to know where it will have the most impact?

A few questions that tend to generate the most honest conversation:

“Nobody on our leadership team has personally gone through our own customer or employee journey end-to-end in the last 12 months.”

“We’ve launched improvement initiatives before that didn’t move the numbers we expected them to move.”

“We’ve never formally compared our experience, touchpoint by touchpoint, against our top competitors.”

In my experience, leadership teams that read those statements and immediately think of one or two colleagues who would answer them differently have found some of their most useful conversations.

What Your Score Means

The checklist produces a simple score based on how many of the 12 items apply to your organization:

0–2 checked — Strong foundation. Keep monitoring proactively.
3–5 checked — Early warning signs worth a closer look.
6–8 checked — Meaningful blind spots likely costing you revenue.
9–12 checked — High risk. An audit should be a near-term priority.

Download the Free Checklist

The Experience Audit Readiness Checklist is available as a free PDF download — two pages, five minutes, and a clearer picture of whether your experience gaps are a background concern or a front-burner priority.

Download the free checklist on the Experience Audit page →

If you check six or more boxes and want to talk through what an Experience Audit would look like for your specific situation,
contact me directly or call (206) 349-8931. I’m happy to have a no-obligation conversation about whether an audit makes sense for where you are right now.

Image Credit: Gemini

Content Authenticity Statement: The topic area, key elements to focus on, etc. were decisions made by Braden Kelley, with a little help from Claude to clean up the article, add Gemini to add images.

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5 Ways IKEA Creates A Luxury Experience

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How IKEA Creates A Luxury Experience

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

IKEA is a retailer known for furniture that the customers have to assemble. Its showrooms feature ongoing displays of its products, and delicious Swedish meatballs are sold in restaurants located inside its stores. It is also known as affordable, which may make you ask, “How can an affordable brand, like IKEA, create a luxury experience?”

That’s the question answered by Neen James, the author of Exceptional Experiences: Five Luxury Levers to Elevate Every Aspect of Your Business, who uses IKEA as a case study to prove that even brands known for low prices can create a luxury experience.

In my interview with James on Amazing Business Radio, she makes it clear that luxury experiences aren’t always about high-end and high cost, although they can be. An evening at the Ritz-Carlton or Four Seasons will cost significantly more than an inexpensive roadside hotel, and the experience will be distinctly different. However, the experience at an inexpensive hotel can be elevated by triggering the five luxury levels in James’ book.

Luxury Is About Experiences, Not Things

This is the title of Part One in the book and makes the case for my hotel comment above. James says, “You don’t have to have a luxury product to provide a luxury level of service.” Luxury experiences don’t have to be costly or limited to fancy products like expensive handbags or high-end cars (or fancy hotels). Even a small business or budget hotel can deliver what feels like a luxury experience if it focuses on how it treats its customers. It’s more important to make people feel special, valued and appreciated than to give them material things. True luxury comes from the way you make someone feel, not just from the price tag.

The Five Characteristics of Luxury

According to James, “In the Luxury Mindset Study, we learned that luxury is defined with five words: high quality, long lasting, authentic, unique and indulgent. These characteristics apply whether you’re at Motel 6 or the Ritz, except maybe the word indulgent.” These words can shape the way your company or team interacts with customers, making every experience feel exceptional. By focusing on these qualities, even basic products and services can seem luxurious. It’s the way you make customers feel. James says, “Always look for ways to make your service authentic and memorable.”

The Five Luxury Levers

James talks about “champagne moments,” about elevating the ordinary and making it extraordinary. Any company can have these types of moments. It’s about elevating these moments and creating a human connection. The experience elevation model has five levers:

Entice: Create the experience that will captivate your customers’ interest and make them pay attention to you.
Invite: Communicate your offerings in a way that makes them feel exclusive and desirable. Make your customers feel special by making them feel as if they have been “invited” to do business with you. When possible, make it feel personal.
Excite: The experience should be exciting enough to be share-worthy. If your customers are talking about you, you’ve triggered this level. James writes in her book, “When clients think of your brand, you want them to ask, with awe and wonder, ‘What else will they do?’”
Delight: This lever comes from making a customer feel unique and special, offering excellent customer service and anticipating your customers’ needs.
Ignite: This is where you create advocates. The experience is so good that customers want to tell others about you.

How IKEA Creates a Luxury Experience

While not traditionally associated with luxury, according to James, IKEA hits a number of luxury triggers. First, they engage all five senses—even taste and smell, thanks to the brand’s delicious Swedish meatballs. The in-store experience allows customers to touch fabrics and see how easy products are to assemble. Its use of “sensory elements” (touch, taste, smell, sight) makes shopping at an IKEA store feel special and memorable.

Additionally, there is the incredible experience of the IKEA effect, in which customers feel a sense of accomplishment when they assemble furniture themselves, creating more satisfaction than simply receiving pre-assembled furniture.

And to emphasize that luxury is about experiences, not things, James points out that luxury is not about the price tag. IKEA offers the luxury experience in a way that makes customers feel special, not just through expensive items. In short, it’s all about the experience.

Final Words

Don’t be fooled by the simplicity of the five characteristics of luxury or James’ luxury levers. They may seem like common sense, but common sense isn’t so common.

Dig into these ideas and strategize around how you can activate them throughout your customers’ journey. Ask yourself questions like, “What do we do to entice our customers?” “Do we make customers feel special, like they are invited guests?,” or “Are we creating the type of experience that our customers would want to tell others about?”

Questions like these will get you into a luxury mindset. Remember, the luxury experience is tied to the customer experience more than it is to fancy and expensive products.

This article was originally published on Forbes.com.

Image Credit: Shep Hyken

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The Experience Economy 2.0

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Finding the Human Premium in an Automated World – An AI Soft Landing Scenario

LAST UPDATED: July 5, 2026 at 11:58 AM

The Experience Economy 2.0

by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia

I. Introduction: The Generated Abundance Paradox

We are witnessing a profound shift in the fabric of digital and physical commerce. As artificial intelligence advances, the marginal cost of producing digital content, functional code, and foundational logic is rapidly plummeting toward zero. We are entering an era of generated abundance, where software can instantly synthesize solutions that once required weeks of human labor.

“When everything can be generated, the things that cannot be automated become priceless.”

This reality introduces a compelling paradox for innovators and experience designers: the more artificial intelligence expands, the more valuable authentic human experiences become. When synthetic perfection becomes the default, human imperfection, intentionality, and presence transform into premium commodities.

This dynamic is not a techno-dystopian roadblock, but rather a human-centered evolution. We are actively transitioning away from the efficiency-first playbook of the early internet and stepping squarely into The Experience Economy 2.0. In this new landscape, technology serves as the invisible infrastructure, while unique, emotionally resonant, and human-designed touchpoints become the ultimate differentiator.

II. The Great Pivot: Efficiency vs. Resonance

To understand where we are going, we must first look at the foundation we are leaving behind. The first era of the internet age established a highly specific corporate playbook. For decades, organizations competed on their ability to scale rapidly, automate processes, and drive maximum transactional efficiency. Success meant eliminating friction, standardizing touchpoints, and processing interactions at a lower cost than the competition.

In the era of Experience Economy 2.0, that playbook is no longer a differentiator — it is simply the cost of entry. When every organization has access to the same foundational AI tools capable of infinite scale and flawless, hyper-optimized efficiency, those traits become commoditized table stakes. True value is moving away from the cold mechanics of a transaction and toward the warmth of human connection.

This macro-shift forces us to pivot our focus toward five distinct pillars of human-centered value that algorithms cannot replicate:

Emotional Resonance: Moving far past basic customer satisfaction to intentionally design interactions that spark genuine feeling, empathy, and shared understanding.
Physical Presence: Recognizing the returning premium of the tactile, the local, and the tangible. In a hyper-digital world, sharing physical space and holding physical goods becomes a luxury.
Radical Trust: As deepfakes, synthetic media, and automated noise flood our information ecosystems, verified truth, human integrity, and radical transparency become an organization’s most valuable assets.
Deep Community: Shifting our focus from building passive digital audiences or follower counts to cultivating active, interconnected human ecosystems rooted in shared values and mutual contribution.
Memorable Moments: Designing deliberate peaks within the customer and employee journey — unscripted, highly meaningful interactions that linger in the memory long after a transaction is complete.

The strategic imperative for innovators is clear: we must stop using technology merely to optimize the background, and start using it to liberate our people to elevate the foreground.

Unlocking the Human Premium

III. The Counter-Intuitive Reality

This shift toward the human premium is not a hypothetical future projection; it is a live market dynamic unfolding across industries. As synthetic capabilities reach near-perfection, consumer behavior is shifting in highly counter-intuitive ways, proving that our psychological need for the authentic scales in direct proportion to the volume of automation around us.

We can observe this behavioral correction across three distinct dimensions of daily life:

1. Entertainment & Creativity: The Pull of the Unpredictable

As generative tools make it possible to stream infinite, hyper-personalized, AI-generated music, film, and art at zero marginal cost, a fascinating reversal is occurring. Instead of rendering human creators obsolete, it has triggered an unprecedented premium for raw, collective, and unpredictable live experiences. Audiences are willing to pay significant premiums not just to consume content, but to witness the vulnerability of live performance and share a physical space with thousands of other humans experiencing the exact same unrepeatable moment.

2. Commerce & Brand Strategy: Believing in the Flawed

In a world where sophisticated AI shopping assistants can perfectly scan millions of data points to find the absolute lowest price or the most efficient product, traditional transactional marketing loses its grip. When algorithms handle the cold filtering, human consumers increasingly seek out brands that possess a fierce, distinct, and sometimes beautifully flawed emotional identity. We don’t just buy what works; we buy from organizations that stand for something real. The purchasing decision shifts from a logic problem solved by a machine to an emotional alignment sought by a person.

3. Connection & Workplace Culture: The Premium on Empathy

The rise of emotionally intelligent AI companions and highly efficient virtual co-pilots is fundamentally altering how we perceive productivity. As these tools seamlessly streamline our daily communication, schedules, and administrative tasks, they inadvertently shine a spotlight on what they lack. Our baseline appreciation for messy, authentic human relationships, collaborative empathy, and shared vulnerability is skyrocketing. In the modern organization, leadership is no longer about managing transactional throughput — it is about cultivating high-trust, human-centric ecosystems where people feel safe to co-create.

Three Counter-Intuitive Realities

IV. Designing for the Human Premium (The Framework)

To successfully capture value in the Experience Economy 2.0, business leaders must pivot away from standard digital transformation metrics and establish a structured approach to human-centered experience architecture. The strategic objective is no longer just optimizing workflows, but intentionally mapping how automated efficiency can actively fund and liberate deeper human engagement.

When applying this framework to your organization’s strategy, three structural shifts must occur simultaneously:

1. Implement the Background vs. Foreground Split

Organizations must audit their entire journey map to establish a clear divide between where machines run and where humans shine. AI should remain focused on the invisible infrastructure — handling predictions, real-time data processing, and systemic operations in the background. This intentionally clears the operational runway, giving your people the time, emotional capacity, and autonomy to elevate the foreground through empathy, deep listening, and creative problem-solving.

2. Execute an “Un-Automatable” Asset Audit

To identify your organization’s unique human premium, you must isolate the exact components of your business model that lose all their value if handled by an algorithm. Leaders need to audit their current touchpoints by asking three core questions:

Where does our customer journey rely entirely on verified, absolute human trust?
Which of our interactions explicitly require shared vulnerability or mutual accountability to succeed?
Where do our customers or employees seek to actively contribute and co-create, rather than passively consume?

3. The Futurology Outlook: Designing an AI Soft Landing

True strategic foresight rejects the binary narrative of automation replacing humanity. A soft landing requires intentional design that positions advanced computing as a tool for cognitive liberation. By engineering workflows where technology carries the cognitive weight of processing and analysis, we don’t diminish the human worker; we restore their capacity to build community, establish deep rapport, and deliver memorable moments that leave a lasting mark.

Designing for the Human Premium

V. Conclusion: The Priceless Future

Ultimately, advanced automation is not a threat to human-centered design — it is its ultimate catalyst. The rise of artificial intelligence does not diminish our worth; rather, it strips away the mechanical, transactional, and repetitive tasks that corporate structures have spent a century forcing humans to perform. AI is a tool for systemic liberation, handling the data-heavy heavy lifting so we can return to what we do best.

As we navigate the transition into the Experience Economy 2.0, the core competitive mandate for innovators completely flips. We must actively resist the urge to measure organizational success purely through the lens of cost reduction and automated throughput. If your entire value proposition can be replicated by a machine at zero marginal cost, you no longer possess a sustainable strategy.

The future belongs to those who design for the human premium. Moving forward, the most critical question an experience leader can ask is no longer, “What can we automate?” The defining question of our era must be: “What can we create that our customers and communities will deeply cherish precisely because it was built by a human hand, driven by human empathy, and designed to be intentionally un-automatable?”

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the core premise of the Experience Economy 2.0?

The core premise is the Generated Abundance Paradox: as AI makes digital content, software, and transactions infinitely abundant and cheap to produce, the value shifts entirely to what cannot be automated. Authentic, human-designed experiences—rooted in trust, physical presence, and emotional resonance—become premium commodities.

How should organizations separate AI tasks from human tasks?

Organizations should use the “Background vs. Foreground Split.” AI should run the invisible infrastructure in the background (predictive analytics, scaling data processing, routine tasks). This clears the operational runway so human workers can focus entirely on the foreground (building relationships, empathy, and creative problem-solving).

What makes an organizational asset completely “un-automatable”?

An asset or touchpoint is un-automatable if its entire economic and emotional value disappears the moment an algorithm replaces it. Examples include verified human trust, raw shared vulnerability, and mutual co-creation within an active community ecosystem.

Operationalize Organizational Empathy

Ready to Bridge the Gap Between Technology and Human Experience?

Technology only provides capability; human adoption creates the value. If you want to move past cold operational metrics and design fear out of your transformation, let’s connect. Get expert guidance on architecting impactful Experience Level Measures (XLMs) or establishing a dedicated Experience Management Office (XMO) tailored to your culture.

Contact Braden Kelley

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a visualization of but one possible future. I will be publishing other possible futures as they crystallize in my mind (or as you suggest them for me to explore).

Image credits: Google Gemini

Content Authenticity Statement: The topic area, key elements to focus on, etc. were decisions made by Braden Kelley, with a little help from Google Gemini to clean up the article, add images and create infographics.

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10 Reasons Why Customers Hate Calling You for Help 

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10 Reasons Why Customers Hate Calling You for Help 

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

This article answers the question: Why do customers hate calling customer support, and how can companies fix the experience?

I have good news. Calling customer support is getting better, even if you don’t notice it yet. Part of the reason you might think it’s not improving is that past bad experiences have left such a “metaphorical scar” that you avoid making the call for many reasons I’ll share in just a moment.

Yes, we may still encounter friction when calling for help or support, but with the latest technology, which includes AI-infused chatbots that either talk or message with you, the experience of getting help is improving. And even without technology, it’s still possible to create an experience that makes customers love you. You just have to know what they hate about calling for support and eliminate those from the experience. So, with that in mind, here are the ten reasons customers hate calling for help:

Making It Hard to Find Contact Information: This is where customer support starts. Some companies seem to bury contact information, making it hard for customers to find, which creates or adds frustration.
Long Hold Times: Nobody wants to wait. At best, keep hold times short. At worst, which isn’t so bad, let customers know how long the wait will be and give them the option of a call-back.
Making Customers Repeat Themselves: The more times you make customers retell their story, the more frustrated they become.
Being Transferred: The goal should be to not transfer a customer, but if you do, make sure it’s only once. And multiple transfers most likely mean customers are repeating themselves multiple times.
Agents Who Aren’t Empowered: If you hire good people and train them well, they should be empowered to take care of customers, eliminating the need for customers to repeat themselves and be transferred multiple times.

Agent Representative Customer Service Shep Hyken Cartoon

Inconvenient Hours of Operation: Some companies make support available only during normal working hours. This is fine if your customers are unemployed, but for everyone else, be accessible. And with AI being able to handle many issues, some questions and problems can be answered 24/7.
Bad Phone Trees or IVRs (Interactive Voice Response): If you have called for support and none of the choices offered are what you need, or you find yourself trapped in a loop of options, you’ve experienced this. By the way, our annual customer support research found that 76% of customers have been caught in an automated menu system and screamed “Agent” or “Representative” into the phone, before eventually hanging up.
Clunky and Ineffective Self-Service: Customer support of any type should be easy. Self-service systems should be intuitive and easy to navigate.
Telling Customers, “You Have to ____ ”: It’s okay to tell a customer what to do, just phrase it in a way that’s helpful, not forceful. And if you can do it for them, even better.
Customer Anxiety: This may be the most important one! There’s a reason that 34% of customers we surveyed said they would rather go to the dentist than call customer support. It’s because they’ve experienced one or more of the above reasons that customers hate calling customer support. This anxiety causes customers to be frustrated even before they decide to reach out to you.

Yes, there are other reasons that frustrate and anger customers when they have to call customer support. A short summary of the above is to be easy, eliminate friction, respect customers’ time, and give them the right answer the first time. This will make customers love you and say, “I’ll be back!”

Image Credit: Shep Hyken, Unsplash

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Ten Signs You Need a Customer Experience Audit

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Ten Signs You Need a Customer Experience Audit

by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia

The Silent Churn: Why Business-Centric Operations Blind Us to Customer Reality

The silent killer of modern businesses isn’t a flawed product; it’s a friction-filled experience that slowly alienates customers without management ever realizing it. Companies often pour millions into product development, marketing campaigns, and sales pipelines, only to watch customer loyalty bleed out through a thousand unmapped micro-frictions. When metrics begin to slip, the instinct is often to look inward — to optimize processes, cut costs, or push harder sales targets. However, fixing an experience problem with operational pressure only accelerates the decline.

Shifting the Lens: From Internal Systems to Human-Centered Design

The core vulnerability for most organizations lies in their viewpoint. It is natural to look through the company’s lens, evaluating success based on internal milestones, department-specific KPIs, and system efficiencies. But your customers do not care about your organizational chart, your legacy software limitations, or your internal workflows. They care about their own time, their own goals, and how effortlessly your business helps them achieve them. True human-centered design requires shifting from an inside-out mentality to an outside-in perspective, evaluating every touchpoint based on human behavior, emotion, and cognitive load rather than operational convenience.

The Purpose of an Audit: Diagnosis, Empathy, and Alignment

This is where a Customer Experience (CX) Audit becomes vital. Far from a finger-pointing exercise or a bureaucratic compliance check, a CX audit is a rigorous, empathetic diagnostic tool. It is designed to dismantle assumptions, expose the gaps between what a company *thinks* it delivers versus what the customer *actually* experiences, and align the entire organization around a unified journey. Identifying whether your business is suffering from these hidden friction points is the first step toward building sustainable, customer-led growth.

Ten Signs You Need a Customer Experience Audit

Recognizing when an organization’s internal processes have decoupled from customer expectations is critical. The following ten warning signs indicate that systemic friction is eroding value and that a comprehensive customer experience diagnostic is required.

1. The “Metric Paradox” (High CSAT, Dropping Retention)

Operational dashboards show excellent customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores or high Net Promoter Scores (NPS), yet contract renewals, repeat purchases, or customer lifetime value (LTV) are steadily declining. This paradox occurs when metrics evaluate isolated, transactional touchpoints rather than the cumulative, end-to-end journey. Customers may be satisfied with a specific support interaction but entirely frustrated by the overall relationship.

2. Cross-Departmental Finger Pointing (The Silo Effect)

When customer satisfaction drops or friction surfaces, internal teams retreat into functional silos. Marketing blames Sales for setting improper expectations, Sales blames Product for missing capabilities, and operations blames Customer Support for failing to retain accounts. When an organization’s internal structure dictates the customer journey, the customer is forced to act as the integrator, piecing together a fragmented, inconsistent relationship.

3. Rapidly Escalating Customer Support Costs

Customer support ticket volumes, live chat queues, and operational costs are outstripping overall customer acquisition or revenue growth. When frontline teams are consistently overwhelmed by repetitive, basic procedural questions, it signals a systemic failure in proactive communication, self-service infrastructure, or initial onboarding design.

4. The “Feature-Rich, Adoption-Poor” Product

The organization continuously ships highly requested product features, digital enhancements, or service updates, yet product telemetry and usage data reveal that customers utilize only a minor fraction of the ecosystem. This indicates a gap between what customers *say* they want during isolated feedback loops and how they actually behave within their day-to-day context.

5. Onboarding is a “Black Box”

A significant percentage of customer churn or user drop-off occurs within the critical first 30 to 90 days following initial conversion. When post-sale momentum stalls, it reveals a lack of structural alignment between the initial marketing promise and the operational reality of delivery, leaving customers without a clear path to achieving their first milestone of value.

6. Your Customer Journey Map Hasn’t Been Updated in Years

The organization relies on historical customer personas, idealized flowcharts, or journey maps developed years ago. In rapidly evolving markets, customer behaviors, environmental pressures, and digital expectations shift continuously. Relying on outdated assumptions ensures that operational models remain optimized for a customer base that no longer exists.

7. Over-Reliance on “Discounting” to Win Back Customers

The primary mechanism for retaining accounts, securing contract renewals, or winning back lapsed customers relies heavily on price concessions, promotions, or fee waivers. When financial discounting becomes the default retention strategy, it demonstrates that the experience itself has failed to provide a meaningful, non-commodity differentiator.

8. “Ghosting” After the Initial Touchpoint

Marketing funnels successfully generate high digital traffic, inbound inquiries, or initial sign-ups, but conversion rates to the next meaningful milestone are low. This drop-off indicates that micro-frictions—such as confusing interface copy, excessive form fields, or slow operational response times — are killing engagement before trust can be established.

9. Customer Feedback is Reactive, Not Proactive

Customer insights are derived exclusively from trailing indicators, such as public reviews, escalation tickets, or formal cancellation notices. Lacking continuous, human-centered listening posts across key milestones leaves an organization permanently reactive, fixing broken experiences after damage to customer sentiment is already permanent.

10. Employees are Burned Out and Disengaged

Frontline customer success, account management, and support teams experience high turnover, low morale, or systematic disengagement. Because employee experience (EX) mirrors customer experience, a team that lacks adequate tools, clear data pathways, or operational autonomy will inherently project that frustration directly onto the customer base.

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Demystifying the Process: What Happens During a Customer Experience Audit?

A human-centered customer experience audit is not a theoretical exercise; it is an active, cross-functional diagnostic designed to uncover operational friction and hidden human insights. By combining behavioral observations with systemic data, the audit establishes an objective reality of how your organization interfaces with the market. The methodology focuses on three primary pillars:

1. Heuristic Evaluation and Journey Walkthroughs

This phase requires shedding internal assumptions and experiencing the organization exactly as a customer does. Auditors conduct meticulous journey walkthroughs — often utilizing mystery shopping methodologies across both digital and physical touchpoints. Every step of the lifecycle is evaluated, from the initial search and purchasing process to onboarding, billing, support, and account renewal. This captures the micro-frictions, confusing interfaces, and inconsistent messaging that traditional internal reporting fails to catch.

2. Data Triangulation: Quantitative Metrics Meet Qualitative Insights

Data without context leads to false assumptions, while feedback without data leads to unscalable solutions. A rigorous audit triangulates multiple data streams to find the ground truth:

Quantitative Operational Data: Analyzing product telemetry, support ticket trends, drop-off rates, behavioral analytics, and time-to-value metrics.
Qualitative Human Insights: Conducting deep-dive user interviews, direct ethnographic observations, and empathy-mapping sessions with actual customers.
Internal Stakeholder Feedback: Interviewing frontline employees to uncover the broken back-end tools and siloed processes that directly impact customer delivery.

3. The Friction Inventory and Strategic Prioritization

The ultimate deliverable of a customer experience audit is a comprehensive Friction Inventory. Rather than a simple list of problems, identified gaps are categorized and mapped against a matrix of operational effort and customer impact. This ensures leadership walks away with an actionable, phased roadmap: prioritizing immediate “quick wins” that relieve acute pressure on the customer, while outlining the structural, cross-departmental redesigns required for sustainable, long-term growth.

Beyond Diagnosis: Activating the Audit with Proven Innovation Frameworks

Identifying the ten signs of customer experience decay is only half the battle. A successful audit does not just live in a static PDF report; it must serve as a catalyst for human-centered change. To transform these audit insights into sustained operational reality, organizations must cross-pollinate CX diagnostics with structured innovation and change management frameworks.

1. Mobilizing the Right Talent: The Nine Innovation Roles

Fixing systemic journey friction requires cross-functional collaboration. Once the audit exposes key gaps, teams can utilize the Nine Innovation Roles framework to assemble the right transformation task force. By intentionally balancing roles—such as the Revolutionary to challenge legacy processes, the Conductor to manage cross-departmental dependencies, and the Empath to safeguard the customer’s emotional reality—organizations ensure that the remediation phase isn’t derailed by traditional corporate inertia.

2. Designing the Solution: The Eight I’s of Infinite Innovation

Resolving complex, deep-seated friction points is an act of continuous creation. The Eight I’s of Infinite Innovation provides the repeatable lifecycle needed to scale audit findings. Teams move systematically from Intent and Insight (fully realized during the audit) into Ideation, Evaluation, and Investigation of potential journey fixes. This prevents organizations from rushing into superficial “band-aid” fixes and instead drives them toward deep, human-centered architectural improvements.

3. Overcoming Internal Resistance: The Change Planning Toolkit

The greatest barrier to fixing a broken customer experience isn’t technology; it is internal human resistance to changing legacy workflows. If employees are comfortable with the old, siloed way of working, a new CX strategy will fail. Utilizing visual collaboration tools like the Change Planning Toolkit allows cross-functional teams to co-create the blueprint for new customer-centric processes. Moving away from top-down mandates toward participatory innovation drastically reduces internal friction, aligning employee behaviors directly with the desired customer outcomes.

The Path Forward: From Diagnosis to Customer-Led Growth

A customer experience audit is not a confession of organizational failure; it is an active investment in sustainable, customer-led growth. In highly competitive markets, the experience a company delivers becomes its ultimate competitive advantage or its greatest point of failure. Continuing to view customer friction as isolated support tickets or occasional operational anomalies guarantees that your business will continue to bleed value to more agile, human-centered competitors.

Take the First Step

Uncovering systemic friction requires the willingness to look closely at uncomfortable operational truths. You do not need to overhaul your entire enterprise overnight. To begin, gather your leadership team this week and evaluate your performance against just one or two of the ten signs outlined above. Challenge your assumptions, listen deeply to your frontline employees, and commit to looking at your organization through the eyes of the people who matter most—your customers.

Frequently Asked Questions

How often should an organization conduct a customer experience audit?

A comprehensive, deep-dive customer experience audit should be conducted every 12 to 18 months, or immediately following major business inflection points such as a product pivot, a merger, or a significant shift in market dynamics. However, organizations should maintain continuous, lightweight qualitative and quantitative monitoring loops between these formal deep dives to catch micro-frictions early.

What is the difference between a traditional business audit and a CX audit?

A traditional business audit is inside-out, focusing on financial compliance, internal operational efficiency, and system metrics. A customer experience (CX) audit is outside-in and human-centered. It evaluates the organization strictly through the customer’s behavioral and emotional reality, diagnosing gaps where internal operational convenience is actively harming customer retention and value delivery.

How long does a human-centered CX audit typically take to complete?

A standard human-centered customer experience audit typically takes between 4 to 8 weeks, depending on the scale of the organization and the complexity of the customer journey ecosystems. This timeframe allows for thorough journey walkthroughs, data triangulation from operational telemetry, deep-dive customer interviews, and the prioritization of an actionable friction inventory.

1. Why is an independent CX audit better than an internal one?

Internal teams often suffer from the “Curse of Knowledge” — they are so familiar with how things should work that they miss how they actually work for the customer. An independent auditor brings unbiased clarity and the courage to name the structural issues that internal politics might keep hidden.

2. How does Braden Kelley’s approach differ from others?

Most audits look for bugs; Braden Kelley looks for breakthroughs. By applying a human-centered innovation lens, Braden identifies not just where you are failing the customer, but where the customer is signaling a need for a new solution you haven’t built yet.

3. What is the main outcome of this audit?

The primary outcome is Actionable Velocity. You won’t receive a static report; you’ll get a prioritized roadmap that balances immediate experience “quick wins” with long-term strategic innovation goals, ensuring your CX is a driver of growth, not just a line item.

Click here to learn more or to book your CX Audit

Image credits: Gemini

Content Authenticity Statement: The topic area, key elements to focus on, etc. were decisions made by Braden Kelley, with a little help from Google Gemini to clean up the article and add citations.

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CX Leadership Insights from Disney, Ritz-Carlton and MasterCard

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CX Leadership Insights from Disney, Ritz-Carlton and MasterCard

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

If you look up the definition of customer experience in the dictionary, you might find a picture of Lance Gruner, whose leadership, customer service and CX training come from his stints at some of the most recognizable brands on the planet, including Disney, The Ritz-Carlton and MasterCard, where he served as executive vice president of global customer care in his most recent role.

After retiring from MasterCard earlier this year, Gruner decided to share the lessons he learned from a lifetime of leadership and customer experience in his new book, Ten Things They Hate About You: A CX Playbook for Leaders. If keeping customers is important to you — and you know it is — then this is the next book you want to read.

I interviewed Gruner on an episode of Amazing Business Radio, and we talked about some of the most valuable lessons he learned from working for those iconic brands.

1. Walk the Property

Gruner says, “Today, a lot of leaders make decisions from the boardroom, but they rarely experience their customers’ friction points firsthand.” He learned the importance of “walking the property” from his days at the Ritz-Carlton, where he would walk through the hotel daily and notice what guests were seeing, smelling and experiencing. This “walk the property” ritual applies to any type of business. It simply means stepping outside of the office to buy and use the products you sell, just as a customer would. Or calling the company to ask a question during busy times. Observe the experience from the customer’s point of view. To make good decisions, you must experience what customers experience.

2. Pick Up the Trash

Employees pay attention to their leaders, and they notice everything. One of the most powerful leadership principles Gruner shared was how leaders teach everyone else how to act at work. We talked about his days at Disney and how Walt Disney used to walk the property. All cast members (Disney’s term for employees) paid close attention to Mr. Disney. They noticed whether he walked by a piece of trash or stooped down to pick it up and throw it away. Gruner says, “If a leader walks past a piece of paper on the ground and doesn’t pick it up, you condone that activity.” In other words, as a leader, you are giving permission for your employees to do the same. Picking up trash is a metaphor. Make sure the behaviors you model are the ones you want your team to repeat.

3. Pay Attention to Details

Small details make a big difference. It’s often the little things customers remember. Gruner insists that companies pay attention to every touchpoint, no matter how minor, to find opportunities to enhance the experience and earn a customer’s trust. Details aren’t just details. They can be the difference between losing a customer or creating a fan for life.

4. Automate Where You Can

One of my favorite questions to ask high-level execs in the CX world is whether or not AI will take away jobs. Every one of them has said, “No,” and Gruner agrees, saying, “AI is going to automate the simple things that you currently have your team doing, freeing up time for them to really take care of customers.” By removing the simple, mundane tasks, employees have more time to focus on complex issues and do what AI can’t do, which is old-fashioned human-to-human relationship building.

5. The Top Reason a Customer Hates You

Hate is a strong word. Using that word implies customers do not want to do business with you. To wrap up our interview, I asked for one lesson from his book, Ten Things They Hate About You, that we must know. His answer was quick, simple and something we already know (and have probably experienced). It’s having to deal with untrained and unempowered employees. When companies look to cut costs, one of the first areas they cut is training. Yes, taking people away from their normal productive responsibilities to train them is expensive, but what happens when you don’t? What happens when a customer interacts with an employee who hasn’t been properly trained or doesn’t have the knowledge to help the customer resolve their problem? We know what happens … the customer disappears.

Final Words

Customer experience isn’t built in a boardroom. It’s built where your customers live, buy and interact with your brand. Gruner’s insights remind us that the best leaders stay close to the front line, empower their people and never stop paying attention to the little things. That’s how you turn ordinary moments into extraordinary ones, and keep your customers saying, “I’ll be back!”

This article was originally published on Forbes.com.

Image Credit: Shep Hyken

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