Customer Experience University - Winning Loyalty & Engagement One Customer at a Time

The handheld device that once felt futuristic at The Ritz-Carlton is obsolete — but the standard it served isn’t. Joseph Michelli makes the case that AI doesn’t rewrite great service; it raises the stakes on it. Through three enduring Ritz-Carlton standards — the Credo, the Motto, and the daily Line-Up — he shows how to keep your “durable core” alive while letting AI carry th...

A discount that only appears when you threaten to cancel isn’t loyalty — it’s a confession. Joseph Michelli unpacks the “smoke detector test” for predictive churn AI: the same model can serve customers or surveil them, and they can tell the difference instantly. With Bain’s retention economics and a Ritz-Carlton story, he offers three guardrails to use predictive signals to s...

Every leader’s obsessing over which AI model to deploy. Joseph Michelli argues they’re ignoring the real algorithm: the middle manager who decides whether AI feels like a gift or a threat. Drawing on Gallup data — 42% of quits are preventable, and one weekly conversation quadruples engagement — plus a Starbucks store-manager story, he unpacks why enabling managers, not announ...

The bot was fine. The agent was great. The customer was still left furious — because of the handoff between them. In this episode, Joseph Michelli makes the case that AI-to-human escalation, not the bot itself, is the real failure point in customer service. Drawing on the Corporate Executive Board’s customer-effort research, he explains why making people repeat themselves is ...