Experts of Experience
A Psychologist’s Take On Winning Customers: Make Them Feel Like The Hero!
Wed, 28 May 2025
Is your customer experience too easy? According to Dr. Joseph Michelli — psychologist, author of 13 books, and consultant to brands like Starbucks, Mercedes-Benz, and Ritz-Carlton — that could actually be the problem. Dr. Joseph Michelli joins Lacey to dismantle the myth of “effortless” CX and make the bold claim: CX might not survive unless we get a lot more human… and a little more emotional.Want your customers to care? They need to struggle (just a little). Want your team to win with AI? Teach your bots emotional intelligence. Deep, funny, a little existential — this conversation is for CX pros, tech optimists, and anyone who’s ever asked, "Wait… did that chatbot just gaslight me?"Tune in to hear why Joseph says, “All business is personal,” and what brands must do now to build human connection at scale.Key Moments: 00:00 Customer Effort vs. Ease, AI in CX, & Introducing Dr. Joseph Michelli05:10 From Psychology to Business Consulting10:59 The Art and Science of Customer Experience24:04 The Balance Between Effort and Ease39:35 The Service Recovery Paradox40:03 Handling Friction in Customer Relationships42:34 Generational Differences in Technology Adoption46:41 Emotional Intelligence in AI Interactions01:11:32 Impressive CX & Key Advice for CX Leaders –Are your teams facing growing demands? Join CX leaders transforming their AI strategy with Agentforce. Start achieving your ambitious goals. Visit salesforce.com/agentforce Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode?
No good experience would be effortless. An effortless experience meant that I was not engaged at any level whatsoever.
You can't be the hero without any effort. You can't be the hero without mastering something.
What creates engagement? It is mastery and purpose and autonomy. As a psychologist, I understand that emotions drive behavior far more than logic does. We have an epidemic right now in loneliness in our society. How do we create a place that inspires people? What are some of the things we could do on a routine and regular basis?
I think if we make it all too formulaic, too efficiency driven, these are all things that are going to threaten the CX in the end.
All these ideas of technology giving you more time has ultimately resulted in the opposite of that.
The CX space has been nothing more than fluff. Creating value through experiences has to be validated.
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Chapter 2: How does Dr. Joseph Michelli apply psychology to business?
You think CX might not make it? Welcome back to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lacey Pease, and we've got producer Rose on the other line. Lacey, who did we talk to today? We talked to Dr. Joseph Michelli, CEO of the Michelli Experience, who is an author of 13 books about CX. His most recent releasing here in tomorrow, actually, so by the time you hear this. It'll be out.
And he's worked with some really cool companies, right? Yes. He's worked with Starbucks, Airbnb, Godiva, Ritz Carlton, Mercedes Benz. Like, can I name drop any better companies to have worked with?
Yeah, for real. And by the way, Lacey said doctor because the man has a Ph.D. in psychology, which just makes him even cooler.
He talked about that a lot in the episode about how his background in psychology has influenced how he is helping work with these companies today. So he's got a lot of different insights that I haven't heard put the way he is putting them. One of my favorites is he talked about the push and pull between effort and ease with customers.
So finding this beautiful middle ground between what we were talking about was good friction and bad friction and why the customer actually should be putting forth some level of effort to feel more invested in the product or service that you are selling.
Yeah. He said something cool about if your customer's experience is completely effortless, that they probably weren't engaged with you at all. So kind of shifting your mindset away from let's create a completely effortless experience to how can we get good investment from our customer.
And in tandem with that, we talked a lot about emotions and the role that emotions play on the customer journey. So whether that's, you know, a quote unquote good emotion versus a bad emotion, what it what those different experiences of joy and anger or happiness, how those things can correlate into a powerful customer experience.
Lacey, what was your favorite part of this interview? Was it us talking about our AI centered future looking like a Black Mirror episode?
Yeah, actually, I think that was my favorite part of this. And I will say, I didn't say it would look like a Black Mirror episode. I said, I'm optimistic in that it won't look like a Black Mirror episode. But yes, Joseph did offer a lot of great insights on how to actually use AI in a way that's going to elevate the customer experience and not dilute it and how we can make it feel more human.
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Chapter 3: What is the balance between effort and ease in customer experience?
Yeah, I got a PhD in clinical and organizational psychology. So I started off working with families mostly. And I realized that was not what I felt my calling was to be. So I took that organizational system mindset and trying to affect change and applied it more to two businesses. And it's been a really interesting journey from some very small ones to some very large ones.
Well, can you tell me a little bit more about that like origin story? Because I do want to hear how that transition sort of occurred in your mind, because it's not like a natural idea that I study psychology and now I'm looking at customer experience in business.
Yeah, I'm not sure if it occurred in my mind. I know that in my soul, my mom and dad had always said that you're not on this planet to be served. You're here to serve others. That was the fundamental message that kept coming up in different forms as I was growing up. And so I knew I was going to be doing something to help people in a professional setting. And I thought it was clinical psychology.
And I in graduate school, though, I did as part of that systems work. I worked for the Pike Place Fish Market. And I worked with a guy by the name of Johnny Yokoyama, who's really the main character in the development of that fish throwing place in Seattle. And so that experience kind of lay dormant.
And then I was doing clinical psychology and then I was brought in by the organization, the health care system I was working for to do more org development. And I was getting back to that system change organizational stuff. And through that, I kind of looped back to doing more consulting in the business space.
What has been some of your favorite experiences so far in your consulting work?
Well, catching fish at the Pike Place Fish Market, throwing them, that was pretty good.
I mean, that's awesome. Yeah, that's great.
I mean, getting totally messy and claiming it was work. You know, picking coffee cherries, as they're called, with migrant farm workers from Guatemala and Costa Rica, right? Experiencing the... The joy of being at the origin of the coffee journey, as well as the last 10 feet of the journey in a Starbucks store and trying to figure out how to make that experience memorable.
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Chapter 4: What is the Service Recovery Paradox?
I want it not. to happen. I want you to be around for a long, long time. I want CX to last, but I do think we have some risk factors here. You've done a great job in this podcast, really getting at nuggets that are actionable and that matter. But there's been a lot of this CX space has been nothing more than fluff. And I've been in the business since before it was called CX.
We called it customer service. And then we start reading Gilmore and Pine, and we started to appreciate that there's an actual economy that's shifting and value is created through experience. It's not just service delivery. And if you think about Gilmore Pines argument, you know, it's raw materials that created value. And then it was it was extracting those raw materials from the earth.
And then ultimately it was providing them as products and then ultimately as service. And then finally, now in this experience economy and now we may have even moved to another rail of the technological economy. But I think it all comes down, no matter what you want to call any of that, is value creation. And so right now, I think creating value through experiences has to be validated.
Chapter 5: How do generational differences affect technology adoption?
It makes total sense. I mean, it's not enough just to serve a product. It's not enough just to get a product to market in the most cost-effective way. But how do we build experiences that legitimately produce value and show that that value is worth the investment?
And I think unless we get a little more disciplined and stop playing around with some of the metrics that even the people who created them tell us have severe limitations in the future of the profession, I think we're going to end up with with a lot of people turning their nose to it and say, of course, certain experiences matter.
But unless you can show how I can monetize it, I don't really see why I should care.
Well, why should people care? Like if you were to answer that question for someone, why should someone care?
Chapter 6: What role does emotional intelligence play in AI interactions?
If you can dial it up right, and that's the big if, right, you can drive earned revenue. So that's the key. It really is earned revenue. And I know Fred Reichelt has moved to a metric that describes this, but I think I've been championing this for a long, long time that.
that we have to either pay for the revenue that we get in the door, and that's a cost per dollar that we return on that investment, or we earn it through the way we create experiences that requires us not to have to go out and pay for more eyeballs or ears or clicks to get into our world. So I think earned revenue is critical, and then being able to link that earned revenue
to the success of your business? And what is the lifetime value of the customers for whom you earn revenue?
So I was talking to a friend who was staying here at my house this past weekend. And I hadn't seen him in a while. And he's been working in customer success for a very long time. And his philosophy was one that customer experience is such an art form that to measure it almost makes it minute. And he was very passionate about this. So I was kind of wondering from your perspective. Let's go get him.
Let's bring him in.
I'd love to have a debate. Let's get it going here. Yeah. But I would love to hear from your perspective that kind of balance between the art of customer experience and then the science of like metrics. Like I need to be able to measure this. I need to be able to report it to my CFO or CRO and explain what we're doing here. How do you kind of balance that in your own head?
There is no doubt that people have nuance and art in creating great experiences. You've been to parties where people have just sucked it up, like they invited a bunch of people, but the experience was just flat as could be. They had all the same ingredients as a party that was fabulous, where the host felt a way to create a felt sense that people felt appreciated value.
There's no doubt there's an art to doing this, but at the end of the day, if you can't continue to make profits for people through people... You don't have a business. So if you can't marry the art with the science, then you have a nice sounding, platitudinal, relational, soft skill stuff that that CFOs aren't going to buy into.
And that over time, more and more people are going to say that's just a buzzword that means very little more than everything. Like everything is the customer experience. I once wrote a business principle in my Starbucks book, I think called, I think, you know, something like every detail matters or something like that, or everything matters.
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Chapter 7: What key advice does Dr. Michelli have for CX leaders?
I'm not.
Yeah, I could see that coming. But my point is, I think we have to meet customers where they are. We have to give them the options for self-service and convenience. And these technologies are amazing. But when you restrict people from not having access to humans, then you have a problem. So I use Amazon as a pretty good example. I've got a new book coming out that is about an Amazon company.
And Zappos, for that matter, now is acquired by Amazon, too. So I'm You look at Amazon, and most everything is done in a digital interface. They'll try to drive you to technology, self-service solutions. Your refunds, returns are almost always tried to be done without having a person involved.
But when I want a person, the person that sits behind that technology is well trained on what kind of human experience they want me to have. They're going to make decisions about how easy and how much latitude they're going to give me based on my lifetime value. And that's exactly what I think the models should be.
It should be tech first, if we can solve it there, but be ready pretty quickly to move it to a human who's well-trained to get even more value given and extracted in the relationship.
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What I think is interesting about this is you can kind of flip the question too, right? It's not just AI that's customer facing, but if I have AI that's employee facing, that's supporting my employees so they can actually have the time and energy and like willingness to connect with the customer when they do decide to call me.
That's where I think it's more interesting for me is how AI can elevate like the employee experience. So that way we can deliver better customer experiences when the phone is called.
Hallelujah and amen and all those things. Right. But I would go a step further. You have to make sure that people realize they will have a job because we still value humans in the organization. The big fight for most people now is will I be replaced by, you know, AI?
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