Experts of Experience
A Psychologist’s Take On Winning Customers: Make Them Feel Like The Hero!
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
Full 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.
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.
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