Joseph Michelli

Listen – All Business is Personal

In most of my books (including two to be released later this year about Zappos and UCLA) I find myself touching on a theme that sounds something like “all business is personal.” I think I am attracted to this message because well-intentioned business leaders can get drawn into tasks, products, and profits and lose sight…

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New opportunities for old and new customers

Meister Eckhart  once said “Be willing to be a beginner every single morning.” A new year is symbolic of new beginnings. Thank you for making 2010 the most professionally successful ever for The Michelli Experience! May all of us start each day this year with the same spirit of new beginnings that we ascribed to…

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Doing Good and Doing Well

Installment 6 of my holiday retrospective is a classic example of how businesses can create truly memorable experiences…. From my book The New Gold Standard …  Salazar, age 12, was a champion figure skater who began noticing pain in her legs while preparing for a regional competition as a step toward the Olympics. While originally thinking…

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Make it Their Own – Experiences that Connect

Installment 5 of this holiday retrospective, takes me back to my book The Starbucks Experience and the importance of not “doing the experience to your customers” but instead “doing it with them.” At Starbucks, customers must be able to customize their beverage order, with the handcrafted assistance of their barista (the Italian word for bartender…

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Service the Way it Ought to Be!

The fourth installment of my reflective blogs comes from an upcoming book about revolutionary changes in patient experience at UCLA Health Systems: Dr. Michael W. Yeh, Assistant Professor of Surgery and Medicine and Program Director of Endocrine Surgery at UCLA, saddressed challenges of the timely delivery of care when taking over leadership of his program.…

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What’s in a name? The Starbucks Experience

The second installment in my year end reflection brings me back to lessons learned from a Starbucks barista named Joy Wilson, as shared in my book The Starbucks Experience: Welcoming people by name and remembering them from visit to visit is a small thing, but it counts!  The great Dale Carnegie recognized this in his…

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A Personal McDonald’s Experience…Absurd?

I know this may seem un-American but I seldom eat at McDonald’s and almost never do so by dining-in. Recently, I was very early for a morning meeting and decided to grab a cup of coffee at a nearby McDonald’s.  Past encounters predicted that I would get served quickly and that the product would be…

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Customer Service ISN’T Customer Experience

As a customer experience design type, I definitely help companies deliver better service!  But… Service improvements are just one component in elevating the experiences people have when they encounter your brand. Actually, my favorite definition of customer experience comes from my friend Doug Fleener of the Dynamic Experiences Group.  Doug says…. “Customer experience is managing…

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How to REALLY say “THANK YOU!”

Many people will say “thank you” to their customers today.  Sadly, in some cases that gratitude will lack credibility.  To have your customer appreciation message stick, you may need to translate the words into the following actions: 1) Strive to offer the best possible product, 2) Seek to deliver the product in a manner that…

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FREE RESOURCES

The Starbucks Experience: Leadership Tips eBook
Elevating Care in Healthcare: Lessons from the UCLA Health System eBook
How to Win Every Customer, Every Time, No Excuses! Article