Keynotes & Workshops

Elevate your next event with a presentation that inspires, empowers, and drives lasting change.

Imagine having an expert in customer service, client experience design, employee engagement, and leadership deliver a customized keynote that exceeds your expectations.
Picture a presentation that is informative and unforgettable - leaving a lasting impact on your audience. That is the Michelli Experience.

A Net Promoter Score of 100

Event planners unanimously rate Joseph's keynotes (and the experience of working with our team) as a 9 or 10. This remarkable track record is a testament to our ability to streamline and customize our presentations to the needs of our clients.

Dr. Michelli's extensive experience ensures your success.

With over 25 years as a professional speaker, Dr. Michelli understands the challenges of delivering a successful event. Accordingly, he meets with key stakeholders throughout the content development process and provides as many planning meetings as you desire. Joseph runs through drafts of his presentation, adjusting each drafts based on your input - until final presentation content is approved

Joseph offers more than a keynote. He fosters transformation.

Joseph's presentations provide valuable insights garnered from his practical consulting experiences with clients like Mercedes-Benz, Pandora Jewelry, and Godiva Chocolate. He also empowers audience to take action and make positive changes within their organizations. Joseph is committed to helping you achieve your goals and create a lasting impact.

Partner with Joseph for a memorable, inspiring presentation that engages and produces a substantial shift in mindset and skills.

Watch Joseph Speak

2 mins 8 secs

9 mins 37 sec

12 mins 41 secs

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Joseph meticulously customizes each speaking engagement to meet your needs through his workshops, breakout sessions, and keynote speeches. Whether you’re serving customers/clients in the financial industry, home building sector, or retail arena Joseph has you covered – given that he has worked with and written about companies from A to Z (Airbnb to Zappos).

Your personalized event is crafted through multiple planning, marketing, and post-event steps which include:

  • An initial meeting to explore your needs and define the practical and emotional outcomes from the presentation
  • Collaboration on a compelling and relevant presentation title
  • A prepared draft of key learning objectives
  • Interviews to personalize and enhance the shared experience of the audience
  • Customized marketing support messages (audio or video) produced by Dr. Michelli
  • Uniquely crafted articles for inclusion in websites, newsletters, etc. designed to
    pique interest in his presentation
  • Participation in media interviews to support the event
  • Discounted pricing of Dr. Michelli's books
  • Book signings at the event
  • Complimentary resources for participants such as free weekly podcasts and quarterly newsletters
  • Complimentary post-event webinar hosted by Dr. Michelli
  • Participation in post-event debriefing meetings with your event organizers
  • Formal, post-event assessment of stakeholders
    stakeholders

Customized Presentations for Your Organization

Dr. Michelli has presented to organizations, corporate clients, and entrepreneurs in over 30 countries and excels in delivering his message with ease, humor, and the expertise of someone who "lives" client experience and leadership excellence. The following sample presentations can take the form of keynote addresses, workshops, or breakout sessions.

All presentations can be targeted exclusively for senior leadership teams, middle managers, and/or frontline staff. They also can be crafted to serve your entire organization or a mix of leaders and frontline team members. The topics below are provided as examples of the type of content Dr. Michelli regularly provides. Your presentation will be unique to you, so upon reviewing the information below: please schedule a free 15-minute consultation to explore how Joseph can develop content that will best serve you!

Service Excellence and Customer Experience Sample Presentations:

You are not alone in wanting to deliver outstanding customer experiences. According to Forrester Research, customer experience elevation is on the strategic priority list of 92% of businesses. Despite that prioritization, consumer satisfaction continues to decline. This presentation outlines the difference between companies that “aspire to” and those like Mercedes-Benz USA that “execute to” deliver customer delight. It outlines the importance of leadership vision and approaches to inspire customer-centricity for everyone who represents your brand. Moreover, the presentation offers practical tools for integrating technology with human service delivery to create a unique, special bond with your customers.

Let's face it: the wants, needs, and desires of your customers are constantly changing. In this presentation, Dr. Michelli distinguishes between product, service, and experience-based strategies for acquiring, retaining, and driving referrals from your customers. Leveraging key principles from customer experience design technology, Joseph shows the importance of crafting a Way We Serve™ Statement, which helps staff members understand the nature of the optimal experience you seek to deliver. In this keynote, Dr. Michelli also demonstrates how to make cost-conscious decisions that drive customer loyalty and increase customer spend.

No company makes money or stays in business unless they serve the needs of others. Moreover, "crave-able" customer experiences drive consumer loyalty. Conservative estimates suggest it costs six times more to attract a new customer than to retain an existing one. By offering solutions to address stated and unstated customer needs, you increase your customers' desire to spend more money on your business. In this keynote or workshop, Dr. Michelli discusses ways to innovate solutions that will enhance the customer's life, such that existing customers spend more and increase their referrals to your business. By identifying loyalty drivers, Dr. Michelli helps audience members understand how to allocate limited financial and staff resources for maximum customer experience return.

Who is responsible for creating compelling experiences that draw customers? The short answer is everyone in the business! Dr. Michelli's presentation challenges each audience member to take ownership of the experiences they provide to assure long-term viability. By making distinctions involving varying levels of employee engagement (owners, renters, and squatters), Dr. Michelli helps redefine the role of every employee as an "equity generator." He demonstrates that every employee affects the engagement level of colleagues and contributes to positive or negative customer experiences. Dr. Michelli shows how a single employee can change a culture, lift morale, innovate breakthrough products, create customer evangelists, and even save a business. This inspirational presentation is an impassioned yet optimistic call for strong action in rapidly changing times. It is a call for rock-solid execution of customer service standards.

Employee Engagement and Customer Loyalty Sample Presentations:

The drivers of customer loyalty are changing! Consumers no longer stay loyal to brands that simply satisfy them. Increasingly, customers churn because brands are difficult to do business with and/or those brands don’t develop emotional or lifestyle connections with them. In this customer loyalty presentation, Dr. Michelli looks at best practices from brands like Mercedes-Benz USA, Zappos, and Starbucks as they forge emotional connections at high-value touchpoints. He also demonstrates how an entire workforce listens to the voice of customers and looks for ways to remove pain points and enhance delight. This presentation also explores the role of employee loyalty to customer loyalty and the leadership behaviors needed to achieve both.

A Harvard Business Review research article suggests that customer experience initiatives are failing because they are not grounded in cultures of service excellence. In "Transforming Your Culture," Dr. Michelli looks at how brands like Mercedes-Benz USA create a compelling vision of change urgency, align leaders in pursuit of tangible customer experience objectives, offer technology and process tools to delight customers, and change the internal conversation to discuss the business from the customer’s vantage point. If you are seeking a fundamental shift toward true “customer-centric” execution, this presentation will offer a roadmap and tools for transformational change!

Mastering Change, Unleashing Innovation and Leaving a Legacy Sample Presentations:

The phrase “new normal” is being overused these days! When most people say it, you can hear the pain in their voice and a nostalgic longing for the way things used to be. There are lots of “if onlys” packed into the phrase. “If only,” we could go back to the “old normal.” This presentation focuses on a different set of “what if” questions. What if you can disrupt the pandemic to make the future better than the old normal?  What if you could leverage technology tools in conjunction with higher human service levels to deliver a more engaging experience to all stakeholders (peers, team members, customers, and vendors)? Dr. Michelli will customize this presentation to offer immediate impact tools to design and deliver humanity and technology-rich experiences that drive loyalty and referrals.

This presentation examines the primary drivers of change in the technological age. It demonstrates ways to establish flexible service and quality standards while encouraging the sharing of unique ideas and talents of employees. By making important leadership distinctions between "being" and "doing," Dr. Michelli offers a fun yet practical approach to infusing greater employee vitality, ownership, and fun. This presentation helps participants utilize essential strategies for seizing opportunities in a rapidly changing world.

Innovation is a daunting word. In this presentation, Dr. Michelli demystifies the innovative process. By exploring the inside (ideas of staff) and outside (benchmarking other businesses) lanes, Dr. Michelli demonstrates how your business can gain a competitive advantage in creative product development and service delivery. Dr. Michelli shows how to effectively elicit and implement staff-generated ideas while also looking for best practices inside and outside your industry. This presentation also offers structured and advanced innovation strategies that lead to results-based breakthroughs.

Legacy/Service Significance Sample Presentations:

Everyone leaves a legacy. The scope of that legacy is largely a function of the degree to which it is designed versus left to chance. Utilizing a legacy model, Dr. Michelli helps frontline team members, managers and leaders understand the importance of finding defining the lasting emotional impact they wish to have on colleagues and customers. Further, he guides audience members to see their influence as a function of effort as well as the scope of impact. "Engineering Legacy - The Art of Lasting Significance," takes participants through a process to define and be held accountable to their own personal  “Legacy Vision."

"Why do you come to work?" That fundamental question is the foundation for a presentation that analyzes the transformational power of work and service. By shifting the focus away from the task nature of work to the purpose of a person's job choice, Dr. Michelli helps participants ignite their passion and calling for their work. Dr. Michelli guides employees at all levels of the organization to understand how they can do more than transact business. Instead, he shows how they can develop their gifts and talents in service of powerful transcendent goals.

Presentations Based on Bestsellers:

Within days of COVID-19 disrupting the business world, Dr. Michelli began asking senior leaders at major companies about their specific challenges and how they were meeting them, getting raw yet thoughtful real-time insights into the greatest business crisis in generations. In this presentation, Dr. Michelli shares the invaluable wisdom and practical insights from 150+ top global business leaders on all aspects of leading through and beyond COVID, including crisis management, keeping employees and customers safe, maintaining a culture of engagement, rapidly innovating, and more. In this highly customized presentation, Dr. Michelli will provide winning leadership methods based on his conversations with Google, Microsoft, Starbucks, United Way, RBC, Verizon, Southwest Airlines, Goldman Sachs, and H&R Block.

Joseph MichelliIn 2007, the founders of Airbnb had a roommate move out of their San Francisco apartment. To pay rent, they placed air mattresses in a spare room and created a website where they listed the sleeping space. Within a decade, the company was valued at 38 billion dollars. In this presentation, Dr. Michelli outlines the process of creating a 21st-century customer experience that is technology-aided and human-powered. He offers tools for disrupting or averting disruption by creating customer belonging, designing for trust, and maximizing team member and customer empowerment.

Many businesses were not created on a customer experience or customer service foundation. They started from a founder’s passion for a given product or industry. These types of businesses might have innovative products, operational excellence, and even great marketing. However, they often lack a consistent and emotionally engaging customer experience that lives up to their product quality. In Driven to Delight, Dr. Michelli looks at how an iconic brand with the motto “best or nothing” set sights on being one of the world’s best customer experience providers. Moving from the middle of the pack among luxury automobile manufacturers on customer satisfaction surveys toward levels that rival a brand like The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, leaders at Mercedes-Benz USA created a compelling transformational vision while aligning and mobilizing people, processes, and technology. If you are on a cultural journey to be Driven to Delight, this message will inform and resonate!

Let's assume you have an engaged workforce and a consistent experience that drives staff and customer loyalty. How will you sustain and build on that success? For example, how does your business remain relevant to your existing customers while continually developing products that attract diverse customer segments? In Leading the Starbucks Way, Dr. Michelli touches upon key drivers that led to Starbucks' meteoric success. He also emphasizes actionable takeaways born from the wisdom of Starbucks leaders as they leverage technology, mobilize the interpersonal connection through social media, expand offerings into the consumer product goods space, and increase sustainability and global relevance. If you are looking for lasting success built on a passion for product and people, Leading the Starbucks Way is for you.

Culture, culture, culture! This presentation highlights tools that have created a rich and unorthodox service culture at Zappos. Against all odds, this online business (known primarily for selling shoes in playful and emotionally engaging ways) has revolutionized social media strategies, developed an environment that has earned it a consistent spot in the top ten of Fortune magazine's best places to work, created zealous fans, and attracted Amazon.com as a purchaser for more than $1.2 billion. In this keynote or workshop, Dr. Michelli outlines the five principles leaders, and frontline workers can use to "zappify" enduring success (Serve a Perfect Fit, Make it Effortlessly Swift, Step Into the Personal, S T R E T C H, and Play to Win). It's time to integrate (not balance) work and fun. It's time to benefit from the unique and effective employee and customer engagement techniques of Zappos!

Imagine running a business that requires the innovation of Apple, the commitment to the safety of NASA, and the customer service of The Ritz-Carlton. Further, imagine your mandate demands you are a world-class educator, your work product holds life and death in the balance, and you are responsible for discoveries that shape the future of medicine. That is the charter of the UCLA Health System. As such, UCLA tackles a diverse set of challenges faced by most businesses. Borrowing from transformational leadership at UCLA, Dr. Michelli outlines lessons on how to catapult your business to preeminence at an unusually rapid pace, transform the satisfaction and engagement of your customers through a service-centric approach, achieve enviable profitability during economic downturns, and re-design, elevate, and humanize your customer experience. Through the context of business principles like Commit to Care, Make the Best Better, and Create the Future, Dr. Michelli offers insights about elevating service excellence by consistently executing against the highest service standards.

In this presentation, Dr. Michelli examines how to deliver legendary customer experiences such as those consistently offered by The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, Zappos, and Starbucks. The New Gold Standard presents cutting-edge leadership strategies for selecting, training, and retaining the "right" staff. It demonstrates how leaders and frontline workers can drive staff engagement and ownership behavior that ultimately produces transformational customer experiences. Expounding on leadership principles such as "Define and Refine," "It's Not About You," and "Leave Your Mark," this presentation examines ways to keep your service relevant to changing customer needs and shifting economic times.

By strategically executing the details of the internal and external customer experience, Starbucks has become an employer and coffee provider of choice. Truly, Starbucks has become a name synonymous with coffee itself. While most people see Starbucks as a coffee company that serves people, its success is inverse. It is a people company serving coffee. In this keynote or workshop, Dr. Michelli shows frontline workers and business leaders how to "stage" and perform on their brand's promise. He analyzes the importance of identifying a desired emotional connection with the customer and helps participants see the important distinction between "good" and "bad" profit. Using principles like "Make it Your Own," "Surprise and Delight," and "Embrace Resistance," Dr. Michelli shows how to create the ultimate customer experience. Lights, camera, action! Your experience awaits.

Dr. Michelli helps you create a unique and durable experience that energizes employees and draws customers — excerpting from his book of the same name, Dr. Michelli reels in the complete fish story behind the World-Famous Pike Place Fish Market in Seattle (where they are known for throwing fish and engaging antics). In this keynote or workshop, Dr. Michelli examines core principles like "Commit It," "Be It," and "Coach It," which create a market's uniquely vital and creative culture. This culture leads to excellent customer service, legendary employee morale, a fun, and dynamic work environment, and ultimately makes a "World Famous" difference in the lives of those they serve. This presentation offers a cohesive strategy for achieving world-famous results for owners, managers, frontline workers, and customers alike. If Pike Place Fish can achieve world fame from a small storefront, with zero advertising in a smelly, physically arduous profession, think about what is possible for your company!

Based on the global growth of MindChamps (Singapore’s premier pre-school), Dr. Michelli outlines the importance of a clear leadership vision, values-based service delivery, and an unwavering commitment to the success of those you serve. In this presentation, Dr. Michelli offers tools for driving an “open mindset” to foster leadership and frontline growth. He also provides a model for challenging conventions, prototyping new offerings, and expanding the impact of your business.