It’s an affliction, really. I can’t get on a train without redesigning the DelayRepay system, receive a feedback survey without wincing, go on holiday without mapping the journey in my head.

I’m SO much fun to live with.

But the upside of living like that is, when I see an experience that’s genuinely great, I really get to celebrate it. And this experience, whilst incredibly simple, is really remarkable.

It’s not the first time I’ve written about reMarkable’s superb customer service. They played a bit-part in my epic tale of the Royal Mail in October last year, their device at the centre of a case of mistaken identity, which led to it taking a three-month trip around the world. It’s also not the first time I’ve written about a broken pen, so maybe that’s the Venn diagram that creates the conditions for a perfect experience.

This story has no such highs and lows. I’ve had my reMarkable for quite a while – maybe four years – and the pen just as long. This isn’t any ordinary pen, though. Because of the way the device works, these pens are really rather special, and really rather expensive.

So, I wasn’t delighted to see the plastic casing fall off, and the nib start to bend at funny angles.

With that trepidation we all feel when we’re going to have to ask a company for help, I went to their website to get support.

Underneath the usual FAQs, I managed to find the Contact Us link. No searching the footnotes of the page, no clicking in several places to try and find a hidden button. It was just… there. Ready to be used.

Even more surprisingly, when I clicked on the link, it took me to a page where you could, well, contact them. Not a further list of FAQs, or an endless loop of ‘tell us your problem and we’ll try and solve it before letting you speak to someone’. An actual page where you could choose to email them (with a timeline set), chat with their AI agent, or chat with a human.

I clicked the human option (of course), and prepared to wait for a while. Twenty seconds later, I was chatting to one of the team.

The usual stuff – name, postcode, address – was dealt with quickly. Do I still have my order number from four years ago? I don’t. Never mind, we’ll use your email. Could you tell me what the problem is? Ok, got that, give me a minute.

Then the big question – is my pen still covered? Well, it’s been a while but it’s an expensive device and we expect it to last so, yes, it is. And I’ve already raised the return request for you.

And that was it. By the time I ended the chat – not even enough time to watch the iPlayer highlights of England’s famous victory against Norway – I had an email in my inbox confirming the conversation, and another saying the order was being processed, with clear steps and a tracking link to check the timelines.

You see, there’s no secret to great customer experience. Most of the time, it really is just doing some of the most basic, most human things right.

Being accessible, easy to get in touch with.

Being responsible, taking ownership of the issue.

Being respectful, of my time, of the money I’ve spent.

And as always, whilst this is good for the customer, it’s good for the company.

Because there are no protracted chats or calls. No complaints to deal with, or frustrated customers when they do finally get through. And a little bit more added to the fabric of the relationship, making it more likely I’ll recommend and buy from them again.

When you break it down, it’s really not that remarkable.

But unfortunately, it is fairly rare.

However, having had the unfortunate pleasure of having to deal with them a lot in the last couple of years, it’s pretty clear to me that, like most companies, this isn’t because of a lack of intent. The organisation has become so complex, the systems so confusing, that even if the people that work there wanted to give a great experience, it’s almost impossible for them to.

When my colleague Florrie Hodgkinson told me about her recent adventure with them, it felt CX Story worthy. And so here it is.

The day had begun with big government news: Keir Starmer was resigning as Prime Minister of the UK.

I had a more modest item on my to-do list. I needed to read a message in my online tax account.

The night before, I’d spent an hour trying to do exactly that, having been prompted by an email they sent me.

I could log in to my HMRC account without a problem. I just couldn’t seem to open the message (despite trying to repeatedly log in and out, the online equivalent of ‘turn it on and off again’).

Apparently, I needed a specific Government Gateway login, and to sort that out I’d have to call them during contactable hours. Sounded simple enough. So as the news of Starmer’s demise broke the next morning, I decided to get it out of the way and pick up the phone.

There was over a minute of recorded preamble before I could confirm why I was calling and choose who to speak to. The blurb finished up with a question:

‘How would you rate today’s service with HMRC? Please help us out by filling in the survey we’ve sent to your phone.’

I hadn’t spoken to anyone yet or given them any details of my problem. Maybe they were hoping they’d get a better score that way.

Not unsurprisingly, I decided against filling out the survey then, instead choosing to, you know, wait on the phone to solve my actual problem. I was met with a list of options for why I was calling, and selected the option that matched my problem.

A recorded voice politely suggested I complete my task online, and then hung up on me.

Watching the clock, I called again. This time, I tried a slightly different option. I was met with the same suggestion and the same polite hang-up.

I needed to get to work (and join in the office chat on the next round of political chaos) so, decided I’d try again at lunchtime.

Hours later, on my third attempt, I’d cracked the code. I selected an option that I hoped would enable me to speak to a human, and was right. The agent who answered was warm and well-intentioned. They helped me see what my pending message was - £116 in a rebate! Always better than being told you owe HMRC money.

What they couldn’t do was help fix the underlying access problem on my account, meaning that the next time they email and ask me to log in to my online account, I’ll be calling them back again.

As a customer, the whole experience was hugely frustrating and hugely time-wasting.

And as someone who works in Customer Experience - and I guess as a taxpayer funding the service - it’s painful to see failure demand in action. The struggle to log in. The repeated calls to try and get help. The inability to solve the root cause, meaning the problem continues. Extrapolate that across a nation of taxpayers, and you get a highly expensive service to run.

I appreciate Keir Starmer had more pressing tax-related issues to deal with. And you might argue that none of this matters, because HMRC has no competition. I cannot take my taxes elsewhere; there is no rival authority offering a better experience.

But I think that gets it the wrong way round.

When people have no choice but to deal with you, and when the subject is something as anxiety-inducing as money, the behaviours that earn trust matter more, not less.

A creaky, tired experience doesn’t cost HMRC customers. It costs something slower and harder to measure: the sense that the institutions we rely on still know what they’re doing.

In the meantime, the only certainty I have is that I’ll be ringing back next time I get an email asking me to log in, whoever the Prime Minister happens to be.

Alongside these was a company wanting to turn air-beds and sofas into genuine competition for hotels, making peer-to-peer room sharing the future of travel.

Airbnb is a business built on trust. By using it, you’re forgoing the certainty that comes from using an established brand, in favour of finding a unique stay, a good price, something more homely than an identikit bathroom with inexplicably unlabelled taps.

When it works, it’s spectacular. And I’ve had some truly brilliant experiences with it:

But over time, the prices have risen and the rooms have got worse. And when that certainty and trust go missing, the whole experience falls down.

Just as it did for me a few weeks ago.

I was heading to Birmingham to speak at a conference. The hotels seemed pretty expensive, so thought I’d try Airbnb instead. I found a decent place right by the station, which I needed as was arriving pretty late at night.

A couple of days before, the fun started (n.b. I’ve left the name ‘Sophie’ in as it was pretty clear this wasn’t the person’s real name).

The link asked for a load of personal details, and for another waiver to be signed. For years Airbnb has taught me everything should be done through the app, and there was no mention of this waiver in the listing, so I tried to push back.

This did not go well.

After several identical replies, all emphasising how this damage waiver was ‘to ensure everything is secure for my stay’, I got in touch with the previously-brilliant Airbnb support.

Uh-oh.

Before I had the chance to reply, I got another message from the host saying that, rather than get the keys from a lockbox, I had to go to a shop.

We all hate the ‘go to the shop’ option. Especially when it’s about half a mile in the opposite direction.

At first, the AI bot seemed like it was pretty helpful in its response

Great. Problem solved. I’ll cancel the Airbnb, grab a hotel, have the certainty of being able to walk in, drop my bags and head to bed.

Just before I did, I thought I should double check.

Hold up.

‘may’?

‘We may assist with a refund…’

I asked for a bit more certainty, and got the same back again. May.

(It reminded me of the scene in the superb British political documentary sitcom, where ‘Should does not mean yes’. ‘May’ does not mean ‘we will’).

I asked to speak to a real human. And in fairness to the bot, it put me through pretty quickly.

However, it’s also fair to say that humanity made a pretty compelling case for submitting to the robots.

So, I asked whether, if I asked the host for a refund and they said no, Airbnb would cover the amount, as they have in the past…

And that was that. No offer for anyone else to step in and help, just ‘I’m off for a couple of days, hope it all works out ok 👍’

As for my human host, well, ‘she’ was clearly a company with a number of properties, and a host of pre-prepared message templates to be sent at the right time. With no hint of recognition of the ongoing issue, these lovely images appeared halfway through the chat:

And on the morning I was due to leave, this beautifully personal message, full of warmth, and not a hint of irony.

It doesn’t matter how old or young a business is, whether it’s an incumbent or a challenger, on an app or in a store. Creating certainty, taking ownership, and dealing with problems are at the heart of a great customer experience - and there’s no ‘may’ about it.

On day one, I turned up wearing what I’d been wearing for the past few years - suit from Burtons, white shirt from M&S, red tie representing the brand (but we all know what that was really about).

“You won’t be needing that anymore” said one of the team, flicking my tie up into my face.

Looking around, I could see he was right. The global team was blissfully progressive; the tie a thing of the past up here. In fact, only one person on the floor did wear a tie: David, the senior manager.

A couple of weeks later, my neck enjoying its new-found freedom, it was time for my first all-team meeting. Feeling a little nervous, I gathered my notes, stood up from my desk - and froze in horror at the scene unfolding in front of me.

Everyone - well, all the men - was reaching into their drawers, pulling out their ties, and slipping them on round their necks.

“What’s going on?” I asked the tie-flicker.

“Oh, it’s David’s monthly ManCo meeting. We always wear a tie for that.”

David sat at his desk and watched the whole thing unfold, a group of people he saw without ties every day, putting them on just for him. He never requested it. He never stopped it. He must have thought we were completely insane - and probably thoroughly enjoyed it.

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It’s often said that how you treat your customers is a mirror of how you treat your colleagues: the happier your colleagues are, the more likely they are to create a great experience for your customers.

But it’s also true for organisational culture: the image you present to the outside world is a reflection of the culture you have inside.

In our non-work lives, most of us are kind, empathetic people. We know how to have a good conversation. We understand the stresses and strains friends and family are under. We’re aware of what good customer experience looks like.

Yet as soon as we walk through the doors of the office (or open our laptop to enter our virtual office), we start speaking and typing a different language, using words we’d never normally use. We talk about people in a way we’d never normally talk about them: heartless, unemotional, as if they’re a number. We start making decisions we’d never normally make, hidden from the consequences by spreadsheets and PowerPoints.

It’s completely inhuman - and it’s entirely natural. As Charlie Dawson and Sean Meehan write in The Customer Copernicus, this inside-out thinking is like gravity, a force pulling you inside an organisation, closer to colleagues, competitors and regulators than you are to customers. And like gravity, the bigger the organisation, the stronger the force.

What’s this got to do with my tie?

Well, I think the more humanity that’s shown to colleagues, the more humanity they’ll treat customers with, reciprocity in action.

It was always my favourite thing about going to visit first direct. A vibrant, buzzing contact centre, instantly welcoming, totally down to earth.

At the entrance, they had a concierge for the staff, for anyone who needed a job doing that day. Shoe repairs? Clean suit? Parcel picked up? A service available to anyone, understanding their stresses, wanting to be genuinely useful.

Combine that with a wear-what-you-want policy, a fun fair to celebrate their birthday, a creche for kids and a VIP lanyard for any visitors who arrive, it’s no surprise that colleagues who feel loved end up making their customers feel loved, too.

Us humans are able to do amazing things when we’re given the chance. And more often than not, we’re people who care about others, who want to make things better where we can.

But we’re also people who follow the status quo and behave in line with incentives, with what we get praised for, and what gets us told off. If a culture is too rigid, it gradually squeezes the life out of the people inside, which ends up being felt by the people they’re trying to serve.

So if you want to create a truly human customer experience, you have to start by creating a truly human culture inside the organisation - not one that leaves people feeling tied up too tight.

It seemed like a simple request. It turned out it was not. By the end, I’d seen the difference between a human elevating a good experience, and a human needing to rescue a poor process.

I was lucky enough to be in Cape Town for the week, experiencing everything the city has to offer. And by ‘everything’, I mean a business hotel, a pre-arranged taxi, and a local contact centre.

Even though that was a lot of fun, I was quite keen to have a few hours outside before flying back. And given South Africa is famous for having a very large, very table-shaped mountain, that felt like the place to be heading on the final morning.

There was just one problem. It’s a long way up and a hot day. No-one – least of all my fellow passengers – wants me to do that and then get on a plane for twelve hours without a shower in between.

So, a couple of evenings before, we spoke to the reception

Hi, on Saturday we fly home, but want to climb a mountain in the morning. Would we be able to have a late checkout, so we can have showers when we get back?

Erm… sure, I can give you the room until 1pm

Ah, that won’t be late enough, we won’t be back until 2. Could we use the spa?

Yes, of course! That’s no problem at all. You just need to book in, but they’re closed now. Ask again in the morning

Satisfied we had a plan, we set off for the best steak I’ve ever had.

The next morning, we went back to reception – a different group of people this time – to book into the spa.

Hi, we’d just like to book in to the spa for showers Saturday afternoon please

Oh…. You can’t do that. They don’t do that.

Ah… can we pay?

Yes, that’s fine, you can pay. Let me phone them

We wait

Yeah, no, they don’t do that anymore.

But your colleague said…

That’s wrong, they must have changed their process yesterday. Sorry.

Now, for the sake of brevity and your sanity, I’m going to shortcut things a little here.

Over a three-day period, we asked the reception about seven times what we could do. Every time, we got a different answer. You can have a room. You can’t have a room. You can use the spa. The spa is out of bounds. Unless you pay. But actually, you can’t pay.

In fact, we had the same conversation each day about taking a lunch with us, too. Of course we can do you a lunch! Ah, actually, we don’t do lunches. We could do you a breakfast? Actually, we don’t do that either. But here, we’ve made a lunch for you!

The morning of the hike arrived. We had no plans for showers. We had no plans for lunch. And we had a very real chance of not being allowed on the plane due to anti-social behaviour.

As we left for the walk, we thought we’d try one more time, repeating the question we’d had all week. This time, the manager overheard us and stepped in.

Of course! No problem at all. We’ll get you a lunch made now, just five minutes. We’ll keep one of the rooms for you until 4pm. We’ll have it ready, laid out with separate towels for you all. And it’s on us, no charge.

As we walked (/crawled) back in later, he personally handed us the room key.

Although of course, there were no towels.

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People can elevate an experience, bringing a warm, human touch to an otherwise-unremarkable process. But, too often, the human is actually there to save the day, covering up for a poor, or non-existent process.

Leaders don’t always hear about this, because they only see the end result, the satisfied customer, and have no idea how regularly their people are rescuing them.

It’s this that creates inconsistency in an experience. And when it comes down to it, consistency is the thing that matters most to us.

Those are the organisations we’re drawn to, time and time again. Those that we can rely on, those that give us that sense of certainty.

If you don’t believe me, put yourself in my shoes, stood at the top of Table Mountain, waiting to get the cable car back down. If I told you it would probably be safe, depending on who’s pressing the buttons that day, would you get in?

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A few years ago, in the heyday of their 2-for-1 voucher offer, Jamie Douglass sent me the most brilliant story about Pizza Express:

That’s not really relevant to today’s story, but it makes me laugh every time.

I never used to go there at all. It almost seemed the most chain of chain restaurants: identikit interior, good-enough food, standard-10%-tip service.

Then children appeared in my life, and I’ve grown to love it.

Because Pizza Express really, really knows their family audience - and crucially, they’ve made a clear strategic choice as to how to be meaningfully distinct, and earn more customer decisions in their favour.

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When you have little people in your life, that identikit interior and standard service are a huge benefit. You know exactly what you’re going to get when you want to take the kids out for food, but didn’t want to remortgage the house or collapse in tears in the process.

For example, they really think about where to sit you. A bit like airlines, they know the best place for families with small children to sit is near other families with small children.

Partly, this is to help those without children avoid the risk of being caught in the carbonara crossfire. But it’s also good for parents, who tend to be slightly more relaxed about misbehaving children when other parents of misbehaving children are in close proximity, ready with a sympathetic smile and a ‘we’ve all been there’ nod.

They also know that the gap between a child ordering their food and receiving their food is the most dangerous and stress-inducing time any parent can face. (Shortly after having children, we had lunch at a local cafe. The waiter brought over the adults’ food first. It’s fair to say the five minutes before the kids’ food arrived were the most stressful of my life up to that point. The locally handmade sausage roll didn’t survive the encounter.)

Whereas, within about a minute of ordering at Pizza Express, the kids have the classic dough balls + veg sticks in front of them, satiating their hunger, calming their nervous system, and reducing the decibel level in the restaurant by a factor of about fifty.

Finally, they know that taking the family out for a meal isn’t quite as cheap as it used to be. So, with their audience very clearly in mind, they’ve recently launched their ‘After School Club’ menu, offering a range of dishes for £5 each, on weekdays between 3pm and 5pm.

Now, this may sound a bit like a party political broadcast for Pizza Express at the moment, but there’s a reason I like their approach, over and above it just being a good proposition for families.

They’ve made a decision.

Lots of organisations think they have a customer strategy, but what they really have is a load of segments that cover nearly the whole population, and a whole load of ideas that could work for all of them.

A strategy can only be a strategy if you’re making deliberate choices: choices about which customers you’re for; about which customer decisions you want to earn; about how you’re going to be meaningfully distinct from the competitors.

Without those choices, it’s near-impossible to prioritise, with the company instead doing lots of well-meaning but piecemeal activities. And if an organisation isn’t meaningfully distinct, it’s hard to become the customer’s default choice, to be the habit, to avoid a race to the bottom on price.

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We’re coming to the end of our Pizza Express phase now, so won’t be going there anywhere near as much in the next ten years as we have in the last. But my kids, entering their teenage years, might.

Should they still try to appeal to me, an empty-nester with a bit more disposable income? Possibly, but probably better not to. Because there’s lots of parents, lots of people with kids aged 0-10, lots of teenagers going on their first dates. Even with birthrates falling, that audience is going to be there for a long time to come yet.

Put simply, to earn more customer decisions, it’s better to make a choice and be meaningfully distinct than avoid the decision and be distinctly average. And having crayons and colouring pads at the ready always helps, too.

In that book, I suggested that, amidst all the incredible new technology that’s appeared in the world, the things that matter most to customers when they’re choosing where to spend their money are the same as they ever were – how the organisation behaves.

In particular, I suggested that customers are more likely to give their money to organisations that have kept hold of their humanity in a sea of functionality, behaving in seven complementary ways – Accessible, Consistent, Flexible, Proactive, Respectful, Responsible, Straightforward – traits that define our opinion of a good relationship.

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Think about it. If your partner didn’t answer your calls, wouldn’t let you message them, didn’t keep their promises, made you organise anything you did together, spoke in words you couldn’t understand, blamed you when things went wrong, and was nicer to new people they just met than to you, would you stay with them? I hope not.

But here’s the thing: it was a bit of a guess.

Not a total guess, you understand. I’d spent 25 years working with customers, designing for customers, and consulting with companies who have lots of customers. And I spoke to a whole load of leaders who ran truly human, commercially successful companies, to understand how they did it.

It was a qualitative hypothesis, based on what I could see and hear, but without any data behind it. Surely, if I say things confidently enough, we can all just agree they’re probably correct?

Well, the folk at The Foundation decided this wasn’t good enough. And so, we went to find out if I was right.

And it turns out, these human behaviours have more of an impact on customers’ decisions than even I thought they would.

Today, we’re launching our new report, The Human Experience Advantage.

In a study of 5,000 customers, across 277 UK companies in 24 industries, we sought to understand how important these behaviours are in earning customer decisions, and which of the behaviours matter the most, right now.

The answer, it seems, is very. Our study discovered:

• 70% of brand consideration is explained by the seven organisational behaviours, consistent across demographic and category

• In a chaotic and uncertain world, consistency and straightforwardness far out-perform flexibility and proactivity (despite the current obsession with ‘personalisation’)

• The winning brands may not be the ones you expect, with Tesco, Samsung and Greggs outperforming John Lewis, Apple and Pret

Our study also showed that there isn’t just one way to ‘win’.

Some of our favourite brands are ‘steady’, performing solidly across all seven behaviours.

Other are ‘spiky’, choosing one or two behaviours to really excel at, to be meaningfully distinct from the rest of the industry.

However, what pleased me most about these results was that the book was published in 2023, just two months after ChatGPT launched to the world.

In the years since, we’ve seen an onslaught of new AI technologies that could make things better for customers – but with a real risk that organisations repeat the mistakes of the past, of chatbot gatekeepers, impersonal IVRs, and email overload.

The organisations that retain human behaviours, whilst adopting AI, will be the ones who ultimately earn more customer decisions in their favour, in an increasingly efficient way for the company.

The full report, along with the list of the top 100 organisations, is available to download on The Foundation’s website.

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Take a look – I’d love to know what you think.

Well, I guess to him they were just newspapers. But now they’re pretty old.

As much as I enjoyed seeing how the stories of the time were reported, what I really love is seeing the old adverts. The Wrigley’s adverts that promised if you chewed their gum, women would fancy you. The smoking adverts that promised if you smoked their brand, women would fancy you. The clothes adverts that promised if you bought this suit, then women would…. you get the idea (It’s fair to say 1930s adverts had a very clear segment and ‘customer benefit’ in mind).

This one caught my eye, for a metal works in Islington. In a world of convoluted corporate values and purposes, its aim is so brilliantly simple.

‘A satisfied customer’. That’s it. Of course, that’s it. What other aim could there be? After all, revenue only comes from earning customer decisions in your favour, not from your products and services alone.

Yet over time, it feels like this has been forgotten by organisations, with less focus on earning customer decisions, and more focus on buying them.

Genuine relationships have been replaced by bought ‘loyalty’, offering points and prizes, or literally giving people money to join and stay, whilst industry after industry has allowed itself to become commoditised, competing through comparison websites or new customer offers.

And the problem with that approach - aside from the fact that it’s easily gamed by people who now see more benefit in gaming the system than staying with the same organisation - is that it’s fairly easy for a competitor to come along and offer to buy those decisions for a little bit more money.

It’s a bit like offering to take someone to a really nice restaurant to hang out with you. They might get to like you whilst you’re there, but really they only want the free food. And if you start dating someone who is more interested in the food than they are in you, don’t be surprised if they go elsewhere for a meal the next time one is offered.

Now, I don’t believe in customer loyalty. And I think the fact that many leaders do means that once they’ve got a customer to sign up, they stop trying to impress them.

I’ve argued before that a better word for it is usefulness - companies stay chosen by staying useful. But the word loyalty isn’t going anywhere, so rather than keep fighting it, let’s look at how you actually build the thing the industry claims to want.

The trick is to stop treating it as absolute, binary, binding, and start seeing it as a fabric, woven over time.

The fabric of loyalty

I see a customer’s relationship with a company as a bit like a piece of fabric, that starts small and grows over time. It has four elements to it: Threads, Wear, Tear, Repair.

Threads: the material added to the fabric over time, small and big pieces added as organisations do things that are genuinely useful to customers. They can be small – having an easy-to-use app – or big – being there when something goes wrong. As these moments build up, they strengthen the relationship, giving an elasticity to survive any small errors or disappointments that may occur.

Wear: the cumulative damage to the fabric that occurs over time from small annoyances. A ‘Do Not Reply’ email address. A confusing letter. A price rise, or a broken promise. The things that make you think less of a company and reduces your tolerance if something were to go wrong. When the fabric gets too thin, you start thinking about replacing it with a new one.

Tear: the big moments that cause lasting – perhaps irreparable – damage to the fabric of the relationship. The moments where a company gets it really wrong, causing significant stress or loss, or fails to be there when its’s really needed. These don’t have to be individual to the customer, either - think a bank losing data, a retailer with a cyber-security breach, a drinks company caught in a scandal.

Repair: the moments where a company manages to fix the fabric before it breaks: a genuine apology, a problem well dealt with, a personal contact from someone in charge. It’s the extra effort put in to fix the relationship, to try and make it as strong as it was before.

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So rather than trying to bring customers in the door, then hope you’re good enough to keep them using you, organisations need to carefully build the relationship over time, adding threads, doing quick repairs, and reducing wear or tear that might break the relationship apart.

It should be enough to stop customers looking elsewhere - and keep them satisfied until today’s newspapers are old and faded.

Like if you’re thinking of buying a new car, say a dark grey Volkswagen, and without warning, they’re everywhere you look. You can’t move for grey Volkswagens, as if VW are undertaking some kind of guerrilla marketing targeted only at you (or ‘being on instagram’, as it’s called now).

This is Frequency Bias - and it’s what’s been happening to me of late. Except rather than nice cars, I’ve been surrounded by totally pointless signs.

But they have served one purpose - to remind me of the importance of being proactive for your customers, taking on the effort before they ask you to.

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The first one was at my physio (definitely not age-related, let’s call it a sports injury), which gave me precisely the information I could see for myself, and absolutely nothing more. Like a reverse Escape Room, where you have to try and work your way in.

Not long after that, I found myself in the BFI cafe, a great spot on the South Bank. I was meeting a friend at midday, and so at 11.57am, went to the restaurant to grab a table. Being told it was closed was helpful; Being told when it might re-open would have been even more so.

Having shared these on LinkedIn, Joe Bolger got in touch with one of his own, of the only train ticket machine at his unmanned local station. On the screen, confirmation from the machine that it’s ‘down at the moment’ (emotionally? on its luck? in the dumps?), with a line letting him know that it will be fixed at some point soon - but crucially, no advice on whether or not he could get on the train without a ticket.

When you see a company being genuinely proactive, it feels great. And many companies do.

Like this, from Trainline, on potential disruption to my journey. Firstly, the pop up saying there might be a problem. That’s useful. But more useful is what comes next - what’s happening with the previous train. It’s not foolproof, but is probably a good indication of what might happen to my train a few minutes later.

Apple surprised me recently with an email out of the blue about my iTunes Wishlist going away. Now, I wasn’t aware I had an iTunes wishlist (probably why they’re getting rid of it). But clearly I did.

As well as giving me the information, they gave me a solution: a PDF attachment with my full list, and easy links to click and add to a new wish list, if I wanted to keep them.

(I’m not convinced this is my wishlist…)

And being proactive doesn’t just have to be reactionary, in the moment. A bike shop near me offers free lessons on how to repair a puncture, knowing it’s going to be something that their customers will experience at least once in their lives.

And like everything in customer experience, doing something that’s good for the customer is good for the business, too.

In the bike shop example, as well as making you like them more, it saves them having to do lots of low-value repairs that they’d probably rather not do.

For Apple, this approach hopefully saves on a whole load of complaints by people who really do treasure their forgotten film list.

And recently, my home insurance company made it incredible easy for me to renew, offering me ways to do it via phone, chat, or just a one line email reply. One line, and I was done.

It’s a lesson my car company could learn from. I emailed them - the same branch I’ve used for ten years - to ask when my MOT was due. They replied saying they knew exactly when it was due - in about a week. Cue absolute panic trying to book it in in time to keep driving legally.

But if they had that information, why not get in touch with me first? Offer me a few appointment times? Give me a one-click way to book the car in? Why ask what my preferred branch is, after ten years of using the same one?

If they’d got in touch first, I’d think much more of them as a company - and crucially, I’m far more likely to give them my money at the click of a button.

Putting that inconvenient truth aside, I suggested the reason for my ‘unbeatable’ rating was because I make the ending of the experience great.

I always offer for the driver to drop me off slightly early, so they can swing round the roundabout at the end of my road and out again quickly.

I often tell them to mind the potholes on the road, because I don’t want them to damage their tyres.

And I always close the door really carefully - I’ve heard if you’re a slammer, they don’t like that.

In other words, I use the well-known Peak-End rule (popularised by the late, great Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow), a finding that says when people recall an experience, they mostly remember any emotional peaks, and how the experience ends.

The Peak-End rule pops up in all kinds of customer experiences now, often via food-based goods.

The last time I walked off a Eurowings flight, the air steward was handing out chocolate bars to passengers as they got off (yes, the Germans really are Kinder (credit: Nick Bush).

At Flat Iron, accompanying your bill is a little silver meat cleaver token that you can swap for an ice-cream on the way out.

And the last time I bought a car, the final email I received said:

“You’re going to receive a survey and I’m going for promotion next month so I’d be ever so grateful if you score me 5 out of 5”

Actually maybe that one’s not so good.

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There’s a risk that these types of ideas seem a bit gimmicky, a cheap add on to try and earn extra marks on the inevitable Trust Pilot review. And of course, these things are only nice-to-haves if the rest of the experience has been broadly fine.

My Eurowings flight was good - took off on time, landed on time, comfortable enough. So in that context, the Kinder bar was a nice little extra. But if we were landing into Heathrow two hours late having had rude start and a child kicking the back of my chair, it’s likely I’d have been looking at that Kinder in disdain and suggesting creative places for the air steward to store it.

But the best examples of peak-end rule aren’t gimmicks at all. In fact, they’re the ones we don’t notice.

Imagine someone describes to you the concept of Disneyland. You’ll spend all day fenced in, surrounded by screaming children, routinely moving from one hour-long queue to the next, in which you’ll feed your kids anything they want and let them watch anything they want to try and distract them from the fact they need a wee (pro parenting tip if you have boys: always carry an empty water bottle), all so that you can go on a ride that lasts two minutes and leaves you all wanting to vomit. Oh, and you’ll have to remortgage your house to pay for the privilege.

But people love it, because the experience of the ride makes them forget the pain of getting there (albeit it should be said Disney are good at making the queue bearable, but that’s a whole other post).

The same is true with wait times on the phone, or queueing to speak to someone. It can be frustrating at the time, but if when you get through you get dealt with really well, people rarely remember the wait. It’s only a factor if the problem isn’t dealt with: 'I had to wait 20 minutes to get through, and they still couldn’t help me!’

It’s for this reason that Average Handling Time is a poor measure for contact centre success. In all of our work, allowing colleagues more freedom on the phones occasionally leads to longer calls - but it always leads to higher customer satisfaction, higher colleague satisfaction and - crucially - higher first contact resolution / lower repeat phone calls, more than negating and operational loss of a longer AHT.

So next time you design how an experience ends, by all means give out free confectionary - but more importantly, make sure you’ve done what the customer wants you to first.

That last one explains why my least favourite phrase is ‘the world is changing faster than ever’. My second-least favourite is ‘things will never be the same again’.

As someone who studied history at university, I’m a particularly annoying person to be around when things like this are said. I’ll say things like ‘what about the Romans, and their massive-scale water infrastructure?’; ‘how about Henry VIII, changing the religion of a country overnight?’; ‘what about the industrial revolution, going from horses to aeroplanes, pantries to fridges, no TV to, well, TV?’

I’m great to have at dinner parties.

The temptation can be to think that everything is new, and when new things come along, that everything needs re-thinking. Whereas looking back to the past can help to understand the things that have always been true, and that will continue to be true in the years to come, giving some much-needed certainty amongst the change that sails around us.

Recent thoughts on LinkedIn:

• On a trip to the physio and stating the flippin’ obvious

• A bizarre suggestion of what to do with a delayed Valentine’s Day gift

• How to design for people with disabilities - and how crucial it is to understand the context

Take, for example, the letter my (amazing) Nan received on the day she joined the Telephone Exchange Service in 1961, making clear the importance of putting yourself in the customers’ shoes, and why the role was so important.

‘Think of the service you get from others. You travel by train or bus, you are served in shops, so from your own experience, you know the difference between service giving cheerfully and service which seems grudging and ungracious’

This wasn’t just one inspired leader’s view of how things should happen. It was backed up by the Telephone Exchange Customer Charter, which I love for three reasons.

1. ‘For any great enterprise, objectives must be clearly stated and widely understood’

2. ‘The aim and purpose of the telephone exchange is not only to serve but to please the customer. Everything must be subordinated and surrender to that aim’

3. ‘Scientific progress in itself is not enough. What really counts is the spirit of the men and women behind the machine. Machines must be servants, not masters.’

Sound familiar?

When you look back at what was driving organisations in the past, you see that the things that matter to customers, and the things successful organisations build their business around, really haven't changed that much at all.

Take this from Pugh Bros, a metalworks wholesaler in Islington, London. Three-word ‘company values’ and marketing taglines have been all the rage in the past decade - just as they were in the 1960s:

‘Service, Quality, Price’

Or this publicly stated customer policy, advertised in a newspaper in 1934, for a company also in London.

I particularly love this one for two reasons.

First, that simple aim: ‘A satisfied customer’, as true in 1934 as it is nearly a hundred years later: revenue only comes from earning customer decisions in your favour. The products and services organisations offer don’t make any money sat on the shelves; it’s only by a customer choosing to buy it or use it that the company makes money.

So, having satisfied customers? That means having sustainable revenue. So simple, yet so easily forgotten.

But I also love the line about complaints.

‘If you have any cause for complaint… we shall consider it a favour if you will tell us.’

The ‘oldest known complaint’ has been shared about a thousand times on social media, and in my book (have I mentioned I’ve written a book?), but is worth showing again as a reminder that wherever there are customers, they’ll be things that go wrong.

But more interestingly, I think, is this letter that reminds us that how you deal with customer problems - owning it, explaining it, resolving it - was as true 75 years ago as it will be in the year 2100.

One thing that has changed, though? How we collect customer feedback. And given what I suspect might be written on this board if it existed today, maybe it’s one change for the better.

As a bonus, last week I went to see the comedian Darren Walsh touring in Colchester. He specialises in puns, and offered to create personalised puns for people. I gave him the topic of Customer Experience, and…

As part of the project, we listened to about a hundred real customer calls. One stood out more than any other:

‘Can you confirm the mobile number of the joint party?’

‘The join… do you mean… do you mean my wife?’

‘Yes. We encourage you to book your appointment when both applicants are available, but if the joint party can’t make it, that’s ok’

‘Ok, I think she…’

‘If it’s not convenient for the joint party to be on the call, you just need written confirmation from the joint party, and we may need to call the joint party to confirm their acceptance’

The words ‘Joint Party’ became totemic throughout the organisation, a symbol of what happens when confusing, internal jargon comes out to customers.

But the thing is, whilst it’s easy to blame the frontline team for this, or the scripts teams have to use to be compliant, this kind of thing is usually just a symbol of what’s happening deeper (and higher) in the organisation.

Recent thoughts on LinkedIn:

• On the ‘Normalisation of Deviance’ (or why companies end up doing bad things)

• How my local bike shop gives up short-term revenue for long-term relationships

• The unintended consequences of mystery shopping (and a colleague frozen to the spot)

Gill’s book highlights many ways that the organisational ‘discourse’ reveals the culture of the company, whether it be a gender bias, overly macho, or believing that your customers are criminals.

Sometimes this comes through in how customers are described, in a way that dehumanises them, such as calling them ‘policy holders’ or ‘claimants’, ‘back book’ and ‘front book’, or ‘beneficiaries’ when there’s been a bereavement. These make sense, but if you’ve had a close relative pass away, do you want to be described as ‘the beneficiary’?

Other descriptions can appear harmless, but reveal an underlying disrespect for customers. ‘Punters’ is thankfully less common than it was; ‘Rate Tarts’ one I heard a lot in banking in the 2000s, and the energy industry in the 2010s. Perhaps most shocking, just a couple of years ago I heard passengers in a transport business being described as ‘self-loading cargo’.

But it’s not all about how customers are described.

The most common example is how organisations talk about ‘winning’ customers, looking at performance through the lenses of ‘acquisition’, ‘retention’ and ‘churn’. I don’t know about you, but I’m not sure I want to be ‘acquired’, and I’m sure I don’t want to be ‘retained’. I guess maybe I churn, on occasion.

And that’s before you get to ‘extracting value’ and ‘driving engagement’ language which - as Gill talks about - suggests a sense of customers as resources to be mined rather than humans to be served.

However, I think my favourite point in Gill’s book was something that’s bothered me since my early days in banking:

Educating customers.

‘If only our customers understood our industry more, understood what we have to go through, understood what we do for them, then they’d be much happier’ is the belief, with the answer that ‘we’re going to create FAQs, videos to help people understand, a newsletter with articles about us, and what we do.’

It’s a useful clue for companies. If you’re sending customers something - say, a bill - that requires you to make a 3-minute video explaining it, then the job is to make the bill more simple, not to educate customers on how to negotiate the inner workings of the industry.

As always, none of this happens on purpose.

Most people in most organisations are well-meaning, wanting to create a good experience for customers, wanting to respect the people they serve. But what Gill’s book brilliantly shows is how accidental this is, how natural this is, how easy it is for people to be surrounded by others talking in the same way, to the point where these linguistic traits become unnoticeable.

And the way you talk about your customers inside the organisation will come out in how you speak to them externally. If you don’t believe me, just ask your Joint Party what they think.

Our favourite Indian restaurant - close to our old house, not really near the new one - had started to offer delivery. Which meant I could be reunited with one of the best curries I’d ever had.

However, the journey from getting that leaflet to getting the curry was far more ludicrous than I’d anticipated, and taught me a lot about the importance of companies taking ownership of the problems their customers have.

It’s not the first time I’ve written about this restaurant, actually. For those of you with long memories (or a copy of my book - have I mentioned I’ve written a book?) this was the place where the waiter once came over and asked if we’d leave a review on TripAdvisor.

We lied and said we would - not expecting the waiter to literally stand over us and watch whilst we got out our phones to do it there and then. He even checked the scores we gave.

Fast forward to this particular weekend and I put the order in on their website, placed the plates into the oven to warm up, and got the trays ready to lug everything into the living room (takeaway is a TV meal, after all).

Then I waited. And waited. And waited.

With over an hour gone since ordering, I rang the restaurant. With unnerving certainty and speed, the waiter told me:

‘I’m sorry sir, the driver has just left now, he’ll be with you in ten minutes’

Fifteen minutes later, still no sign.

I called again. What followed was a great example of excuses, rather than ownership.

‘I’m sorry sir, he will be with you soon. We’ve had an unexpected surge of orders.’

(I’m guessing you might predict - and hope for - a surge in orders on the day you put flyers through a thousand homes in the local area)

‘Why didn’t you just call me and let me know?’

‘Oh, we don’t have your phone number’

‘But I put it on the order form’

‘We don’t get that information passed to us’

At this point, the food arrived. My son opened the door, took the bags, and brought them into the kitchen.

Understandably, I was quite keen to get off the phone now and, y’know, eat the food.

Then things started to get weird.

‘To say sorry, let me give you a discount next time you order’

‘To be honest, I probably won’t get delivery from you again’

‘Ok, I’ll refund you ten pounds’

‘Ok’

‘It’ll have to be in cash as we don’t have your card details?’

‘But I paid with a card?’

‘We don’t get that information from the website’

‘Right’

‘Hold the line, let me see what I can do’

(I waited for a couple of minutes, enviously looking at the food being devoured in front of me)

‘Ok, you’ll have to come and pick up the cash’

‘I’m not going to do that’

‘Hold the line, let me see what I can do’

(I need to remind you at this point that I didn’t ask for this refund; this is not me being a Karen. For once.)

‘I’ll send my driver back to you now’

I hung up the phone, dished up my food, and sat down.

As I put the first forkful into my mouth, there was a knock at the door.

‘Hello sir - my manager says you owe us a tenner?’

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I recently shared a video about what Disney do when someone queues up for one of their rides, and then is too short to go on. That’s not their fault - the height signs are there. But rather than just send the kid away, they give them a voucher for the next time they visit which allows them to skip the queue.

Why? Because one of their mantras is ‘it’s not our fault, but it is our problem’.

In my Indian restaurant experience, it was very much their fault, and my problem.

We had a surge in orders. We can’t get your phone number. We don’t know your card details. Your food will be late. You’ll have to come to us to get the cash.

Admittedly, they did offer some money back. And in the end, their driver did arrive with some money - but the experience was far from the nice, relaxed takeaway I was hoping for.

But more than how I felt, think of the ‘failure demand’ for the restaurant. Calls from people wanting to know where their food is, refunds having to be given, drivers having to make return trips (which presumably delays other customers’ food - sorry neighbours.)

For both customers and organisations, owing problems and proactively resolving them will lead to much better outcomes - and maybe some 5* reviews without having to watch over them.

Recent thoughts on LinkedIn:

• Five reflections on the recent Institute of Customer Service

• Possibly the greatest invention in the history of customer experience

• Why is Guinness so successful?

So, how are those new year’s resolutions going? This is usually about the time when those good intentions made whilst hanging out at home start to meet the crushing reality of being back at work.

I’m not usually one for resolutions (except for the year I resolved to take up drinking whisky, that one stuck) but this year I have made a fairly significant change - all because of the price of a sandwich.

And I think this sandwich story tells us something about how to make change happen inside a big organisation - because it’s much easier to say you’re going to change a behaviour than it actually is to change it.

Regular readers will know that late last year, my writing-about-places-I-like curse struck again, when my favourite local sandwich shop closed down.

I probably hadn’t realised what a habit it had become to buy my lunch there every day. But with my default option gone, a whole world of food options opened up to me. The new Gail’s down the road? SushiDog, to pretend I’m being healthy? How about Sainsbury’s, for the world’s most confusing meal deal?

With this array of options laid out in front of me, I did what any of you would have done.

I went to the new sandwich shop that took the place of the old one. (Paradox of choice, amirite?)

The people seemed nice enough. The menu, limited, but interesting. Ordering, it was ok, given they were still figuring it out.

But the price? £12. £12! Now at the risk of sounding like a cheapskate, that did take me back. Even for London, that price was punchy. But it was Christmas, I’d already ordered, and I’d pay anything to avoid the social embarrassment of cancelling the order.

And after all, it was a New York-inspired sandwich bar. This could be a sandwich of Joey proportions.

It was not. In fact, it was one of the most disappointing lunches I’ve ever had.

So now, after a decade of sandwiches, I’m going to start bringing my own lunch into work.

But why now? At any point in the last decade, I could have clocked how much money I was wasting, how long I was queueing for, how restricted my choices had been. I’ve even bought fancy lunch boxes, soup containers, and lunch-focused recipe books. But still I went to the shop.

In 2007, the social scientist and author BJ Fogg shared his theory of behaviour change with the world. In it, he argued that for any change in behaviour to occur, three elements must converge at the same time: motivation, ability, and a prompt.

For me, the motivation (wanting a good lunch) was there, but it was much easier for me to go to the shop than make my own, even with the containers and recipe books ready to go at home.

Crucially, I didn't have the trigger, the prompt to shake me from my sandwich-buying slumber. The way I’d always done things was comfortable and easy. This is the problem most leaders and organisations face when trying to create a better experience for their customers.

They tend to focus on motivation, hosting big events and telling their teams ‘we really care about customers’ and ‘we want you to do the right thing’.

Often isn’t backed up by giving their colleagues the ability to do it. This might mean them not having the right tools and systems, or it could be colleagues not having the autonomy or empowerment to do what’s right for customers.

And if colleagues do have the motivation and ability to make things better for customers, do they have the prompt, the trigger to do it? The change from the old, safe way of working into something bold and new?

For me, my favourite food place closing combined with the astoundingly high price for a cr*ppy lunch was the prompt I needed to shake me from my sandwich slumber. So now, I have the motivation, I have the ability, and I have the moment to shift me into a new behaviour.

As we step into 2026, it’s tempting for leaders to make all sorts of customer-led promises to their colleagues. But if they want real change to happen, they need to be clear on the prompt, the story, the moment that’s going to act like a lightning bolt in the organisation, building belief and creating the change you want to see (something that Charlie Dawson in The Customer Copernicus calls ‘Burningness’).

Without that, this time next year, you might be making those same resolutions all over again.

I hope you have a great 2026.

It’s been a full-on year. The Foundation is growing, the news is, well, everywhere, and there’s this little thing called AI that’s either going to change everything, or change absolutely nothing. It’ll probably be a bit of both.

I’ve been lucky enough to work on some brilliant projects with some brilliant clients (and, as always, with some brilliant colleagues). Mumbai, Manchester, Newcastle, Edinburgh, even a presentation to Alton Towers. The amount of time I’ve spent on trains is probably equal to the amount of time I haven’t.

I’m incredibly grateful for you reading and sharing the things I’ve written this year. It’s so lovely to receive any emails or comments on anything I post, and I really appreciate your eyeballs and attention.

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So, here’s the random list of things that caught my eye this year, all vaguely connected to creating better customer experiences and more customer-led organisations.

1. I love Disney’s approach of ‘it’s not our fault, but it is our problem’

2. In March, we released our ‘Myth of Feedback’ report, showing that 53% of business leaders aren’t customers of their own business and 56% haven’t spoken to a customer in over a month

3. The Toronto Raptors offer first-time visitors a different coloured lanyard, so colleagues know to offer them a little extra help

4. Rory Sutherland introduced me to the concept of ‘Reverse Benchmarking’, finding the thing your competitors are worst at and being brilliant at it - like the service station (Buc-ees) in the US which aims to have the cleanest toilets in the country

5. Young people are spending more time alone than ever before

6. When Doctors give patients more time to talk, they give better diagnosis and the appointment time isn’t any longer

7. Octopus Energy chose to go against the regulator’s rules - and in the process, saved vulnerable customers nearly £7m

8. We learnt a huge amount about Sam Altman by observing him in his kitchen

9. London’s oldest insurance companies used to put metal markers on the outside of people’s houses to show they were insured

10. In 2007, there were still 24 payphone in the centre of London Victoria station

11. Vodafone launched their ‘Just Ask Once’ feature to try and stop the customer service doom loop

12. An industrial designer who spent two years working on a new MRI machine realised within seconds of it’s first use that been looking at it all wrong - so turned it into a ‘Fun Jungle’ and reduced child sedation rates from 80% to 27%

13. Customer Experiences come in all different shapes and sizes. Look out for Transitions, Milestones, and Pitfalls

14. Forget the AI hype - we’re never going to stop working

15. Roald Dahl’s writing room shows the importance of habit and routine in creativity

16. The 95/5 rule says you should tightly control 95% of your company spending - which gives you 5% to spend frivolously on the things that create joy.

17. Self-checkouts are a failed experiment

18. If you want to really understand what people think, you might want to be more annoying as an interviewer

19. The end is in sight for the UK‘s Parking App nightmare

20. People will queue for anything if they think they might get something for free:

‘Why are you queuing?’

‘Well, there was just a queue and I thought we’d join it’

21. UK water is some of the cleanest in the world - so clean you could drink your toilet water (if you wanted to. And post-flush.)

22. The African Union rightly called for an end to the use of the Mercator map

23. If you want to stop yourself getting dizzy when going down lots of stairs, put up photos of wild animals

24. People really enjoy my misery. Of all the posts I wrote this year, the most popular were:

    1. Me repeatedly getting stuck between the barriers on the Paris Metro

    2. Me spending a month trying to find a lost Royal Mail parcel, and ending up writing a letter to the CEO and MP (but the real story was how brilliant ReMarkable were)

    3. Me buying a corded hedge trimmer, cutting through the cord, short-circuiting the house, getting it fixed, then immediately cutting through it again

25. But the thing that resonated most this year was how organisations have made it easy to do the easy things and hard to do the hard things - and AI might be about to make that so much worse

(And a bonus 26 as we look forward to more technological advancements in the new year. I asked CoPilot to assess our server and tell me which client we’d worked the most with in our 26 year history. It’s answer? The Foundation…)

Thank you again for reading and sharing this year, I really do appreciate it. And as always, feel free to let me know if there’s anything you’d like to see more of (or less of) as we head into 2026.

I hope you have a great Christmas and New Year time, however and with whoever you spend it.

On the Friday night, the three women went for an evening in the Spa together, coming back fully relaxed.

On the Saturday night, they suggested us three blokes should do the same, so we did.

When we got back, my friend’s wife asked how we found it.

‘It was great! We completed the whole thing’.

It’s fair to say they looked quite bemused.

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In a recent podcast, Rory Sutherland mentioned a book called ‘Obvious Adams’. Published in 1916, it’s one of those beautifully slim books that manages to contain more wisdom in its 60 pages than most modern books do in 600.

In short, it’s the story of a young marketeer who finds his way in the industry by, well, hanging around, watching people, and stating the obvious. Think a cake company that needs to get people to taste their cakes, not just see them. Or a store that needs to move location to somewhere with more passing footfall. The things that organisation’s know, but have become blind to.

A couple of years ago, I had my own Obvious Adams moment in an airport we were working with at the time.

The brief was simply: improve the experience for customers. So off we went, like Tom Hanks in The Terminal, to spend a few days just sort of… hanging around.

As the days went by, I became fixated on a table by one of the wings of the airport, leading from the main concourse (where all the shops are) to some of the gates (where the planes are).

Throughout the day, people would see their gate called, neck as much of their pint as they could, put their glass on this table, and run down to the waiting plane. This meant that as the day went on, the glasses piled up, leaving a table full of half-drunk beer to act as a final goodbye to people as they left the city.

I went to ask the airport customer service team - whose desk was meters from the table - why they didn’t do something about it.

Oh, those glasses belong to the pub, they’re not our responsibility

So I went to speak to the pub, again pretty close to where the beer-tsunami table was, to ask why they didn't do something.

Oh, our jurisdiction is only the area of the pub, we don’t get involved in anything outside of that

When we played back our findings to the Exec team, we put up photos of everything we’d seen and experienced during our visits. Walking the walls, we paused at the photo of the troublesome table. I asked why the table was there in the first place.

One of the Execs looked a little sheepish.

Oh, well, Burger King wanted to increase their footprint and add a few more of their own tables, so we took a few of ours away to make room and just popped them around the airport.

One very innocent act had caused half of the passengers going through that airport to walk past an overflowing table to empty glasses, with no obvious owner.

So what did they do? They just took the table away. And what did customers do? They finished their pints, and took them back to the bar.

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The thing is, you’re not getting that from a survey. People are unlikely to talk about their airport experience and specifically call out the table with the glasses on. And even if they did, they wouldn’t be able to explain why they were behaving in that way. But that doesn’t mean it’s not important - especially if you have many of those small things add up, to give the impression of a tired, unloved, unclean space.

And in the same way, you’re probably not going to find out that for me and my friends, our approach to a nice relaxing spa is to try and get through every room in the allotted time. ‘Come on, we’ve had our five minutes of steaming, only twenty minutes left to do the hot pool, and sauna, and the weird showery spray thing!’

What if they lent into that, and gave us a set route to follow? Or they could push against it, realising we had no clue what we’re doing and giving us a quick introduction that made it very clear THE POINT IS TO RELAX, as our partners made clear to us when we got back, high-fiving our achievement.

Either way, it would show a bit of understanding of how different people see the world. And to understand that, you have to try and see their world for yourself.

I added it to my growing list of things that I find intensely annoying, such as:

• Do Not Reply email addresses

• No obvious contact number to call

• ⁠Being able to get through to a sales or ‘retention’ line but not a service line

• FAQ / ‘community’ articles instead of real help

• Chatbots that stop you speaking to a human

• ⁠Phoning up and repeatedly being told by an automated voice ‘did you know you can do this online?’ (yes I did because it’s 2025 and I’m aware of the existence of the internet)

• Phoning up, choosing the right options, then being told by an automated voice ‘you can do this online, thank you, good bye’ and the call being ended

The folk on LinkedIn added a few of their own:

When you ring up and you have to choose an option but none of the options are what you need

When they give you the option to request a call-back. Ring you once and hang up before you can answer

Unexpectedly long wait times that have been long for six years now

I find this the most interesting question in Customer Experience right now.

In trying to make everything ‘digital-first’, we’ve made it easy to do the easy things, and hard to do the hard things.

And with the advent of AI, the risk is that, whilst it’s brilliant at stripping away the faff, it may make it even harder for customers to speak to organisations when they need to.

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I find it this interesting for two reasons.

Firstly, because those businesses only exist because those customers choose to use them. Given that, it’s probably not a good idea to annoy them.

(Some companies have tried to frame this as a benefit, a saving if you go online. There’s a logic to that - online, less people, lower cost. Very logical, very rational. But seeing a ‘phone admin fee’ of £26 doesn’t talk to the logical part of my brain; rather, it makes me think if I need you in a hurry, you’re not going to be there for me)

The second reason is that, from a national, economic point of view, it feels highly unproductive to have people wasting hours of their lives waiting on the phone and screaming into their screens.

One study recently worked out that taxpayers spent nearly 800 years on hold to HMRC in 2022-23. 800 years. That would take you back to roughly the Middle Ages. Which is roughly where HMRC’s customer experience is.

I understand it for some companies, especially smaller ones. I phoned my local barber over the weekend to see if he was open. He didn’t answer, probably because he was cutting hair. I’m ok with that. And probably wouldn’t want a barber that answered their phone with one hand whilst hacking at my hair with the other.

But the large insurer who wouldn’t take my call when I needed to urgently know if I could drive my Mum’s car? They made over £2Bn profit last year. They could probably afford to pick up the phone.

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I have to check myself here, though. Because whilst I’m moaning it’s hard to speak to a real person, it is, of course, exponentially easier to be a customer now than it was twenty years ago.

Can you imagine having to go into a bank branch every time you wanted to check your balance?

Or visiting an insurance broker every time your home cover was up for renewal?

Or only being able to do things between 9am and 5pm when you yourself were meant to be at work?

Surely that was also bad for productivity, rather than being able to do things at any hour of the day?

In fact, Human Progress recently shared data that shows American workers today 50% less time at work than they would have in 1900. Over the same period, real hourly wages have gone up 10-fold, and the inflation-adjusted price of leisure has dropped by more than half. So things aren’t all bad.

So why does it feel harder to be a customer at the moment? It could be that, like so many other unintended consequences of a digital life, it just feels like there’s more to do now. More inboxes to check, more notifications to read, more apps to open. Just how many times a day is it ok to check your ISA balance?

But I think there are three other things going on:

1. Bad news travels fast

2. Expectations rise with reality

3. Prioritising the easy over the meaningful.

The first doesn’t take much explanation. Bad news travels fast, and bad news gets clicks. So we hear about the bad experiences more than we do the good. That means we’re more likely to share bad customer service stories with each other than we are to marvel every time we seamlessly log on and see how much electricity we’ve used.

The second, that expectations rise with reality, is what makes me feel sorry for HMRC. And I can’t believe I’ve just said that.

Janen Ganesh said this better than I could in the Financial Times. But in short, private companies making the customer experience so simple has put pressure on public services - without anywhere near as much funding - to be just as good.

Capitalism has raised expectations that are then dashed in almost every interaction with the state. The problem is not bad government … so much as a miraculous private sector. Consumer life has rewired people, sensitising them to inconvenience.

However, it’s the third reason that I think is mostly driving the frustration customers feel about not being able to contact organisations: prioritising the easy over the meaningful.

Because so much is able to be done so simply, the only time we want to speak to a person is when we really, really need to speak to a person. It might be it’s complicated, urgent, or emotional. Whatever the reason, those are the times we need help the most and that the company needs to be most accessible.

And those are the times that companies are found wanting.

The irony is that all this is usually done in the name of profit and efficiency - but in the long run, nothing destroys profit faster than disappearing when your customers really need you.

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Which brings us back to AI.

AI should be used to take the pointless work away: the repeated questions, the form-filling, the ‘what’s my balance?’ moments. It could make both customers and employees more productive and happier, by freeing humans up for the hard, human conversations.

Instead, in too many places, it’s being used as another layer of defence between people and organisations - another way to take cost out, to protect profit, to avoid paying for humans to answer the phone.

In the first wave of the digital revolution, we’ve made it easy to do the easy things, and hard to do the hard things.

Let’s not make the same mistake again.

This is an announcement for passengers travelling on flight AC877 to Montreal. There will be no toilets available on this plane. I repeat, there will be no toilets available on this plane.

Panic ensured.

People started clambering over each other to get to the bathrooms.

Some made a dash for the pharmacy, looking for absorbent options.

An older woman snatched a bottle of water from her husband’s lips, chastising poor Eric for his fluid-intake stupidity.

A few minutes later, the speaker crackled into life again.

Ladies and gentleman, to clarify my previous messages, the toilets on the plane will be out of service until it has taken off.

The importance of clear communication, eh?

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Organisations spend a lot of time trying to design superb customer experiences. They think through the insight, the idea, the way it could be implemented. They get the right systems, people and processes in place. Then the launch to the public, seeing how well it lands.

Sometimes things work, sometimes they don’t. But most annoying is when everything that’s meant to work, works, but customer don’t realise because the communication is so poor.

My favourite example of this is to think about the digital boards in train stations.

If you walk onto a platform and see this sign, you feel instantly relaxed. You get your phone out, scroll through TikTok (well, argumentative Facebook neighbourhood groups for me), and wait for the train the pull up.

Whereas if you see this sign, panic ensues. You worry you’re going to be late home. You presume the whole network may be down. You put your ear to the floor to try and hear if the train is rumbling towards you (just me?).

In reality, most of the time the service is running completely fine in both scenarios. The only thing that’s changed is the communication around it. And it’s that communication – the simplest, cheapest, easiest part to get right – that defines the experience the customer has, the way they feel in that moment.

I’ve had a few examples of this recently.

When I went to book a snooker table at a venue I hadn’t been to before, I was greeted with this screen. It took several minutes, and eventually a phone call, to work out these were specific tables numbers. (I also put this on LinkedIn, just to check it wasn’t just me being stupid. Some people thought it was me being stupid. But most agreed they would have been confused).

Another day, I was due to be running a workshop in Newcastle, getting the train up that morning for a 1pm start. At 8am, this notification arrived on my phone and in my inbox. Not the kind of thing you want to see when you’ve only got a few hours to get to the other side of the country.

I tentatively clicked the link to find out what the disruption was that was going to affect my journey, and…

(Now, obviously this information matters to some people. But how about we start that email subject line with the words ‘YOUR TRAIN IS ON TIME, BUT…’)

I had another enjoyable one on a plane, too, this time with colleagues not thinking through how their words might land.

As one of the cabin crew walked through to hand out drinks at 36,000 feet, the trolley was causing him some bother.

Oh for god’s sake he half muttered to himself. Absolutely everything is broken on this old plane!

The sea of nervous smiles that greeted him caused a very hasty retraction and an attempt at reassurance.

Organisations need to think through the communication of the experience in as much detail as they do the pricing and the process. And not just for the customer’s benefit, but for their own bottom line, too. Because what do you think happens if people are confused? They get in touch to try and clear things up, taking up colleague time or making costly phone calls.

Doing this well means making sure the communication is there in the first place, and when it is, thinking about the customer who’s receiving it: what they might know already or need to know; the easiest way for them to receive it, not for the company to send it; and how the customer might feel when they receive what is about to be shared.

Ten years later, there’s still no better example of when this can go wrong than a Christmas card one of the banks sent to every customer who had taken a mortgage with them that year. It’s a lovely idea, which helped the bank get a lot of publicity on the social media channels of the time, and get to speak to lots of their customers that day.

Merry Christmas. But don’t spend too much on presents, because…

A couple of years ago, I wrote an article about how much I loved the Honest Burgers that’s opposite our office. A few weeks later, me and the team went in for a Friday lunch, and the manager came over to tell us she was leaving. I was devastated.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote an article about how much I loved the little Café that’s next to our office. On Friday, I went in to get lunch. The manager came over to tell me he was leaving. That they were all leaving. That day.

I was devastated.

(By the way, I’m not saying we’re all living in my simulation, but it does feel both odd and oddly coincidental that twice I’ve written about places I love and twice they’ve almost immediately changed hands. So if there’s a place you really hate, let me know and I’ll write about it and get it gone. The pen is mightier than the sword and all that.)

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When the manager told me, I was genuinely choked up. He grabbed my hand, told me he was retiring, that the team were leaving with him. He gave me a hug, said thank you for being a regular customer, and that he hoped to see me around some time.

I went back into the office to break the news to the team. We were all in a bit of disbelief, and decided we wanted to do something to say thank you. We ran over the road to buy a goodbye card, signed it from everyone at The Foundation, and filled the envelope with Malteser Teasers (got to be on brand).

Half an hour later we went back in, gave him the card, shook hands, hugged, and said a proper goodbye to them all.

(It’s worth pausing here to say we did also recognise that this was a sandwich shop closing, and not something more major…)

Over the weekend, I was reflecting on the experience, on how I felt, on how many other companies I’d rush out to buy a ‘goodbye’ card for if they disappeared. And it made me think about three things that are worth considering for every company, no matter the size.

1. Firstly, it was a joy to be their customer. It was a moment we looked forward to in the day, going to buy lunch, see the team, have a nice chat. You always left with a bigger smile than when you went it (and not just because you were a step closer to eating). No part of it was hard, difficult, or a hassle. It was fun to go, to interact, to be there.

2. Secondly, it’s another reminder that where customer loyalty exists (and as most of you know, I don’t really think it does), it’s far more to the people than to the brand. When I go to work this week, the café may still be there, it might even be called the same name. But I’ll be starting over again, building new relationships, seeing whether the new owners match up to the other lunch options in the area. It was the atmosphere the team created that made the relationship, not the name above the door.

3. And thirdly, the question of whether this kind of experience and relationship is ever possible with an organisation of significant size and scale. This is probably the question that I get asked more than ever – can you really create a truly human experience across hundreds of outlets, thousands of employees, millions of customers?

My answer is always the same: that surely, we should have the ambition to try. Even if it’s not possible to create quite as deep a connection, having that as the aim rather than accepting mediocrity will undoubtedly lead to better experiences for customers overall.

It’s why I’ve never really liked talking about ‘customer satisfaction’. Who wants a ‘satisfied’ customer? Surely better to have one that loves you, that finds you a joy to be a customer of. Metro Bank were onto something when they talked about having ‘fans’.

So, the real question is, would your customers buy you a leaving card if you closed? If you can answer yes, then you’re doing something right. And if no, then it’s worth exploring what would it take.

This article is not going to help with those concerns.

What follows is a genuine but avoidable mistake, descends into a month of calls, emails, and broken promises, and ends up with me writing a letter to a now-sacked MP. But as well as a villain, it has a truly remarkable hero, and shows the difference between taking ownership of your customers problems, and not. It also shows that bad customer experience really is expensive to provide.

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Let’s start at the start.

A few months ago, my Remarkable tablet - like a digital paper notebook – started charging really slowly.

I’d had it for quite a while, so didn’t expect much joy from the company. But to my (pleasant) surprise, Remarkable were, true to their name, great.

As you were one of our early customers, send it back, and if we can’t fix it, we’ll give you another.

A day later, my Remarkable (worth about £350) was packaged up, DHL label on the front, waiting to be collected from the office.

It turned out, my colleague also had a parcel being collected on the same day by Royal Mail.

You can probably guess what happened next.

As I was sat in a meeting I saw the Royal Mail ‘Delivery Officer’ walk out with my parcel. That’s odd, I thought. Maybe they have a deal with DHL?

They do not have a deal with DHL.

That’s ok, I thought. Mistakes happen. And with so many parcels being collected by so many companies in so many offices, surely this will be easy to resolve…

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Within ten minutes of my parcel disappearing into the wrong hands, I phoned the Royal Mail Collections team, and waited 30 minutes to get through. I was told that number was for tech queries only, and I’d have to ring customer service. 30 minutes later again, I was told

It will either come back to your office today or will be delivered anyway

The next day, with nothing having appeared, I popped into the local depot. The guy was brilliantly friendly, and perhaps too honest.

This happens all the time

We took a bloke’s suitcase by mistake once

It’s probably just lying around the office somewhere

He gives me a direct number for the depot to call, but they didn’t pick up. So, I went into the half-hour wait for Customer Services again. This time I was told ‘It’ll take 72 hours for the depot to investigate’ and that once they’ve done that ‘they’ll tell us at Customer Services; they won’t contact you’. So, perhaps understandably, I ask how I, the customer, find out what’s happened to it.

If you’d like feedback, you have to request it – that’ll be another ten days

I’m not sure I’d describe what I was after as ‘feedback’, more ‘an answer’. He also says I can track the parcel using the Royal Mail tracker number, to which I explain – again – that it’s a DHL parcel.

In that case, we’ll give it to DHL to deliver, that’s our process

I try the direct depot number again, and this time get through. Another very lovely, albeit slightly bemused guy answers.

I don’t know why they’ve given you my number, I look after the lorries.

But nonetheless, he says he’ll go and have a look for it, and call me back, which he duly does.

I’ve spoken to the Foreign desk, and they say we’ll deliver it anyway, and just charge them when it arrives.

If you’re keeping count, this means that within the first 24 hours, I was told

1. It’s coming back to the office

2. It’s going to Hong Kong

3. It’s going to DHL

4. It’s coming to my home

5. It’s lost forever

Variety is the spice of life, eh?

I’m going to fast forward a bit here, for risk of this email being caught in your spam filters due to excessive obscene language. Over the next week, I called several times, and even joined a forum called ‘Royal Mail Chat’ of Royal Mail employees to try and get some insider information.

After some days, the case was escalated to the correctly-names Escalation Team, who promised me a call back within 24 hours.

Four days later, after a few more requests, they phoned me.

It will be fully investigated fully and if we can’t find it, you can apply for compensation from us. You’ll hear back in ten days.

Remember that.

Now, whilst this ludicrous event is playing out, Remarkable are living up to their name. I told them what was happening via webchat – answered immediately by a human – and whilst this is all going on, they emailed every couple of days to see if I had any news, if there was anything they could do to help, and said they’d keep an eye on the serial number of the tablet to make sure it wasn’t being used anywhere else.

Eventually, the promised Royal Mail investigation reply appeared in my inbox…

So, the tablet has disappeared into the ether, and I can claim compensation from them – but have to do it via DHL. Now, maybe I’m just becoming cynical, but my gut feel was that given DHL hadn’t touched the parcel, they’d be pretty unlikely to pay me £350 of compensation.

I contact DHL, who gave an enjoyably specific wait time, which ironically was wrong, as they put me through almost immediately.

Almost as quickly as they answered, they confirmed what we were all thinking: obviously they’re not going to pay compensation for an item they haven’t touched. They show me the terms and conditions, and within minutes emailed me a full copy to share back with Royal Mail. Really impressive.

So back I go to Royal Mail, like a lemming about to jump off the same cliff for the fifteenth time. I share the DHL policy, and that I’ll need the compensation directly from them. Luckily, I was sat down and alone when the email came through, with nothing valuable or breakable within reach.

(Pay special attention to the line ‘committed to providing a consistent level of customer service’. I’d certainly agree it had been consistently something…)

I updated Remarkable on what had been going on. They continued to be brilliant. Once I told them I wasn’t going to get the item or the money back, they offered to give me a new one but at a heavily discounted price, a fraction of the usual cost. Within two days that had been packaged up, posted from abroad, and arrived at my home.

As for the Royal Mail, I sent a few more emails back and forth over the next few days, asking if someone could call me to talk about it, and asking where I was supposed to get compensation from. Neither question was answered, and no-one would speak to me.

In the end, they just stopped replying, with their final email confirming that, with regret, the item cannot be located, and they would no longer contact me.

Two days later, my original Remarkable arrived back at my house (with a surcharge of £7 to pay)

And when I told Remarkable? They said I could keep both.

When I wrote The Human Experience (have I mentioned I wrote a book?), I suggested seven human ‘behaviours’ that the best customer experiences organisations exhibit. For me, this is one of the first experiences I’ve had that failed on every front:

• Accessible – long wait times, confusing emails, no conversation with the escalation team

• Consistent – told six possible different answers, every channel giving a different view

• Flexible – Rigidly sticking to a process with no adjustment for context or circumstance

• Proactive – Failed to call back multiple times. All the effort on me.

• Respectful – No respect for my time, the effort put in, or the potential impact of the loss

• Responsible – No obvious intention to help me solve the issue, or take ownership

• Straightforward – Complex procedures, unclear timelines, confusing conversations

And so, I did what I do best, and wrote a 2,500 word, ten-page letter to the Review Service, the CEO and, just for good measure, the MP who oversees the service (albeit, it’s now a private company). Not to get more money, but to let them know about their highly costly ways of working.

By the time I’d finished writing this, I’d received my reply from the review panel.

‘I acknowledge your dissatisfaction with how your complaint was handled therefore, I have arranged for a cheque to the value of £25.00 to be sent to you’

When I replied and asked whether the information would be used to improve the service, I was told that

‘Your particular experience is a rare occurrence. Please be assured that your concerns have been recorded and will be kept on file. ‘

So that’s a no, then.

This experience, whilst extreme, is symptomatic of an understaffed organisation with the barricades up, unable and unwilling to help customers for fear of extra work or compensation cost, and uninterested in learning to improve.

The result is an experience which is highly stressful for me, and highly costly for the Royal Mail. All those calls, emails, letters; all the time spent by me and them, nearly all of it totally avoidable. And in the end, totally pointless.

Of course, the irony is that their process did actually work. It’s just that no-one knew it, and no-one had faith in it. But, as I always say, bad customer experience is expensive to provide. They really should aim to deliver better.