Joseph Michelli: All Business Is Personal

[00:00:03] Jason S. Bradshaw: Hi, and welcome to this edition of Chats With Jason. I'm of course your host, Jason S. Bradshaw, and this is the show that helps you transform the experience to transform your business.

[00:00:16] Jason S. Bradshaw: Sometimes the most unforgettable experience in life aren't the ones that cost the most. They're the ones where we felt seen, heard, valued. What if companies could create those kinds of moments? Not by accident, but by design.

[00:00:48] Jason S. Bradshaw: He's not just a business thinker, he's a master storyteller and a trusted voice in human centered leadership. An internationally sought after speaker and consultant, Dr. Joseph Michelli is the author of 9 New York Times bestselling books. Each one, a blueprint for turning ordinary transactions into extraordinary human connections. He has sat down with frontline baristas, C-suite giants, and everyday people who have created extraordinary impact, one small interaction at a time.

[00:01:31] Jason S. Bradshaw: Joseph, welcome to the show.

[00:01:50] Jason S. Bradshaw: Do you realize it is 9 years ago when you stood up in front of an audience for me in San Francisco? At The Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco. Almost a decade of knowing each other. And I know I've been following your work for longer than that, but yeah they were great times.

[00:02:08] Joseph Michelli: You know, I really am glad to be here. This is not, you know, me joining some host I've never heard of before. I am truly committed to try to help illuminate whatever topic we're gonna talk about with your audience today.

[00:02:39] Jason S. Bradshaw: Now we'll get to some good news or some new news that your book, your next book, which is bound to be another bestseller that's coming out later in the year in May. We'll get to that shortly.

[00:03:11] Joseph Michelli: Oh yeah, I had just left being a clinical psychologist, so I was working one-on-one with individuals trying to help them in a healthcare setting at Penrose St. Francis Healthcare System. I was promoted or volunteered into trying to help with organizational development between the Seventh Day Adventist and the Catholics as they merged their healthcare systems. And I was charged with elevating customer service or patient service. We didn't call it experience at the time. And so I went out, I researched how we could be consistent in executing with a flow, a template of interactions, and literally came up with a script of what every doctor or nurse in the hospital is supposed to say in every interaction. And I was amazed that nobody seemed to use the script. It was a true phenomena that humans didn't like to be told how to relate to other people in social interactions. It was such an abysmal, top down, tone deaf approach. I've probably made every mistake in the book over the course of my career, but what I do know now, is it starts with listening. It starts with listening with your team members. It starts with listening with the customers. It starts with helping your team members listen to the customers. And yeah, we did everything wrong and there's a place for standardization or some key points and talking points and different interactions, but you can't script a human interaction and you can't microwave customer experience change.

[00:04:33] Jason S. Bradshaw: I think we're all probably guilty of that sort of approach at some point in our career for various reasons.

[00:04:53] Jason S. Bradshaw: What created the movement or the move from service to experience, do you think?

[00:05:07] Joseph Michelli: You've gotta think about the entire setting of a stage, right? All of the backstage, the emotions that you want to evoke in the person sitting in the front row. So I think that was the beginning and they made a business case too, and they were suggesting that our society had moved, from an industrial age into a service space.

[00:05:35] Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah. I remember that work by Joe Pine and his colleague, and it certainly helped shape some of my early work. In fact, I took a statement out of his book and turned it into an interview question, and everyone was always puzzled what I was doing. And I was like, I actually just wanna know if they can think on their feet.

[00:05:51] Jason S. Bradshaw: Like the answer doesn't matter so much. It matters whether they can connect the dots, because in front of a customer, you have to be confident regardless of what's being thrown at you.

[00:06:05] Jason S. Bradshaw: Going from those learnings, you continued your journey of working with different brands over the years, and you've written about how they can create emotionally engaging experiences, or the ones that do create emotionally engaging experiences are the ones that win.

[00:06:27] Joseph Michelli: Yeah I remember, and it's very similar to an experience that Howard Schultz the CEO of Starbucks told me, happened to him, but they were very similar. But for me, I was dining at a restaurant. It was in Asia. I was in Singapore. I had just this fabulous, experience at dinner, and then all of a sudden I noticed that the owner of the restaurant not only had been very attentive during the meal, but he actually opened the door and he walked me out to my car. I'm like, wow.

[00:07:08] Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah.

[00:07:17] Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah, the intentionality that the experience is, got that full 360 experience, from the moment you arrive to the moment that you inevitably have to leave.

[00:07:35] Jason S. Bradshaw: What's something that's completely surprised you when you've got behind the scenes of those iconic brands?

[00:07:54] Joseph Michelli: The leaders who run these brands have a heart for creating value for the people they serve and encouraging them to create value for the people they serve. It's pretty much that.

[00:08:14] Jason S. Bradshaw: Yes.

[00:08:38] Joseph Michelli: And then you'll take a very buttoned up leader like Simon Cooper, who was then the General Manager of The Ritz Carlton when I worked with him, and very much buttoned up and polished and not particularly emotionally effusive.

[00:08:56] Joseph Michelli: So my point is just be yourself as a leader, but champion a common theme that the way we win in the marketplace is not only by executing great products, but delivering them in ways that are emotionally resonant with the people that we serve.

[00:09:26] Jason S. Bradshaw: I remember many years ago, now be something like 20 years ago, I actually toured Zappos when they were at Henderson.

[00:10:03] Joseph Michelli: So much for building rapport, right? All the things they teach you in Communication 101. That was not Tony, but he was incredibly visionary.

[00:10:25] Joseph Michelli: Yeah.

[00:10:28] Joseph Michelli: Yeah. I've been blessed to work with brands that I think have had a reputation, and some of them in a consulting role and other times just being able to be a spokesperson for them. But I've really been blessed to be inside of those great brands.

[00:11:00] Joseph Michelli: Those are normally my efforts and occasionally I'll vary. Zappos was a little bit on the edge of whether it had a global footprint because in Australia for example, you can't use the brand per se. But reputationally, you're gonna read about it in the, in Forbes or whatever it was at the time.

[00:11:23] Jason S. Bradshaw: I always get challenged. You've talked about, a handful or you've referenced to handful of leaders and their diversity of their approach, but their commonality, their share performance, their profit performance. Some of them were privately traded at various times. It is phenomenal. No one can debate it. And the thing is, it's sustained. It's not, we're up this year, we're down the next. Yet we see other leaders out there. I won't name them, but others leaders out there that just focus on the bottom line, and we do see their profits go up and down so often. Why do you think in 2025, we still are having this conversation, shall we say? I was gonna say argument with C-Suite executives around the importance of long-term investment in customer and employee experience.

[00:12:27] Joseph Michelli: We're not patient with anything. And that urgency of everything has caused people to take shortcuts. And, I think automation, for example, is a great shortcut in a lot of applications. Like it is a gift unto itself. Self-serve is amazing. But when I was in Australia for example, it was almost as a person from the US at times, I felt like everything was self-serve. I'd sit down in a restaurant, I had to get my QR code out. There was a dearth of humans who gave a damn about my existence. But there was really cool technology that facilitated and expedited a lot of the experience. And I think you just have to find this balance of patience, and using people to help you elevate experiences above your technology. That's my answer. And I think there are a lot of people who just want the short term results that they can get from cutting down headcount taking the 800 number off of the website, not having a contact center that you can ever get a hold of any human being.

[00:13:40] Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah.

[00:13:42] Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah. And if they don't, they will quickly enough.

[00:14:01] Joseph Michelli: Yeah.

[00:14:04] Jason S. Bradshaw: Nothing says you're valuable when, as a customer, when they just remove service because you don't spend enough with them.

[00:14:52] Jason S. Bradshaw: And the next sale actually comes from that service.

[00:14:56] Joseph Michelli: So let's assume you reached out to the contact center in Zappos because you couldn't find the product online. And let's say that I said to you, Jason, we don't have it, but I am gonna look in the inventory of shoes.com or whatever the competitor. And I found it there as best I can see in their inventory. It's not fully transparent, but I can see, and so I recommend you go and get it from them, the SKU. And, by the way, I'm just gonna send you an email right afterwards and I'm gonna give you a bounce back code for 20% off on your next purchase. Now if you look at bounce back codes, in general, their redemption is fairly low. But at Zappos, those codes were used something on the order of 60% of the time, which was like treble, industry standards.

[00:16:03] Jason S. Bradshaw: And my experience, personal experience with Zappos is that I ended up spending more money than I was going to the first time.

[00:16:17] Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah, phenomenal organization. A great example of measuring what matters most. And so often in contact centers we measure time to resolution, number of calls taken, things like that. How about the impact you had on the human that was calling?

[00:16:45] Joseph Michelli: It really is would you be willing to reach out to this person because they connected with you on such a level you'd want to have them on your sales far as your team, your service team and I really do think that's that kind of question that matters most.

[00:17:07] Joseph Michelli: Yeah. I would try to help the 10-year-old understand I care for you. Like I can make sure you have a place to sleep, and you have food, and I would care for you. And I could also care about you. Meaning that I could worry about whether you're happy, whether you're joyful, whether you're in pain. And the heart of customer experience is making sure I do both those things- that I care about you and your basic needs, and I also really care about what happens in your life and how you feel about it.

[00:17:45] Joseph Michelli: That was a dang hard question too, by the way. I just wanna be on the record that I got through that question.

[00:17:57] Jason S. Bradshaw: Let's dive into the new book- All Business is Personal: One Medical's Human-Centered, Technology Powered Approach to Customer Engagement.

[00:18:10] Joseph Michelli: Yeah, a minute ago I said I have to have an internationally recognizable brand, and all of a sudden I'm talking about this brand called One Medical. Let's just realize there's also the word Amazon that goes right before One Medical, and so maybe it makes it relevant in other markets whether it's Amazon web services or whatever you might be familiar with wherever you are in the world.

[00:18:53] Joseph Michelli: And so I got to take this journey fairly early. Now, before Amir, there was a doctor by the name of Tom Lee, Harvard trained, also trained at Stanford Business School. And this guy set up a transformative, disruptive brand that I wanted to tell the story of and how people like Amir took it beyond.

[00:19:27] Joseph Michelli: So early on in the genesis of One Medical, Tom was asking, why do we have to do that? You typically would have to sit in a waiting room for some period of time. You'd have to go get weighed, and then you'd have to go sit in an exam room for some considerable period of time. Why do we have to have a double waiting area? Do we have to weigh every patient every time? If it's not even a relevant variable, why are we putting 'em through this emotional strange step? Lots of questions. Why does all the furniture look like it came from a bad Ikea experience?

[00:20:40] Joseph Michelli: So let's go back to the Gilmore-Pine days when they said if you create a really great experience, people will pay to have it done. Just pay to get in the stage show and people paid a membership fee, kind of concierge medicine, but not really. Concierge medicine's expensive and you get your own doctor, and this was just merely being able to access the app and the accessibility of One Medical. Your insurance still was billed for the actual clinical care. So the message I'm trying to get here is this was such a way to think about what are the pain points that you have? Stop thinking about the way the industry has always done it, and let's start optimizing an ideal experience and then let's develop technology if we need it, human solutions if we need it, processes if we need it, to bridge the gap between what we know we could deliver if we just started again instead of iteratively trying to rectify this Frankenstein monster of a thing that we wanna make prettier.

[00:22:01] Joseph Michelli: And their NPS is just, world class. I mean it's

[00:22:03] Jason S. Bradshaw: Of course,

[00:22:04] Jason S. Bradshaw: yeah.

[00:22:52] Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah. You're doing something right when Amazon comes along with a checkbook that size.

[00:23:07] Joseph Michelli: Yeah I hope it comes down to, you have to know what you want people to feel in every single interaction, every time, no excuses. And if you haven't defined that, then you've got a whole bunch of people in your organization doing their best to have some positive feeling state for the customer, but it's not gonna be a branded customer experience, and you're not gonna execute it in an aligned fashion. I hope that's what they get from the book. And then very specifically, how do they go about creating that, both in terms of the vision of it and the articulation of it, and then the execution that travels out through the experience of the customer?

[00:23:51] Jason S. Bradshaw: So was there a particular story or interview that you took during the process of writing the book that really shaped your thinking and perhaps even changed your thinking around customer experience in 2025?

[00:24:26] Joseph Michelli: He went back to his primary care physician at One Medical. They took the time, helped him explain it. They took responsibility for helping him navigate healthcare. He not only navigated it well, adapted well from the brain tumor. Now he quit his job. He travels in an RV around the country. He is really living the off the grid life of what really matters in relationships but he also has started his own group to help young people who have brain tumors.

[00:25:10] Joseph Michelli: So for me, I just think you never know when you serve well, how far that travels.

[00:25:32] Joseph Michelli: That AI can give you personalization, but it takes people to really make it personal. And I think that's important to make a distinction between the personalizing that we get from big data. But, to really say thank you, Jason, for this interview, I don't have any AI that can do it.

[00:26:38] Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah. Quite powerful. I think that you are a hundred percent on the mark. Personalization can happen faster than ever through AI, but the personality of personalization- the heart of personalization- still requires that human. And sure, you might say there's no human in an email, in a marketing message, but at some point that customer's going to connect with a human. And if the human and the AI aren't aligned. If the human isn't better than the AI yet delivering that personalization, we're gonna have some problems because brands are built outta trust, and trust comes from consistency.

[00:27:24] Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah. So for listeners or people watching along on YouTube, what's that one small shift that they could make today as soon as they finish listening to this episode, that would have an outsized impact on employee and customer experience?

[00:28:14] Jason S. Bradshaw: Make it absolutely clear to your teams on how you want customers to feel.

[00:28:26] Joseph Michelli: You owe me a trip here to the United States so we can revisit our old memories here.

[00:28:33] Jason S. Bradshaw: Now, Joseph's reminded us of unforgettable experiences don't come from big budgets. They come from big hearts.

[00:28:47] Jason S. Bradshaw: And definitely remember to check out Joseph Michelli's latest book- All Business Is Personal: One Medical's Human-Centered, Technology-Powered Approach to Customer Engagement. Available everywhere great books are sold.

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