Customer Experience University - Winning Loyalty & Engagement One Customer at a Time
Sep 25, 2026 · 10 min · 8 segments
The cheapest customer-experience strategy in your company is already on the payroll—and mostly ignored. Joseph Michelli unpacks Medallia/McKinsey research showing nearly 60% of frontline employees…
Joseph MichelliHost
You're about to spend a fortune on consultants, on analytic platforms, on a shiny new AI tool to figure out why your customers are frustrated.
And meanwhile, a person who can tell you the answer in about four minutes is clocking in for a shift right now, and nobody has asked them.
How did this happen? That's the quiet absurdity sitting at the center of many customer experience strategies.
They take the calls, they watch the faces, they hear the same complaint for the fortieth time this month, and they know precisely which broken policies cause it and exactly how to fix it.
They're your front line, and they're sitting on the most accurate, most current, least expensive customer experience research your company will ever have access to.
I've spent nearly four decades consulting inside of organizations famous for customer experience, some of whom I've written books about, including Starbucks, The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, Mercedes-Benz, Zappos, and Amazon One Medical.
It originates at the point of contact in the head of someone wearing your badge, and then it either gets surfaced or it gets buried.
I call that buried insight your payroll intelligence, the strategy you've already hired, already paid for, and mostly thrown away.
Let me give you the data because this isn't a feel-good platitude about valuing people.
About seventy percent of frontline employees said their leaders had made customer experience a top priority.
Nearly sixty percent of those same frontline employees believed their own ideas for improving the experience routinely went unheard.
Leadership has declared customer experience the mission, the people closest to the customer have the ideas to deliver it, and most of those ideas die somewhere in the gap between the floor and the top floor.
You're about to spend a fortune on consultants, on analytic platforms, on a shiny new AI tool to figure out why your customers are frustrated.
And meanwhile, a person who can tell you the answer in about four minutes is clocking in for a shift right now, and nobody has asked them.
How did this happen? That's the quiet absurdity sitting at the center of many customer experience strategies.
They take the calls, they watch the faces, they hear the same complaint for the fortieth time this month, and they know precisely which broken policies cause it and exactly how to fix it.
They're your front line, and they're sitting on the most accurate, most current, least expensive customer experience research your company will ever have access to.
I've spent nearly four decades consulting inside of organizations famous for customer experience, some of whom I've written books about, including Starbucks, The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, Mercedes-Benz, Zappos, and Amazon One Medical.
It originates at the point of contact in the head of someone wearing your badge, and then it either gets surfaced or it gets buried.
I call that buried insight your payroll intelligence, the strategy you've already hired, already paid for, and mostly thrown away.
Let me give you the data because this isn't a feel-good platitude about valuing people.
About seventy percent of frontline employees said their leaders had made customer experience a top priority.
Nearly sixty percent of those same frontline employees believed their own ideas for improving the experience routinely went unheard.
Leadership has declared customer experience the mission, the people closest to the customer have the ideas to deliver it, and most of those ideas die somewhere in the gap between the floor and the top floor.
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