Episode first aired in Dec 2025. The actionable recommendations apply even more today!

What's the best leadership advice you've ever received or given?

For her 200th episode of Doing CX Right, host Stacy Sherman shares a curated collection of the most memorable and actionable leadership wisdom from the show's renowned guests. Consider this a masterclass in leading with influence, featuring insight you can apply immediately to boost both your business growth and your personal development.

You'll hear powerful lessons from leaders like Seth Godin, Daniel Pink, Jeanne Bliss, Fred Reichheld, Shep Hyken, Daniel Goleman, Mark Schaefer, and many others. Their brief insights here reveal the advice that shaped their success and their approach to supporting every person on their team.

Inside this special episode, you'll gain

• The crucial mindset shift that catalyzed their biggest career growth.
• The essential principles they pass on to rising talent.
• The game-changing perspective they wish they had adopted sooner.
• The practical steps they use daily to create a supportive team environment.

There are countless more actionable strategies shared beyond this show! While this episode is packed with wisdom, the full stories and in-depth advice are in the past 199 shows. Listen and take notes, as you'll find incredible wisdom you can apply today. Also, subscribe on your favorite channel to get notified of NEW episodes that will give you even MORE strategies to elevate your business and personal career too!

This episode is also available to watch on YouTube.

Listed in the order they appear so you can follow the voices as you listen.

Seth Godin • Shep Hyken • Daniel Pink • Wally Feresten • Jay Baer • Fred Reichheld • Rob Markey • Bob Burg • Greg McKeown • Eileen Brenner • Sam Brenner • David Avrin • Mark Sanborn • Brittany Hodak • Joe Calloway • David Singer • Jeannie Walters • Colin Shaw • Kerry Bodine • Jeanne Bliss • Lisa Ford • Mark Schaefer • Joe Pine • Bill Price • Katie Webb • Brian Elliott • Scott McKain • Jackie Yeaney • Josh Bersin • Tiffani Bova • Wendy Smith • Stephen Shedletzky • Sylvie di Giusto • Bill Staikos • Neal Schaffer • Daniel Goleman • Patrick McCullough • Dennis Snow • Neil Hoyne • Simon T. Bailey • Mauro Porcini • Laurie Guest • Cindy Gallop • Zach Picon • Nir Eyal • Sean Albertson • Neal Topf • David Allen • Blake Morgan • Marcey Rader • Michael B. White • Max Ball • David Wachs • Sean Hawkins • Jacqui Brassey • Michael Brenner • Sharon Weinstein • Miya Gray • Joel Block • Mark Stern • Catherine Sugarbroad • Dave Seaton • Jon Picoult • Greg Kihlström • Eric Skeens • Ryan Estis • Ian Golding • Jeff Toister • Matt Dixon • Annette Franz • Stan Phelps • Jim Tincher • Joey Coleman • Dan Gingiss • Miika Mäkitalo • Greg Melia

Download The Distinctive Business Advantage research report to discover exactly what top-performing companies are doing to drive customer loyalty and sustainable growth, and what you can do as well.

Bring these insights to your company.

Stacy Sherman is available to present the findings and proven strategies at your events, workshops, podcasts, and training sessions. Contact her now.

Companies often focus on designing logical, frictionless transactions, but customers base their loyalty on emotion. This fundamental disconnect is driving customer loss. The latest data proves it, and this episode reveals exactly what to do to shift the trend at your workplace.

Across the U.S., customer experience scores recently hit historic lows after four straight years of decline. While 2026 shows a marginal increase, only 26 percent of companies have actually made progress, with the vast majority remaining completely flat. Forrester's Customer Experience Research Leader, Rick Parrish, joins Stacy Sherman to explain the underlying reasons behind this multi-year decline. They discuss what the top-performing companies are doing differently and how to use concrete data to convince budget holders to fund crucial CX initiatives.

Inside this episode, you will learn:

• The Frictionless Trap: Why making an interaction incredibly "easy" still won't guarantee your customers come back.
• The "Delight" Backfire: Why the popular goal of surprising and delighting your customers is usually the wrong target, and which subtle emotions you should be designing for instead.
• Creepy vs. Helpful: The single "inside-out" mistake executives make that instantly turns a personalized experience into a liability.
• The ROI Paradox: The bizarre reason leadership teams routinely dismantle CX programs that are actively generating a positive ROI.
• The Reporting Structure Reality: What a year-long study reveals about where CX leaders actually get the most done and why the most coveted seat in the C-suite can actually delay your progress.
• Scaling the Voice of the Customer: An emerging technological approach to qualitative research that lets you multiply your customer listening without adding a single new staff member.

Download The Distinctive Business Advantage research report to discover exactly what top-performing companies are doing to drive customer loyalty and sustainable growth, and what you can do as well.

Bring these insights to your company.

Stacy Sherman is available to present the findings and proven strategies at your events, workshops, podcasts, and training sessions. Contact her now.

Did you know there's an international Customer Experience (CX) Day and Customer Service Week dedicated to celebrating the people who create great experiences? Many companies overlook them or treat them as simple gestures, but they can be powerful opportunities to unite teams, build loyalty, and strengthen company culture through meaningful, practical actions.

In this episode of Doing CX Right®, Stacy Sherman shares 8 ways to turn these events into year-round habits that keep employees engaged and customers coming back. And even if you're hearing this episode after CX Day or Customer Service Week, the lessons still apply because appreciation and connection must not end when the calendar says the celebration is over.

Stacy speaks from experience. When she introduced these events to companies that had never celebrated them before, what started as a small initiative quickly grew into an annual tradition. Employees who once felt isolated began to see their work as part of a much bigger mission.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN:

• How to unite every department around the customer, not only frontline teams
• Low-cost ways to make employees feel recognized and valued
• How to turn customer stories and feedback into loyalty that lasts all year

Download The Distinctive Business Advantage research report to discover exactly what top-performing companies are doing to drive customer loyalty and sustainable growth, and what you can do as well.

Bring these insights to your company.

Stacy Sherman is available to present the findings and proven strategies at your events, workshops, podcasts, and training sessions. Contact her now.

John Sileo lost his entire net worth and software business after his partner stole his identity, a devastating betrayal that inspired the Hollywood movie Identity Thief. While I sat in an audience of 1,000 people, he accessed my phone in under three minutes, proving how quickly human psychology can be manipulated to bypass security defenses.

When protection fails, or identity verification feels painful, people experience immediate anxiety, fear, and frustration. How clients feel during these vulnerable moments defines their total impression of your brand. Preserving personal details is not a back-office technical task; it is the highest-stakes emotional experience in the entire customer journey.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN

• The $25 Million AI Deepfake: How criminals are cloning executives' faces and voices on live video calls to trick employees into wiring millions of dollars.

• The $5 Billion Human Error: The single forgotten button that caused the massive UnitedHealthcare breach, and why your biggest threat isn't technology—it's your people.

• The Airplane Hacker: Why opening your laptop in an aisle seat allows the row behind you to zoom in and steal your passwords and corporate spreadsheets.

• The "BS Reflex": The one critical instinct only 1 in 1,000 companies teach their customer service teams that stops hackers in their tracks.

• The Cybersecurity Data Trap: Why everything you type into AI platforms is being indexed, and the default privacy settings you must change today.

TIMESTAMPS

• 0:35 The Identity Theft Story That Inspired a Movie
• 1:12 Framed by a Best Friend: The Insider Betrayal
• 3:13 Default AI Settings and Data Exposure Risks
• 4:41 Impersonation Scams and Live Video Deepfakes
• 6:29 Doing CX Right®: Why Safety and Customer Feelings Are Connected
• 9:29 Corporate Breaches: Human Decisions vs System Failures
• 13:27 Security Protocols: Protecting Clients Without Creating Frustration
• 17:04 Customer Anxiety: Managing Risk to Prevent Flight
• 19:30 Stage Demonstration: Accessing My Phone in 180 Seconds
• 23:00 Instant Image Manipulation and Fake Media
• 25:26 The Verification Reflex for Customer Service Teams
• 26:57 Visual Privacy and Travel Security Risks
• 31:08 The File Metadata That Proved Innocence
• 34:55 Practical Daily Defense and Values-Based Leadership

Download The Distinctive Business Advantage research report to discover exactly what top-performing companies are doing to drive customer loyalty and sustainable growth, and what you can do as well.

Bring these insights to your company.

Stacy Sherman is available to present the findings and proven strategies at your events, workshops, podcasts, and training sessions. Contact her now.

Episode first aired in 2022. The actionable recommendations apply even more today!

Being frictionless has become a strategic necessity. What does frictionless even mean? Why should you care? And, what are simple steps to remove customer pain points and get to a frictionless state based on learnings from the most reputable brands?

In this replay episode of Doing CX Right℠, Stacy Sherman and author Bill Price, answer these questions and share key principles to improve experiences for everyone who interacts with your brand. In fact, customer loyalty depends on it.

• How to separate first-time issues from repeat contacts (snowballs) by asking one question during live calls and chat sessions.
• How to assign each customer contact reason to the department that caused it and close the loop with a fix and a customer update.
• How to map journeys across website, app, chatbot, IVR, store, and contact center to expose handoffs that create delays and repeat questions.
• How to preempt customer frustration by sending two-way updates before customers need to chase status on delays, price changes, or shipment issues.
• How to turn cancellation requests into root-cause analysis by asking why, recording patterns, and fixing the underlying process for other customers.

Download The Distinctive Business Advantage research report to discover exactly what top-performing companies are doing to drive customer loyalty and sustainable growth, and what you can do as well.

Want Stacy Sherman to bring these findings to your conference or company event? Schedule a call.

New articles and podcast episodes every week. Subscribe to the Doing CX Right® newsletter.

Companies are investing more in customer experience than ever before, yet many still struggle to retain customers and win new ones. That contradiction led me to ask a simple question: What is driving customer decisions today, and how can companies gain a sustainable competitive advantage?

To answer it, I commissioned new research with Jason Ten-Pow of ONR EDGE, and this special Doing CX Right® episode is its debut. We compare how companies design customer experiences today with what customers say they actually want. The gap between the two surprised us both.

In this conversation, you'll discover key insights from the research, the structural changes reshaping customer expectations, how leading companies are adapting, and practical steps your company can take to improve loyalty and business performance.

• How many positive emotional experiences it takes to rebuild customer loyalty after one negative experience
• What replaces price as the primary driver in customer buying decisions today
• Which new customer loyalty metric reveals at-risk customers before they leave, so you can intervene early (hint: not NPS or CSAT)
• Why AI recommends your competitors based on customer emotion data you can control but aren't managing
• What actionable steps to implement at your workplace immediately to boost results the right way
• What combination of customer feedback sources exposes the loyalty signals you're currently overlooking, and much more!

Download The Distinctive Business Advantage research report to discover exactly what top-performing companies are doing to drive customer loyalty and sustainable growth, and what you can do as well.

Want to bring these findings to your conference or company event? Contact Stacy Sherman

Get notified of new articles and podcast episodes. Subscribe to the Doing CX Right® newsletter.

This podcast was previously recorded in 2022. The actionable recommendations apply even more today!

Can you imagine employees and customers loving your brand so much that they'd consider or actually get a tattoo of the company logo? Hard Rock Cafe has documented cases of this happening among both staff and guests, and it is not a marketing stunt. It is the result of a specific, repeatable approach to culture and customer experience that Jim Knight breaks down on this episode of Doing CX Right with Stacy Sherman.

This episode explores what he calls a tattoo-worthy brand and why that level of loyalty forms only when employees and customers feel a personal connection strong enough to mark it permanently. They also make a point directly relevant to any listener in this audience, regardless of title: "You may not be an executive, and you may or may not have direct reports. Yet, you have the power to be a major influencer of your organization's culture, lighting it up and making it rock from the inside out." The conversation that follows covers what leaders and individual employees must do day to day to build that level of connection on their own teams, including a specific method Stacy shares for measuring employee and customer satisfaction side by side.

• How to redesign your interview process so multiple leaders ask different questions across multiple rounds instead of relying on one conversation to judge fit.
• Why customer experience results need an internal satisfaction score for employees, not only an external score for customers, and how to connect the two at the local office level.
• How to write job descriptions and performance conversations so customer experience expectations are stated up front instead of discovered later during a performance appraisal.
• Where to look for hiring candidates outside your own industry, including tour guides, improv actors, and people with nontraditional work backgrounds who bring adaptability to customer facing roles.
• Why replacing annual performance appraisals with monthly one on one conversations keeps employees clear on what they are accountable for before a survey score arrives.

Download The Distinctive Business Advantage research report to discover exactly what top-performing companies are doing to drive customer loyalty and sustainable growth, and what you can do as well.

Want to bring these findings to your conference or company event? Contact Stacy Sherman

Get notified of new articles and podcast episodes. Subscribe to the Doing CX Right® newsletter.

Previously recorded in 2023. The actionable recommendations apply even more today!

Customer experience teams are deploying chatbots and AI assistants earlier in the service journey because leadership wants faster resolution and lower cost per contact. That shifts more first interactions to automated flows. Customers are encountering decision-tree prompts instead of human conversation. That produces frustration and forgettable moments instead of loyalty-building moments. This episode addresses that operating pattern with a clear alternative: design AI around emotion and memory, not just efficiency.

The conversation features Brian Solis, VP of Global Innovation at Salesforce, a digital anthropologist and futurist who has advised thousands of startups and enterprise organizations on innovation and transformation. He brings a human-centered lens to AI, automation, and the future of work, and he shares how leaders can use technology to build better relationships, better experiences, and better business models without losing the human element.

• Replace "cheap automation" with human-centered design by mapping each AI touchpoint to an intended emotional reaction and a memorable moment.
• Close the skills gap for the jobs of the future by investing in soft skills such as creativity, listening, critical thinking, empathy, and leadership.
• Use AI to reimagine the customer journey and touchpoints, not just to cut cost, so relationships deepen instead of thinning out.
• Protect creativity and deep work by rewiring daily habits to reduce distraction and restore flow.
• Run an "undercover boss" moment to feel the customer and employee experience, then adjust processes so people feel understood and valued.

Download The Distinctive Business Advantage research report to discover exactly what top-performing companies are doing to drive customer loyalty and sustainable growth, and what you can do as well.

Want to bring these findings to your conference or company event? Contact Stacy Sherman

Get notified of new articles and podcast episodes. Subscribe to the Doing CX Right® newsletter.