All Business Is Personal: How Human Connection Wins in the Age of AI

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Welcome to this edition of Chats with Jason. I am, of course, your host, Jason Ayres Bradshaw. And this is the show that helps you transform the experience to transform your business. 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? Today's guest has spent his life pulling back the curtain on the world's most beloved brands. From the humble origins of Starbucks to the gold standard service of the Ritz Carlton to the radical hospitality of Airbnb. 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 Michelle is the author of nine 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. In this episode, we talk about leadership legacy in business and why the greatest customer experience starts with being human. This is a conversation you didn't know you needed with the one and only Dr. Joseph Micelli. Joseph, welcome to the show. Wow.

I'm still just trying to recover from that introduction and you missed out the most important thing. And I got to work with Jason when he was at Volkswagen leading the way on customer experience in Australia, so that was the thing you should have mentioned. The rest of us just puffery, I think.

Do you realize it is nine 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.

Yeah. And one of my favorite books is It's all about the cx. By the way, 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'm truly committed to try to help illuminate whatever topic we're going to talk about with your audience today.

Yeah, I appreciate it, Joseph. You've always been so generous with your time. And I should mention that not only have you spoken as a keynote presenter at events for me, you've also held small sessions with my team to help guide them on their journey. I've experienced both ends of the prison where the consultant Joseph and the keynote speaker. 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. But first I wanted to ask Joseph, you've studied and told the stories of legendary brands. I think we originally connected over your work with Mercedes Benz and the Ritz Carlton. But can you share a personal story of failure or challenge early in your career that shaped your perspective on customer experience? Oh, yeah.

I 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 Adventists 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, 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 phenomenon 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 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. There's a place for standardization or some key points and talking points in different interactions, but you can't script a human interaction and you can't microwave customer experience change. And I try to do both.

I think we're all probably guilty of that sort of approach at some point in our career for various reasons. Interesting enough, you touched on something that we don't talk about enough. Years ago, when I can remember when I first started my career, and as you just mentioned, we didn't talk about the experience. We talked about the transaction, the customer service, the patient service, what created the movement or the move from service to experience.

Do you think Joe Pine and Gilmore were the ones in the experience economy who really started to say, look, you got to stage an experience. You're not just trying to deliver service or a transaction. You've got to 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 phase. And I think that got us talking about the experience economy over a service economy, and I think that got us moving in the direction that we are today.

Yeah, I remember that work by Joe Pyne 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 want to know if they can think on their feet. 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. Great. And I completely agree that the Experience Economy by Joe Pyne and his colleague was definitely a shaper in the industry. 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. Can you tell us about a time that you personally felt truly cared for as a customer and why that moment has stuck with you to this day?

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're 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 up to my car. I'm like, wow. It seemed like the restaurant was pretty full. He got a day job. But there was a sense of just really wanting to make sure I was okay. And. And Singapore is not an unsafe place. You could pretty much get to your car and not think anything bad's going to happen to you. But there's a sense of tucking you into the closure of the interaction at a level that just was oddly wonderful. And so I tell the story today that just a few extra steps and it made a difference.

Yeah. The intentionality of the experience is that full 360 experience from the moment you arrive to the moment that you inevitably have to leave. So you've worked with the who's who of business. Certainly companies Like Airbnb and Starbucks and others. What's something that's completely surprised you when you've got behind the scenes of those iconic brands?

I think that the leaders are so different. Like, you think every one of these brands is led by some charismatic leader who just says, take this hill. I'm so eloquent. We're going to be the year of the customer or something. 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. And their styles are so different. So let's take a Tony Hsieh, rest his soul from Zappos, who I worked with for a long time. I've quoted him in multiple books. He was in my Stronger Through Adversity book, as were you, I think. Yes, during the pandemic and right before in his tragic death. But Tony was the most introverted, uncomfortable in social interaction, really quiet, super thinker. He's a lot of fun when you got to know him, but generally not super comfortable in a outgoing kind of way. And yet he led one of the most novel customer experience brands out there. And then you'll take a very buttoned up leader like Simon Cooper was then the general manager of the Ritz Carlton when I worked with them, and very much buttoned up and polished and not particularly emotionally effusive. And then you take a Howard Schultz, who I just think is like one of my favorite people in the way he had such high emotional intelligence. 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.

Yeah, it's interesting that you share the diversity of the leadership, yet the commonality that they're all passionate about the experience that they deliver. And some have more focus on their employees than customers and some just love on both. I remember many years ago now, be something like 20 years ago, actually two in Zappos, when they were at Henderson before they moved downtown la, downtown Vegas, I should say. And then just shortly after they'd moved downtown Vegas, I had the pleasure of meeting Tony Hsieh. And yeah, I understand what you say about awkward in social situations, and I'm guilty of this too. We'll ask, how's the weather? What's the trip like? I think his opening question was one that was about uncovering differences in customer experience, trying to learn and genuinely being interested A great man and someone that we lost too early.

So much for building rapport, right? All the things they teach you and Communication 101, that was not Tony, but he was incredibly visionary.

Yeah, yeah. And you can see that. Like when he asked the question, he didn't ask it just to be awkward, he asked it because he was genuinely curious about what others were doing and how that ultimately I'm sure could help him or how he could help them.

Yeah.

Interesting how our worlds have collided, I would say.

Yeah. I've been blessed to work with brands that I think have had a reputation and some of them a consulting role and other times just being able to be a spokesperson for them. But. But I've really been blessed to be inside of those great brands just like you. I've worked with so many other companies that don't make it into my books, some of whom have much better stories to tell. It's just that there's no global recognition of the brand. Part of my journey in writing any book is to have a brand that treats its people well and treats its customers well and has a global footprint. Those are normally my efforts and occasionally I'll vary. Zappos is 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 going to read about it in the Forbes or whatever it was at the time.

Yeah, absolutely. A brand that, like you said, you can't get Zappos in Australia, but I think anyone, at least any CX professional has definitely heard of them. You always get challenged. You've talked about a handful or you've referenced a 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, 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, won't name them, but other 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 going to say argument with C suite executives around the importance of long term investment in customer and employee experience.

I think it's. In some ways it's gotten worse. I think they know now like this is a differentiator and it drives long term success. The reality is very few people have an Attention span of a nat. Right. So the idea that we will be patient with money is, is just not there. We're not patient with anything. And that urgency of everything has caused people to take shortcuts and 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. All those are efficiencies that do support a bottom line for a period of time, but they make you more of a commodity and more of a faceless, nameless, amorphous entity for which loyalty is really hard to conjure up because the other guy's got the same app and the same technology. Pretty much a parody.

Yeah. And if they don't, they will quickly enough.

Yeah.

And it's interesting, you talk about taking the 800 number down in one of the businesses I'm involved in, one of Australia's major banks. Someone that they interact with every single day. And they've literally removed the opportunity for their teams to call and speak to a human because they don't do enough business with them. Nothing says you're valuable as a customer when they just remove service because you don't spend enough with them and just.

Go to the other side. Let's go back to Zappos again. That contact center, Tony would say this is our profit center. The team is called the customer loyalty team. They're not called a contact center. The notion that I can call somebody who really listened to me, will talk to me, will answer any question, who will give me suggestions beyond the shoes, who will tell me if we don't have the shoes in stock, I'll go try to find them at our competitor so that you can get them in time for your need. All of that stuff was considered to be a profit center that Drove loyalty. Not viewed as a cost center that was servicing nagging, complaining, whining customers. Which is where I think a lot of people have viewed customers like this annoyance that calls me for service after I made my money and the next.

Sale actually comes from that service.

Here's, here's one for you, Jason. This is, I think, mind blowing. 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 going to 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. Here's the sku. And by the way, I'm just going to send you an email right afterwards and I'm going to give you a bounce back code for 20% off 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. And the point was really weird to me because in a way I just shopped you and it's kind of like taking milk out of your refrigerator and finding out it's spoiled and then you put it back in to drink another day for a 20% coupon. There's something wrong about that. Why would I trust you? You didn't have the product the first place. But the point was that's the way it works, really. You care more about me than the sale. So I'm going to reciprocate by realizing that you're going to take care of me in the next transaction.

And my experience, personal experience with SEPA is I ended up spending more money than I was going to the first time. I tested that contact center on everything that was in the book, everything that they were known for. They even helped me with not booking my hotel, but choosing my hotel when I visited them. 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?

Yeah, did I form a personal emotional connection? A peck. That was a big concept. And then was that person willing to answer a question like this? How likely are you, if you are in a service business, you would want to hire our person? Away from us. Think about that. It really is. Would you be willing to reach out to this person because they connected with you on such a level? You want to have them on your salesforce, your team, your service team? And I really do think that's that kind of question that matters most.

Yeah, absolutely. So, Joseph, if you had to explain the heart of unforgettable customer experience to a 10 year old, how would you put it?

Yeah, I would try to help the 10 year old understand that I can 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.

Fantastic explanation of customer experience.

That was a dang hard question too, by the way. I just want to be on the record that I. I got through that question.

You did get through that question. And you didn't get any advance notice about the question. So much fire already. Let's dive into the new book, All Business Is Personal. One Medical's human centered technology powered approach to customer engagement. What was the spark behind the book and why is now the right time for it to come out?

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. The reason that this book came to be is I'd worked with UCLA Health Systems and an incredible leader, David Feinberg there and his second in command, Amir Rubin. I was a consultant for them there and. And then Amir went on to Stanford Medical center and then on ultimately to One Medical. And I'm thinking, why did Amir leave Stanford and then end up at a place called One Medical? And then Amir calls me and says, joseph, hey, let me explain to you what's going on over here, One Medical. And I really could use you to come over here and help us. And so I got to take this journey fairly early. Now, before Amir 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. So in a nutshell, in the United States, to get an appointment with a primary care physician, you had to call in and get that appointment, and some receptionist would have to look through the schedule and they would get that appointment for you. And seemed like it took too long, and there's a lot of effort on your part to get seen. 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 them through this emotional strain? Step? Lots of questions. Why does all the furniture look like it came from a bad IKEA experience? Like what? Why? And so this why question caused him to redesign. And they were based out of the Silicon Valley, so they were using technologists to develop their own technology. So the patients who went to one medical could get their appointments via an app. They could get all their medical records via an app. The physicians were using electronic medical record that they created proprietarily. They were saving the physician's time. Physicians would walk out from the treatment area to the waiting room. Patients were seen 97% of the time within three minutes of their scheduled appointment, walk directly into the exam room. No double waiting. All these things were redesigned, and it was so effective that they could charge an admission fee. 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 is 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 want to make prettier.

Yeah. I love that it was the curiosity asking of the why constantly around. Why have we, the industry, always done it this way? And one of the results that you shared, 97% of the time, patients are seen within three minutes of their appointment time.

Yeah.

I think that would be even hard to beat for some concierge physicians out there.

And their NPS is just world class. I mean, it's crazy, right? Yeah. And members, referred members and they did not have the budget. This is not a marketing heavy organization. It had to rely on word of mouth. It had to get a beachhead in San Francisco and then concentrically build beachheads in other cities and use that word of mouth approach. You go through all that and then Amazon buys them for $4 billion. One of the biggest purchases, the only bigger purchase Amazon has ever made to that point was the Whole Foods purchase. So clearly it had something Amazon wants. Now can Amazon deliver against it? Will they continue to maintain the human centered approach? They certainly have the technology efficiencies, Right? That's to be determined. That's the next chapter. But I really wanted to tell the story of what takes a startup to a point where somebody's willing to pay $4 billion for it in just over a decade.

Yeah. You're doing something right when Amazon comes along with a checkbook that size. Yeah. So if someone's read the book, what's one life changing idea from the book that you would love them to take away? 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 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 going to be a branded customer experience and you're not going to 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, the articulation of it, and then the execution that travels out through the experience of the customer.

I love that. Getting people aligned on how you want people to feel from the experience, not necessarily the nuts and bolts all the way along.

Yeah.

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. Yeah.

In this book I talked to a guy who, very young person who had a brain tumor, very unusual. He talked to me about his symptoms, the experience of the brain tumor, his early announcement of it through this doctor and he was traveling on vacation at the time and just how frightened, how scared, how unwell he felt about it all. 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, has adapted well from the brain tumor. Now he quit his job, he travels in an RV around the country, 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. And I think the point is when we take the time, not only help serve people in the now, but help them navigate the journey through a brand or in a sector, we often have concentric impact because they sometimes go on and amplify that through their own voice and their own service in the community. So for me, I just think you never know when you serve well, how far that travels.

Yeah, powerful. So if there was one story or one quote or one idea from the new book that went viral tomorrow, shared across social media, boardrooms and baristas alike, would you want it to be 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 and I honestly tell you, I adore you, I have huge respect for you and I am grateful for the time. And if you have any AI that sells you that from the heart, like I feel it ahead of anything that we're seeing in the universe right now, it may very know very well have heard every one of your podcasts have a script, know what words to use based on the words that seem to resonate most. The words you use. I can do all the NLP AI make you feel like I gotcha, gotcha. And I can use all those tools for personalizing this. But to really tell you how much you mean to me and my gratitude, I think you need a person. So I hope we make a distinction between personalization and the personal care we can deliver.

Yeah, quite powerful. I think that you're 100% 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 is 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 at delivering that personalization, we're going to have some problems. Because brands are built out of trust, and trust comes from consistency. Yeah.

Don't let your products down. Don't let your AI down. Be bigger than all of it when it comes to being a human.

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?

I think it really is going back to what do you want every single person to feel that you interact with with every time? And if you're doing it by yourself in a solopreneurship, then it's easy. If not, I'd have that conversation with my team and I would try to say, if this is our mission, if we lived our mission, what would people feel like? Our mission tells us what we're aspiring to achieve. But if we achieved it, how would our customers feel? I think we just shifted that little bit and had a meaningful conversation. I call it a way we serve statement. If we defined our way we serve statement, we'd be a heck of a lot farther along in an aligned, differentiated customer experience.

Make it absolutely clear to your teams on how you want customers to feel. Joseph, it has been my absolute honor and pleasure as always to catch up with you. But to have you on the show.

Today, you owe me a trip here to the United States so we can revisit our old memories here.

Absolutely. I can't wait. Now, Joseph's reminded us of unforgettable experiences don't come from big budgets, they come from big hearts. If this episode moved you, please give us a thumbs up, a five star review, and importantly, share it with someone who needs it. And definitely remember to check out Joseph Micelli's latest book, All Businesses Personal One Medical's Human Centered Technology Powered approach to Customer engagement. Available everywhere, great books are sold. I'm Jason Espretta and until next time, remember, the experience is what your customers us remember.