Transforming customer experience (CX) doesn’t always require massive overhauls or multi-million-dollar investments. In fact, research shows that 73% of consumers say CX is a key factor in their purchasing decisions (PwC’s Experience is Everything), and companies with superior CX bring in 5.7 times more revenue than those lagging behind (Forrester Research). Sometimes, the most impactful improvements come from small, targeted actions.
To explore this idea, we spoke with Dan Gingiss, a leading CX thought leader and international keynote speaker. With experience at brands like McDonald’s, Discover, and Humana, Dan shares how small changes can lead to big wins in customer satisfaction and loyalty. For instance, businesses that prioritize even modest CX improvements can see customer retention rates increase by up to 42% (Bain & Company), proving that starting small can make a significant impact.
In this article, Dan reveals how businesses can leverage data, technology, and employee empowerment to enhance every touchpoint and create memorable customer journeys. Whether you’re just starting your CX strategy transformation or looking for quick wins, Dan’s insights offer a practical roadmap to success.
Dan Gingiss
Dan is an international keynote speaker and customer experience expert. Visit his website for more information.
Dan Gingiss’ path to becoming a CX expert
Q: Dan, you’ve worked with big brands like McDonald’s, Discover, and Humana. How did these experiences shape your approach to customer experience?
I learned so much about how consumers engage with large brands like the ones I worked at. At Discover, I was amazed to see so many customers say that they “love” their Discover Card; something I didn’t think was possible about a credit card. At Humana, it was about the emotion tied to one’s health and how there’s almost nothing more important. At McDonald’s, everything was super-sized (pun intended) because there were SO many customers, so the challenge was to make individual customers feel valued.
Learning from big brands
Q: What sparked your passion for customer experience, and how did it lead you to become an expert in the field?
It was pretty much by accident. I was a marketer for most of my career until the Chief Digital Officer at Discover recruited me to a role called Head of Digital Customer Experience. At the time, I barely knew what CX even was, much less how to “do” it. But I quickly learned the power of CX in terms of its impact on both customer satisfaction and bottom-line metrics. After that, I was sold. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Founding a CX consulting firm
Q: Since founding your consulting firm in January 2019, what’s a practical, low-cost strategy that’s really improved customer satisfaction?
Becoming a customer of your own business. Business leaders don’t spend enough time talking with real customers, so a shortcut is to become a customer themselves.
Overcoming resistance to technologies
Q: How do you help companies overcome resistance to new customer experience strategies or technologies?
I always focus on ideas that are simple, practical, and inexpensive. This gets past a lot of the pushback (including budgetary) and returns the focus to doing the little things right. I find that little things almost always add up to big things, and this method is far more approachable to people.
Customer experience doesn’t have to be a multi-year, multi-million dollar transformational project; it can just be a series of little things that add up to something bigger.
Training employees to be “The Experience Makers”
Q: What role does employee training play in customer experience, and how can companies ensure their staff consistently deliver great service?
Training every employee on your products and services is critical because you never know when they’ll get a question from a prospective customer – even at a cocktail party. So I always taught my teams to “know enough to be dangerous.”
It’s also important to empower every employee to be what I call The Experience Maker at their business. This means that they are allowed and encouraged to do right by a customer every time. They’ll never get in trouble for being customer-centric. This empowerment allows employees to be creative and to react in real-time to situations as they present themselves.
Q: From your experience, what’s a common mistake companies make when trying to improve customer experience?
Starting too big instead of small. CX initiatives can quickly get overwhelming – monetarily, operationally, and technologically. And when that happens, they get deprioritized or management doesn’t buy in.
Starting small allows for quick wins that can build momentum, show results, and gain the necessary buy-in.
Fostering a customer-centric culture in organizations
Q: How do you help organizations build a customer-centric culture, and what’s key to making it successful?
When everyone is speaking the same CX language, it improves communication and collaboration between departments. My goal is to both inspire and empower employees because I believe that every employee is in the customer experience business – no matter their title or job description. When employees are inspired and empowered, they think about the customer in everything they do.
Leveraging customer feedback for business success
Q: Can you share an example of how customer feedback led to major improvements in a company’s customer experience?
Discover used a survey widget on every page of its website. Users would click on a feedback icon, score their interaction, and leave comments. We received dozens and sometimes hundreds of comments every day, with tens of millions of customers logging in monthly or more often.
This “voice of the customer” feedback was compiled into a report that was distributed every day to the digital team and various other executives.
The report made it easy to identify urgent issues that needed addressing immediately because many similar comments would appear on the same day. But it was harder to see more infrequent trends that maybe only showed up every few days with one or two customers complaining.
How small fixes led Discover to win the J.D. Power award
To address this, we added a single question to each survey: “How easy was it to use the Discover Card website today?”
After about six weeks of collecting the data, I asked for a report by page instead of by date, in order of the average ease-of-use score. Immediately, I turned to the back page and looked at the pages with the worst scores—in other words, the ones that customers said made it most difficult to use the Discover site.
The absolute bottom-ranking page turned out to be a very important one—the “Refer a Friend” page where cardmembers could enter the names and email addresses of their friends and earn $50 each for them and their friend if the friend signed up for a Discover Card.
I then dug into the recent customer comments from just that page, and a previously unidentified trend surfaced immediately: On one particular browser, the “Submit” button was not displaying.
The fix was quick and easy from a technology perspective, and immediately thereafter, the Refer a Friend page’s ease-of-use scores returned to normal.
We then did the same exercise for the bottom 100 pages. We found so many little pain points that were easy to fix but had enormous impact on customer satisfaction scores—and it eventually won us the J.D. Power Award for Customer Satisfaction.
Using AI and technology for better CX
Q: Dan, how do you balance advanced technology with the need for genuine human interaction in customer service?
We need to look at AI as a complement to humans, not as a replacement. AI can help humans do their jobs better, and can make them infinitely more efficient. It’s important to keep experimenting with this new technology because it’s changing almost every day. And keep the focus on the customer – how can AI make our customers’ lives easier?
We’re still a long way from customers being OK with not interacting at all with humans, so let’s not rush to get there. For example, any chatbot should be programmed to refer the customer to a human agent as soon as it realizes it can’t answer the question.
Insights from Dan’s books and podcasts
Q: Your book, “The Experience Maker,” is a guide for building top-performing CX programs. What inspired you to write it, and what key insights do you want readers to take away?
This book is the culmination of my research, experience in Corporate America, and collection of real-life CX stories. During my years in Corporate America and subsequently, as a CX speaker and coach, I noticed that most businesses have what I call a “leaky bucket”. They spend all their time, energy, and money on acquiring new customers at the expense of their existing customers that got them to that point. But without those existing customers, there is no business!
So, why not focus those same resources on providing your existing customers with a remarkable experience? When you do this, your customers will become your best marketers and plug that “leaky bucket” of yours by helping you acquire new customers.
The Experience Maker book shows you exactly how to do this in your own business, so you can stop the “leaking” and start WOW-ing your customers, new and old.
Winning at Social Customer Care: Strategies for Success
Q: You’ve also written “Winning at Social Customer Care”. How do you see social media evolving as a tool for customer care, and what are some strategies for using it effectively?
Social media has changed customer experience forever by shifting power from brands to consumers, requiring a different way of thinking about engagement. I looked at how top brands created engaging social media experiences – not just marketing posts – and how all companies can do the same.
The book includes the 8 steps to “winning at social customer care,” some of which include:
- Developing a Social Customer Care Philosophy
- Finding the right technology provider for your company
- Recruiting and training social customer service agents
- Integrating Social Customer Care with your business
Memorable stories shared on Dan’s podcasts
Q: On your podcasts, “Experience This!” and “Focus on Customer Service,” you’ve shared a lot of practical tips. What are some of the most memorable insights or stories that resonate with your listeners?
Honestly, I took my favorites and put them all into The Experience Maker book. But by and large, I’d say there are two brands that consistently outdo themselves and cause customers to rave about them: Chewy and Amazon. With Chewy, almost every time I mention that brand on stage, someone in the audience comes up to me afterward to tell me their “Chewy story.”
That’s how much the brand has touched people’s lives. And with Amazon, it continues to innovate even though it’s the e-commerce leader. It would be so easy for it to rest on its laurels and dare everyone to catch up, but it’s always trying to make its own experience better, and always with the customer in the center.
Advice for enhancing customer experience
Q: What’s your top advice for businesses looking to enhance their customer experience?
Just start. Don’t worry about figuring everything out at once. Find one part of your experience that needs improving, and focus there. Then find another and another. Empower all of your employees to constantly be thinking with the customer in mind when making business decisions. Because when we do that, we actually make better business decisions!
Embracing AI to transform customer experience
Q: How do you see the future of customer experience evolving, and what role do you hope to play in that transformation?
There’s no question that AI will continue to challenge traditional experience norms. It will continue to get better at hyper-personalization and creating immersive experiences (such as with virtual reality) to allow customers to experience brands in a whole new way. It’s exciting, and I’m glad to be here. I have recently launched a brand-new keynote on this topic, so I look forward to inspiring and empowering more audiences to embrace AI in the spirit of enhancing CX.
Recap on the insights from Dan Gingiss
Dan Gingiss shares his journey from marketing expert to CX thought leader, revealing how he shaped memorable experiences at brands like McDonald’s, Discover, and Humana. His approach focuses on understanding customer emotions and using those insights to elevate every touchpoint.
Dan’s message? Customer experience doesn’t require multi-million-dollar transformations—it’s about doing the small things right. Start by becoming a customer of your own business, identify quick wins, and use technology like AI to complement human interactions for better engagement.
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To build a CX-focused culture, Dan recommends empowering every employee to be an “Experience Maker” who can create personalized experiences and build customer loyalty. His advice for companies looking to improve? Don’t wait for the perfect moment—start small, listen to customers, and empower your team to create remarkable experiences that set your brand apart.