Business Pillars Part 3: Designing the Customer Experience
If customers aren’t talking about you, here’s what you’re missing.
A few weeks back, I outlined what I call “Business Pillars,” the five critical elements to any kick-ass, top-notch, dominate-the-competition business. Over the coming weeks, we’ll do a deep dive into each of these pillars. You won’t want to miss it.
Our first pillar was Clarifying the Plan and Direction for your organization. This week, the topic is Designing the Customer Experience. And, indeed, we all have a lot of work to do here.
I don’t know about you, but I feel like “customer service” as a concept has eroded significantly over the last few decades, and especially since COVID. I sometimes feel almost hated by service providers when I attempt to make a simple transaction.
But let’s work on fixing this, shall we?
The way our customers feel before, during, and after interacting with our businesses is no accident. It’s an intentional decision. And choosing not to design the experience is, in itself, a decision to fall well short of your customer experience potential.
Before we dive into the building blocks of a great customer experience, let’s define success.
Definition of Excellence
There are many signs that you’ve built a wonderful customer experience, but perhaps none as foundational as this: people are talking about you.
What do I mean by that?
I mean that your business is truly remarkable, in the literal sense of the word. Credit to Seth Godin for making this point a few decades ago in Purple Cow.
People are telling others how great you are. People are telling you how great you are. People are shouting from the rooftops about what you do, how you do it, what they love about the way you do it, and all sorts of other flattery.
And I hate to say this, but here’s some tough love: if you’re rarely, if ever, hearing people “remark” about your business, then your business is not remarkable.
But take heart and keep reading. We can fix this.
Element 1: Defining Your Ideal Customer (Avatar)
To design an amazing customer experience, you first have to know who you’re designing it for.
Why?
Here’s an example.
I have a wonderful wife and three amazing kids. A 19-year-old boy, a 17-year-old girl, and a 13-year-old girl.
I did not give them all the same Christmas gift. Of course I didn’t. Because a teenage daughter and a middle-aged wife typically do not share the same interests.
The same logic applies to the customer experience.
While there are indeed fundamental things nearly every human wants and expects from a business, things like truthfulness, high quality, and polite interactions, there is a massive spectrum of what truly delights the buying public.
It’s critical that you take the time to define your “ideal customer.”
The easiest way to do this is to jot down 10–20 names of recent past customers you really enjoyed working with and who clearly benefited from your product or service.
Then list three to five characteristics of those customers. And now is not the time to be “woke,” friends. I want you to stereotype. Age. Gender. Buying habits. Household income. Profession. Hobbies.
You may be surprised to find that your “best” customers share some commonalities.
At kitchen & bath CRATE, we’ve even given our ideal customer a name: Dolores.
And we’ve defined her clearly.
Our customer is a female homeowner between 40 and 70 with disposable income, a household income between $150,000 and $250,000, who is not a DIYer and not overly frugal, who values organization and delegation, and who has high yet reasonable standards.
Is this the only customer type we serve? Of course not.
But when we make decisions about customer experience and marketing, this is who we’re thinking about. Dolores is our North Star.
Element 2: Be Remarkable
We touched on this already in our Definition of Excellence, but let’s go a bit further.
At our core human essence, we’re actually pretty simple. Maslow put this together nicely for us a long time ago.
We want to be the best we can be.
We want to feel good about ourselves.
We want to feel loved and like we belong.
We want to feel safe.
We want our most basic physical needs met.
So to be remarkable, to be the kind of business people talk about, you need to make people feel these things.
Ask yourself: what can I do to ensure my customer’s most basic needs are met? It can be as simple as a great coffee station in your showroom or ensuring your place of business is clean and smells good.
What can I do to make my customers feel safe? If I’m doing in-home sales, how can I ensure “Dolores” knows who is coming into her home, that they’ve been background-checked and vetted, and what they look and sound like before they arrive?
What can I do to make my customers feel loved, as if they belong? Maybe it’s training your team to stop what they’re doing to meet a need when it arises. Maybe it’s creating a club or community they can join after doing business with you. Maybe it’s as simple as sending a birthday card each year.
What can you do to make your customers feel like they’re a big deal? How can you emphasize the premium nature of your product or service? How can you help them imagine how they’ll feel after working with you?
Focus on making your customers feel these things, and they will talk about you. Believe me.
It’s not hard to think of these ideas. It is hard to execute them consistently.
But you can do that by making sure you…
Element 3: Imagine the End Result
Now that you know who you’re designing the experience for and how you might meet their most fundamental human needs, it’s time to define how this plays out in practice.
Joey Coleman offers a helpful framework that outlines the eight phases of a customer’s interaction with a business.
What you need to do is imagine how you want your customer to feel at every step of working with you.
Gather your team. Have them close their eyes. Then give them a prompt:
“Okay, our ideal customer is [briefly describe your avatar]. They walk into our shop on a Thursday at 11 a.m. What do they see, smell, and hear? Who do they speak with first? What do they want to hear from that person?”
Jot down the responses.
Repeat this brainstorming exercise for each major inflection point in your customer’s journey.
Spend a few hours doing this and you’ll have a crystal-clear picture of what you want your customer to not just experience outwardly, but feel inwardly.
This is critical.
The brands we love make us feel something. When you walk through the gates of Disneyland, you feel something. When you open the packaging on an Apple product, you feel something. When you step into your favorite restaurant, you feel something.
This is where the magic is.
Element 4: Create Raving Fans
If you do the first three elements well, you’ll end up with what Ken Blanchard described in his 1993 classic as “Raving Fans.”
So what do you do with them?
First, an analogy.
My wife and I are collecting midlife stereotype badges like a Girl Scout on Adderall. We play pickleball. I smoke meat. We use teenage slang in a super-cringe way. See what I did there?
Another thing we’ve started doing is watching copious amounts of Survivor. You know, the show that’s on season 49 and is basically the same cast every year, just with different names and phobias.
Anyway, in the finale, two cast members have to compete to start a fire. The goal is to create a tiny spark with a flint and then nurture that spark until it becomes a full flame that burns through a rope.
I can’t help but think of our raving fans the same way.
We have to work our tails off to create the spark by being remarkable. And once we do, we have to cultivate it.
We need to communicate with them frequently. We need to let them know they’re part of something special. We need to do nice things for them. We need to treat them like the most valuable asset our company has.
Because they are.
Tools and Inspiration
Here’s a quick rundown of resources that can help you design your customer experience.
The role you play in your customer’s life as they use your product or service is expertly outlined in Dennis Miller’s Building a StoryBrand 2.0. Walking through the StoryBrand process is an excellent way to commence this pillar. Simple and powerful. The best of both worlds.
Will Guidara’s Unreasonable Hospitality was my favorite read of 2025. I was a few years late to the party. It’s a masterclass in customer experience and a fascinating business biography. Listen to this today. I implore you.
Never Lose a Customer Again by Joey Coleman is a seminal work on how customers feel at each phase of their journey with you. I had the privilege of attending a workshop he gave for EO Sacramento in early 2025. One of the better in-person events I’ve attended. Check him out.
Raving Fans by Ken Blanchard is more than 30 years old, but it holds up better than Brad Pitt. He’s 62, by the way. Makes you feel really old, right?
We used this book to launch the CRATE Raving Fans program almost a decade ago. We now have about 300 households that we intentionally cultivate through live events, special gifts, and regular communication. I estimate this group alone accounts for 20–30% of our annual revenue in one way or another.
Wrap Up
A great business is not a set-it-and-forget-it endeavor. It requires thoughtfulness and constant refinement.
So don’t feel overwhelmed by designing your customer experience. Start with one or two ideas. Roll them out. Monitor the results. Then move on to the next.
Accept that this is a never-ending process, and embrace it as such.
The next pillar we’ll cover is Designing the Team Member Experience. This is all about building an organization your people love, and one where they’re excited to deliver the customer experience we’ve outlined above.
If you’d like to get this upcoming series directly in your inbox, please go ahead and subscribe. And of course, if you know someone who may benefit from this information, please share this email with them.
I appreciate you following along on this journey. As always, let me know if I can help in any way: scott@scottmonday.com.
Thanks for reading this post. I appreciate you.
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