Most companies don't fail their customers on purpose. They fail them because rigid process and automation stop good people from acting like humans.
At a glance
- Author: John Sills
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Business, April 2023
- Recognition: Leadership Book of the Year 2023, Institute of Leadership
- ISBN: 9781399401739
- Get it: Find it on Bookshop.org
- Read: October 2026
- My verdict: One of the best books I've read on customer experience. I keep going back to it.
The big idea
Sills makes three points that stuck with me:
- The emotional side of an experience matters as much as the functional side. How it felt counts as much as whether it worked.
- Getting the human side right doesn't cost more. It makes a business more efficient.
- Experience isn't the front line's job alone. Everyone in the organisation shapes it.
What I liked most is that he doesn't hand you a checklist. He says each company has to choose the experience that fits its own customers and its own strengths.
The framework in one picture
Sills sums the book up in seven behaviours customers can feel, held up by five enablers inside the organisation.
The behaviours are what customers notice. The enablers are what lets your people behave that way without fighting the system.
Stories that stayed with me
The book is full of real examples, mostly from UK companies. These are the ones I keep thinking about.
Octopus Energy and the battery pack. Engineers brought a battery pack when fitting smart meters, so the customer's Wi-Fi stayed on. Small thing. But someone was thinking about the customer, not just the job.
Octopus and "put Harry on the phone". When Octopus was small, a customer with a problem got the person who knew them. At around 50,000 customers they split into specialist teams and lost that. So they rebuilt teams to own a customer from start to finish, with no scripts.
AO.com and the anniversary plant. A driver called ahead before delivering a fridge. The customer's son mentioned it was his parents' wedding anniversary. The driver stopped, bought a pot plant in AO colours and handed it over at the door. No process asks for that. AO just trusts its people to treat customers like their own gran.
NHS Blood and Transplant. Complaints are owned by whoever was involved, not passed to a generic team. And donors get thank-you dinners, which they describe as recognition, not reward.
Chiltern Railways. Senior managers travel on their own trains, name badge on. Every new starter is told their one job is to make the right decisions for customers.
Citymapper. Simple "Report Issue" and "Get Me Home" buttons. The app takes responsibility for getting you where you need to be.
Lines worth remembering
- "Treat every customer as if they were your own gran." AO.com
- "If companies treat people like adults, they'll respond like adults." NHS Blood and Transplant
- "Human relationships shouldn't be defined by a training manual." Riverford
- People are only consumers for a few hours of the day. Stan Sthanunathan, from his Unilever days
- Making staff escalate for permission is "handcuffing them". Workday
One more thing that surprised me: most executives think they deliver great customer experience, but only about one in three customers feel their favourite brands really understand them.
What I'm taking from it
I read it as a delivery person, and it fits programmes just as well as customer service.
- Telling the business what will break before they find out is the programme version of the battery pack.
- The drop from a great pitch team to the delivery team is the same as Octopus losing "Harry".
- Stakeholders are only stakeholders for a few hours a day. The rest of the time our programme is getting in the way of their real job.
It also shapes how I think about AI. Most AI work is about automating steps. This book is a good reminder that the point is to free people up to act like humans, not to script them further.
Who should read it: anyone who leads teams, runs a service or delivers change. It's full of real stories and it's genuinely warm.