Episode 1: The Myths of Customer Experience

In the first episode of CX Matters, host Bram De Vos sits down with Horst Remes, founder and CEO of One Stone, to unpack the biggest myths that keep companies from delivering meaningful customer experiences.

Horst shares how his team uses a startup-style experimentation approach to redesign customer journeys, why memories matter more than experiences, and how one powerful moment can shape how customers talk about you. They challenge common beliefs like “you must be excellent everywhere” and “never make a promise you can’t keep” and explain why focusing on peace of mind can be more effective than perfect accuracy.

Together they explore psychological insight, design trade-offs, and the real role of process vs attitude. They also look ahead at how AI will shift the foundation of customer experience, making emotion and memory the new battleground for differentiation.

A smart, candid conversation for leaders who want to rethink what customer centricity actually means.

Learn how Hello Customer turns feedback into business improvements: https://www.hellocustomer.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to CX Matters, the podcast where we dive into all matters CX to find out what really makes the difference, what moves the needle, and what makes customers tick. CX Matters is a podcast powered by Hello Customer, the platform that helps organizations turn feedback into real business improvements. My name is Blom De Vos, and I'm your host. And today my guest is Horst Remes, founder and CEO of OneStone, a consultancy that helps companies build truly customer-focused operations. Over the past two decades, he's helped leadership teams redesign their organizations around the customer. Not just to create warm feelings, but to deliver real business impact through smarter processes and sharper choices. In this episode, we'll go into what Horst calls the myths of customer experience. Those well-intentioned ideas that sound right but often lead companies in the wrong direction. Welcome Horst. Thank you. Very happy to be here, come. Very happy. So happy to have you on the show. I have been present at some of your keynotes, and I've seen the keynote that you do on uh the myths of customer experience, and I've I've thoroughly enjoyed them. And you know, for all of you listening out there, if you can if you can um go and catch this, it'd be great. You know, go and see it. It's it's a fun and entertainment key entertaining keynote. I'm blushing now, it's so good that you can't see that on the podcast. We we we took away the cameras because we knew this was gonna happen. So blush away to your heart's delight. But I love before we go into these myth of myths of customer experience, I wanted to touch on something that you and your company, One Stone, do. Is that something that I I really um like very much, the way that you approach your projects is you approach them almost like engineers with with the um with the mindset of experiment. You're you're you're taking, you're making assumptions, you're then questioning some common truths, and then you're looking for things that actually work. Can you say a little bit about things about that? Because I think that ties in really well with with the myths of customer experience that we'll address in a moment.

SPEAKER_00 2:05

Yeah, what you're talking about probably is um the way we experiment in a startup. So we install a startup basically within a company. And the reason we do that is that you can't always design an experience from a meeting room. And so what we do is the the first question we want to answer is let's say you have two of your customers and they are on an event to in an event together and they're talking to each other and they're talking about you. What would you like them to say? And if a third one enters the conversation and says, Well, you're both working with this company, why should I do that? What do you want them to say? And is that going to be the same? Right. And so that's what you want to design. That's the you need to give this person a story to tell. So that means that he needs an experience uh to be able to tell that story. And obviously, you can design the experience, but you never know exactly how that is going to turn out. And what people often do is they do a proof of concept or they do a pilot. And what happens then is they do the pilot, and if it works, they continue, and if it doesn't work, they stop. What we like to do is to treat it rather like a startup. And so that means that we can keep on pivoting until we reach that goal. So we never stop, we just keep on working until it works the way we've intended it to work. And so that is a major difference with more traditional approaches that we have.

SPEAKER_01 3:30

I I I love that, I love that approach. And another thing that I really like about your approach and that I would like you to explain to the listeners is um you're one of those people who have um who have taken inspiration from from Daniel Kahneman. Um and you you very often talk about uh psychologically engineering experiences. Could you elaborate on that a little bit? Because it's a fascinating concept. And before I before I give you the floor for that, I remember that you, I don't know whether it was in the keynote or somewhere else where you said um it's not about really the customer experience as such, it's it's actually about the memory of an experience and we can influence that. Could you could you take that away?

SPEAKER_00 4:11

Well, so what people talk about customer experience all the time. But the issue is once the experience is over, it is gone. It's very fluid. So what remains, what remains with people is the the how they recall that experience, so the memory of that experience. And it's actually more the memory of that experience that is going to shape their attitude, is going to shape their behavior in the future. So what we see is that how people experience something and how they remember that experience can be different, and that is basically what Kahneman came up with in his research, is that you can have a memory that is quite different from the actual experience. And if you have a very average experience, but with one very high peak, one part of the experience that you've liked a lot, people will remember that whole experience as so much better than it really was at the time. That's what Kahneman calls the peak and rule. And so we use that because obviously you cannot be excellent at everything, and there is no company that can be excellent at everything. And I've seen companies try that and they fail. The problem is they cannot predict where they're gonna fail. And so they fail at different fields, and and uh so the customer doesn't really get a good experience because one time it's this and another time it's something else. So if you really uh design your experience and your processes to be excellent at one point, that will be remembered by the customer if you make it a smart one.

SPEAKER_01 5:49

And maybe one of the myths then is that you have to be excellent at everything. Exactly. And one of the that that brings to mind something also that you said was sometimes something within the experience, something that is particularly not excellent, in fact is is particularly even painful, can be supportive to making the experience as a whole better. And I remember please, please do explain that the waiting time in a chic in a top-notch restaurant, having to wait for the food is, you might say, not the best of experiences, right? And yet experiencing that pain is part of the experience. Explain that.

SPEAKER_00 6:32

Well, it's it's just that every decision you take has consequences, right? And if a hi-fi restaurant really wants to serve fresh foods and for instance fresh vegetables, they cannot just do it like any other restaurant would do. And what uh a common restaurant would do is they would prepare all the vegetables and all the food in the morning, so they can be very efficient in the kitchen when somebody orders a meal. But obviously, then it's not going to be so fresh. So if you want it to be fresh, you can only start cleaning the vegetables when people have orders, right? And so that means if you want to have this really, really fresh food, the consequence is that people have to wait a little bit longer. And actually, it's uh people can say, well, that's not such a good experience because the waiting time is long, but it makes it makes your promise even more credible, right? Nobody will believe that, for instance, a restaurant with a menu of 50 items will serve fresh foods, right? If if you're in a restaurant with a very limited menu, you would believe more that the food is fresh.

SPEAKER_01 7:35

But the the the the fun thing about that, if you think that through, um, is that even if this top-notch restaurant would be capable of serving the food faster, then still it would be a good idea not to do it. Because it makes the customer feel that they have to wait. It they experience some pain before the pleasure comes. I don't want to go too far. This is the CX uh podcast and that could be mistaken for something else entirely. But there is that aspect as well that sometimes you have to you have to almost deserve something. And you play around with that in your keynote with the whole psychologically engineering experiences where you say sometimes it's good to make people wait or to make people suffer. And that suffering can be in in many different forms. It can be it can be price, it can be waiting time, it can be something else entirely.

SPEAKER_00 8:25

Yeah, you so you don't have to make them suffer just for the sake of making them suffer, right? It's just a role there. So you but you may obviously it's it's not so bad to have a a weaker part of your customer journey, a weaker part of your process if that explains what you're really good at. And if you can explain that to customers, it's easy to explain to customers, hey, we have a limited menu because everything is really fresh, or you'll have to wait a little bit longer because everything is fresh. That is easy to explain. And it's it's going to be not credible if you have a very fast meal that you claim to be fresh. I mean, at this point nobody can do that. Maybe uh we we'll we'll end up in a in an era where technology will allow us to combine those things, but at this point that's that's just not a credible thing.

SPEAKER_01 9:10

That's just not possible. No, I I can I can see that. Um a very provocative myth that you're busting every time again. And every time you do it, you you you know, you've got me in in the wrong direction. I'm I'm kind of like, yeah, but it it it it's true, isn't it? It it's okay to make a promise you cannot keep is what you say. You don't have to keep all your promises. It's a very provocative statement. It is, yeah. Do explain.

SPEAKER_00 9:36

Well, uh it the the problem is this uh we we are raised and uh with with this uh with never make a promise that you cannot keep. But the consequence of that is that people in a service position do not dare to make any promises because they're not the ones keeping them, usually, right? So if you have, for instance, a technical problem and I'm in customer service, I get a call from a customer who is in he has some technical trouble, I'm not the one who's going to repair his equipment. I count on somebody else to do that, and so I don't know when this other person is actually going to get to it. So I don't dare to promise anything. And so what I do is I instill uncertainty with that uh certain customer. And what this customer is actually uh seeking when he's calling you is peace of mind. And um That's something really important for you, guys. It is absolutely important.

SPEAKER_01 10:29

That's something that keeps coming back, and wherever I meet you, it's that peace of mind that you want to deliver.

SPEAKER_00 10:35

I would say that the monetary value of peace of mind is one of the most underestimated things in business. Uh so people are willing to pay for peace of mind. And if you just think about yourself, you'll you you'll recognize that. Why do we have insurance? We're buying peace of mind, and that's basically what we're doing. Uh, if you have two uh people who want uh who can repair your roof, which one are you going to choose? The shabby one, the shabby one who is like a very cheap, or the one who looks a bit more decent and is a bit more expensive. So it's why doctors wear these white uniforms.

SPEAKER_01 11:13

Exactly. It's it kind of exudes you can trust this person. Right? It's all it's all the the whole theater of of the human fabric, I suppose. But I like that. I like that.

SPEAKER_00 11:22

And that's where the promise comes in, right? Because obviously, when when you don't dare to promise anything, people we really stay with this with this uh awkward feeling of okay, they don't have dealing with my yeah, yeah. So so uh let's say you have a small business and all of a sudden your internet is out. What is the first thing you want to know? When is it going to be back up? Right, and so for instance, we worked with a company who's actually hosting um the tech the IT of smaller companies of SMBs. And so they get a call, okay, we can't email anymore. The email is out. Okay, they have the email server at their location, they're actually serving that thing. And so the the answer was never it's going to be solved in 40 minutes, it's going to be solved in an hour. It's like, okay, we'll see what we can do. We'll get back to you as soon as we know something. But okay, this whole organization is then waiting for a call from this provider. So so they that's that's a very awkward feeling. It causes a lot of stress. And the problem is when people are in stress, they remember quite well uh what's happening, right? And so what what you're actually doing, you're implanting a memory in this customer of not being capable of giving them peace of mind.

SPEAKER_01 12:35

Instead of a peak end rule, it's the abyss. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 12:40

Well, they know we we see if we if we if we look at that kind of interactions, we see within the hour 98% of those issues are solved. Like, why can't we just say, hey, it will be fixed within an hour?

SPEAKER_01 12:55

And obviously then let me let me be the devil's advocate then, right? I'm I'm in that company um and I'm a frontline employee. And you tell me you just get the promise it's gonna be fixed within the hour. Horst, what am I gonna do with that? You say it's only two percent, but what am I gonna do with those people that I've lied to? And that's crucial. What what what what what now?

SPEAKER_00 13:16

Yeah, absolutely. That's crucial. So the the point is this if we don't dare to say anything, we are frustrating a hundred percent of our customers, right? Yes. So by saying it's going to be fixed in an hour, what we do is already 98% of our customers are safe because we know for 98% of the customers that will be okay. Now the question is what do you do to the 2%? And that is obviously crucial, crucial if because if you wait for them to call you back, you wait for them to discover that you haven't kept your promise, then you're definitely causing a lot of frustration. Yes. But we know we know um which servers are backup and which ones are not, right? So we can monitor the time and we can just check, okay, with some of those, the the issue is going to be more complicated. Uh and we call we can call uh those people back and say, hey, I promised you it would be up within an hour. I see now that the issue is more complicated than I originally anticipated, and therefore, maybe I cannot even tell you when it's going to be fixed, but what what I can promise to you is that within two hours I'll give you a call back to give you a status update. And that is a promise that we can keep. And the very surprising thing is that if we only interview the two percent, so only the people we haven't kept our promise, and we ask them after an experience like this like, do we keep our promises to you on a scale between zero and ten? Most of those customers give us a top box score, so a nine or a ten. Imagine that. Well, in in essence, we haven't kept the original promise we haven't kept. Right? But what have we done? We haven't given them first peace of mind, and then when we called back because we couldn't keep our promise, what they uh remember is that somebody cared enough to give them an update before they found out that the promise was not kept. And it's that feeling, it's that feeling that makes them perceive that you've kept your promise. And then obviously you make a new promise. I I'll call you back in two hours to give you a status update, and a promise that you can easily keep, right? And the total of that experience is a perception, and the perception is just not exactly what happened, it's a perception. That's what politicians are so uh so frustrated about, right? Uh it's perception. So we can steer that perception, and that way, and that's what we call psychology engineering, and we make we make the process so that we create a perception with that customer that is not just exactly what happened, but that gives them a very good feeling about what happened.

SPEAKER_01 15:47

It's it's remarkable because when you explain it that way, it makes total, total sense. And yet I can I can see, I can predict that a lot of companies will be resistant against that. Oh, yeah. But it makes total sense and it shows that human nature is much more subtle and much more intricate than we than we tend to give it credit for.

SPEAKER_00 16:20

Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, the the there is a difference between the real experience and the perception of that experience and the the the how people remember that experience eventually. And that's what steers their behavior. So it's that what we are after. And I often say we shouldn't be talking about customer experience management, we should be talking about customer memory management, something like that.

SPEAKER_01 16:39

I I totally agree. I totally agree. And I I think I think one of the um one of the issues with customer experience in itself and is that is that word. Customer experience is such a bland word, and we're not we're not clear about what we're talking about. And your suggestion to talk about the memory of the experience is a very, very good suggestion, because you you shift your mind to something completely different, and it obliges you to look at an experience, as it were, you look at the experience while it's happening, but you take a step forward and say, retrospectively, what would this do to the people I'm doing it with? I th I find that very, very, very inspiring. Another thing, another thing completely. When I speak with our business leaders, CEOs and so forth, COOs very often as well, um, and we we talk about customer centricity and how important it is. And you know, in in my line of business as as CEO of Hello Customer, of course I come across many people who are convinced of the need for the need for customer centricity. So that's hardly a problem. It's not like I have to uh you know have to bring them the gospel, they are already believers. But then one of the things I very, very often hear is that you know it's kind of like a bit of a complaint that comes up time and again is when when business leaders say, well, you know, I'm totally convinced of that, but um, you know, we're we're gonna have to do something about our people as well because you know good customer centricity is actually a question of attitude. And um I was always inclined to believe that. Like, yes, of course, that that's that's very important. So then you go to new phases of thinking, like, oh, if it's attitude, then maybe we should hire rather on attitude and not on skills and that whole field. Until one day, a couple of years ago, I'm in Antwerp listening to your keynote, and you say that's completely wrong, it's not a matter of attitude.

SPEAKER_00 18:35

Yeah, it's a it's a actually a very common uh misunderstanding, and it that's because if you see, for instance, if you see on YouTube you see movies about uh very bad customer service, it's usually because people have an extremely bad attitude. People are not looking at customers and they're just doing their own thing, uh, they're impolite, uh rude. Um, and so uh it's what you see is that if if the attitude is bad, almost every time you have a bad service. But that doesn't mean that the opposite is true. It's not because the attitude is good that you have good service. You can do terrible things to customer with the the most perfect attitude if the process just is unexplainable. The most terrible things to customers, even when the attitude is is good. Yeah, okay. Explain that. I'm a willing, I'm a willing customer service uh agent, but I have to work with a a process that just doesn't work, that is inexplicable to a customer, or that is just so cumbersome that no customer doesn't really accept it. I can have the best possible attitude, I can be as helpful as I can. That customer is never going to return with a very good feeling. I see.

SPEAKER_01 19:50

And what I remember you explaining to me over a coffee one one time, I think it was after one of the keynotes. Um I remember now it was you were talking about Lake Wobgon. You've got to tell that story, but but before you tell that story, one of the things that struck me then was it is when you're talking about attitude, you're almost implicitly leaving it to the employee to decide what customer centricity is.

SPEAKER_00 20:19

That is the problem. And that is the problem. Yeah, exactly. So we we're leaving so what we if we say, hey guys, it's the attitudes, what we do is we want our employees to um compensate for bad processes. And they then then they're constantly in stress mode. That that's just unattainable. Nobody can continuously do that. So in instead of having that responsibility with the employee, I think the responsibility should be with the organization. And then uh obviously many people in the organization will have different ideas about what is it to be customer centric. And what we see in practice, for instance, is let's say you take a team, a sales team, uh customer experience team, uh a technician team, and you ask people, okay, rate your own customer centricity on a scale between zero and ten. What is the average you'll get? I've I've tried it a few times. Uh, we'll have an average of eight. Now ask the same question to the same people, but slightly different. So, how do you rate everybody else in your team apart from you? And you'll get an average of six. Right. Obviously, that cannot be true, right? You the the the the population that you're judging is the same, it's just the the uh measuring instrument is different. And if you have two measuring instruments that uh that uh result to different scores, then one of the measuring instruments is broken, right? Or both. That needs to be the case. So what you see is that people think they are more customer centric because they do they genuinely do what they believe is the most customer centric way to have. Handle something. But their colleague is doing something entirely different. And so they think, well, my colleague is not so customer centric as I am because he's not doing what I believe is customer centric. But that's exactly what the colleague thinks of me. Of course. And so everybody's doing something differently. And remember, I talked about those two people who were at an event and they're talking about your company. So that means that those two people will have a totally different experience because they they work with different people inside your organization. So they'll tell different stories about you. So is that the message you want to you want to communicate? Is that what you want? That uh people say, well, it depends on who you talk to. It depends on on who you work with in that company. If you work with Bob, it's fantastic. If you if you work with uh somebody else, it's different. That's not what you want.

SPEAKER_01 22:48

That's not what you want with the thing. Exactly. Consistency. And so the consistency needs to be installed by the organization. Exactly. How do you go about that as an organization? Imagine you know you're in leadership, you've heard these ideas, you're convinced of them. What's the first step that you can take? Because it sounds absolutely logical, but it seems to me that it's it's quite something to bring that across to people, to make people see that. Um you can hardly well, maybe they could, you can hardly send them all to to listen to a keynote of you. Could be profitable, could be interesting. But apart from that, how do you go about doing that? What would be your first step to get this this um go away from attitudes, don't leave it at the individual, but on the other hand, you know, organize it, orchestrate it, and then keep in mind that you're going for the peak and rule motive, and that you're going for we'd love to have a an experience that leaves good memories. How you go about it?

SPEAKER_00 23:45

It doesn't have to be complicated. Okay, and people always overcomplicate that. It's it it just formulating an answer to the question: what do you want those two people to say about you? Those two people are talking about you, they're at an event, they see uh an advertisement of your company, they're talking about you because they both work with you. What do you want them to say? An answer to that question that is just where it starts. And obviously, you need to need to make it uh sufficiently concrete, and that it may be a challenge that you could say, well, we want them to tell that we're really proactive. Okay, proactive is what I call management bullshit, right? It's a very nice word, everybody will agree, but everybody will mean something different with it. So so what you what you need to you need to go one step deeper, and what does that mean? And for instance, if I'm a telecom company, I want to be able to call my customer to warn them about the problem before the modem goes out, yes, right? Because before they find themselves without internet, I want to intervene with before that happens. That could be a definition of proactive, but you have to make it that concrete. That concrete exactly and then your people know then your people know what they need to do, right? Also, uh, if you're talking about the promises that we've just uh talked about, I want uh to make a very concrete promise about when I will deliver what to a customer. So instead of saying, you know, you've asked me this question and I will answer you as soon as I have the information, no, you've asked me this question and I will answer you the day after tomorrow, which is uh a very concrete promise, but also is very efficient because that prevents that customer from calling back a few hours later because he thinks, well, as soon as possible should be now already.

SPEAKER_01 25:28

And and on top of that, you know, what you've established, what you've what you've created, what you've brought into the world by saying that we'll be back with you in an hour or the day after tomorrow or next week for that matter, is you have created that little little bit of peace of mind, of which you said you know, the monetary value of peace of mind is is underrated. And that's precisely what you what you're doing there. I I think that's that's you know a lot of very, very interesting uh approaches that you have to customer experience or the memory of customer experience. Now, you you know you've got a lot of clients, you've been doing this work for decades with One Stone, you you do a lot of great keynotes uh in in the world. If I were to ask you for evolutions that you see, trends that you pick up within this field, what what would your answer be? It's a very broad question, I know, Horst, but but you know, to narrow it down, what do you pick up? What do you sense is going on? And now now I have to talk about AI, right?

SPEAKER_00 26:25

And that's the Oh dear God, is it that moment? Yes, yeah. Yeah, well, that's what I see it in your eyes, that's what you want. But actually it it is, because AI is the big equalizer. Uh so um what we'll come we'll come into a stage quite soon where a basic level of service is going to be easier uh for everybody. Uh some things will run more automatically, and then that will just go easier. But everybody can buy that, and that is uh an issue with technology is that technology is extremely easy to reverse engineer. Everybody can be buy the same platforms if you have sufficient uh amount of money, you can do that, and you can copy anybody. And you have the same if you have the same supplier and let them do the same thing, you can do the same thing. The thing is um building an experience from what do we want the customer to see, to feel, that is much more difficult. And just thinking about okay, what do we what do we want those customers to experience, that is going to be the differentiating factor far more than the operational excellence that we have now, which is still a very big differentiator today, and it will it will be for a while, but obviously with the but the advent of uh AI, that will just become more easy. So we'll have to focus on things that are not so easy to reverse engineer. And if you have an experience and it's in the process and it's in the way people work, you'll see that that is far more difficult to reverse engineer and far more difficult to copy.

SPEAKER_01 28:02

Interesting that you should bring up that operational excellence because of course that brings to mind the the Trecian and uh and Wearsema triangle, right? Where you have this uh you have operational excellence, you have product leadership, and you have customer intimacy. And I heard I had an explanation a couple of months ago where they said AI, as you put it, it's the great equalizer, it's the great leveler, um, is going to take away that that um the product leadership and the operational excellence. That's gonna be a given. And it's all gonna be about the customer intimacy. And when you go into that field, of course, then you come to what you're good at, what your what your what your purpose in life is and and of one stone is engineering that the memories of the customer experience are are great.

SPEAKER_00 28:44

I would I would even be more critical about that saying because I I don't uh fully agree with that, because uh developing a fantastic product will still be uh a creative job. And so you you customer centricity is just one of those three strategies. And you don't have to choose customer experience as your strategy. If you uh succeed in creating the best possible uh product or service that nobody can touch, and that is so far above any other product that's in the market, and you can can continue that. That's that that's for instance the the position that Apple has had for a long time. Yes, absolutely. Then then you don't need to bother too much about uh that customer experience. Then that is your differentiator, and that that's perfectly okay. Or if you can be the cheapest, that's also fine. That's still fine.

SPEAKER_01 29:32

That's still that's still a strategy that can work. It's still um a life-to-lead, so to speak. It's still something that you can you can uh navigate by. Um but I think that you know AI, you know with Intel Customer, it's it's been at the core of what we do for for for ages. It's going so fast. What I what I feel to be a trend is, and it it kind of touches on what you've said, what you've picked up as a trend, is that the challenge is going to be to remain human and to enable human beings to be creative and to not just trust on the averages and the speed that AI can deliver. Um but we'll we'll see where AI is going, because it goes so fast sometimes, maybe it'll it'll surprise us and do something that we didn't expect it to do. Yeah. Um because it's it's quite a quite a rocky ride. Anyway, the peace of mind, the monetary value of the peace of mind is underrated. That's what I definitely take away uh for today. And sadly, that's all we have time for today. So uh a big thank you to uh it was my pleasure, for sure it was, um, sharing your insights on the myths of customer experience. As I said, you know, much more to unpack. Do go and see the keynote, uh dear listeners. It's really worth your while. Infotainment, it the word was invented for it. It was fantastically entertaining and very uh informative. This has been CX Matters, a podcast produced by Hello Customer. If you want to discover how your company can act smarter on customer feedback, visit HelloCustomer.com. In our next episode, I'm inviting another distinguished CX thought leader to the podcast. Michelle Stevens will join me and Horst to explore where strategy and execution meet and how customer centric thinking can lead to measurable impact. We'll be talking ROI. Until then, thank you for listening. Goodbye.