Designing Customer Experiences with Soul
“A serious challenge for many organizations that wish to improve in both the areas of customer experience and employee experience occurs when the main inhibiting factor is the leadership experience.”
–Simon Robinson and Maria Moraes Robinson
Designing Customer Experiences with Soul is different than other books about customer experience for several reasons. It approaches CX through a strategic lens, connecting CX to the organization’s mission and purpose. It encourages a more holistic approach to generating insights, tapping into how experiences reinforce meaning and an emotional connection for customers and employees. Perhaps most importantly, it puts the focus squarely on leadership experience, as a distinct type of experience from customer and employee experience (LX, CX, and EX). Without an intentional focus on LX, your change management efforts will fail, and culture will eat your strategy for breakfast.
The book was written together by Simon Robinson and Maria Moraes Robinson, the husband-and-wife team that co-founded the consulting firm Holonomics, which is named after the core framework they introduced in 2014 in the first of three books they published together, Holonomics: Business Where People and Planet Matter. Their latest book builds on another book published in 2017, Customer Experiences with Soul: a New Era in Design.
These books draw on Simon’s earlier work at the Human Factors department within BT Laboratories. Back in 1995, Simon published an article with Mike Atyeo on “Designing the Customer Experience.” This came out just one year after Lou (Lewis) Carbone and Stephen Haeckel’s seminal article on “Engineering Customer Experiences” that is credited with introducing the term Experience Management (XM). You can find my earlier review of Lou’s book Clued In here, and my most recent podcast episode with Lou here, in which we discuss an initiative we’re working on together called the XM Collaboratory (www.xmcollaboratory.org).
Holonomics focuses on strategy as an ongoing narrative, putting the customer lifecycle at the center of strategy. It emphasizes change management as an iterative process to evolve and communicate the organization’s strategic decisions. The core idea is that when leaders and the teams they engage, motivate, and develop, contribute to their organization’s strategy in a way that is aligned to universal values of peace, truth, love, righteousness, and non-violence, they foster a more empowered and resilient organization that taps into the energy and intrinsic motivation of employees.
The book lays out 5 principles of customer driven organizations
Customer understanding (focus on insights)
Customer engagement (foster relationships and trust)
Customer experience (take a holistic approach to journey design and management)
Customer satisfaction and loyalty (focus on exceeding expectations)
Continuous improvement (never ending journey with measurable goals)
But is focusing on these 5 principles sufficient for a customer experience to have soul? Perhaps they are enough to prevent the customer experience from being “soul destroying,” as the authors describe the way we feel when brands are inauthentic and don’t align to our values. In contrast, organization’s whose customer experiences have soul elevate the consciousness of their leaders so they collaborate more effectively to design and deliver customer and employee experiences that are emotionally resonant and meaningful.
Nurturing the leadership experience at your organization is key to realizing a customer experience with soul. Leaders’ actions and the relationships they nurture either raise up or lower the energy of the organization through its culture. As the authors put it, “if leaders have not fully understood the impact of their actions and the importance of human values – no matter how worthy the purpose of their brands or organizations – there is still a danger that archetypal behaviors such as being blinkered, predatory, selfish, and elitist will sabotage the customer and employee experience.”
Leaders’ self-awareness and intentional focus on being cultural stewards is a force-multiplier for investments in CX and EX. This is a key theme of an article I co-authored with my colleague Sujay Saha, ROX^3: Boosting Returns on Leadership, Customer, and Employee Experiences. More recently, I wrote about the importance of LX in my Winning Experience Substack that I team on with Randall Rothenberg, The Craft of Leadership in an AI-Fueled World.
In their book, Simon and Maria write about the breakdowns that occur when there isn’t enough focus on nurturing LX and connecting it to CX and EX. This happens when leaders:
Don’t experience products and services fully by walking in customers shoes
Are insulated from EX given limited day-to-day contact across the organization
Don’t pay attention to potential blind spots and cognitive biases
Have limited self-awareness for how their behaviors impact culture
Lack authenticity and don’t consider how their actions are perceived by others
When this occurs, it undermines trust and erodes EX, as well as CX through the way employees show up with customers along the customer journey. Strong leaders not only invest in training but spend time mentoring and developing others in the organization. Reinforcing the connection between CX, EX, and culture is a huge untapped opportunity in most organizations.
Another core theme in the book that resonates for me is the emphasis placed on expanding the way leaders develop insights. Simon and Maria write about the “four ways of knowing that provide a richer picture and allow us to tap into deeper insights than rational thinking alone.” They encourage leaders to embrace sensing, feeling, and intuition as ways of knowing that complement rational thinking. Right brain thinking is key to forming social bonds and relationships. It is through feeling that we achieve a stronger sense of connection with others. Sensing involves more intuitive ways of experiencing the world, like how artists do. This has parallels to an approach to developing deeper insights that I write about in my own book, The CX & Culture Connection, called the Experience Collage Canvas ™. Collage, like customer experience, has many layers. Like an artist working on a collage, understanding the pieces and how they fit together reveals deeper meaning. Your Experience Collage Canvas ™ reveals the deeper emotional connection customers have with your brand beyond the functional benefits of products and services, tapping into deeper sources of meaning that foster sharing and community around the brand.
I’ve enjoyed sharing a few themes from Designing Customer Experiences with Soul. I hope this inspires you to read the book and watch my podcast with Simon when it comes out. I’m looking forward to sharing more about some of the ways that we are collaborating to help clients elevate the leadership experience at their organization.
If you’d like to check out my other book reviews, you can find them here on JourneySpark’s website: https://www.journeysparkconsulting.com/book-reviews.
I’ll post my podcast discussion with Simon on LinkedIn, after which it will be available here on the site for my book and podcast: www.cxandcultureconnection.com.
Also keep an eye out for my podcast with James Killian, Ph.D., which will debut shortly as well. James and I focus our discussion on leadership experience, which is only fitting as James hosts his own podcast called The Customer-Driven Leader. Given the intersection of all our interests, you also won't be surprised that Lou Carbone was his first guest! I'll be on James' podcast myself early in 2026.