Podcast

Oct 6, 2026

Customer Passion with Steven Van Belleghem

Podcast cover art for In Clear Focus episode Customer Passion

IN CLEAR FOCUS: This week's guest, Steven Van Belleghem, explores how to build a customer culture competitors can't copy. Discussing this month's Bigeye Book Club selection, "Customer Passion: 101 Ways to Meet Customer Expectations and Stand Out," Steven explains the 95-5 rule and why AI makes human empathy vital for complex interactions. Discover how to ignite deep loyalty using friction hunting, the 10-star mindset stretch, and empowering frontline employees to surprise and delight buyers.

Episode Transcript

Adrian Tennant: Coming up in this episode of IN CLEAR FOCUS.

Steven Van Belleghem: Don't spend all your time and money on big strategic customer projects, but look for 100 small things that you can do better in the next 12 months. And you will be surprised by the impact, and it will create energy internally. Customers will say, “I don't really know what you do differently”, but we feel that you guys are on a roll.

Adrian Tennant: You're listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, fresh perspectives on marketing and advertising produced weekly by Bigeye, a strategy-led, full-service creative agency growing brands for clients globally. Hello, I'm your host, Adrian Tennant, Bigeye's Chief Strategy Officer. Thank you for joining us. Bigeye is based in Orlando, Florida, where we're surrounded by attractions, including Walt Disney World and Universal Resort, that treat customer experience as an operational discipline. The same kind of guest- and customer-first thinking is also present in many of the area's top hospitality and dining options. My guest today argues that artificial intelligence is about to make fast, accurate service available to every company. Steven Van Belleghem is a co-founder of Nexxworks, where he helps companies navigate the intersection of technology and human connection. A keynote speaker in more than 50 countries, he's the author of six international bestsellers, including “When Digital Becomes Human,” and “The Conversation Company.” His new book, published by Kogan Page and our Bigeye Book Club selection for October, is "Customer Passion: 101 Ways to Meet Customer Expectations and Stand Out." To discuss the kind of customer culture competitors can't copy, I'm delighted that Steven is joining us today from Bruges in Belgium. Steven, welcome to IN CLEAR FOCUS!

Steven Van Belleghem: Hey Adrian, good to see you. Thank you for inviting me.

Adrian Tennant: Well, Steven, first of all, congratulations on the publication of “Customer Passion.” Why 101 actions?

Steven Van Belleghem: Because I believe that we underestimate the impact of a lot of small changes that you can make in an organization to make your customers happy. I think we overinvest in big strategic projects in customer experience, and we underinvest in the 101 small things we can do. So I wanted to write a book where people have a very practical guide where they can choose a number of tips that fits with their industry that is in line with their own behavior and motivations. And that they can do something different as from tomorrow, without big investments, without big changes in the organization, but with instant impact on your customer happiness.

Adrian Tennant: Many businesses and brands identify customer experience as a key priority, showing up in mission statements and company values and so on. Steven, where do things typically go wrong?

Steven Van Belleghem: You're absolutely right. Every company I meet believes it's customer-centric, or wants to be. But if you talk with their customers, there's always this gap in perception. Things go wrong because companies are over-focused on the short term and don't understand the value of investing in the long run. And the whole system of an organization is built towards that short-term success, the whole rewarding system, the coaching system, the training system. And because of that, most companies fail to make their customers really happy and fail to be memorable and fail to become part of the word of mouth or the day-to-day conversations that customers have about them in a positive way.

Adrian Tennant: Marketing teams typically invest the budget that builds a customer's expectations, while operations typically delivers against it. Steven, who owns the gap between the two?

Steven Van Belleghem: I don't think that customer happiness is the responsibility of a single team. I also don't believe in the concept of the internal customer. Because when you work with a system like the internal customer, it's like you work for me or I work for you and there's like a different hierarchy. I think the goal of a company is to create value for the end customer. And that as a team, as a group, you figure out a way how to deliver value so that the customer becomes happy and the customer becomes an ambassador of your services. But that's a shared goal. And the moment that an organization stops thinking in internal customers, but understands that there's only one real customer, the ones that actually pays the bills towards the organization. And if everyone is focused towards delivering towards that one customer, you have a complete different kind of organization.

Adrian Tennant: Well, in “Customer Passion,” you write about the 95-5 rule, designed for the 95% of customers who are honest, not the 5% who aren't. Take a retailer writing a returns policy. What changes?

Steven Van Belleghem: Well, in many organizations, when one customer takes advantage of a certain rule or a certain procedure or a certain action, most of the time there's a meeting and then organizations will say, Oh, this can never happen again. So let's create a new rule to avoid this. And what you're trying to do is to protect yourself against the 5% what I call pain in the ass people. But what you actually do is you punish the 95% normal people. And the moment that you can mentally accept as an organization that you will accept that five percent of your customers can have bad intentions or shows bad behavior can show toxic behavior but you're okay with that and you focus on the ninety five and you create rules and procedures based on the ninety five that's the moment when your customer service levels go up tremendously so i invite every company and everyone who's listening. go through all the rules and procedures that your own company has and ask yourself, how many of them are created to protect ourselves against the 5%? And can we get rid of them and create a happier world for the 95%?

Adrian Tennant: Well, a direct-to-consumer brand might never speak to a customer. The relationship runs through a website and a shipping notification. Steven, where does customer culture show up there?

Steven Van Belleghem: It's a disadvantage, of course, if you never talk to a customer and if you never hear them, then the only platform where you can deliver a certain kind of service is the digital tools that you have. And the moment when the package ends up at your doorstep, those are the two moments where you can make a difference. Plus if someone is unhappy because the product was damaged or something went wrong. So those companies excel in the operational perfection. And to get there, I think the goal is to make sure that you always tell the customer that they are right. I think that's the strategy that Amazon actually followed for years when they said, if someone tells us that their books didn't arrive, we're just going to send new books. We're not going to ask for evidence. We're not going to argue. And because of that, we're going to build trust and that trust will create loyalty and new business. So you have to be more strict on your service guidelines and service levels if you don't actually talk to a customer. Second thing you can do is you can try to add a little human touch to that relationship. There are a lot of e-commerce brands that add handwritten cards in their box with the name of a certain person to show that, oh, someone really took care of this order for you. And it gives people two or three seconds of warm feeling saying, oh, there was actually someone working on this product and this delivery for me, which can create a little bond if you do that over time. But the main goal there is to have transactional loyalty and transactional perfection.

Adrian Tennant: In “Customer Passion,” you also introduced the 99-1 rule. That is, artificial intelligence handles almost every routine interaction well, and the small remainder carries the emotional weight. Steven, how does a company find its 1%?

Steven Van Belleghem: The customer will find you. I always take the example of an insurance company. In 99% of the cases, if you have a small issue, if you have a small little scratch on your car, you don't want to invest any time in that process. You just want to be reimbursed. You want it to be as efficient as possible. So in those 99% of the cases, when you have a small issue, you don't want to talk to a human. You just want efficiency. But if you're in a car accident where someone got hurt badly or someone died or something terrible happened or your house burned down, at that moment, you don't want to talk to a chatbot. At that moment, you don't want efficiency. You want empathy. And that's the 1% of the cases. And in those 1% of the cases, the customer will reach out for you. And at that moment, that's a moment of truth, because at that moment, you need to understand as an organization, this is serious. This is a customer with a big problem. And now we have to show that we can really care. So I think in a world of AI, indeed, we're going to end up that 99% of the cases will be handled by AI chatbots. The 1%ers, we're going to need a completely different profile of people to take care of all this. Those people will have to be really good in emotional connection, better than functional knowledge or transactional perfection. Time is no longer a limitation because the AI takes care of 99% of cases and it has unlimited time. The 1% cases, they should take as much time as possible. It can be in any channel. Maybe you will have to go to the customer's house to support them at a certain moment. So it takes a complete different mindset on how to deal with the 1%. Actually, all the KPIs that are being used in contact centers today are no longer valid if you end up in the 99 AI versus 1% human situation in customer service.

Adrian Tennant: That's really interesting. You write that AI raises the work of people who are below average, but does less for people who are already excellent. So, Steven, what should a brand do to go beyond average?

Steven Van Belleghem: That's a very good question, because I believe that eventually, because of AI, most customer relations will become extremely average. Even if you have customer service perfection at a certain moment, imagine that you're always helped in real time, in your own language, 24-7, unlimited time per call, and so on and so on, and that the problem is solved. Eventually, that's what AI chatbots will do. And every company is investing in that, spending millions on that. Funny thing is the moment that everyone achieves that kind of perfect customer service, at that moment, it completely loses its value because everyone will have it. And when everyone has something, it becomes the norm, it becomes average again. So with the technology, I don't think we will be able to differentiate. I think we're gonna have more and more average, boring stuff coming in our direction. So as organizations, it's gonna become important to think beyond efficiency And to look for ways to get deep loyalty from your customers, to get deep belonging from your customers, that they want to be with you, that they want to buy your product. And that's something that you will achieve by being creative, by being innovative, by being humans, that it's not humans in the loop, but that it's humans in the core. That's going to be the differentiator.

Adrian Tennant: Let's talk about customer loyalty. Steven, in your book, you observe that points programs earn loyalty to the program itself. As AI agents start doing comparison shopping on behalf of consumers, what happens to the loyalty schemes retailers have spent years building?

Steven Van Belleghem: Well, the whole loyalty program drives behavior. It creates loyalty to the loyalty program. You do choose a certain airline because you want to get the points. You go to a certain supermarket because you want to get some sort of a present. So it works, but it doesn't create emotional loyalty. It drives behavior. And I believe maybe as a consequence of what I talked about earlier, that we have to rethink the whole loyalty game. Don't ask yourself the question, what do we need to do to make our customers more loyal to us? But turn that question around, ask yourself, how can we show more loyalty to our customers? I think loyalty will have to start with an organization and as a reward, you get the loyalty back from customers. Today, most organizations are like, okay, as soon as someone spends a lot of money with us, then they're going to get a better treatment. Maybe that's the wrong philosophy in the age of AI.

Adrian Tennant: As listeners know, I'm based in Orlando, and many of our theme parks run on rituals: the same greeting, the same closing, every day. What does a customer ritual look like for brands that don't have guests walking through a physical entrance and exit?

Steven Van Belleghem: Yeah, I'm a big fan of Orlando and the parks and all parks around the world. I think theme parks are an interesting environment to study customer experience and customer service. Especially Orlando parks are really doing their best and I'm always super amazed with how good they are in people handling like thousands of people. going to a certain ride early in the morning. And I think that their success is perfect in that process management, people management combined with those rituals of trying to show that you want people to have a good time and to put your energy into that. And I think they're doing an amazing job there. Rituals work really, really well. If you walk into a park and Mickey is waving at you, it gives you a sense of happiness. If Mickey wouldn't be there or if you wouldn't see Mickey throughout the day, it would be a disappointment because that ritual disappears. Only that small wave creates something that customers expect. So if you do a good job with your rituals and your organization, it becomes something that people will start to miss if you wouldn't do it anymore. And it can be a yearly event. I mean, I talked to a big B2B company that is the sugar industry in Europe, and every year they have this huge concert at their facilities called Sugar Rock. And they invite rock bands and 60 or 70,000 people come there, their employees, their customers and other people. Imagine that they wouldn't do that anymore. It's only a once a year thing, but it's a ritual that they have been doing for decades. Imagine that they wouldn't do it anymore. People would start to miss it. So a good ritual, the check that you can do for yourself. What if we would remove it? Would people complain? If yes, it's a good ritual and you double down on it, if the answer is no, if they wouldn't notice it, you need to step up your game.

Adrian Tennant: Well, relatedly, one question you propose brands ask themselves is, “Would you miss us if we disappeared?” Steven, what does the answer tell a marketing team?

Steven Van Belleghem: That in 90% of the cases, the answer would be no, I would not miss you. I live in Belgium. Every year in Belgium, 15,000 businesses go bankrupt on average. You live in the US, the number must be much, much higher. How many of the businesses that went out of business do you know by name i mean probably the biggest one would be serious serious can you name two or three more probably not easily cuz i don't care. We don't have a clue who they are. So thousands of businesses disappear every year. And we're like, okay, let's move on to the next one. So the problem with KPIs and businesses is that we are focused on the numbers game, which I fully understand, but we forget the emotional game. And if you want to be missed, if you want sticky loyalty. that happens when people would miss you if they would disappear. So I invite companies really to work with that, kill half of their KPIs and add this new one. How much would you miss us if we're gone?

Adrian Tennant: Let's take a short break. We'll be right back after this message.

Adrian Tennant: Welcome back. I'm talking with Steven Van Belleghem, author of the Bigeye Book Club's October selection, "Customer Passion: 101 Ways to Meet Customer Expectations and Stand Out." You write about giving frontline employees the freedom to bend a rule. What has to be true inside a company before that freedom is safe to give?

Steven Van Belleghem: Well, people need a safety net. You know, the Ritz-Carlton is my favorite example. They have The $2,000 Rule, is what they call it. And basically it means this, it means that they encourage their employees to invest their time, their energy, and if needed, the money of the company to make customers happy. And on the one hand, they can use it to compensate if they made a mistake or if they disappointed customers, but they can also use it, and that's something you don't hear that often, they can also use it to surprise customers, to delight them at an unexpected moment. I was giving a talk in the Ritz-Carlton somewhere in the southern part of France two years ago and I forgot my iPhone charger so you can imagine the stress I felt at that moment so I went to the reception desk and I asked if I could charge my phone there they said, "Of course! Come back in an hour it will be fully charged." So I came back phone was good. But then with a big smile, the guy behind reception desk, he gave me a box with a brand new Apple iPhone charger. And I said, "What's, what's going on?" He said, "Well, you looked a little bit stressed and we want you to be happy here. So here you go." I said, "That's amazing." I said, "how much do I need to pay?" He said, "No, no, no, no, no. We got this for you. It's on the house." They could have said, "Steven, there's a store 500 meters from our hotel. If you run, you can still get in the charger there." They could have charged me 35 euros. That would all have been fine. But now I'm an ambassador for life for Ritz-Carlton. It costed them 35 euros and 15 minutes to create an ambassador for life. That's what the result is of their $2,000 rule. People know that the management encourages them to do so. So there's the safety net. And if you just tell your employees, "Do whatever it takes to help a customer" they will think, "Yeah, right. Until I do it." And then they will not act. So they need to be sure, 100% sure that you encourage them, that you will support them to do things to surprise and make customers happy. And then they will understand that, "Okay, this is the rule that we usually apply in 99% of the cases, but this situation is so exceptional. What happened here with this customer is so unique. I need to do something different and I am certain that my management will applaud me for that decision." That's what you need to install a culture like that.

Adrian Tennant: Makes sense. You describe speed as a form of empathy. Where should a brand look first to give customers their time back?

Steven Van Belleghem: You know, there's so many frictions today in processes with organizations. Online interfaces are not user-centric. We have to wait in line. We sometimes don't get the right communication, and because of that, we lose time. So there's so many small things that every organization does that is costing time of the customer that I invite everyone to become a friction hunter. In your own organization, look for small frictions. Friction is a place where you waste the time for your customer and where it's not necessary. Look for those frictions. Look for easy to solve frictions. And in the next week, take three or five of them, solve them. Celebrate the fact that you removed those frictions and do it again the week after that. And if you install a rhythm like that, you will be surprised on what happens and you will save so much time of your customers. And the funny thing is, if you save time of your customers, the reward is that they will spend more time with you.

Adrian Tennant: Well, there's a lot in your book. I think there's more than 101 tips actually. The book includes an exercise you call the 10 star mindset stretch. Steven, how does that one work?

Steven Van Belleghem: This is an idea that I learned from Airbnb, where now and then they do this exercise because they learned that if you go to Airbnb and you look at the review scores of all the properties on their website or on their app, almost every house or apartment has a score that is higher than 4.5 on a five point scale. So they started to ask the question, if people give you a five on a five star rating, what does that really mean? Does it mean that it was exceptional or does it mean that it was in line with the expectations? What I learned is that if people give a 5 star today, it means that it is in line with expectations. Whereas if you designed a curve, 3 would be average, 5 would be exceptional, 1 would be really bad. If you get a 3 now as an Uber driver, it means that you are the most terrible driver on the planet. Because the standard is 5 today. So they were like, "Okay, we're, we're blinding ourselves here. So if we want to stretch our customer happiness, we have to rethink this and we have to try to envision what a six star experience could look like. What would a seven star experience look like? Up to a 10 star experience." And the 10 star experience can be wild. Doesn't have to be realistic. Could be that you say your favorite artists will perform the night of your arrival. Probably Taylor Swift will not do that, but it creates a mindset that helps people to stretch the possibilities. And if you then reverse engineer it back, you will eventually get better services than what you have today if you just stick with what you have. So that's a little exercise that I've done with many companies and it always creates new opportunities. They always come up with crazy stuff that everyone thinks, oh, this is too crazy. And then they just do one step back and suddenly the crazy idea becomes a reality.

Adrian Tennant: Now, you name word of mouth as the measure to watch. How would you track it?

Steven Van Belleghem: A number of ways. Social media online is crucial. So what people say on platforms, review platforms is number one source because there you didn't ask them. It happened spontaneously. Sometimes we ask them to give reviews, but you get spontaneous reviews and feedback there. Second thing where I'm still a fan of is just measurement. And you can do the NPS score or customer satisfaction score. I don't care that much about the score. I'm more interested in the second question where you say, why did you give us this score? Why did you give us a four? Why did you give us a 10? What did we do? And understanding those dynamics and working with the answers that you get in that open field. That learns you a lot about what drives word of mouth, both negatively and positively. And if you actually create a program where you work with those feedback points, you can manage word of mouth yourself.

Adrian Tennant: Well, let's talk a little bit about implementation. You recommend picking five tips, running them without compromise for two months, then picking five more. What makes a good first five?

Steven Van Belleghem: Yeah. I always recommend people to start with friction hunting. What I just described earlier, small improvements, and it's great. Such a good vibe internally. If you start to do that, the 95 5% rule, which we discussed earlier as well, where you look for those five percenters and try to remove them. The third one is everyone should feel the good, the bad, and the ugly of the customers.

Adrian Tennant: Oh.

Steven Van Belleghem: What I mean with this is that make sure that customer feedback reaches all employees directly. If you have a contact center, let them listen in. Make sure you have videos of customers that you don't just share statistics where you say, "Oh, 70% of our customers is super happy." Because, I mean, a seven out of 10 in school was kind of okay. If seven out of 10 customers are happy, it means that one out of three goes home and is super disappointed. But it doesn't sound that bad in statistics. You need to make sure that they feel it. They need to feel the oohs and the ahs directly. That's number three. The fourth one is check your automated flows. Many organizations have automated flows, automated communication, automated email confirmations and all that kind of stuff. And usually it's been there for two or three years and no one watches that anymore because it runs. Look at it again and you will be surprised by the tone of voice. It will be more boring than what you imagined and take a look at it and figure out how to make those better. And the fifth one is kill the zombies. which means solve your problems in a structural way. If you get questions over and over again from customers, it means that something isn't clear or something isn't right. I had this unfortunate experience this summer when I was in Switzerland. We were climbing somewhere towards one of their huts, beautiful. And we had lunch in one of those huts with my family. And afterwards we asked if we had to remove the plates and bring them somewhere or how it worked. They became very angry instantly. They said, "You should have seen it. It's right there. It's right there where you have to put it." I said, "Okay, no problem. We will do that." So my wife places those plates and forks and knives where she thinks she had to place it. But apparently that was the wrong spot. So that waiter lost control and became super, super angry because of that. And I said, "Why are you so angry? I mean, we were happy to place in the right spot. We just didn't understand." He said, "It's on a big sign here. You should have seen it." I said, "I'm sorry, I don't speak German. I missed it. My apologies." And he said, "You know what? I'm sorry, but you're the 100th person here that is doing it wrong this week. And I'm so tired of it." And then I thought, "If I'm the 100th person doing it wrong, maybe your system isn't right. Maybe then it's not the fault of the customers that maybe have to rethink this." And that's an example of killing the zombies. If something happens over and over again, and customers do crazy stuff, usually the mistake is not on the customer side, but on your end. So kill the zombies is number five.

Adrian Tennant: Excellent. Steven, if listeners take away one idea from "Customer Passion" and act on it this week, what would you want it to be?

Steven Van Belleghem: The general philosophy: don't spend all your time and money in big strategic customer projects, but look for 100 small things that you can do better in the next 12 months. And you will be surprised by the impact of the accumulation of those 100 small things. and it will create energy internally. Customers will say, I don't really know what you do differently, but we feel that you guys are on a roll, and that's what you want to achieve.

Adrian Tennant: Some great tips there. Steven, if IN CLEAR FOCUS listeners would like to learn more about you, nexxworks, or your new book, “Customer Passion,” what's the best way of doing so?

Steven Van Belleghem: Best way is to follow me on LinkedIn. I share a lot of content there also on Instagram, YouTube. It's just always my name. It's a difficult name, but it's Steven van Bellingham. I'm sure people will see it in the show notes or in the title of this show. And of course my website, if they want to reach out to me, that's also my name, stevenvanbelleghem.com.

Adrian Tennant: Perfect. And a reminder that IN CLEAR FOCUS listeners can save 25 percent on “Customer Passion” when you order directly from KoganPage.com using the promo code BIGEYE25 at checkout. Steven, thank you very much for being our guest this week on IN CLEAR FOCUS.

Steven Van Belleghem: Thank you for the invitation. I appreciate it.

Adrian Tennant: Thanks again to my guest this week, Steven Van Belleghem, author of “Customer Passion.” As always, you'll find a complete transcript of our conversation with timestamps and links to the resources we discussed on the IN CLEAR FOCUS page at Bigeyeagency.com. Thank you for listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, produced by Bigeye. I've been your host, Adrian Tennant. Until next week, goodbye.

Timestamps

00:00: Introduction to Customer Experience

00:27: Meet Steven Van Belleghem

02:13: The Power of Small Changes

03:06: The Gap in Customer Perception

04:01: Shared Responsibility for Customer Happiness

05:07: The 95-5 Rule in Customer Service

06:23: Customer Culture in E-Commerce

08:11: Understanding the 99-1 Rule

10:14: Going Beyond Average with AI

11:32: Rethinking Loyalty Programs

13:04: Customer Rituals in Non-Physical Brands

15:07: The Importance of Being Missed

16:16: Promoting Customer Passion

17:21: Empowering Frontline Employees

20:07: Speed as a Form of Empathy

21:02: The 10 Star Mindset Stretch

23:06: Tracking Word of Mouth

24:17: Implementing Customer-Centric Tips

27:23: Key Takeaway: Focus on Small Improvements

28:01: Where to Find More About Steven

28:42: Closing Remarks

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