Businesses often design for internal processes and efficiency, creating a series of disconnected handoffs (e.g., in a hospital or restaurant). This forces the customer to maintain the coherence of their own journey, resulting in a fragmented, unloving, and ineffective experience that ultimately harms outcomes.
To systematically create an experience people love, design for a specific sequence of five feelings: 1. Control (clarity of rules), 2. Harmony (emotional awareness), 3. Significance (personal recognition), 4. Warmth of Others (human connection), and 5. Growth (feeling more capable).
While emotions like respect, satisfaction, or joy are positive, they don't reliably predict whether a person will repeat a behavior (e.g., re-buy a product or work harder). "Love" is the only feeling that consistently drives future actions, making it the most critical emotion for businesses to cultivate.
To measure genuine customer or employee "love," use the statement: "I can't imagine a world without [your company/leader]." When people strongly agree, you have tapped into an emotional connection that drives behavior, far surpassing standard satisfaction or NPS questions.
The relationship between customer experience and behavior is curvilinear. Moving a customer from a 3 to a 4 on a satisfaction scale yields no behavioral change. Only the jump from a 4 to a 5 (extreme satisfaction) actually predicts loyalty, retention, or advocacy, making 'top two box' survey analysis misleading.
Every leader is inherently an "experience maker," whether skilled or not. If you don't intentionally design a holistic experience for customers or employees, you will create one by default through drift and disconnected processes, which is often negative. The question isn't *if* you make experiences, but *how well* you do it.