Harvard Business Review Just Validated Everything I’ve Been Teaching for 25 Years.
The May/June 2026 Cover Story on Customer Loyalty Says “Good” Is Not Good Enough. Here’s How to Get to “Love.”
Harvard Just Said What I’ve Been Saying Since 1998
The May/June 2026 issue of Harvard Business Review landed on my desk this week, and I want to be direct with you: I read the cover story and felt something I don’t experience very often.
Vindication.
The article, “What Companies Can Learn from Their Biggest Fans” by researcher Marcus Buckingham, opens with a finding that I believe is the single most important idea in all of customer experience right now: human behavior does not change in response to mildly positive experiences. It only shifts — meaningfully, measurably, lastingly — when experiences are so extraordinary that people say they love them.
Buckingham’s research found that the relationship between customer sentiment and customer behavior is not linear. It’s exponential. There is a critical emotional threshold — and below that threshold, incremental improvements in satisfaction produce almost no meaningful change in loyalty or advocacy. Above it, everything accelerates. Repeat visits. Word of mouth. Willingness to pay more. Resistance to competitors.
I have been saying a version of this for 25 years. I have built an entire methodology around it. And now the May/June 2026 cover of Harvard Business Review is saying it with longitudinal data, large-scale research, and the full weight of HBR’s academic credibility behind it.
So let me tell you what it means for your business — and exactly how to get there.
The Finding That Should Change How You Think About “Good” Service
Here is what Buckingham’s research shows, and why it matters so much. Most organizations spend their energy trying to fix what’s broken, reduce complaints, and inch their CSAT scores upward. They are trying to move customers from a 3 to a 4 on a five-point scale. From frustrated to fine. From dissatisfied to acceptable.
The problem, as the HBR research makes clear, is that this effort produces almost no meaningful change in behavior. A customer who rates you a 4 does not behave meaningfully differently from a customer who rates you a 3. They are both transactional. They will switch for a better price. They will not recommend you unless asked. They will not go out of their way to come back.
The behavioral change — the loyalty, the advocacy, the word of mouth, the emotional attachment that makes price irrelevant — only happens when you move a customer from a 4 to a 5. From satisfied to love. And that jump, according to Buckingham’s data, is not incremental. It is a threshold. You either cross it or you don’t.
As I read that, I thought about something I have told every audience I’ve ever spoken to:
“You don’t need satisfied Customers, you need loyal Customers.” — John DiJulius, The DiJulius Group
Buckingham’s research is the academic proof of what I have seen play out in practice for decades. The brands that retain customers, generate referrals, and command premium pricing are not the ones that eliminated friction. They’re the ones that created genuine emotional connection. And that is not an accident. It is a design.
Why “Good Enough” Is Actually Getting Worse
The timing of this research matters. Buckingham opens the article with a sobering set of facts: despite decades of investment in engagement and customer experience, employee trust levels are at all-time lows and engagement is at the bottom of a 20-year range. Customers are simultaneously more demanding and more fickle than ever. They expect more, forgive less, and switch faster.
This is the backdrop against which the “good enough” trap becomes fatal. If customer expectations are rising and your service is staying flat, you are not standing still. You are falling behind. The gap between what customers experience at your best competitors and what they experience with you is widening even if you are doing nothing differently.
I have been watching this play out in real time. The brands I see thriving right now are not the ones that invested in marginal improvements. They are the ones that made a deliberate decision to stop chasing “good” and start designing for extraordinary. They built systems around the question: not “how do we reduce complaints?” but “how do we create the kind of experience that makes people say they love us?”
That is a completely different question. And it leads to completely different actions.
What the Research Says Creates “Love” — And What I’ve Built Around It
Buckingham’s research identifies five conditions that, experienced in sequence, produce the emotional threshold where love becomes possible: control, harmony, significance, warmth, and growth. When people experience all five, they don’t just like the experience. They feel they are flourishing in it. And when they feel that — whether as a customer or an employee — their behavior changes fundamentally.
I want to walk through what each of these looks like in practice, because I have been building around these same conditions — under different names, through different tools — for my entire career.
Control: Customers Need to Feel Informed, Never Confused
Buckingham describes control as removing the disorienting fog of confusion — making sure the customer always knows what is happening, what to expect, and what to do next. In my methodology, this is one of the primary functions of the Customer Experience Cycle. When you map every stage of your customer’s journey and define what they experience at each touchpoint, you are engineering control. The customer never feels lost, overwhelmed, or uncertain about what happens next. That certainty is not just convenient. It is emotionally significant.
Significance: Every Person Needs to Feel Like They Matter
This is perhaps the condition I am most passionate about. Significance is what happens when a customer feels genuinely seen — when they understand that to you, they are not an account number or a transaction, but a person whose experience you have thought about, prepared for, and invested in.
This is the entire premise of The Relationship Economy. I wrote that book because I believe — and now the HBR research confirms — that the highest form of customer experience is making another person feel significant. Using their name. Remembering their preferences. Anticipating what they need before they ask. These are not soft gestures. They are, as Buckingham’s data shows, the behaviors that move a customer from satisfied to loyal.
Warmth: The Human Ingredient That Technology Cannot Replace
Buckingham’s research identifies warmth — the genuine human care expressed in an interaction — as a non-negotiable ingredient in love. And this finding lands with particular force right now, in a moment when companies are rushing to replace human interaction with AI automation.
The HBR IdeaCast episode on this research, “To Gain Customer and Employee Loyalty, Go Beyond Good Enough”, makes the argument even more directly: the most common experiences that cross the emotional threshold into love are ones where another human being made someone feel genuinely cared for. Not an efficient process. Not a fast resolution. A person who brought genuine warmth to the interaction.
I have been saying this for years. I said it when AI was still a distant concern. And I am saying it now with even more urgency: the warmth gap — the growing distance between what technology delivers and what humans crave — is the single greatest competitive opening in customer experience today. The brands that fill it will build the kind of loyalty Buckingham’s research describes. The brands that automate past it will become Spirit Airlines.
Growth: Customers Want to Feel Better After Doing Business with You
This is the condition that surprises most leaders when I talk about it. Growth, in Buckingham’s framework, means that the customer feels they have gained something — knowledge, capability, confidence, wellbeing — from the interaction. They walk away better than they arrived.
In my work, this is what I call creating inspired moments — the interactions that a customer carries with them, that they tell stories about, that they remember years later. Not because something extraordinary happened in a transactional sense, but because a person made them feel more capable, more informed, or more cared for than they expected. Those moments are what transform a customer into an advocate.
The Gap Between What Most Businesses Do and What the Research Requires
I want to be honest about why this research is so important — and why most organizations will read it and change nothing.
Most businesses are designed to be adequate. Their training is designed to reduce errors. Their processes are designed to minimize friction. Their metrics are designed to track satisfaction. None of that is bad. But none of it will get you to love.
Getting to love requires a different architecture. It requires asking, at every stage of the customer journey: is this person experiencing control, significance, and warmth right now? And if the answer is no — if they are confused, feeling anonymous, or interacting with a process rather than a person — the experience needs to be redesigned.
This is exactly what my X-Commandment Methodology is built to do. The Customer Experience Action Statement gives every employee a clear North Star: not “be efficient” but “make every person feel this specific thing.” The Never & Always standards operationalize warmth and significance into specific, trainable behaviors that happen consistently — not just when someone feels like it. The Customer Experience Cycle maps the specific moments where control and growth can be designed in, rather than left to chance.
The brands Buckingham highlights in his research — Disney, Kroger — did not get to love by accident. They got there by designing for it, systematically, at every touchpoint, with every employee. That is what I have been helping organizations do for 25 years. And now Harvard Business Review has put the data behind it.
This Is Also True for Your Employees. And That’s Not a Coincidence.
One of the most powerful aspects of Buckingham’s research is that it applies equally to employees and customers. The same five conditions — control, harmony, significance, warmth, growth — that create love in a customer also create love in an employee. An employee who experiences those five things in their daily work is not just engaged. They are flourishing. And a flourishing employee delivers the kind of experience that makes a customer flourish too.
This is something I have always believed, and it is the foundation of The Employee Experience Revolution. You cannot ask your team to create love in a customer interaction if they have never experienced love in their own daily work. The EX always precedes the CX. Every time.
“A good customer experience starts with a good employee experience. The CX will never be better than the EX.” — John DiJulius
Buckingham’s research adds a layer of precision to this: it is not just about whether your employees are satisfied or even engaged. It is about whether they feel significant. Whether they experience warmth from their leadership. Whether they feel they are growing. An organization that engineers those five conditions for its people will find that those people naturally engineer them for its customers. The loop is not accidental. It is structural.
What I Want Every Leader Reading This to Do Right Now
I have one ask after reading this. Not a 90-day initiative. Not a new tool. One question to sit with honestly:
Do your customers — genuinely, consistently, at every touchpoint — feel significant? Not just served. Not just processed efficiently. Seen. Known. Cared for by a person who treats their experience as something worth designing.
If the answer is sometimes, or “it depends on who’s working,” then you have your answer about why you have satisfied customers but not loyal ones. Satisfaction is what happens when you meet expectations. Love is what happens when you exceed them in a way that is personal, consistent, and human.
Harvard Business Review just devoted its cover to proving that the gap between those two things is the most important strategic issue in business today. I have devoted my career to building the systems that close it. And I will tell you what I have told leaders for 25 years — it matters in every economy, but it matters most in a hard one:
“Because in any economy — especially a down economy — Customer loyalty is your strongest asset!” — John DiJulius, The Customer Service Revolution
Ready to Move Your Customers From Satisfied to “I Love Them”?
If the HBR research resonates — if you know your customers like you but you want them to love you — my team can help you design an experience that crosses that threshold. Consistently, at every touchpoint, with every employee.
→ Schedule a Complimentary Strategy Call — Let’s talk about designing love into your customer experience
→ Read: What a Customer Service Revolution Really Is — The difference between satisfied customers and loyal ones
→ Read: How to Create Inspired Moments in Each Customer’s Day — The moments that move customers from a 4 to a 5
→ Get The Relationship Economy — The book on building human connection — the core ingredient of love
→ Get The Employee Experience Revolution — Because your employees have to experience love before they can deliver it
→ Explore the X-Commandment Methodology — The system that engineers the five conditions of love at every touchpoint
→ Register for the CX Executive Academy — The training program for leaders who want to move beyond good enough
→ Book John as a Keynote Speaker — Bring the “good enough is never enough” message to your next event
