This Is What CX Obsession Looks Like

Many organizations provide lip service about the experience they provide. It is on everyone’s website and listed in their core values. But few companies actually execute it and make it a reality.

It has been proven repeatedly that the fastest way to ruin a brand’s customer experience is rapid growth. It is easier when you are small and intimate, and the founder is in the trenches. Explosive growth! It is the one thing every CEO and Entrepreneur wants, works for, and dreams about. However, if your company isn’t ready, it can be the worst thing for your organization. Remember the adage, “Be careful what you wish for.” It has put many successful companies out of business. Rarely does a company experience rapid growth without its customer and employee experience suffering significantly.

How One Brand Built a World-Class Experience and Scaled it to 19 Locations & 20,000 Employees

Now imagine trying to maintain your CX obsession as you grow to 19 locations and 20,000 team members. That is exactly what Sandals Resorts International (SRI) has done and continues to do. Sandals & Beaches Resorts are sister brands under SRI, both offering luxury all-inclusive vacations in the Caribbean. Sandals is the leading luxury all-inclusive brand designed exclusively for couples, offering a romantic, adults-only escape in the Caribbean, with resorts spread across Jamaica, Saint Lucia, Antigua, The Bahamas, Grenada, Barbados, Curaçao, and soon Saint Vincent & The Grenadines. Beaches Resorts are known as the Sandals Resorts for families, featuring spectacular water parks, Sesame Street characters, and kids’ clubs with activities for all ages, and currently has three properties — two in Jamaica (Negril and Ocho Rios) and one in Turks & Caicos.

From Good to Great

So why did SRI double down on what was already a strong reputation for customer experience? “Our Executive Vice Chairman of Sandals Resort, Adam Stewart, has always been laser-focused on continuous improvement of the guest and employee experience,” said Jessica Shannon, Chief Experience Officer of Sandals. “As we grow, we need to determine what that looks like, and how we can continuously improve it? It’s cutting across all departments and looking at that entire customer journey, as well as with employees, it’s hire to retire.”

“The business is growing by leaps and bounds. When you start expanding, and you’re doubling, and you’re tripling in size, you have to be much more intentional and must be more systematic about things,” Shannon explains. “So part of it is the growth and making sure that we don’t lose what is so important to us. I think the second thing would be that in the post-COVID world, a lot of things have shifted, right? Guest expectations are very different in a post-COVID world. Our customers expect a different experience than they did 5 or 10 years ago. I think those two things were certainly catalysts. Adam has been a true visionary in terms of what Sandals 2.0 looks like and in helping codify it. And he has always had a human-centric point of view. We can look at all the data in the world, but what the heart and mind look like has been kind of front and center in his philosophy. So, 2.0 for us really is looking at what is the best of our core that we need to keep, and we need to institutionalize, we need to codify, but then how do we reinvent different things to make sure that we’re taking the best of what exists and the best of what our potential is and putting those two things together into service.”

Why TDG

“We looked at a variety of different firms and different teams and different partners, and we just gravitated to The DiJulius Group right away. From what you had done and what you could do, and it’s your passion for which you had. And we have…been so, so, so fortunate and so grateful that we have been a partner with you on this journey. We wouldn’t have been here without you and without the power of teamwork,” Shannon says.

It Has to Start with Their Hearts and Minds

“No matter how much data we use, you must think about human-centric design because if you create SOPs, that’s fine, people will go through a process, and people will become adherent to it. You create the accountabilities, that’s fine, people will comply. But if you don’t tap into the hearts and the minds and the passion, it’s not going to be real, and it’s not going to give you any of the value that you’re looking for. So, creating a CX culture and a service DNA that really speaks to the hearts and minds of team members and ignites their superpowers and passions is what we think is the most important part of harnessing the power of those 20,000.”

Day in the Life

Sandals followed TDG’s X Commandment methodology. The first place we start is helping every team member understand what a day in the life of a guest and a co-worker looks like. “No one can watch our day in the life video without shedding a tear and smiling at the same time, which is what you need. We were very intentional in working with you to curate experiences that were very representative of guest and team member experiences, so our team members don’t have the life that our guests do, and our guests don’t have the life that our team members do. But helping to understand that one, people are people everywhere, and everyone has their own ongoing human situation, and making that so visceral and so real,” says Shannon.

Cross-Departmental Collaboration

Each workshop was held at different Sandals properties and was attended by not only the executive team, leaders, and heads of departments, but also customer-facing team members from the front desk, booking, bellmen, housekeeping, food & beverage, entertainment, and events. This was critical to buy-in and cross-department collaboration. Shannon says, “We broke down barriers and broke down silos. Let’s say service failures come from a gap between departments. So, one department is responsible for one element, and another for something else. Allowing all the departments to see their impact on the entire guest journey helps break down those barriers.”

Creating Sandals’ Guest Experience Action Statement

The customer experience action statement is a clear call to action of what each and every employee should intentionally achieve with every interaction. It’s a game- changer for your culture. From the CEO down to the back of the house staff, it’s your company’s North Star. “Every team member has the power to shape a guest’s memory of their time with us. As leaders, it is our responsibility to give our people the clarity, confidence, and support to use that power with purpose. That’s how Creating Caribbean Moments becomes something we all own,” states Kareema Clarke-Plummer, Regional Manager – Guest Experience, and distinguished alumnus of the Customer eXperience Executive Academy 2025.

“In thinking about Creating Caribbean Moments, it gives our team members a sense of pride because 98% of our team members are Caribbean nationals. And so, helping to create a moment that is authentic to their lived experience is something everyone can anchor themselves to,” shares Shannon. “When guests choose to come to the Caribbean, they want a Caribbean experience. It is critical that we create lifetime memories. Like those experiences are meant to be lifetime memories, and we have an imperative in a positive way and a desire to make those the best memories they could possibly be.”

How to Keep It Top of Mind

Conducting the workshops, creating your CX standards, and then launching them company-wide is important. However, that is where most companies’ initiatives go to die. Post-launch is where the real work begins. How to keep it TOMA — Top of Mind Awareness. While the SRI leadership team did an incredible company-wide launch, it is what they did next that is having the biggest impact several months later. Similar to America’s Got Talent, they created a Sandals Got Talent contest. Shannon said, “How do we make this fun, so people are engaged, it doesn’t feel like they’re eating their Brussels sprouts, right? How do you make service fun and engaging? And how do you speak to everyone in a moment? And someone said, ‘It’s too bad we don’t have a song because, especially in the Caribbean, music is so embedded in the culture.’”

“We decided to hold a company-wide competition for a new service anthem. Because it will then be immediately top of mind to everyone. It’s going to be the ultimate fun and feel-good experience, but it’s also an amazing way for people to remember the action statement, the pillars, and the Never & Always. We held a competition at each. And the rules of the competition were: it had to be team members, and the lyrics had to be original. Every resort, every destination had a competition. We had hundreds, hundreds of applicants,” explains Shannon.

“We got down to two per resort and our headquarters, so we had 40 tracks. Each of the final two was professionally recorded. That itself was an experience for team members because they got to go to a recording studio and have professional recordings done. We sat in a room for two days, the steering committee and two professional producers, to narrow the final 40 down to the final four,” says Shannon. “And we listened to them blind, front ways, back ways, every which way, considering all the different criteria, did they meet the expectations, et cetera, but also getting that professional ear from the producers to make sure that it was going to hit. We got down to the final four, and then we flew them in to perform live in Jamaica to experience life as a guest being taken care of all the different excursions that they could go on, but they also had a wardrobe budget. We were able to do videos. Our light and film team was awesome, making videos about their experiences, where they came from, and their passions.”

Related: Episode 249: What It Really Takes to Scale Customer Experience Across 20,000 Team Members

Everyone got to see the human-interest element of it as well. They were so good. We finally ended up with a winner. They were able to take home a large cash prize, which was exciting. Our executive chairman also made an on-the-spot decision that every single contestant, because they were so fantastic as finalists, was awarded a free, all-expenses-paid flight and a free vacation for themselves and their partner at a destination of their choosing, which is also fun. That competition got everyone talking and thinking about service, creating Caribbean moments, and what that meant to them. And that will now be part of our launch and rollout, and, in perpetuity, our service anthem. “We are creating a Spotify playlist for our team members because the top 15 songs were so phenomenal. It was so hard to narrow down the great songs. Now we will have an entire playlist of service anthems. These songs deserve to be heard. They deserve to get their moment in the sun and their airtime.”

Check out the Sandals Service Anthem

Customer Obsessed Never Ends

“Behind every score is a guest, and behind every guest experience are countless interactions with our teams. We create that score every single day, one Caribbean moment at a time. Creating Caribbean moments is about giving our guests an experience they cannot wait to tell someone else about, giving them more reasons to become our biggest advocates,” says Clarke-Plummer.

Want to Build Your Own Version of “Creating Caribbean Moments”?

Sandals didn’t stumble into a customer experience action statement that resonates with 20,000 employees across 19 locations — they built it deliberately, with a proven framework.

Join John DiJulius and Dave Murray live on September 14th (12:00–2:00 PM ET) for a hands-on workshop on creating a Customer Experience Action Statement — one that’s actionable, observable, and drives consistent results, not just words on a wall.

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Members also get 3 more live workshops per year, unlimited replays, and the full workshop library — including the session that helped shape Sandals’ own CX transformation.