For years, companies have poured money into customer experience initiatives. New platforms. New journeys. New promises. And yet, the gap between what businesses think they deliver and what customers actually experience remains stubbornly wide.
That disconnect is the focus of Little Things Big Returns, a book by Daryl Travis, Founder and Chairman of Brandtrust and a member of our CMO Think Tank. After decades advising some of the world’s most respected brands, Travis makes a deceptively simple argument: loyalty isn’t built through big statements or polished strategies. It’s built in small, human moments that customers remember long after the interaction ends.
The Experience Companies Design vs. the Experience Customers Live
Most organizations believe they’re doing a good job with customer experience because they can point to what they’ve launched: new processes, training programs, or digital tools. Customers, however, don’t experience initiatives. They experience moments.
“The breakthroughs rarely came from ‘big’ brand moves. They came from tiny human moments.”
Travis explains that leaders often confuse intention with impact. Internally, progress looks like activity. Externally, it looks like effort, friction, reassurance, or confusion. Customers don’t remember what a company tried to do. They remember how it felt when something mattered.
That’s why the experience gap persists. Companies measure what they designed. Customers judge what they lived.
Why the “Little Things” Carry Outsized Weight
In Little Things Big Returns, Travis reframes customer experience around emotionally meaningful moments. While there may be dozens or hundreds of touchpoints in a customer journey, only a handful actually shape loyalty.
Those moments tend to show up when customers feel vulnerable:
- When something goes wrong
- When money or time is at stake
- When they’re confused or unsure
- When they fear they’ve made a mistake
In those moments, small gestures matter more than sweeping initiatives. A tone change. A moment of discretion. A human response instead of policy language.
Travis shares a simple story to illustrate the point. A customer brings his grandfather’s World War II watch to a jeweler, explaining its sentimental value. When the repair is complete, the jeweler refuses payment, saying it was done in gratitude for the grandfather’s service. No marketing campaign could replicate what happened next. That customer never went anywhere else again, and the story became something he told and retold.
The loyalty didn’t come from the repair. It came from the meaning.
Why Surprise Can’t Be Scripted, Only Enabled
One of the most counterintuitive ideas in the book is that surprise cannot be manufactured at scale. It can only happen one customer at a time.
Companies that try to script delight often fail because true surprise depends on discretion, judgment, and empathy. It requires employees to notice something and act on it without fear of breaking a rule.
That’s why culture matters more than process. Organizations that consistently deliver meaningful experiences do a few things differently:
- They hire for empathy, not just compliance
- They give employees permission to use judgment
- They protect people who do the right thing
- They celebrate stories, not just scores
When fear is removed and values are made operational, employees are able to create moments that customers don’t expect but never forget.
Trust Is Built in Micro-Decisions
A central theme of Little Things Big Returns is that trust doesn’t live in a department. It lives in thousands of small decisions made every day.
- How a fee is explained.
- How a delay is handled.
- How confusion is resolved.
- Whether the default response is policy or help.
Customers don’t separate the brand from the people who represent it. When things go wrong, they blame both equally. When things go right, they credit the brand just as quickly.
The most trusted companies behave consistently with clear human values. They reduce uncertainty. They make things easier. They own mistakes quickly. Over time, that consistency becomes reassurance, and reassurance becomes loyalty.
Why Employee Experience Comes First
Travis is clear that customer experience cannot exceed employee experience. You can’t ask employees to create dignity for customers if they don’t feel it themselves.
Customers borrow confidence from employees. When employees feel trusted and equipped, they transmit calm, competence, and care. When they feel constrained or fearful, interactions become transactional.
That’s why organizations that outperform over time tend to invest as much energy in how they treat their people as how they market to customers. Trust travels outward.
Designing Experiences That Actually Matter
One of the most common mistakes companies make is treating every touchpoint as equally important. Journey maps become comprehensive but unfocused. The result is activity without impact.
Customers don’t average experiences. They remember peaks, pits, and endings.
Travis encourages leaders to shift from mapping touchpoints to identifying emotional episodes, the moments that disproportionately shape memory and meaning. These often include:
- The first real interaction
- Moments of confusion or handoffs
- Returns, cancellations, or disputes
- Moments of recovery when something breaks
- What happens after the sale
Improving these moments rarely requires massive budgets or new technology. Often, it’s about removing effort, clarifying language, or giving frontline teams a simple way to make things right.
Where Leaders Should Start
For executives looking to act quickly, Travis offers practical advice: pick one moment of vulnerability and experience it yourself. Go end to end. Talk to frontline employees. Fix the smallest thing that removes the most anxiety.
Repeat weekly.
The goal isn’t perfection. It’s momentum.
Over time, companies that commit to protecting customers in a few defining moments see loyalty rise quickly. Not because the journey looks better on paper, but because customers feel the difference immediately.
A Human Advantage in an Automated World
As AI-driven convenience becomes table stakes, the value of human moments increases, not decreases. Customers are faster to compare, quicker to leave, and less patient with friction. In that environment, the brands that win are the ones that still feel human when it matters.
Travis hopes leaders walk away from Little Things Big Returns with two takeaways: a renewed respect for the power of small acts, and a healthy discomfort with how often businesses unintentionally dehumanize people.
Customer experience, he argues, isn’t a program. It’s the accumulation of moments of meaning. Find the moments that matter, help your people show up well in them, and the returns won’t be incremental. They’ll be outsized.
About the Author
Daryl Travis is the Founder and Chairman of Brandtrust, a highly regarded group of researchers, strategists, innovation, and behavior designers who advise many of the world’s leading brands. Drawing on deep expertise in social and behavioral science, Brandtrust helps organizations uncover the underlying human motivations that drive trust, loyalty, and long-term brand growth.
Travis is the author of Little Things Big Returns, which explores how small, human moments within the customer journey create outsized emotional impact and lasting loyalty. His work challenges leaders to rethink customer experience not as a series of touchpoints, but as moments of meaning shaped by empathy, trust, and everyday decisions made by people across the organization.
Through decades of research and advisory work, Travis has helped companies close the gap between what they intend to deliver and what customers actually experience—proving that when organizations get the little things right, the returns can be significant and sustainable.
