John DiJulius on elevating experience in 2025.
By Pete Mercer
If you were to purchase something from your company, are you certain that you would be satisfied with the whole experience? From the first interaction to the final purchase, every touchpoint that your customers engage with in the purchasing journey is part of the whole customer experience – and that experience matters.
Repertoire Magazine sat down with John DiJulius, chief revolution officer of The DiJulius Group, to discuss the state of the customer experience in 2025. As an employee and customer experience consulting firm, The DiJulius Group’s mission is to change the world by creating a customer service revolution.
From the salon to the stage
DiJulius and his wife opened a salon in Ohio in 1993, where he began to stretch his customer service muscles. Because of the customer service reputation they had built, people started asking DiJulius to come and speak at events.
“I thought it would be a good marketing opportunity, but I didn’t think it was ever going to turn into a career,” he said. “But every time I spoke, two or three business leaders would come up and ask me to speak to their company. By 2003, I released my first book, which took me from being a salon owner that spoke a little bit to a speaker that owns salons.”
From there, The DiJulius Group has worked with clients like Chick-fil-a, Starbucks, Nestlé, Marriott, and Lexus. With brands like this, you would be forgiven for assuming there’s a strategic approach to these partnerships, but DiJulius says that he’s never done outreach.
All their partnerships are formed based on the client being familiar with his work – by seeing him speak or reading one of his books – and reaching out to start a conversation with him. Because of his experience owning and operating a successful chain of salons in Ohio, DiJulius has been able to build a customer experience methodology that speaks for itself.
Building a methodology
Part of what sets DiJulius’ approach apart from others in his field is his methodology, The X-Commandment Methodology. This is a ten-step process that takes a deeper look at how brands and companies can elevate their approach to the customer and employee experience. This is an overview of what DiJulius’ framework looks like:
1. Igniting the CX revolution – This is where you get a better idea of your company’s customer experience and develop a strategy to improve engagement at each touchpoint.
2. Creating your signature experiences – Part of what sets you apart from your competition is a unique and memorable experience, which will turn your customers into your advocates.
3. Zero risk – A zero-risk approach identifies and removes the biggest risk factors in what you offer, allowing you to put your best foot forward.
4. Creating an above-and-beyond culture – In an above-and-beyond culture, your team should be empowered and equipped to exceed customer expectations.
5. Recruiting experience – You need an all-star team, so it’s important to find and attract the top talent to take care of the customer experience at your company.
6. Onboarding experience – Once you have hired the all-star team, it’s time to set them up for success with an excellent onboarding experience.
7. Employee experience – To create a positive employee experience, it’s important to create a work environment where they feel valued.
8. Tearing down silos by building collaboration across departments – By removing silos and encouraging collaboration, you will build a company culture that promotes teamwork.
9. Building and developing leaders – Everything falls on the leadership, so it’s important to cultivate strong and compassionate leaders who are looking to achieve more.
10. Training and implementation – Ensure that your teams have the resources and tools that they need through a consistent training process.
This framework was built while DiJulius and his wife were primarily focused on providing an excellent experience in the hair salon. Their goal was to create the best experience of the customer’s day – not just the best hair salon. Most people go a couple of months without getting a haircut, so it was important to create an experience that would stand out from the rest of the day.
“Even if we were the best in the salon industry, it’s irrelevant. You’re not going to our competitor unless we do something really horrible. We wanted to be the best experience compared to the rest of your daily routine. Ideally, you’d walk into the doctor’s office and say something like, ‘Why don’t they greet me like they did at the hair salon?’”
As DiJulius continued to work out a solution, he started to study world-class companies. After he started working with some of these companies, it helped him to develop his own methodology based on what had worked for them. The X-Commandment Methodology was built from things that all these world-class companies – Chick-fil-A, Starbucks, Marriott, etc. – offered as a signature experience for their customers.
The modern-day customer experience
Defining the customer experience in 2025 can be challenging. While we have all these tools at our disposal to improve efficiency and optimize the experience, customer service is suffering as a whole. DiJulius said, “We have been in a customer service recession for five years now. Customer service is at an all-time low according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index, which measures every industry.”
DiJulius described how ‘experience gaps’, wherein there is a disparity between what the customer expects from a brand and what they actually experience, contribute to the customer service recession. Between things like shrinkflation (fewer Doritos in the bag than there used to be) or tipflation (increase in tip requests at point-of-sale, specifically where there were none before), being a consumer is becoming more challenging than it used to be. Prices have increased, but that doesn’t mean that quality improves as well.
Finding ways to navigate those experience gaps is really where companies are going to shine the brightest, especially when they make a mistake. DiJulius described a concept called the service recovery paradox: when something goes wrong, your team takes that extra step to fix it. The idea is that if you send the wrong order to someone, you would then overcorrect by doing something like sending an extra case for the inconvenience. This is an opportunity to be a hero when you drop the ball.