The new shape of customer loyalty: 10 leaders on emotion, trust, and what keeps people coming back
The hard truth about customer loyalty is that it can no longer be taken for granted. Loyalty today is dynamic—earned (or lost) one interaction, one moment of friction, one unexpected delight at a time.
Across ten episodes of Insights Unlocked over recent years, leaders in UX, strategy, and experience design explored what loyalty really means, how it’s changing, and how organizations can nurture it with intention.
What emerged is a refreshingly human view of loyalty—one powered by emotion, empathy, trust, and a deep understanding of how people make decisions. Below is a roundup of their most compelling ideas.
Loyalty begins with understanding how customers feel
Forget points, punch cards, and promos. Several guests emphasized that emotion is now the biggest driver of loyalty.
Paul Stonick, former UX leader at The Home Depot, put it plainly, “Emotional connection drives significant improvements in financial outcomes… emotionally connected consumers drive greater value.”
In fact, Paul shared that The Home Depot built emotion measurement into their customer experience strategy because they saw how strongly it predicted long-term loyalty. What mattered wasn’t just whether customers completed a task, but whether they felt seen, supported, and confident in the process.
Paul described how often home improvement projects trigger an emotional roller coaster—from excitement to feeling overwhelmed—and how capturing those feelings at every stage helped the team design better experiences.
“Every interaction is a chance for the customer to feel like the company ‘gets me,’” he said.
Loyalty, in other words, is built through moments of understanding.
The cost of ignoring emotions: a warning for organizations
Emotion influences loyalty—but it also influences churn.
Tomer Sharon, former Head of UX at Goldman Sachs, warned that satisfaction scores alone often mask what people are really feeling. He explained how biases, context, or even the weather can influence survey responses, but behavior tells the truer story.
Still, he emphasized that emotion matters. “Any measurement is half the picture,” he said. “There has to be qualitative understanding.”
One example stuck: users reported being “happy” with office coffee, but behavioral data showed they weren’t drinking it. Tomer’s takeaway, “Humans are not to be trusted… We’re biased by so many things.”
It’s only by listening, watching, and engaging directly with people—through real human insights—that teams can understand the root of dissatisfaction and prevent loyalty from eroding.
Loyalty expands when experiences are seamless, omnichannel, and thoughtful
Customer loyalty increasingly depends on whether people can move fluidly across digital and physical touchpoints. Andy Parquette, Senior UX Designer at Panera Bread, sees this every day.
His team designs experiences for everything from kiosks to mobile ordering to catering—each of which must work independently and together. His team needs to move fast because their customers are moving fast.
“We have limited time and we have to fight for that limited time,” Andy said. “So you make your choices carefully, do the research, and then really hold that up and keep it as your north star.”
That effort paid off. When we talked with Andy in 2023, Panera Bread had increased its loyalty base to 53 million members and had launched an innovative loyalty subscription model that has resulted in 25% of all Panera transactions coming from Unlimited Sip Club members.
When brands make things easy—across channels—customers reward them not just with repeat purchases, but with trust.
Loyalty grows when customers feel they're part of something
For Wesley Faulkner, Senior Community Manager at AWS, loyalty isn’t a metric—it’s an outcome of belonging.
“Community helps give perspective,” he said. “It helps people feel they have something to offer.”
Communities shape identity, and brands that invest in authentic, well-moderated communities create lasting, loyalty-building emotional bonds.
Loyalty strengthens when customers feel safe, valued, and supported—not just by the brand, but by one another.
Loyalty forms when brands understand why people buy—not why they say they do
Many organizations still rely on linear funnels or brand tracking metrics to interpret loyalty. Devora Rogers, Chief Strategy Officer at Alter Agents, challenged that model.
She explained that fewer than 5% of shoppers follow a predictable, linear path. What actually drives switching or staying is far more complex:
“Shoppers start fresh every time they buy.”
Loyalty, she said, is heavily influenced by context, life changes, and evolving preferences, like switching milk brands because of new health insights.
Brands must earn loyalty repeatedly, not assume it persists.
Her biggest warning was about brand narcissism.Instead, Devora suggests building obsessive customer listening into every stage of decision-making.
“Humility is the biggest thing brands need,” she said.
Loyal brands are learning organizations—always curious, never complacent.
Loyalty deepens when the experience feels personal and purposeful
Ethan Song, serial startup founder and CEO of RareCircles when we talked with him, is building tools that help brands create new levels of loyalty through Web3-enabled communities and memberships.
His perspective on loyalty is rooted in identity, “It’s about owning a piece of the community,” he said.
Ethan believes future loyalty programs will be less about transactions and more about belonging, ownership, and exclusive access. He pointed to Starbucks exploring NFT-based rewards and explained how this opens new pathways for emotional connection:
“It creates a whole new level of engagement by allowing fans to actually own the rewards.”
But he also stressed the importance of understanding users deeply—especially in new technology spaces where patterns don’t yet exist:
“Your biggest insight may most likely not have come yet,” Ethan said.
Forward-looking brands design loyalty experiences not just for today—but for what customers will value next.
Loyalty is strengthened through effortless giving and authentic impact
In his work at Givelify, Neeraj Ramesh examines loyalty through the lens of donor behavior. His team found a surprising insight: consistency, not size of donation, predicts loyalty.
That insight inspired “Champions of Good,” the first loyalty program in charitable giving.
Neeraj explained, “We wanted to incentivize consistent giving… regardless of the dollar amount.”
But the emotional layer mattered even more.
“We call it the warm glow,” he said. “The positive emotions people get when they give.”
His team tests every prototype for emotional resonance—sometimes discovering counterintuitive things. For example, showing donors their highest giving streak backfired, “They thought, ‘Did I fall off the wagon?’”
Loyalty grows not by pressuring customers—but by supporting how they want to feel.
Loyalty thrives when organizations prioritize customer success
As CEO of Gainsight, Nick Mehta has shaped much of how the tech industry thinks about customer retention. His message is clear:
“What you’re trying to do is get more human interactions, not less,” he said.
Automation should never replace empathy. It should enable teams to spend more time helping customers succeed. And Nick warned against relying solely on quantitative dashboards.
“Data without the human insights is at best neutral and at worst dangerous,” he said.
He also shared a powerful discovery: a feature with only 10% usage turned out to be indispensable to top executives. Without qualitative insight, they might have cut it entirely.
“If you had only had data, you would have made exactly the wrong decision,” Nick said.
True loyalty is nurtured through conversations, stories, and understanding the people behind the metrics. Loyalty grows when brands listen—really listen.
Loyalty requires solving the right problems, not just adding more channels
Kate MacCabe, founder of Flywheel Strategy, has helped brands like Rothy’s and Brooklinen build omnichannel experiences that deepen loyalty. But she warns that omnichannel only works when grounded in user insight.
She distinguished between multichannel and omnichannel bluntly. “Multichannel is being called omnichannel… but the teams are not roadmapping together,” she said.
True loyalty comes when every touchpoint feels like part of one coherent experience.
Her advice for brands, “Give your company the time and space… it’s a multiyear commitment.”
And most importantly, “User testing and user feedback… is the difference between companies seeing growth and those that aren’t.”
Loyalty isn’t created by channels—it’s created by coherence.
Loyalty starts within: the role of employee experience
Catherine Richards, Head of Customer Design at Tesco Bank, believes internal alignment is essential for creating loyal customers.
She described how her team immerses employees in real customer stories so they feel the emotional stakes:
“They remember the stories—they remember that Jill couldn’t afford to buy her daughter a winter coat because she needed to do the big shop.”
This empathy-building is what drives better decisions and, ultimately, more loyal customers.
Catherine also emphasized continuity, “You can’t be customer obsessed if you’re not connecting with customers all the time.”
Loyalty inside the company is reflected in loyalty outside it.
The future of loyalty is human
Across every conversation, one truth rose above all others:
Loyalty is—not a program, not a metric, not a marketing campaign. It is a relationship.
A relationship built on:
- Emotion (Stonick, Ramesh)
- Empathy and belonging (Faulkner, Richards)
- Clarity and trust (Sharon, Mehta)
- Purpose and identity (Song)
- Understanding real decision-making (Rogers)
- Ease and coherence (Parquette, MacCabe)
The brands that win loyalty in the years ahead will be those that commit to understanding customers deeply, continuously, and compassionately.
I’ll leave you with Paul Stonick’s reminder—a perfect summation of modern loyalty, “Every interaction is a chance to deepen the relationship.”
