THE BOOK AND THE COURSE · SEPTEMBER 2027
The Micro CX Leader
How to spark a customer revolution from the bottom up. A book by Michel Stevens and a course by CXM Academy, both out in September 2027.
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OSLO, 4 A.M.
"I do not know how we're going to do this, but I will find them."
Michel Stevens had switched his bags at Oslo airport. Ten thousand euros of cameras and sound equipment, and a set of battery packs that are not allowed in the hold, were on their way to the plane. Security sent him to a service desk, the service desk sent him to the airline, and the airline's phone lines sent him back to the airport desk, which told him to go to the gate and hope.
At the gate, an SAS employee named Jeanette was just starting her shift. She listened, asked a colleague to open the gate for her, and spent the next hour calling the people she knew across the airport, with an update every so often. Michel boarded with his luggage found.
The people with the most influence on how customers feel about a company rarely have customer experience in their job title. They work in billing, in the warehouse, in IT and at the reception desk, and every day they make small decisions that no dashboard records. Michel calls them Micro CX Leaders. Micro, because what they do is often too small for anyone above them to notice. CX, because it's about what the customer experiences. And leader, because nobody asks them to do it.
THE BOOK
Why customer experience stalls from the top down
For years, companies have built customer experience like one big bonfire that's supposed to keep everybody warm: one department, journey maps, dashboards. Everybody else passes the problem up the chain, where it loses its context and comes back as a ticket number. The book makes the case for a thousand small sparks, lit by individual people every day, and for organizations that let them.
Part one shows why customer experience stalls when it is run from the top down, and what Decathlon changed when it restructured.
Part two covers the four conditions people need before they act on their own for a customer. Empathy: can we see the customer? Empowerment: may we act? Enablement: can our tools carry it? Ecosystem: is it safe to try? Each comes with the research behind it and a European company that got it right, from Wehkamp and Handelsbanken to Albert Heijn and Buurtzorg.
Part three is about leaders: how the job changes from handing out tasks to removing what stands in the way, and how a good idea gets from one desk to the rest of the organization, with Spotify and Booking.com.
Michel's author royalties go to Casa Hogar, a Belgian non-profit that funds education for orphaned and street children in Mexico.
THE COURSE
From the book to your Monday morning
The course puts the book to work on your own organization. It starts with where you stand, in a short assessment on the four conditions and on how good ideas spread. Every unit after that opens with your own answers and ends with a move you can make, and at the end you sort those moves into a plan and choose the one thing you start on Monday.
Take it online at your own pace, as a hybrid course with two live workshops, or in a classroom. Every edition ends with a certificate of completion.
For your team, before September 2027
We already run the Micro CX Leader as a keynote, a team session and an in-company workshop, built around your own people and your own customers. If you don't want to wait for the course, talk to us.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michel Stevens
Michel trained as a journalist and then spent more than twenty years in customer experience, many of them running contact centers across Europe. He became a consultant in 2017 and later founded CXM Academy, which trains people in sixteen countries, from the front line to finance.