Best Customer Experience Books to Read in 2025

CX leaders and new practitioners alike, here are the best customer experience books to add to your reading list.

Becoming a customer experience (CX) expert doesn’t happen overnight, and even the most successful leaders in CX still turn to their peers to expand their knowledge.

So, what should you do to stay on top of your craft? Immerse yourself in the experiences and takeaways shared by industry experts, successful CEOs, and other customer-centric pioneers who’ve written acclaimed books about CX. By reading the best customer experience books, you’ll enrich your knowledge and feel equipped to tackle the always-on effort that is making customers happy.

So, what are some must-reads to up-level your knowledge and provide inspiration from innovators in the industry? We asked Medallia’s partners and in-house CX experts for their recommendations. Here’s a list of the top 10 titles they couldn’t put down, and a comprehensive collection of resources that covers topics relevant to CX professionals of various levels.

10 Must-Read Customer Experience Books to Add to Your Reading List

Ready to enhance your customer experience expertise in the new year? Here are 10 customer experience books to energize your thinking and reinvigorate your approach to all things CX in 2025.

Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect

• Author: Will Guidara
• Where to read: Amazon, IndieBound

Will Guidara is the restaurateur who previously co-owned Eleven Madison Park, a recipient of four stars from the New York Times and three Michelin stars and the 2017 World Best Restaurant Awards winner. Most recently, Guidara served as co-producer of the Emmy Award-winning series The Bear. 

It’s safe to say: Guidara knows a thing or two about dishing up incredible experiences and in his bestseller Unreasonable Hospitality, he serves up lessons from the hospitality industry that can be applied to other sectors. He also pulls in stories from Danny Meyer (Union Square Hospitality Group) and others to draw parallels between success in hospitality and what any brand can learn from the industry, laying out everything there is to know about the idea of service, guiding leaders on how customer experience can live at the center of your business.

The Power Of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact

• Authors: Chip Heath and Dan Heath
• Where to read: Amazon, IndieBound

Drew Campbell, CEO of Medallia partner Higher Oak, a consulting firm that helps companies design and implement CX and EX programs, selected this book from bestselling authors and brothers Chip and Dan Heath as his top pick for CX professionals to read in 2025 because of how it “explores how brief, yet potent, experiences can fundamentally transform customer perceptions and loyalty.”

The New York Times best-seller The Power Of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact walks readers through the mysteries of experiences and what it takes to create memorable moments and richer experiences, or “peak moments” — something all brands should be striving to accomplish in the new year.

The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty

• Authors: Matt Dixon, Nick Toman, and Rick DeLisi
• Where to read: Amazon, IndieBound

From bestselling authors and former executives of the Gartner-acquired CEB, a research and insights firm offering best practices for engaging talent, customers, and more, Effortless Experience draws upon five years of CEB research and tens of thousands of respondents’ feedback to refute the idea that companies must dazzle customers to win them over, turning conventional wisdom about customer loyalty on its head. 

“An oldie but a goodie, this book challenges the belief that delighting customers is key to loyalty and instead emphasizes that reducing customer effort is what brands need to do to fuel loyalty,” says Judy Bloch, Vice President and Executive Advisor for Financial Services at Medallia, who has held customer experience leadership roles at Sprint, Citi, and UMB.

The New Gold Standard: 5 Leadership Principles for Creating a Legendary Customer Experience Courtesy of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company

• Authors: Joseph A. Michelli, PhD
• Where to read: Amazon, IndieBound

Professor of Service Excellence at Campbellsville University, Joseph Michelli, PhD, has written about what sets leading brands apart across several bestselling titles, including The Airbnb Way, The Zappos Experience, The Starbucks Experience, and more. In The New Gold Standard, he explores how The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company sets the bar for memorable customer experiences, revealing secrets behind the business’s major success story.

“This timeless book offers cross-industry inspiration, showcasing how empowering people and prioritizing exceptional service can challenge leaders to rethink and innovate their experience strategies,” says Amber Maraccini, Vice President and Executive Advisor for Healthcare at Medallia, who has held experience leadership roles at Renown Health and worked as a clinical assistant professor at the University of Nevada.

Would You Do That to Your Mother?: The “Make Mom Proud” Standard for How to Treat Your Customers

• Author: Jeanne Bliss
• Where to read: Amazon, IndieBound

In Would You Do That to Your Mother? author and the inaugural Chief Customer Officer at Lands’ End, Coldwell Banker, Allstate, and Microsoft Corporations, Jeanne Bliss, offers a five-step guide to customer experience and culture transformation designed to help brands “make mom proud” and outperform the competition.

“In a world where many organizations are data-rich but insights-poor, or struggle to translate insights into action, Bliss demonstrates how clear intent and targeted action can yield mutually beneficial customer experience improvements for both customers and the organization,” says Pernell Cox, VP of Strategy and Innovation at Medallia partner Material, a customer experience strategy consulting firm.

Priority is Prediction: Seven Principles for Better Strategies, Decisions, and Outcomes

• Author: Greg Kihlström
• Where to read: Amazon, IndieBound

There’s an urgent need for organizations to become predictive to be able to operate with agility in line with ever-shifting cultural, economic, and consumer trends. And best-selling author, creator of The Agile Brand podcast, and CX thought leader Greg Kihlström’s book Priority Is Prediction, with a foreword by Medallia’s Chief Product Officer Simonetta Turek, is the resource leaders need to build a data-driven discipline that fuels innovation, customer outcomes, and long-term success. 

“Greg’s book lays the foundation for what organizations need to do to embrace the power of prediction throughout the course of doing business,” writes Turek in her blog post on the importance of predictive analytics in business. “He does this by explaining what he calls ‘seven fundamental principles of predictive prioritization,’ which include building the capacity for prediction, getting wise with data, creating strategies that see around corners, adapting and evolving, choosing resilience over rigidity, balancing risks with boldness, and advancing with agility.”

Businesses that fail to become predictive are more likely to deliver poor experiences for customers and employees, which “in turn can have a major impact on customer and employee satisfaction and turnover,” she adds.

Return on Human Experience: Eight Principles to Inspire Excellence in Healthcare

• Authors: Jason Wolf, PhD and Stacy Palmer
• Where to read: Amazon

This best-selling new release from authors Jason Wolf, PhD, and Stacy Palmer, top executives at the Beryl Institute, is another must-read selected by Medallia’s Vice President and Executive Advisor for Healthcare, Amber Maraccini. And it’s easy to see why. The Beryl Institute has been a leading resource and community for patient experience professionals for more than a decade, and Return on Human Experience leverages this expertise to “provide a transformative, research-backed framework for improving human healthcare experiences through an integrated approach,” she explains. 

“Drawing on decades of insights from a global network of healthcare leaders, it inspires action, refocuses intent, and reaffirms the purpose of advancing human-centered experiences in healthcare,” she adds.

Built to Win: Designing a Customer-Centric Culture that Drives Value for Your Business

• Author: Annette Franz
• Where to read: Amazon, IndieBound

With Built to Win CX influencer and contributor to Medallia’s blog Annette Franz, CEO and founder of CX Journey Inc., has created a blueprint for organizations to follow to design customer-centric organizations that put customers at the heart of everything — every strategy, system, process, decision, you name it — with case studies from leading brands like Airbnb and more.

Amaze Every Customer Every Time: 52 Tools for Delivering the Most Amazing Customer Service on the Planet

• Author: Shep Hyken
• Where to read: Amazon, IndieBound

Best-selling author Shep Hyken is the creator of the annual Achieving Customer Amazement Study, which explores the latest trends in customer preferences and habits to help companies create amazing customer experiences. For decades he’s worked with top brands to help them build customer-centered cultures. His book Amaze Every Customer Every Time draws on these experiences and lays out what organizations need to do across their leadership, culture, interactions, and more to do just what the title of the book says — amaze every customer, every time.

CX Pro Beyond the Basics: Advanced Insights for Customer Experience Professionals

• Editor: Karl Sharicz
• Where to read: Amazon, IndieBound

With 16 chapters each written by a different CX leader, CX Pro Beyond the Basics brings together a diverse set of voices to help seasoned CX practitioners advance to the next level of understanding and expertise within the field. 

Medallia’s own Judy Bloch, VP, Executive Advisor for Financial Services, who has held customer experience leadership roles at Sprint, Citi, and UMB, is one of the contributors and wrote the chapter on storytelling.

Why You Should Read the Best Customer Experience Books

You and your colleagues know it: CX is a crucial aspect of any successful business. It’s the difference between acquiring one-and-done customers and cultivating loyal brand ambassadors for life. Customer experience takes into account every touchpoint and interaction, and, as a result, it directly impacts sales revenue — which is why every organization needs to recognize CX is a top priority.

Reading the best customer experience books will help you:

1. Gain insights from the leaders in the profession: Written by experts with years of experience in enhancing customer experience and all that the practice entails, the books on this list provide unparalleled, invaluable learnings.

2. Understand the value of customer experience: You already find customer experience important, and these authors’ fresh perspectives will help inspire and energize your approaches and strategies and give you new viewpoints to share with your colleagues.

3. Unlock actionable best practices: Improving CX requires significant effort because it’s expansive, and the books we’ve shared tackle a range of topics. Whether you’re dedicated to a specific function or cover several areas related to customer experience, these best CX books will deliver strategies and techniques worth implementing.

4. Inspiration and motivation: Reading a book isn’t always about building your skills, it’s also about feeling inspired and motivated to perform at a high level. Some of the best customer experience books will do just that and motivate you to take action.

5. Get ahead of the curve: In today’s highly-competitive business environment, offering a superior customer experience is a huge differentiator. By reading the best CX books from this list, you’ll have the knowledge and tools to elevate your service and interactions across touchpoints.

6. Evolve with customer expectations: What makes customer experiences great isn’t static. What you do today isn’t necessarily what you should do a month or a year from now, and the books in our list lay out how customer expectations are constantly evolving.

7. Improve business performance: Ultimately, you’re responsible for more than just CX vanity metrics. You need to move the needle across business KPIs that really matter. With a wealth of knowledge molded by the lessons from these books, you’re more prepared than ever to create positive customer experiences that lead to growth for the entire business.

Real-world practice can’t be beaten, and that’s true in two ways. First, it means you need to get your hands dirty to learn something. It also means you should learn from the real-world practices of others in the same fields or industries. When you apply what you’ve learned in both ways, you perform better and move your business forward.

Once you’ve read from our list of the best customer experience books in 2025, think to yourself: “What can I apply starting today?” Share the knowledge with your team, and come together as a group to make improvements to CX immediately and over time.

After that, be sure to schedule a demo with a Medallia expert — we’ll share where your customer experience program is today and what our award-winning platform does to accelerate its impact on the business.