Experience Rules by Michael Hinshaw and Diane Magers: A Customer Experience Book Review

If you're building your CX bookshelf in 2026, here's a book to add to your shopping list:

Experience Rules: The Experience Operating System (XOS) and 8 Keys to Enable It

Authors: Michael Hinshaw and Diane Magers

First up, full transparency: co-author Diane Magers sent me an autographed copy of this book because, well, I asked!

I’ve known Diane for years, and working with her at the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA) several years ago gave me a firsthand view of why she’s a CX OG. The book is just another layer of proof.

For those who practice CX, or want to, you know: the profession often gets reduced to sales monitoring, contact centers, customer satisfaction surveys, CRMs, and customer journey maps,as if one tactic solves everything. The same goes for employee experience when it’s disconnected from the bigger picture. I wrote about this in Chapter 4 of my own book, The Sage Works Guide to Global Leadership.

Experience Rules dives deep into the system that brings it all together beneath the umbrella of "human" experience. It describes an Experience Operating System (XOS) comprised of eight elements that, when practiced together, drive results. Many of these pieces will already be familiar to Certified Customer Experience Professionals because they are core competencies of the profession:

• Strategy and vision

• Alignment and accountability

• Customer understanding

• Design and innovation

• Experience measurement

• Business processes

• Technology, digital, and data

• Culture

But Diane and co-author Michael Hinshaw describe in candid terms, consistently in each chapter, throughout the book’s 3 sections, what “done right” looks like. Each chapter includes:

• Practical litmus tests

• Guiding questions for yourself and your colleagues

• Pitfalls to avoid if you want to lead with finesse.

Diane and Michael have the experience to back up their points, of course. But what I also loved about this book was seeing wisdom in the form of anecdotes from some of the profession’s heavy hitters like Julia Ahlfeldt, Annette Franz, and Cary Cusumano.

Bottom line: This isn’t just a book you read once and put on the shelf. It's a professional guidebook and a source of advice for seeing and running your customer experience operation like the system it is. Find the book on Amazon.

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