Wayne Simmons

Who they are

This page records the public professional record only. Nothing adverse is recorded and no motive is attributed.

Publisher and speaker biographies describe him as a customer excellence and customer experience leader within the Chief Marketing Office at Pfizer, with earlier roles listed at Bayer Pharmaceuticals, The Ritz-Carlton Leadership Center and Mercer, and consulting work on customer experience for brands in financial services, consumer goods, hospitality and retail. He holds the Certified Customer Experience Professional credential.

He is also a professor of practice on the faculty of the Master of Science in Customer Experience Management programme in the Department of Marketing at Michigan State University's Broad College of Business. A professor of practice appointment is a practitioner teaching role rather than a research post, which is a description of the role and not a judgement of it.

The verification pass behind this page found practitioner writing, conference speaking and the book, and no peer-reviewed journal articles. That is recorded as not found rather than as absent.

Key papers

Simmons, W., & DeWitt, T. (2025), The Customer Excellence Enterprise: A Playbook for Creating Customers for Life, John Wiley and Sons, Hoboken, NJ, ISBN 9781394253685. Read in full by the vault from photographs of the printed pages.

No peer-reviewed papers were located.

Key ideas

The book argues for helpfulness as a single organising principle for a company, and builds a vocabulary around it. Three of its coinages matter for how a company handles failure.

The goodwill bank, in Chapter 5 from page 69, treats goodwill as an account: positive experiences are deposits, failures are debits, and the net balance decides whether a lapse is forgiven. Its value is that it explains why the same failure ends one relationship and barely registers in another. It comes with no unit and no measure.

Experience recovery widens service recovery from fixing the incident to restoring trust, drawing on banked goodwill to buy the time and patience a repair needs.

The customer's right to reverence is the book's moral claim, that customers are entitled to respect, fairness and dignity as part of the exchange. The epilogue turns it back on the reader and closes by asking whether customers deserve it.

On this site the coinages are credited to the book and the mechanisms underneath them to their own research. The trust mechanism behind experience recovery is measured in DeWitt's peer-reviewed work, and the limit on banked goodwill comes from Stephen Tax and colleagues in 1998, who found prior good experience softened poor complaint handling only to a limited extent. The article What a Customer Apology Must Contain uses the book as its seed and tests its frame against that research.

How the book is cited here

The book is cited for its vocabulary and for the frame it gives a recovery, and not as evidence that the frame works. The goodwill bank and experience recovery are credited to Simmons and DeWitt as ways of thinking about customers, with no unit and no measure offered for either. The article on what a customer apology must contain sets the book beside DeWitt's own peer-reviewed work, which the book does not cite, and reports the measured results under the researchers' names.

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