Would Recommend: Real Stories From Businesses Worth Talking About with Nikki McKnight
Some businesses get reviewed. Others get raved about.Would Recommend goes behind the five stars with the founders who earned them. Every episode is a real story from a real business that figured out how to turn their client experience into their most powerful growth engine, without more ad spend, without more content, just by designing something worth talking about.Host Nikki McKnight is a CX and operations strategist with 15+ years across wildly different industries and geographies. Each week, she talks with founders about the specific decisions, the costly experiments, and the moments of truth that separate a satisfied client...
Loyalty Programs: Reward the Relationship, Not the Receipt
Most loyalty programs get designed from the business's side of the counter: more repeat purchases, more lock-in, more rewards for the customers who already spend the most.
In this Nikki Talks episode, Nikki names the reframe that changes all of it, that loyalty is what businesses want and not what customers are trying to give, and then walks through the most common loyalty program models, what each one is actually rewarding, and the design calls that separate a program people tolerate from one they genuinely value.
What you'll hear in this episode:
Why loyalty i...How Do You Listen to Your Customers Without Letting Them Run Your Business?
WorkPlay Branding started in 2019 as a six-step signature branding process with a photo shoot bolted on at the end. Today it's a subscription content model with almost one hundred certified creators across four continents, and it got there because Lyrik Fryer refused to stop listening to her customers, and refused to let them pull her off her mission.
Nikki sits down with Lyrik to get into how a founder holds both of those disciplines at once, and what it looks like when you turn instinct into a system your team can actually run without you.
W...
Are You Deepening the Relationship, or Just Maintaining the Connection?
Nikki wore a homemade costume to a Jurassic Park movie with six other grown adults, and it turned into the clearest lesson she's got on the difference between a business that deepens relationships and one that just maintains connections. This is a Nikki Talks solo episode about why "nurture" quietly became a task on your to-do list, and how to turn it back into something your clients actually feel.
What you'll hear in this episode:
The Jurassic Park dinner her brother engineered on a freezer-aisle budget, and the one laminated detail that made seven grown adults...How Do You Keep an Experience Special as More People Want In?
Some events you attend once while others you reorganize your whole year around. Nikki sits down with Maria Tassi and Kristina Bartold of High Vibe Women and Janette Downie of The Chill Space, three women who design live experiences for ambitious entrepreneurs and obsess over the same thing: how it actually feels to be a person in the room. The conversation gets into the decisions most hosts never think to make, why protecting an experience sometimes means turning down money, and how the part people remember is almost never the thing on the sales page.
What...
What You Think You Know About Your Customers
Your brain is trying to protect you but it's also, unfortunately, making things up about your customers.
In this solo episode, Nikki takes a therapy homework assignment (yes, really) and turns it into one of the most practical frameworks she's found for explaining why client experience design goes wrong at the thinking level, not the execution level.
Before you can design a better client experience, you have to notice the stories your brain is generating about your customers. And some of those stories? They are not the truth.
What you'll hear in this e...
How Brand Photographers Build Trust Before Anyone Picks Up a Camera
Most founders spend a lot of time thinking about how to attract the right clients but very few spend time thinking about whether the right clients can actually find them.
Nikki sits down with two brand photographers who have cracked that problem wide open, and what they know about making your personality visible, communicating before anxiety sets in, and designing an experience that filters for fit applies to every service business in this audience, camera or no camera.
What you'll hear in this episode:
Why Vic's clients kept using the same word i...Pokémon Battle Academy Solved Onboarding Without Calling It Onboarding
Nikki hates board games. The rulebook comes out, the energy dies, and the fun sits three feet away behind a wall of logistics. Except once: a Pokémon card game showed up at Christmas and broke every rule she thought was inevitable and it quietly changed how she thinks about client experience design.
What you'll hear in this episode:
Why the Pokémon Battle Academy box is one of the best examples of intuitive experience design Nikki has ever seen (yes, really)The specific design decision the game made that most businesses never do: understanding comes fr...What Professional Organizers Know About Getting Clients to Maintain the Work
Every service business owner has felt it: you do the work, the client is thrilled, and six months later it's like you were never there. Nikki sits down with two professional organizers: Brittnei Gaudio of wellnested living Co. and AnnMarie Zezima of Organized A to Z Inc. The two of them have spent years solving exactly that problem inside people's homes. The principles they've built their businesses around will sound very familiar.
What you'll hear in this episode:
Why Brittnei says the real reason any system fails after she leaves has nothing to do...How to Layer Surprise and Delight For a Big Payoff (Without a Big Budget or a Big System)
Two years ago I walked into a steakhouse for my birthday and walked out with a story I apparently cannot stop telling.
This episode is that story, and more importantly, it's layers of surprise and delight that we can take into our own businesses. None of this costs a lot. All of it requires a decision.
What you'll hear in this episode:
The specific moment at Fleming's Prime Steakhouse that made me realize most businesses are delivering a service when they could be designing an experience.Why the espresso martini my dad cried over wa...What Agencies Know About Human Nature That Every Founder Needs to Hear (And Can't Automate Away) ft. Andréa Jones & Natalia Kaplan
Scope creep. Client reliance. The quiet chaos of selling a service to a human being who doesn't always know what they want. Call them agency problems if you want, but if you've ever said yes to something and spent three weeks wondering why, this conversation is for you.
Andréa Jones and Natalia Kaplan have both built agencies from the ground up, blown past their own limits, and come out the other side with very different businesses and a lot of earned wisdom.
What you'll hear in this episode:
Natalia's $50 campaign that got the Mi...What Would Mr. Rogers Do? How to Stress-Test Any Client Touchpoint
There is a 1970s children's television show that had a more rigorous empathy standard than most businesses apply to their client communication. And the test its head writer used on every single sentence before it could air is one of the most useful frameworks Nikki has ever brought into a client engagement.
What you'll hear in this episode:
How the Mr. Rogers' writing team stress-tested every sentence before it aired, and the three questions that changed what made the final cutThe real revenue problem hiding inside your most reasonable-sounding policies, and why "it makes...How Do You Build a Physical Product Brand That Creates Real Word of Mouth? ft. Lisa Simone Richards and Cheryl Sutherland
What does it mean to design something a customer will hold in their hands every single day?
Nikki sits down with two founders who built physical products rooted in confidence, clarity, and self-belief, and who both obsess over the experience long after the order ships.
What you'll hear in this episode:
The story behind the pink metallic envelope, and why Lisa gets unboxing videos from customers who weren't expecting to feel that moved by a mailer.Why Cheryl spent years trying to make PleaseNotes a faceless brand, what changed her mind, and h...What Is Customer Experience and Why Does It Matter for Your Business?
This is the first episode of Would Recommend, and Nikki is starting here on purpose: because customer experience is one of the most used and least understood terms in business, and getting it wrong is quietly costing founders more than they realize.
What you'll hear in this episode:
Why customer experience and customer service are not the same thing, and why that confusion is where most founders start building defensively instead of intentionally.The three-part equation that runs every client relationship: brand promise, brand experience, and the one in the middle you can't actually control.Why...Trailer
Some businesses get reviewed. Others get raved about. Would Recommend goes behind the five stars with the founders who earned them.
I'm Nikki McKnight, CX and operations strategist and the host of this show. Every week, I sit down with founders who built something worth talking about and get into the real decisions behind it. What they designed on purpose, what broke, what they rebuilt. The thesis: you don't need more marketing. You need an experience so good your clients can't stop talking about you.
Connect with Nikki on Instagram: instagram.com/iamnikkimck
