The Intuitive Customer - Helping You Improve Your Customer Experience To Gain Growth

Going viral is the goal of any passionate social media poster. Posting your content and watching as the views and shares grow exponentially is the dream for marketers trying to build a brand online.    Unless, of course, the viral post is about how you broke a guitar during a customer’s flight and then showed “indifference” to their complaint. (Looking at you, United Airlines.) That’s a nightmare.    The trick is actually doing it—and for the right reasons, not a customer service failure. In an environment where there is infinite amounts of content to compete with, getting a post to go viral is a victory few marketers have the pleasure of experiencing.    In this episode, we explore how to get people to collaborate with you in your efforts to create viral content on social media and the essential elements of the content that encourage people to share it.    Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience   When you want a person to do something, you have probably heard that you should explain the benefits they will enjoy from doing so. It’s no different with social media. Your content should have a benefit that appeals to the sharer and collaborator, and a benefit to whom the person shares it. Therefore, a hearty laugh, a heartfelt “awe,” or an unrealized and epiphanic insight are never a bad way to go.   Here are some other key moments in the discussion:   04:38  Ryan explains how framing plays an essential role in getting people to share your content.  09:47  Colin shares an example of what not to do with your experience that encourage people to share content about you with the infamous (and hilarious), United Breaks Guitars video. 14:04  We share a key insight about how to make something go viral, and it’s not your awesome brand message. 18:34. Colin introduces the idea of internet trolls and everyone piling on as meeting an essential human need to be a part of something.  25:25  Ryan covers a past campaign with Dunkin’ Donuts and Charli D’melio that had all the elements that make a social media campaign go viral.  28:54 We summarize the secret formula ingredients for you and how you can use them in your customer strategy.    Did you know we have a YouTube Channel too? Check it out here.   Customer Experience Information & Resources   LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.   Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.    Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 70,000 subscribers.    How can we help? Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.   Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey. 

Customers are fickle. Or at least they appear to be. What once may have exceeded your customer’s expectations one day becomes ordinary the next. That’s because People become less sensitive to change as things improve. It’s called  Diminishing Sensitivity, and it’s the reason that sometimes you have to work harder to “Wow!” your customers.     If you gave $100 to a poor person and a millionaire, it would have completely different effects on their daily lives. While the millionaire would be polite and appreciative of the extra cash, the poor person would feel the difference made by the money far more.    In some ways, your customers are the millionaire in this scenario. Your excellent Customer Experience has made them less sensitive to your improvements. However, if your experience is next to terrible, improvements feel a lot more like $100 to a poor person.    Diminishing sensitivity can be seen across many different industries. For example, the difference in graphics between the video game Football for the Atari 2600 and Madden’s NFL 10 was astounding. However,  when you compare Madden 10 to Madden 12 and 14, the difference is noticeable, but not astounding. It ceases to be something that amazes and becomes something to be expected.   In this episode, we explore the concept of diminishing sensitivity and how it  can affect your customer experience and your customers’ perception of it. We also talk about what you can do to continue to improve.    How Can I Combat Diminishing Sensitivity?   While it would be easy to say you should constantly push the boundaries of your product or service, this is not necessarily realistic. As we have seen with the iPhone, constant improvement eventually bores consumers. Therefore, it’s essential to occasionally disrupt the market with more significant improvements to keep your customers hooked.     Here are some other key moments: 03:33   Ryan introduces the concept of diminishing sensitivity and the minds behind the concept. 09:07   Colin and Ryan discuss how the iPhone is an example of diminishing sensitivity. 15:09    Colin admits that he likes to find companies that need his help that haven’t gone as far into their experience journey because you can enjoy significant impact quickly.  19:14    Ryan and Colin explain how other large organizations have navigated the tricky bit of continuous improvement after enjoying those initial gains. 25:50    Ryan and Colin go over the “curse of improvement” and what you can do to avoid it.   Did you know we have a YouTube Channel too? Check it out here.   Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.    Customer Experience Information & Resources   LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.   Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.    Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 35,000 subscribers.    How can we help? Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

Recession is a natural step in the economic cycle, but it’s easy to get overwhelmed by all of the bad news. When economic downturn occurs, we all feel it.    Corporations tend to cut back in a downturn, neglecting things like customer experience. To differentiate yourself from everyone else, you should double down on these services while others cut back.   Nobody looks forward to a recession, but being prepared and aggressive can help alleviate its effects. Don’t let yourself get left by the wayside while there is such a great opportunity to grow.   In this episode,  we do not minimize the downsides of economic recession, but rather show that not everything has to be terrible. We discuss what to do when things get bad, and how to focus on the upside of a recession.   Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience   The most crucial part of dealing with a recession is preparing ahead of time. If you're caught blindly by the oncoming decline, you and your business could wipe out. While we may not officially be in a recession yet, planning as though we were will leave you far more prepared for the times ahead.   Here are a few key moments in the discussion:   02:50   We first discuss the effects of recession on the larger economy and its necessity to the business cycle. 10:09   Ryan explores the effects of breakdown on breakthroughs and innovations in corporate structure.  14:29   We look at how changing before change is forced upon you can help your business during recession. 17:36   Colin discusses how speeding up when others slow down can improve your success during downturn. 22:19   We give our personal advice to both companies and individuals concerned about the oncoming recession. 24:37   We explain why customer service is one of the most important aspects of succeeding businesses during times of recession.   Did you know we have a YouTube Channel, too? Check it out here.   Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.    Customer Experience Information & Resources   LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.   Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.    Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 35,000 subscribers.    How can we help? Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

Claire Hillman, a loyal listener, a subscriber to our NL, Why Customers Buy,  and viewer of our podcast on our new YouTube Channel is in a pickle and needs our help. She asks, Should I move to where my customers are or move them to where I want to be?    Now, our first reaction was to tell Claire that she should absolutely meet customers where they are. After all, isn’t that the customer-centric thing to do?    However, it occurred to us that at one time, we waited in line at the airport to check in, wrote out our bills on paper checks to mail back through snail mail, and bought DVDs and CDs that we had to store on specially made racks in our homes.    We did these things because we hadn’t moved to digital check-in, automatic bill payment, and streaming. If organizations hadn’t moved us to these efficient and easy ways to simplify these tasks, we might still be making small talk with the airline employee or licking envelopes.   Since we see that many things that we do today are not the way we used to do things—and realize how much better the experiences are with the new way—it might not be the best things to meet customers where they are. Instead, it might be better to move them where you want them to be.    In this episode, we explore the finer points of moving customers to where they want to be and how to manage this process for your organization. You might be surprised to know that giving customers exactly what they want isn’t always the best way to handle your customer strategy.    Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience   Another area where some customers might have not realized was a benefit to them is Self-Service, particularly at the supermarket. However, other customers are never going to want to serve themselves there. What is happening here is the idea of customer segmentation. Some customers love taking matters into their own hands; others feel like it’s losing something from the experience to have to handle things themselves. How you move these groups to where you want them to be requires a careful look at the value you bring to the experience and framing the change in a way that appeals to each segment.      Here are a few other key moments in the discussion:   02:51  We learn about Claire’s pickle and how our first reaction was replaced with the idea that it depends on where your customers are and where you are trying to move them.   4:50  Colin shares a story about how self-service at a supermarket showed him how organizations train customers to try new services and having front-line employees there is a great way to do it.  07:58  We discuss how customer segmentation and understanding what customers value is an essential part of managing the process for moving customers, or you can move some of them right out the door. 13:57  Colin describes how he gets his wife Lorraine to update her iOS on the iPhone, a task she detests, by showing her a couple of new features she is sure to value, which is a great example of what to do with customers. 16:48  Colin explains how the Focus feature that came out on Apple’s last iOS for the iPhone demonstrated how different people care about different things (customer segments), so getting them to change using the same strategy can be difficult. 23:22  Ryan explains how meeting customer might also mean taking into consideration their cognitive state, and what resources they have for deciding to move forward when you position the change. 26:15  We both share our practical advice for what you can do with this information to move customers where you need them to be.    Do you have a business pickle? Tell us about it here.   Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.    Customer Experience Information & Resources   LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.   Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.    Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 35,000 subscribers.      How can we help? Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

A lot of the behavioral sciences can feel intimidating. However, it doesn’t have to be. The Five Rules Podcast Series is our attempt at giving you an easy entry point into the complex and messy world of Behavioral Science.   As if the world isn’t crazy enough—with the war in Ukraine, the cost-of-living crisis, the looming threat of recession, and the ostensible beginnings of catastrophic climate change— we learned a flesh-eating bacterium (Vibrio vulnificus) is running rampant in Florida, infecting people as it thrives in the brackish floodwaters left in the wake of Hurricane Ian.     It’s bloody stressful these days.    With so many things we can’t control, feeling uncertain about the future economy is normal. However, uncertainty is a difficult environment in which to move forward with business.    Colin thought maybe he was feeling so pessimistic about everything because he is getting old. So, he polled his followers on LinkedIn a few days ago to see what they thought. He asked them,"What are you expecting the business environment will be over the next year?" The results might surprise you.    However, no matter how we all feel about the future, into it we go anyway. So, in an effort to help us all cope with the road ahead, we present the 5 Rules for Managing Uncertainty in this episode, which you can also watch on our YouTube Channel.    Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience   Uncertainty is a difficult environment for decision making. Often, we look for ways to mitigate these feelings using short-cuts in decision making to move forward. It’s also why we like to say a decision was a no-brainer. If the best way forward was so obvious that we didn’t have to think about it much, we have much more certainty about it. Certainty is definitely our preferred state when we decide things.    Here are a few key moments in the discussion:   01:49   We start off by explaining the situation behind the poll and what Colin and Ryan think about the future. Spoiler alert: they don’t agree. 05:35  We share some participant insights, first from René Bomholt and then from Andrew Safnauer, who tell us that it will be different in various parts of the world and that thinking about having a recession is the surest way to ensure there is one. 08:57  We share the first rule, to recognize that uncertainty will happen, and it will be uncomfortable.  15:07  We talk about the positives of uncertainty in rule number two, which is to remember that the upside of uncertainty is it provide opportunity, especially to disrupt things. 17:57  Colin shares why he likes to wear his Luton Town Football Club shirt—even though the team isn’t as good as he wishes it was—and how an ex-manager was the inspiration for Rule #3, control the controllables.  22:27  We get into Rule #4, which is to be alert and prepared; because being flat footed and unprepared is never a winning response to uncertainty while having more information and a plan is.  24:25  We explain why the last rule, hoping for the best while planning for the worst, is an excellent way to cope with uncertainty, and why it can pay off for you no matter which way things go.   Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.    Customer Experience Information & Resources   LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.   Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.    Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 35,000 subscribers.      How can we help? Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

What if we told you that we know how you could develop a superpower? You can. We know you can because the method for it it was developed by a Yale’s assistant professor of marketing that was once a door-to-door salesperson and someone who has performed open-heart surgery on a pig.   The superpower you can develop is influence and it is essential if you want to make changes in your organization. As champions of Customer Experience, we don’t need to tell you how crucial it is to get people to change. Influence and consensus building can help you get there, and our guest will tell you how.    In this episode, we talk with climate philanthropist Zoe Chance (zoechance.com) Ph.D., author of Influence is your Superpower: The Science of Winning Hearts, Sparking Change, and Making Good Things Happen. Chance shares with us why she wrote the book, some constructive criticism for the Customer Experience movement, suggestions for a winning strategy, and step-by-step instructions for how to gain support for your ideas.    Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience One of the reasons Chance wrote the book was because she felt like other tactics written by thought leaders for influence were too transactional. Her methods are softer and built upon a foundation of mutual benefit. In fact, she jokes that her agent wanted to call the book Influence for Nice People. While she rejected the title, she doesn’t reject the premise and hopes that she can do some good with her strategies. Climate change is a topic so important to Chance that she is donating half of the profits from her book to go to 350.org, a global network of climate activists seeking change through the power of ordinary people.    Here are a few other key moments in the discussion:   02:19  We introduce Chance and some of her accomplishments, including the aforementioned open-heart surgery performed on a pig. 05:52  Ryan asks Chance why she chose such a well-written about topic like influence for her book, and Chance explains why she had more to say on the topic. 13:05  Chance explains that the psychology behind influence is the same whether you are convincing people to go to a restaurant or resolving a multi-million-dollar purchase. 17:17 Chance explains to Colin the two big ideas she has for why some organizations do not address the improvement they need in their experiences the way he would like.  21:43  We discuss the intention-behavior gap and how it plays a significant role in influence and getting people to change. 23:46  Chance shares her secret to influencing group decision, including the step-by-step strategy for “working around the roots,” as the Japanese say. 29:36  Ryan asks Chance about the chapter she has on saying no, and what she says about it might surprise you—it has a lot more about getting people to say yes than you might think.    Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey. Subscribe to our YouTube channel here.   Customer Experience Information & Resources LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter. Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.  Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 35,000 subscribers.  How can we help? Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

Neither of us is much of a runner. In fact, to get us to run with any kind of speed would require some motivation—like a tiger chasing us. That’s because fear is a powerful motivator. Fear is also a powerful tool for marketers to get customers or potential customers to care about something.    So, why does fear motivate us so much? Safety is an important value for all of us. When it is threatened, we notice. In other words, fear is a strong emotion, which makes it hard to ignore or control. In some cases, you might even have an involuntary response as the fear you feel taps into something primal. Michael McIntyre provides an engaging and comedic perspective on this topic here.    When you have something to sell, it can be challenging to cut through the clutter to get people to care about what you have. In fact, getting people to care about anything can be challenging, whether there is a potential sale involved or not. That’s one of the reasons that marketers find themselves using it; fear can get people to care.    Political ads are big fans of this type of marketing. Campaigns use the opponent’s platform and voting record to scare voters about what the opponent might do if elected. Of course, the candidate campaign ad creators want voters to choose would never do those things. So, fear motivates the voters to give their vote to the political campaign’s candidate. It’s genius, and very common.    In this episode, we discuss why fear motivates humans, how marketers can use it effectively and what marketers should avoid. Plus, we decide which mask Colin should wear for Halloween. Don’t miss out on the exciting debate.       Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience   Among other ways, Loss Aversion, which is part of the larger behavioral science concept of  Prospect Theory, is part of the equation in using fear as a marketing tool. You might remember that Loss Aversion describes that in our minds, losses loom larger than gains. To put it another way, we hate losing things more than we enjoy winning things. Loss Aversion is why we are sometimes motivated to respond to a marketing offer. We don’t want to risk losing something.    Here are a few other key moments in the discussion:   03:46  We talk about our newest part of the podcast, video; click here to subscribe to the Intuitive Customer video feed for the podcast.  05:36  We talk about how fear is a tool used by marketers because it is a powerful emotion that causes people to care about things they might not have before.    08:45  We review the concept of fear aversion, FOMO, and how these can feed into these marketing messages.  15:43  Colin recalls the work of British comedian Michael McIntyre and his bit about wasps and bees, which demonstrates how we sometimes try to control our very real fear. 18:36  We explore why fear is so motivating to us and why we seek it out in “safe” spaces.  20:56 We explain how fear appeals are motivating, but you should do these things if you want them to work and avoid some other things to keep it from backfiring.  31:05 We share our practical suggestions for what you should do with this information.    Subscribe to our YouTube channel here for more content.   Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.    Customer Experience Information & Resources   LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.   Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.    Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 35,000 subscribers.    How can we help? Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

This week on our podcast and Intuitive Customer YouTube channel, we address a listener’s “Pickle” with our “I’m in a Pickle” feature. You might remember that a Pickle is our term for a business problem that might be addressed with customer strategy and/or the behavioral sciences. We hadn’t featured one for a while, so we thought it was time to dig into a new one.    This week, we hear from a frustrated and disappointed insurance professional named Tonya Dunn who wants to know why, after all their Customer Experience improvements, they still aren’t seeing the results they expected. She wants to know what we think the problem is and what we think they should do.    Customers are complicated and so are the reasons they do what they do—or don’t do— in an experience. In our listener’s case, the thing they are not doing is recommending them to their friends and family.    This problem is not unusual, nor is it insurmountable. However, it usually requires taking a hard look at what an organization is doing to improve and where they might have veered off course from a successful customer strategy to manage customer behavior.    In this episode, we take that hard look at what might be going on with their improvement program and how the organization might change what they are doing to get back on course and start getting those referrals rolling in the door.   Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience   First of all, it’s important to note that there is rarely one reason something like this happens. Like many things, there are several reasons that this can happen with a Customer Experience program. There are theoretical reasons that could influence the results our listener is getting and tactical ones, too. We discuss them all in the podcast.    Here are a few key moments in the discussion:   03:02  We hear about the pickle and why Colin chose this one to feature on the podcast. 04:07  We talk about the theoretical reasons that our listener isn’t getting the results she wanted, starting with a favorite topic, Reference Points. 13:26  Ryan talks a little about the Evaluative Heuristic, which is something we use when comparing complicated or hard to understand things in a decision.   17:23  Colin talks about some tactical problems that could be happening, starting with how organizations sometimes focus on the wrong parts of the experience.  23:04  We discuss why it is essential to identify what customers value the most when choosing what to invest your time and resources into improvement. 27:21   We wind down the discussion and share our recommendations for our listener (and anyone else out there with a similar problem) about what to do about this pickle.   Do you have a business pickle? Tell us about it here.   Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.    Customer Experience Information & Resources   LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.   Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.    Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 35,000 subscribers.      How can we help? Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

Organizations need to embrace that emotional side of their experiences. Not only to design an experience that surprises and delights their customers, but also so their Artificial Intelligence works to provide useable insight. Combining the emotional data into the formula with concepts from the behavioral science side will make it so organizations can understand what and why their customers do what they do.    However, I worry that they don’t.    You’ll remember that Customer Science is the fusion of data, the behavioral sciences, and artificial intelligence (AI). Today, we will discuss what role AI plays in predicting customer emotions and how they affect customer behavior.    AI isn’t perfect. Yet. We did an interview with Broderick Turner, Ph.D., from Virginia Tech about AI recently. Turner explains his skepticism about AI since he views AI as opinions written in code.    However, imperfect or not, AI technology gives us some options we didn’t have before.  Applied intelligently and with a deliberate approach, AI has the potential to solve problems, and help us achieve goals.    This episode is the second of a series of podcasts we did with Beyond Philosophy’s own Zhecho Dobrev (@ZhechoDobrev), author of The Big Miss: How Organizations Overlook the Value of Emotions. We talked with him before on our podcast a month ago about how emotions drive customer behavior. This week, we dive a little deeper on this concept, and explore how emotions affect the insights we get from Customer Science. If you’d like to read a bit more from Zhecho on emotional attachment being a key factor in customer-drive growth check out this article here.       Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience   In the book, Dobrev shares research about AI. It looks at the typical customer journey touchpoints and how much value do each of those drive. Also, Dobrev examines where emotions and customer relationships affect the outcome, and how much value those provide. Now, he is analyzing how AI uses each of those customer journey mapping touchpoints, meaning the customer infinity lifecycle thinking about the brand, learning about the product, purchasing experience, and all the other points until we get to customer retention.      Here are a few more key moments in the discussion:   03:36  We talk about the recent podcasts that led to this one, including the first one with Zhecho a little while ago, the podcast we did on Customer Science, and an episode we had with a guest, Broderick Turner, about how opinions make their way into AI code.  08:30  Dobrev explains that regarding AI in the Customer Science mix, it should include customer emotional data, as they are the main drivers of customer behavior; otherwise, the insights it has gleaned may not be authentic drivers of behavior. 10:43  Dobrev shares three organizations that have done a great job using AI to understand how emotions affect and drive customer behavior and why it helped.  20:26  Colin shares how a previous podcast, one about the book, The Myth of Experience, demonstrates one of the problems with AI, which is that organizations don’t have the data they think they do and how that leads to problems with their application of it. 29:09 Dobrev shares his plans about what is next for AI and experience, and his effort to piece together a strategy that can improve all experiences moving    Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.    Customer Experience Information & Resources   LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.   Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.    Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 35,000 subscribers.    How can we help? Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

This podcast was created in partnership with Streem   Delta thinks I am a liar.  Or at least it felt like they did on this phone call with me. If we had a video option, the entire experience would be better for both sides, and I would have the flight I wanted. Video can be the untapped jewel of your experience design, and we will explain why.    The problem was a schedule change that put me out of Boston instead of Atlanta. I wanted to switch the flight back to Atlanta on a different one that was the same price but was unable to do so on my own online. So, I called the contact center. Unfortunately, they had a different fare on their system than I did, so I felt they didn’t think I was telling the truth. During that phone call with Delta, I wished I could show them what I had on my screen so they could trust me.    I had a similar experience with my doctor. I had pain in my chest and wanted to indicate to the doctor where it was without seeing him or giving him a 400-word description. The video was not an option, so it was a wordy description in stops and starts.    In this episode, we talk with special guest Jóhann Hannesson, Lead Product Manager and the head of Web Development at Streem, about using video in a Customer Experience. Hannesson says that video could be the missing link between your customer who has a problem and the expert they are talking to in the contact center who, through video, can help them faster.    Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience   So, why do humans prefer video in these situations? There are two answers. First, there is a level of information exchange that words do not always have. You are not always depending on a customer that is not necessarily an expert in communicating the problem with terms concisely and accurately with the contact center. Second, it facilitates communication by allowing people to talk and look at the problem together.  Video allows the customers and contact centers to work together on the situation.    Here are a few other critical moments in the discussion:   01:55  We introduce our guest host, Jóhann Hannesson, Lead Product Manager and the head of Web Development at Streem. 05:55  Hannesson explains how interactions with a contact center have friction when they rely on non-expert customers to communicate with expert contact center employees and how video can help resolve them in practical ways.  15:21  We learn that not only does video make calls easier for the customers, but they also improve the employee experience, too. 22:00  Hannesson explains how video has improved customer contacts and helped resolve issues more efficiently.   25:07  Hannesson shares a specific case study that used video to reduce repeat home visits.   29:22  We all share our practical advice about how to use video to improve the metrics that matter most to your organization (and that none of us are footballers, in case you were wondering).        Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.    Customer Experience Information & Resources   LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as a 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' He has 290,000 followers for his work. Shaw is the Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected it as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.   Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.    Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 35,000 subscribers.      How can we help? Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.