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

When it comes to the behavioral sciences, I love their take on memory. I love it so much, that we did a podcast mini-series on it in three parts.    In the first part, we talked about why memories are essential to experiences, when we use them to decide sometimes, and how memories form.    The second part covered how memories are connected and the different types of memories we have.    In this final episode of the memory mini-series, we explore how we store, retrieve, and forget memories.   Why all this hullabaloo about memory? Simply put, I think too many organizations underestimate the significance of the effects customers’ memories have on their bottom line. Memories are essential to experiences. They connect us to our past and drive our behavior in the present. In many ways, memories define us.   Memory is also essential to customer loyalty and retention. Nobel-Prize-Winning economist Professor Daniel Kahneman explained it all to me ten years ago and I never forgot: customers don’t choose between experiences; they choose between the memories of an experience.   In this episode, we discuss how we retrieve, store, and forget memories. However, we also talk about what you can do with this information to ensure that when customers are sorting through their memories of your experience, they come back for more every time.    Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience   In our Memory Maker Training, we cover the importance of memories to your experience and how to train your employees to create excellent and lasting ones of your experience. This training builds upon your choice of the experience you want to deliver customers, whether that’s making them feel valued or cared for or something else in that moment. These memories are reinforced by the words, phrases, body language and tone used by your team.    Here are a few key moments in the discussion:   04:01  Ryan gets the discussion started by going over how our minds store memories and the influences on that process. 12:12  We learn how SOHCAHTOA from trigonometry is an excellent example of mnemonic devices that help us remember things and why.  13:57  Colin explains how an app called  What Three Words uses an easier to remember way to pinpoint your location than coordinate numbers.  16:05  We discuss the Zeigarnik Effect and how it helps us retrieve memories, along with some other interesting tools.    26:41  We discuss how we sometimes misremember things, as studied by Elizabeth Loftus and presented on her TED Talk.   31:24  Ryan and I get into the “So what?” of memory and how you can apply what you have learned practically in your customer strategy.         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.

Memories do not exist alone. They are networked…and this network isn’t a bunch of the same kind of information arranged in neat order and categorized by type. It’s a network of different memory types intermingling facts and feelings, procedures, and judgements, all influencing each other in interesting ways.    Memory is what creates customer loyalty. It doesn’t matter what parts of your customer strategy you design. If customers don’t remember that you did it, it won’t matter later.    It’s for this reason that we love the subject of memory. So, we did a mini-series about it.    In this episode, the second part of a three-part mini-series on Memory, we build on the concepts we shared in the first episode. We talk about the memory network and how it works. We also discuss the different types of memories. Plus, we get into one of my favorite concepts from the “father of the behavioral sciences,” Nobel-Prize-winning economist Professor Daniel Kahneman, the Peak-End Rule.    It's sure to be  an episode you will never forget.    Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience   There are a lot of things that memories are. They are facts, procedures, feelings, and evaluations. One thing they are not is a sole existence. We kick off this episode with an explanation of the network of memories that makes it clear what we mean.   Here are a few key moments in the discussion:   02:53  Ryan explains his metaphor of a fishing net to describe how memories connect to each other in our minds. 11:06  We discuss the different types of memories and how they form.     15:39  Colin explains how sometimes organizations can design experiences that train customers to use them, like the site where he buys his sheet music for the guitar. 19:04  We get into how habits are a type of memory, albeit and automatic and subconscious one.    22:13  Colin tells a story that is sure to mean that his daughter will never let him babysit his grandchild again.   23:55  Ryan explains Episodic memory, which is the one that is most like what experienced champions should do for their customer strategy.       You can listen to part 1 of our mini-series on memory 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.

Memory is crucial to customer strategy. Understanding customer behavior requires a fundamental understanding of how we access and use memories in our daily life and how it drives decision making in our actions and even who we decide to trust.   In other words, understanding people requires understanding their memories. Further, it requires knowing what they remember and why, and also, what they don’t remember at all.    This week, the Intuitive Customer is going Netflix. We present the first of our three-part series on Memory. It’s the Memory Mini-Series, Part 1. In it, we explore how our behavior is motivated by our memories. We also take a closer look at how memories form, and where it lives in your mind, or whether it ends up in the memory wastebasket instead.   Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience   Memory is a giant subject as it relates to Customer Experience. It affects what customers remember about your brand, what they order or buy from you, and whether they ever come back. In essence, managing customer behavior requires managing their memories.    6:43  Ryan explains why memories are not all, but almost all of human psychology. 9:36  Colin asks Ryan to explain whether memory has anything to do with the decision-making shortcuts people use to make decisions, and Ryan explains that some do, and some don’t. 17:37 Ryan explains how brands are a memory-based structure in the minds of your customers, their thoughts, and feelings that they associated with your offering and why that is. 21:21 We explore how memories form, and how the different types of memory formations differ from each other, starting with how memories exist in our minds. 26:46  We explain why Ryan can still order a pizza from Pizza Hut in Cleveland, even though he hasn’t lived there in decades, and what to expect in the next installment of our three-part series on memory.    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 did you do during the lockdown? Did you take up a hobby or a new exercise program? Did you watch hours of news coverage hoping for some good news? Were you in the kitchen working with your sourdough starter? Or were you on the couch watching the entirety of Netflix?   All were excellent pursuits, by the way, especially the bread making. However, one of my team was spending the lock down a different way: taking a deeper dive on the data we have collected on our Emotional Signature® research.  What he found there became a book.    Our Emotional Signature research measures the level of emotional engagement you have with customers right now and determines what the really want from you. We undertake this exercise by asking a lot of questions. As a result, we have loads of responses, nearly a million in fact.    We had looked at it for each project, gleaning the insight for our client and then filing it away for posterity. However, we had never undertaken a perusal of the whole batch together, even though I thought we should and often told my team we were sitting on a gold mine. It only took a global pandemic to get us to start digging.   In this episode, we talk with Zhecho Dobrev, Senior Consultant at Beyond Philosophy for 13 years, Customer Experience and Behavior Science Consultant and Trainer, and, now, Author of The Big Miss: How Organizations Overlook the Value of Emotions, about what he found and whether any of it was worth its weight in gold. You can follow Zhecho on Twitter here.    Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience     In many ways, this research is significant in scope and fairly international. Dobrev's book uses the responses from nearly 20,000 customers from 24 organizations within nine industry sectors, including  healthcare, finance, telecoms, utilities, and others. While there were plenty of business-to-consumer models, almost half were business-to-business companies, too. Respondents were from the US, UK, Canada, and Europe. With all the resources and data gathered over the past two decades, what Dobrev discovered about customer behavior might surprise you.    Here are a few key moments in the discussion:   03:53  Zhecho explains what he was looking at and what he was looking for during his lockdown with a decade’s worth of Beyond Philosophy Emotional Signature data.   08:15  Zhecho shares some interesting research that demonstrates that despite knowing that how customers feel affects decision-making, most organizations ignore it.    15:36  We get into the opportunity costs associated with ignoring this essential part of the customer experience to organizations, including the development of a Wicked Learning environment, which we discussed a few weeks back.     20:19  We hear a story of how a closer look at what people really want helped move the ball for the YMCA gyms.    23:56  Zhecho shares another example from a luxury store in California that measured the brain activity of an employee while managing the emotional experience and how it resulted in more sales for the store. 27:51  Ryan shares his experience with managing emotions and shares his advice for how to apply this in a real world experience.  28:56  Zhecho shares his advice for how to apply these ideas in practical ways for your organization.          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.   In my 20 years as a consultant for Customer Experience, I have been involved in several successful implementations. The Maersk Line project that I worked on with Michél Patterson, a continuous improvement expert in Lean Six Sigma was one of the most, with an improvement of 40 points for their Net Promoter Score® (NPS) over 30 months. What’s more is they also experienced a 10 percent increase in shipping volumes.   Implementation was a big part of that success. To that end, in this episode we share the five rules of a successful customer experience implementation. Michel Patterson takes the lead on this one, as a career-long believer in continuous improvement providing the following five rules she used in her first, and very successful, project with customer experience improvement:     Define: What are you trying to accomplish? Measure: How will you know if what you do is working? Analyze: What changes are possible that might improve experiences? Improve: How can you roll these changes out on a larger basis? Control: How can you keep things moving in the right direction?   In this episode, we cover these five rules and how they played out in our highly successful Customer Experience implementation for the world’s largest shipping container company.      Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience   If you know anything about Lean Six Sigma, you probably recognize the five rules. These phases of the implementation serve as excellent guideposts in a customer experience project like this one. Michel Patterson says that for her first project in the implementation area, these five areas were the natural inclination for organizing their efforts with Maersk.    Here are a few key moments in the discussion:   06:44  Michel Patterson explains how she didn’t have a lot of experience with handling customer experience improvement projects, so she relied on her Lean Six Sigma background and project management structure, starting with Define. 14:43  Michel Patterson explains the concept about putting Measure second in the list and why it is essential it is there. 22:04  We discuss the third in the list, Analyze and how the changes you make are going to improve the experience and move the metric identified in the second step, Measure.    25:00  Colin brings up the Ambassadors, how they were chosen, and the role they played in the implementation.  26:52 After you improve your experience in a bigger way based on the first three steps, you land at Control, which is where you keep things going and improving continuously.   30:58  Colin adds in some details he remembers from the implementation and how they played into the success of the overall project.     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.

Intuition is a concept that plays a major role in decision-making for all humans. Intuition is the way we can “know” things without using our reasoning. It is based on our instincts and experiences, and our need to find patterns for things in our lives.    Unfortunately, intuition isn’t always right. Knowing when intuition could be correct and when it might not be is a critical skill for any of us, particularly in business.    Robin Hogarth’s book, The Myth of Experience, can help. In it, Hogarth has theories about intuition and how it forms, and in what conditions it might be more reliable than others.    In this episode, we explore the idea of intuition, how cognition affects it, and what environmental factors affect its reliability. We also share some practical advice on how you can overcome your propensity to use instinct and combine it with rational processes to get the best possible outcome for yourself and your organization.      Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience   We talk about intuition as a “gut feeling” or “something we know in our hearts.” However, intuition lives squarely in our brains. It is part of the two systems of cognition that we all share. One system is fast and automatic, while the other is slow and methodical. Intuition comes from the fast and automatic part, so understanding how that works will also help you understand when your intuition is serving you—or failing you.   03:48 Ryan discusses what he learned from Hogarth’s book regarding where intuition comes from and how it forms. 06:31  We discuss how intuition plays a role in my Apple product obsession.  10:45  Hogarth’s research indicates that there are two environments under which intuitions form, kind and wicked, which has a video that explains it well.  15:51  We discuss how you might not always know which kind of environment you are in, kind or wicked, and are often fooled; this video also explains how people get fooled and why.  23:48   Moneyball, either the book or the movie, gives us a good example on how to build upon the instinctive decisions we favor and coupling that with rational processes to ensure it isn’t wrong. 25:42  We share the practical advice we can glean from this concept and apply them to your decision making and what resources you trust.   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.

My iPhone is getting bossy. It suggested widgets based on the time of day I was using it. This proactive experience is the future of experiences. Unfortunately, few organizations know how to build them.    While the definition of proactive experience is somewhat fluid at the moment, perhaps the best way to describe it is to solve a problem before the customer knows they have one. This proactive experience is powered by the emerging field of Customer Science, a convergence of data, artificial intelligence (AI), and the behavioral sciences. Intaking a variety of consumer inputs, the machine will output a response intended to resolve these customers’ predicted needs creating a positive engagement tool for customer service.   There are benefits to customers with proactive experiences. Many customers want a proactive experience because it feels more personal, improving consumer satisfaction. It makes a person feel more important and appreciated when a system tries to recognize what they want.    Organizations benefit, too. To the company, proactive experiences provide a different advantage: customer retention. If customers feel more satisfied with their experience, they are more likely to return to your site in the future. In this episode, we invited Vasili Triant, Chief Operating Officer of Ujet, to  tell us more about what is possible with proactive experiences. He shares many go-to-market activities that can help organizations gain the first-mover advantage rather than we-are-getting-left-behind hustle.   Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience   A company can do a few things to create this positive engagement tool for customer service. It all starts with understanding your customers, which involves customer segmentation, dividing them into similar groups, and appealing to what they have in common and value collectively. From there, you must hire people to transform this information into algorithms that can predict what the customer wants to do based upon indicators provided by said customer.   Here are a few critical moments in the discussion:   06:17 Vasili introduces the concept of proactive customer service, its definition, and its benefits. 10:33 We discuss the process of formulating a proactive customer experience and how to ensure its success. 15:45 We discuss how proactivity contributes to the future of customer experience. 25:22 Vasili explains how proactive customer experiences help to predict customer behavior. 27:50   Vasili details his frequently asked questions and the answers he uses to help organizations take advantage of this engagement tool to boost the customer service experiences.    This podcast was produced in partnership with Ujet.cx. You can find more on them on their Twitter page here.   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. Shaw is the 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. 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.

Is your idea of an ideal evening a nice meal at home and a book or a Netflix queue?    Or would you rather be at a cocktail party with people from all walks of life exchanging stories or jumping up and down to a throbbing beat in the middle of a crowded dance floor?    How you answer this question is one of many ways that you can explore your personality type. The personality you have will help you determine how to leverage your strengths (and confront your “opportunities”) on your path to success.    Psychology research determined that there are common areas of personality that all people share with many characteristics that fall under them. They are the Big Five Personality Dimensions and they might be useful to you on a journey of self-discovery.    In this episode, we explore the Big Five Personality Dimensions and how they might affect your preferences. We also look at the characteristics that fall under those dimensions to determine how these facets can affect our choices.      Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience   The Big Five Personality Dimensions are the areas of our personality that drive our decisions. They include Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism, and Openness. For each dimension, there are personality traits that are associated with the area. For example, Extroversion, which determines how you generate your energy around (or away from) people, has facets like warmth, assertiveness, and excitement seeking, as a few of them. We think taking an online quiz is a great start in a journey of exploration for better self-awareness, as well as understanding the people around you.    Here are a few key moments in the discussion:   05:00   Ryan shares his insight on the differences between the two personality camps for psychological research and how it relates to the Big Five Personality Dimensions. 11:32   We discuss some of the psychology tests that human resources departments often use and how we think they should be applied to a journey of self-awareness and discovery.  17:05  We cover the Five Dimensions of Personality and explain what they are, as well as the characteristics associated with each area. 24:26  Colin shares a story about how a leadership conference revealed to him several years ago how his personality traits were interpreted by his team through communication, and how they didn’t necessarily match his self-view.  27:50   We share the practical applications we see for personality exploration in customer experience, customer strategy, and personal self-discovery.        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.

We hope you enjoy today's show. If you do, could vote for us in the People's Choice Podcast Award? It doesn't take long to cast your vote and it would really mean a lot to both Ryan and I. Thanks very much. Cheers!   To vote, please click here.   I am grumpy about customer experience these days. Recently, I vented a bit of my frustration on LinkedIn and asking has the world gone mad? This realization came with a bunch of different things in my life as a customer went wrong, from gate delays on the tarmac for transcontinental flights on both sides of the pond to a house in shambles because of materials delays and poor project management.    Interestingly, it is not simply a case of a single company or industry experiencing failures; the problem is everywhere. From theme parks to airlines, the responses to my rant revealed issues that seem to encompass a wide range of businesses.    The reader's replies voiced many opinions about the possible causes and solutions for these declining experiences. One reader suggested that the lack of good service is due to a lack of motivated workers wanting to be paid more for less work. Another commenter theorized that the culprits might be high expectations, insufficient staffing, and a lack of empathy.      In this episode, we talk about many of the problems with experiences we are seeing today and what we can do about them—and how we can adapt to the new normal.   Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience   While many may be quick to blame the entire situation on COVID, many of the problems we are seeing today are also influenced by other factors. For example, many labor pool shortages in the UK are affected by population migration resulting from Brexit, which makes organizations hard-pressed to find warm bodies, let alone the right warm bodies, to fill their open positions. Also, some of the problems are cultural. For example, one reader shared her perspective as a Dutch person living in Britain. Then, of course, there is the computer to deal with, and sometimes it says no (Warning: Fruity language at the end of this video). Regardless of the causes for this shift in customer service quality, we must begin to repair some of the damage.   Here are a few more key moments in the discussion:   1:38 Colin talks about his frustrations with flights to and from JFK Airport and the subsequent LinkedIn post about the world going crazy. 04:30: We discuss the declining customer satisfaction index and some of our listeners’ responses. 08:05: We evaluate a commenters assessment that customer service quality has declined due to a shrinking labor pool.  12:40: We look at COVID-19 and how it may have affected quality of Customer Experience by raising consumer expectations. 17:12: We examine a listener’s poor experience with Disney and how it is representative of a larger labor shortage problem around many larger corporations. 22:52: We explain how COVID did not cause all customer service issues but rather worsened previously existing ones. Specifically, we look at Brexit and economic downturn in Europe. 32:40: Ryan discusses a listeners review of good customer service and then we look at solutions for these customer and employee experience issues.   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.

We hope you enjoy today's show. If you do, could vote for us in the People's Choice Podcast Award? It doesn't take long to cast your vote and it would really mean a lot to both Ryan and I. Thanks very much. Cheers!   To vote, please click here.   Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an incredible technology with potential to shape the future of humanity. However, it is fundamentally flawed. Who messes it up? That’s right, human programmers.    The common misconception is that AI is a pure technological brain built from scratch without the risk of human influence. The truth is the program is incapable of performing tasks beyond the boundaries of the specific situations for which the algorithms were designed.   Take the basic linear regression formula: y = mx + b. This simple equation is a program to figure out the output or “Y” by means of the input “B” through the algorithm “mx.” All that an AI is doing can be summarized at a basic level in this equation. It is finding an output from an input using a fundamental algorithm. Since the AI is simply doing the math, the algorithm is the most important part of any AI.    Understanding these principles, it is apparent what really matters in AI construction is the importance put upon the inputs in the coding process. Currently, AI is not capable of making these decisions; only human coders have that power.    In this episode, we talk about today’s AI and its flaws with our guest Broderick Turner, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Marketing at Virginia Tech., and founder of TRAP LAB (Technology Race and Prejudice LAB). We explore the inherent biases built into programmers’ decisions when making AI’s—and the ridiculousness of a robot uprising with the technology we have today.    So, What’s AI Good for Then?   Many of us perceive AI as mysterious as a magic trick. However,  in reality, AI is a series of algorithms. In other words, AI is merely the means of producing an output from an input based upon the algorithm put in place by the programmer. Therefore, AI tends to work best when the inputs are limited.    Here are a few key moments in the discussion:   03:46 Dr. Turner introduces “Weapons of Math Destruction”, the concept that AIs are merely opinions written in code, and what that means for AI. 05:30 We discuss the absurdity of the idea of an AI takeover and why this would be impossible with our current technology. 09:32 Ryan asks Dr. Turner to explain what scenarios AI is good for and we discuss some of the most successful AI products in the modern world. 13:09 Dr. Turner discusses his own private research including how AI is used in conjunction with YouTube thumbnails to determine optimization for view counts for advertisers. 17:12 We discuss how AI is used to determine which thumbnails will be the default based upon data collected through user trials and how AI is effective in this field. We then discuss how AI audits are conducted in these scenarios. 26:28 We discuss the results of the audits conducted by Dr. Turner and what this means about the user groups of the sites tested. 32:40 Dr. Turner discusses the racial and gender biases found in websites like Twitter and how the algorithms the sites use affect them.     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.