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

Who do you feel loyal to in your life? My money is on your answer being your friends and family. The reason you feel loyal to them is because you have an emotional relationship with them. They might do things you don’t like sometimes, usually at the holidays, that drive you crazy. However, you don’t sever ties over it.  The same emotional connection happens in business relationships. Also, like your personal relationships, they can weather a little bad news without ending them. However, for this to be the case, there are some things you need to do ensure that this relationship forms—and it probably isn’t as complicated as you might think. This episode focuses on how to create these emotional bonds with your customers and foster customer loyalty. We explain why emotional bonds protect you in business relationships and how to lay the foundation for customer loyalty.  Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience To begin with, we borrow from a concept in Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People called the Emotional Bank Account. An Emotional Bank Account is a lot like a regular bank account where you make deposits and withdrawals. The difference is the deposits are good things that you do for your customers and the withdrawals are the things that happen that they don’t like. We think that everyone should invest a lot of time making deposits into the Emotional Bank Account for that rainy day when something doesn’t go the customers’ way.  Here are a few key moments in the discussion: 01:39  Colin introduces the listener’s business pickle and why loyalty is such an essential part of your experience. 05:18  We explain the concept of the Emotional Bank Account and how it applies to your personal and business relationships. 08:22  Colin shares an example of working with a construction equipment company that you would think wouldn’t want to get into the touchy-feely stuff—until they learned that’s what their customers wanted.     09:57  We discuss the simple way you can build up your customers’ trust in you, which facilitates an emotional relationship forming with your business customers. 13:35  Colin explains how having the entire team consistent in their dealings with customers, and presenting a unified front is essential to forming an emotional bond with customers.    15:01  We explain how you should be yourself when you deal with customers because the relationship will hopefully last, and no one can keep up pretense for that long. 16:41  Ryan explains how addressing the individual’s personal career goals and job responsibilities are also essential to emotional relationships in business, as well as understanding the company politics your business contact must navigate.   21:06 We explain how creating win-wins is essential, and there are times when you have to let a customer go.     Do you have a business problem you would like our help with? Please contact us to tell us about it. We may solve it with you and our listening audience on the podcast! 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 289,000 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 LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two 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 22,000 subscribers.  How can we help? Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

Ever been channel surfing and see a movie playing on broadcast that you own in your digital personal library and been unexpectedly delighted? Have you ever then watched that movie, commercials and editing and all, even though with very minimal effort you could watch that movie from streaming without any of that stuff?  This episode explains why you were so happy to find the movie and why it was better to watch it that way rather than stream it yourself. It’s related to the idea of serendipity, and the explanation is the result of a decade of research by Kristina Durante, (@KristinaDurante) Ph.D., Professor of Marketing at Rutgers Business School. We invited Durante to come talk with us, and much to our surprise, she accepted.  However, our surprise in this instance was not serendipity. Durante says serendipity boosts our enjoyment of something because it feels like a “gift from the gods.” The idea that fate has dealt you a good hand is one that makes people feel happier with Customer Experiences, even when they can’t attribute that good luck to the organization providing it. She says that customers like how it feels like magic. Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience Durante says that there are three main components to define serendipity. First, it must be something positive that happens. Second, it should be unexpected and unplanned. Finally, it should have no obvious source, meaning it can’t be attributed directly to anything or anybody.  Here are a few key moments in the discussion: 02:28  Ryan introduces our guest and explains why she is on the show. 04:26  Durante explains how she became interested in serendipity after the song “Material Girl” thrilled her when she heard it on the radio, but hearing it later on her playlist wasn’t the same. 07:42  Durante explains what their research defines as serendipity and how it differs from surprise or luck.     11:24  We discuss how Netflix employs a bit of serendipity in it’s “Play something” feature and why it was necessary for the Netflix viewer experience. 16:28  Durante discusses how serendipity is different than surprise and how this difference is essential to boosting enjoyment for customers.   25:42  Durante talks about ways marketers can set this up for customers in their experiences, as well as some retailers that understand and employ this concept well. 32:22   All three of us share our insights into how marketers can increase the feeling of serendipity in their own experiences as well as what to avoid while doing it.    Join us in celebrating our 20th anniversary over the next month. We will be giving away books and other things this month. Check out our LinkedIn and Twitter feeds for more information. 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 289,000 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 LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two 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 22,000 subscribers.  How can we help? Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

Do you know when in your experience customers decide to buy from you or not? You should. Otherwise, how can you design an appropriate environment to get customers to decide to do what you want?  It reminds me of the phrase, "Crossing the Rubicon." The Rubicon river was a northern boundary outside Rome in the ancient Roman Empire. The Senate determined if a general crossed the Rubicon with their army, that was grounds for treason.  There is a famous story that as Julius Caesar crossed it with his army, he said,"Alea iacta est”, which means “Now the die is cast” for those of us a little rusty on the Latin. The quote signifies passing the point of no return.  This story is more than a Roman history lesson. I mention it because customers also "cross the Rubicon" when they decide things. Psychology refers to this as the Rubicon Model of action phases in decision-making, and it describes our varying mindsets before and after choosing. The deliberative mindset before choosing takes in information; the implementing mindset commits to and maybe defends the decision after choosing.  In this episode, we take a look at how deciding changes our perspective on things in an experience and how we assign importance to information. We also discuss how your experience design should support and complement these mindset shifts.  Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience A buying decision is not the only one a customer makes. All of the little decisions that customers make are part of this mindset shift also, in varying degrees. That means plotting them and understanding when they happen is crucial. Knowing when they occur will help you determine where to design features into the experience that get them to decide what you want them to, which is the how, or critical skill of experience design and customer strategy.  Here are a few key moments in the discussion: 02:15  Colin shares a marital problem he is having with his wife Lorraine about, well, picking wallpaper for their home redecoration project.  05:44  Ryan explains the psychology behind decision making called the Rubicon Model of Decision Making, and a bit of Roman history lesson about the origin of its name. 07:59  We explain how your customers essentially “Cross the Rubicon” in your experience, too.     11:49  We discuss the two mindsets of customers in decision making, deliberative and implementing.  17:16   We discuss how all the decisions along the way are also subject to the Rubicon Model.    21:07   The discussion turns into how to strategize in your experience to take advantage of the timing for customer decision-making.  27:59  We share the practicalities of applying this information in your experience design.      Join us in celebrating our 20th anniversary over the next month. We will be giving away books and other things this month. Check out our LinkedIn and Twitter feeds for more information.   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 289,000 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 LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two 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 22,000 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. Senior executives have risen to their position for many reasons, but one of them is a love for numbers. Executives live by numbers.  So, you can’t just have a “really great idea.” It would be best if you had a “really great idea” and an idea of how it will drive numbers for the organization. I have learned a lot about how to win over senior executives. In this episode, we explore the five rules for successfully engaging with senior executives to enhance your career. I share these based on my decades-long career and constant immersion in these skills. Moreover, I share them because I have learned that if you don’t engage properly with senior executives, it can have precisely the opposite effect on your career.  Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience One of the overarching principles that guide your behavior when engaging with senior executives is to remember what matters to them most. So, if you're having a conversation about customer strategy, think at their level, which is a high-level customer strategy, not an on-the-ground customer tactic. We often mention getting inside the head of your customer and looking at the experience from their perspective. Now, apply that principle your upline by taking their perspective and speaking to them in the language of their decision making. Here are a few key moments in the discussion. 03:25  Colin shares the first rule, which is that everyone should have an opinion; that’s what you are paid for and how you add value to the team.  08:51  We discuss how to handle an explanation with senior executives, and walking the tight rope between respect and intimidation. 13:25  We talk about how at a senior level the questions get simpler, even if the responsibility gets more intense.  18:38  Ryan explains how the fourth rule is essential, be concise, because he has seen people that cannot adapt to a changing environment, and they lose their opportunity to communicate it as a result. 21:38  Colin shares the last rule, Back up your argument with numbers and explains why these matters—maybe the most—when talking to senior executives.  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 289,000 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 LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two 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 22,000 subscribers.  Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.  How can we help? Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

The future of customer strategy is providing proactive experiences based on the predicted needs of your customers. The key to unlocking this future is your customer data, particularly the data you have collected about customer behavior. You have most of what you need to predict your customers' next move in your customers' past behavior.  This concept is predicated on the idea of Customer Science. As you might recall, Customer Science is the blending of customer data with artificial intelligence and the theories of the behavioral sciences. Customer Science is the next big thing in Customer Experiences, and it is what you need to predict accurately how your customers are going to behave.  I am fascinated by how Customer Science is already changing experiences for the better in the real world. For example, at a recent CX Live Event, I heard Michelle Huenink, Director, Customer Experience & Success at Microsoft, speak about how the company was using their data to provide predictive—and in some cases—prescriptive experiences to their customers. In this episode, Huenink explains what she did, why she did it, and how you can get started doing the same for your organization.  Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience A significant part of Huenink’s motivation is transforming Microsoft’s Customer Experience to a connected experience using customer data as the basis for its change. She wants to leverage the vast amounts of Microsoft’s customer data to identify moments that are sending an individual’s experience down the wrong path, as well as find parts of the process that necessitate too much customer effort. Then, she wants to empower the front-line teams to correct course and fix things for customers, sometimes even before the customer knows there is a problem.  Here are a few key moments in the discussion: 05:39  Huenink walks us through a recent implementation from the past year that identifies and intervenes when a customer enters an “at-risk” zone in the experience. 07:37  Colin asks Huenink what she is looking for in data that helps her focus on the area that will benefit the experience. 11:14  We discuss some of the challenges an organization faces when they try to change the experience based on data discoveries.     16:14  We discuss the differences between customers regarding the channels they use to interact with a company and how data can help you provide solutions to present a consistent experience regardless of the contact made. 20:03   Huenink identifies the most significant opportunity for Microsoft with their experience transformation efforts—and it will probably sound familiar.    22:09 Colin asks about segmentation and how they use it to personalize experiences.  27:17  Huenink shares her advice for what organizations can do to use their data to identify focus areas in their experience transformations.      Don’t miss CXN Live: Customer Self Service 2022 for more great ideas on leveraging self-service to increase customer experience, reduce contact volumes and improve efficiency. 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.' He has 289,000 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 LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two 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 22,000 subscribers.  Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.  How can we help? Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

We celebrated a significant milestone this year. It’s Beyond Philosophy’s 20th anniversary. Not only that, but Financial Times also recognized our company as one of the top management consultancies for the fourth year in a row.  It is always gratifying to reach these milestones and enjoy these accolades. However, they didn’t happen by chance. It was lots of trial and error, hard work, passion, and (a little) luck that went into this business. I once heard on the British version of Shark Tank that the secret to business success is making more good decisions than bad. I am proof positive that this is true.  Small businesses are somewhat easy to start but not easy to keep. The US Bureau of Labor and Statistics estimates that 20 percent of new small businesses don’t survive the year. That number jumps to 50 percent that fail in five years. So, as you can see, making it to 20 is no joke.  Over the past 20 years, I have learned a lot of things about business. In this episode, I share them with you, my listeners. My hope is that I can share them with others and help them survive and be one of the 50 percent of small businesses that is still around in five years.  Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience There are many things I have learned over the past two decades. Now, as we find ourselves in the Great Resignation, a period where people are re-thinking their careers post-pandemic and starting their own businesses, I have distilled the ten most important to this list.  Here are a few key moments in the discussion: 02:31  We discuss the survival statistics of small business per the US Bureau of Labor and Statistics, and, spoiler alert, they aren’t that great. 06:36  We share the first of the ten lessons I learned over the last 20 years in business, which is be brave. 11:48  We discuss the second of the lessons, which is to zig when others zag, which we also discussed on a recent podcast with Alex Mead.     13:08  We share the importance of focus, which can be scary for entrepreneurs because it might mean turning away business. 15:40  Number four is the lesson about what to expect when you start your new company (hint: hard work and lots of it).   17:15   Colin shares his fifth lesson, which is about learning who is wasting your time and who has something to offer you.  19:46   We begin the second half of the list, starting with the fact that cash is king, especially to you the new business, and ending with the last lesson, which is… 29:10  Colin talks about the final lesson, which is to provide value, and without it, it won’t matter if you know the other nine.     Join us in celebrating our 20th anniversary over the next month. We will be giving away books and other things this month. Check out our LinkedIn and Twitter feeds for more information. 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 289,000 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 LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two 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 22,000 subscribers.  Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.    How can we help? Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

Big Data creates big problems. One of the biggest problems is what to do with it now that you have it.  Don’t feel too bad if this is true for your company. Most organizations have no idea to use the customer insights they have collected. Moreover, it’s surprising how many organizations can’t tell you how improving metrics identified by the employed measures translates to providing value to the organization. In many ways, measurement is killing your Customer Experience. But there are things you can do to fix that.  We invited Founder and CEO Ryan Stuart, @rstuart85, of Kapiche, a customer insights platform to discuss this problem. Kapiche specializes in helping organizations interpret customer data without manually coding it reading thousands of comments. Stuart understands the problem with collecting customer data but not knowing what to do with it next. Stuart explains to us the lessons he has learned in this area and how to use customer data to improve your customer strategy for your Customer Experience moving forward.  Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience One of the big problems with data is how much of it there is. With such enormous amounts of it, many organizations are overwhelmed by what to do with it. Stuart provides specific things that organizations can do for determining how to use the customer feedback usefully in their customer strategy. Then, they can go to work interpreting the data to move the needle on what measures are helpful to their experiences. Here are a few key moments in the discussion: 03:43  Stuart shares his thoughts on why so few organizations have improved their Customer Satisfaction scores over the last ten years pre-COVID.    10:15  Colin shares the importance of using the right lens to interpret data, and why that lens shouldn’t be the same one you used 20 years ago.  12:06  Ryan shares his thoughts on why having a specific strategy for your data helps make your hopes for analyzing customer insights and the outcomes it will have for your experience become the reality of your data analysis.    15:04  Stuart explains how the data pyramid works for transforming data into wisdom, from the bottom (data) to the top (wisdom).   20:10  Colin explains that he encounters similar problems when rolling out Emotional Signature data to organizations; they still look at the new data with old eyes.   22:47  Stuart explains his two-part answer to the question of how to help organizations rise to the data challenge and use it effectively. 32:11  All three hosts share their practical insights on what you can do with your customer data to create a winning customer strategy that improves the experience in ways that matter to your bottom line.  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 289,000 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 LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two 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 22,000 subscribers.  Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.  How can we help? Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

One of our listeners in Finland is in a pickle. Anna wants to operationalize journey mapping to make their Customer Experience more customer centric. Perhaps more importantly, she wants these improvements to prove practical and effective rather than viewed as a “soft and fluffy” exercise that is not practical for the organization to continue to support.  Anna is not alone in this problem. Similar situations are everywhere in business today. After all, owners and stakeholders in an organization do not invest money in anything because they are hoping it doesn’t provide a return on investment. The things you spend resources on in business should provide a return on investment—or they are not practical enough for the organization to continue to support.  In this episode, we discuss Anna’s business pickle and how she can leverage what she learns in journey mapping to improve her organization’s customer strategy. In addition, we will share practical steps and advice that any organization should take when implementing what they learn from the exercise to become more customer-centric in the experience they provide. Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience When it comes to journey mapping, we often encounter a problem. People think that the exercise is the answer to everything that’s wrong (or right) with Customer Experiences. But it isn’t. Journey Mapping is a way to uncover the answers to everything, and should be combined with other customer-centricity experience improvement efforts and measurements to ensure success. We talk about these areas in the podcast.  Here are a few key moments in the discussion: 2:55  Anna shares her pickle in a recording about how to use the findings in their journey mapping exercise to change the organization to be more customer-centric. 6:10  We share our advice on how to operationalize journey mapping starting with the four parts of a customer experience, including the rational, conscious, subconscious, and psychological.  07:15  Ryan shares his view on what journey mapping can do for an organization, and how it can benefit organizations in their experience improvement efforts. 12:50  Colin addresses the nine areas of customer centricity that affect customer experiences, and the four levels of customer centricity that range from Naïve to Natural.  16:40  Colin shares a personal example of how an experience can expose how customer-centric an organization is.  20:46  We talk about the John Cotter’s 8-step Process for Leading Change and how Anna (and other organizations) can use it to manage the process.  32:08  We both share the practical steps for leveraging what you know from your journey mapping exercise into improving your experience to drive value for the organization, from Emotional Signture research to measurement strategy and more.  Do you have a business problem you would like our help with? Please contact us to tell us about it. We may solve it with you and our listening audience on the podcast!   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 289,000 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 LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two 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 22,000 subscribers.  Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.  How can we help? Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

I started Beyond Philosophy 20 years ago when Customer Experience was the next big thing; the new concept that was going to change everything in business. The last big thing, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), was old news. After all, everyone had one at that point.  Now, in 2022, I see the next big thing: Customer Science. Customer Science combines the power of artificial intelligence (AI), customer data, and the concepts of behavioral science to help organizations create a winning customer strategy. Leveraging the power of Customer Science, organizations can understand why their customers are doing what they are now and, perhaps more importantly, what they are likely to do next.  In this episode, we talk about Customer Science and how it can turn things around for your organization in 2022. Will you be on this new wave of change’s crest or left in its trough making the same mistakes you did last year? Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience The mistakes of last year are best summarized by lagging or plateauing Customer Satisfaction Scores. The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) says only 30 percent of companies tracked by ACSI improved their score over the last 10 years. Another way to look at it is ASCI says 70 percent of companies either had flat results or saw a decline in customer satisfaction. All this to say, it’s time for a next level for customer strategy. As Customer Experience moves aside for Customer Science, we have found it. Here are a few key moments in the discussion: 03:21  Colin describes how what he is seeing in business today regarding customer experience feels familiar to what was happening over two decades ago with CRM. 08:34  We get into what Customer Science is and what it is capable of doing for businesses today.   13:27  Colin reads some articles for 2002 regarding CRM, when experiences were becoming a new focus and compares it to what is happening with Customer Experience today.     20:10  Colin explains what this might mean for Customer Experience professionals moving forward with the new wave of change. 22:51 We share how to respond to these changes in the best possible way for your organization and your career as we move into 2022.      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 289,000 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 LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two 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 22,000 subscribers.  Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.  How can we help? Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

The metaverse. It is supposed to be a digital world. Some say it will combine social media and virtual reality (VR), like a more complex VR chat. Some say it will be the next level of online interaction where anything can happen. Others are confused by what it is and what it means. Some call it Mark Zuckerberg’s pipe dream. We think it is the future of Customer Experiences.  Immersive experiences are part of the metaverse, leveraging the power of augmented reality (AR) and VR. While they have to this point largely been dominated by games and entertainment, these immersive technologies are poised to change how people interact with brands’ products and services in more everyday ways.  In this episode, we invited Dobrian Dobrev (@DobrianDobrev), a User Experience Designer and a speaker at UX conferences and author on UX Design and Information Architecture  to tell us how the metaverse will change things in brand marketing. Dobrev takes us through the ways Coca-Cola has been using these technologies in their customer strategy to great success.  Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience The metaverse is in its infancy. Few organizations really know what it is or how to use it in their customer strategy, perhaps thinking of it as a “gamer thing.” However, Dobrev sees enormous potential for brands to use these technologies beyond entertainment, which he has written about in the past. Coca-Cola has been one of the first brands that gets it and Dobrev gives us a front-row seat to their strategy and success.  Here are a few key moments in the discussion: 05:29  Dobrev to defines the immersive technologies that Coca-Cola uses, and the differences between AR and VR. 07:41  Colin gives a layman’s example of what a metaverse is using a science fiction example and Dobrev explains how AR, VR, and the metaverse will leverage immersive technology to real-world applications and change customer interactions. 13:04  We learn about an entertainment VR project Coca-Cola used to promote their Fanta brand and how that evolved into a campaign, called Hydr8 AR prototype that ventured outside entertainment and what it was designed to do for customers.     17:02  Dobrev shares the concepts behind an early VR project where Coca-Cola made their packaging convert to a VR headset.        18:48  Dobrev explains how Coca-Cola used AR to help small businesses reinvigorate their business after the first global shut down with “Open Like Never Before.” 20:50  We ask Dobrev what he sees as the future and what brands can do to get started creating immersive experiences for their products and services.   Want more stuff like this? Don’t miss CXN Live: Voice of the Customer 2022  for more great ideas on leveraging customer feedback to enhance customer understanding, optimize key touchpoints, identify friction points, and drive culture change. 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 289,000 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 LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two 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 22,000 subscribers.  Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.  How can we help? Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.