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

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.

Customer satisfaction is low. What's worse, we can't just blame COVID for the problem. Sure, COVID is part of it, but, surprisingly, this problem has other causes. Not only that, but a recent report from the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) suggests that only 30 percent of companies tracked by ACSI improved their score—since 2011. That means that 70 percent of companies either had flat results or saw a decline in customer satisfaction. It's time to stop making excuses and turn things around. In this episode, we talk with the Managing Director of the ACSI, David VanAmburg about what has been going on over the past ten years in Customer Experience. Like usual, the problem, has a few different influences. We discuss them and what we can do to fix them in 2022. Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience I have experienced many waves of change in my career. When I was starting out it was all about Total Quality Management and Business Process Reengineering. Then, following that was Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Starting in the 90s and over the last 20 years, it has been Customer Experience. It surprised me to see that in a time when more organizations were addressing Customer Experience that the ACSI scores were mostly flat or declining. We discussed a few things that might be part of the problem. Here are a few key moments in the discussion: 04:22 VanAmburg gives us his take on the things that are affecting the low scores we see of late on the ACSI. 08:18. Colin asks why VanAmburg thinks that only 30 percent of companies improved their customer satisfaction scores in the last ten years covered by the report. 10:20 VanAmburg explains the problems of too much focus on the smaller picture and not enough of the bigger picture when analyzing data from a CRM. 12:58 Colin talks about how some companies jump into things without understanding them or committing to them, including CRM. 17:04 VanAmburg explains how retail banking faired through the pandemic, and what other companies could learn from it. 18:31 Ryan summarizes the discussion and teaches us all about medium maximization and how that can affect results. 24:07 Colin and VanAmburg discuss the influence of customer expectations and how those changed during the pandemic and affected scores during the pandemic. 27:31 Colin asks what VanAmburg thinks will happen in 2022, and his answer probably won't satisfy you. 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.

What would it be like if your printer sent you an email to let you know it needed ink? Or if your car could tell you that you need to take it in for transmission service? Or if your refrigerator could tell the repair professional what was wrong with it before you ever said a word? Sound like a futuristic take on product technology? It is, and it's called the Internet of Things (IoT). However, you might be surprised to know that the ability to have all these things is already available and some companies have been using it to excellent effect. In this episode, we hosted Tobias Goebel (@tpgoebel) Product Marketing Principal at Twilio IoT. Goebel's article, "It's Time for the VoC to Get a Little Brother: The Voice of the Product," introduced the idea of the Voice of Product (VoP) to us. We discuss how the VoP can change how experiences occur in the future and why it should be a significant part of your customer strategy today. Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience Goebel is clear that he thinks the VoP will not replace the VoC. Instead, Goebel sees it as enhancing the interactions customers have with organizations. The VoP can help firms be proactive in anticipating customers' needs by communicating issues before they become problems, be active in resolving customer issues by providing unbiased feedback regarding its usage and be reactive to the trends the product team sees and areas of opportunity the VoP uncovers from the data it reveals. Here are a few more of the key moments in the discussion: 05:04 Goebel describes how he views IoT and what that means for product technology and the VoP. 10:35 We discuss how the VoP could be used with different consumer products, like vacuum robots and table saws. 12:19 Goebel shares the three benefits he sees for connecting a product into an organization. 16:07 We hear a story about iRobot, which inspired Goebel's article and fueled his fascination for what was possible with the VoP from a customer service perspective. 20:23 Ryan and Goebel discuss how the Voice of Customer and the VoP can work together to provide lots of valuable insight and facilitate faster response times. 26:47 Goebel explains how Amazon has a leg up on this insight as it is an outlet for millions of products and has access to the data about them. 28:52 We talk about why now is the time to tap into VoP and what you should consider when you do so. This episode was sponsored by Twilio Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey. Would you like to appear on the show? Please contact us here 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.: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular LinkedIn column called, Why Customers Buy . Click here to read and subscribe. 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 three years. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter. Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University. How can we help? Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.