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

In a discussion that echoes the age-old chicken vs. egg conversation sentiment, we engaged in a debate. After meeting a fellow Customer Experience proponent on a new social media platform called Clubhouse, we invited author and speaker Stacy Sherman to debate. The topic: Is Customer Experience the new marketing, or is it an entity on its own? Sherman and I have a difference of opinion. Sherman, a director of Customer Experience and employee engagement at a global organization by day and the founder of DoingCXRight.com by night, says that Customer Experience is the new marketing, replacing and usurping it. I don't see it this way, and I see it as an entity/team separate from but working closely with marketing.  In this episode, we each make our case for our view. We also define what Customer Experience and Marketing are and the relationships that we see between them. In the end, we settle on an answer that should help organizations make the most of both teams.  Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience We have set up this episode as a court with Professor Hamilton presiding as the judge and jury to offer his unbiased decision. For our part, Sherman and I know that both the marketing and Customer Experience teams contribute a lot to the bottom line. We also understand that the two departments have many shared goals and metrics that measure their success. However, is one of them swallowing the other or do they both present value to the overall goal in equal parts? You'll have to listen to know for sure. Here are a few key moments in the discussion: 03:44 I define the topic of the debate based on a sentiment I have been hearing that CX is replacing marketing.  08:41 Sherman and I offer our Customer Experience and Marketing definitions, which set the foundation for further discussion of our positions. 15:48  I explain why marketing has a different and equally important role as Customer Experience in defining what the experience should be. 18:25  Sherman explains that the blend of skills and real-world application of experiences that makes Customer Experience the new marketing. 22:15  Ryan asks us why this discussion matters to organizations trying to deliver an experience that promotes customer-driven growth.  26:38 Ryan gives his decision and summarizes the issue for us all.  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.

Some of you might know that I am learning to play guitar. However, almost none of you will ever hear my covers of Pink Floyd. In fact, that audience is quite exclusive, and includes only me and my wife Lorraine. That is because my guitar playing is something that I do in private, not public.  In this episode, we talk about privacy, or rather, the lack of it in today’s online environment. Your customers probably also have some things they would rather keep private, and finding out that you are invading their privacy with undisclosed data collection is not going to do good things for your Customer Experience. Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience There is a bit of a duplicity in this topic for me. On the one hand, I applaud organizations that use the data they have about customer behavior to anticipate customer needs and provide an elevated, personalized experience for them. However, if customers don’t know that you are collecting data about them and then learn that you have without their explicit permission, it can feel creepy—and creepy is not a good emotion to evoke with your Customer Experience.  We discuss this conflict of interest and some ways that you can address it. Here are some key moments in the discussion: 04:22   Ryan explains the psychology of privacy and the differing needs of it amongst individuals.  06:56   We talk about a TED Talk by journalist Glenn Greenwald who explained that we wouldn’t give our ATM PIN to a company if they asked for it, but we give them plenty of other data about ourselves. 10:50   Colin discusses Apple’s new App Tracking Transparency function and what it revealed to me about some of his apps. 14:35  Ryan talks about how discovering that apps are tracking your data might lead customers to wonder about the safety of it. 19:29   We discuss whether some organizations are collecting data they don’t intend to use.  21:36  Colin shares a shocking story about the vacuum robots, which leads into a discussion about what could happen with data collection at a legislative level. 28:47   We share our insights on how you can manage this situation moving forward to a positive outcome for your Customer Experience.  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.

Maybe it’s a towing service. Perhaps you use an interior designer. It could be that you needed to outsource your call center. Whatever the reason may be, you have outsourced part of your Customer Experience.  There is an inherent risk involved, of course, if there are problems. After all, customers do not distinguish between the part of the experience you provide and the part your third-party does. To customers, it’s all one experience and any problems that happen along the way, whether they were under your control or not, reflect upon your brand. However, by bringing in these additional resources the third-party company provides, you also have created an end-to-end experience that makes it easy for your customers to do business with you.  The question is, was outsourcing that part of your experience really a good idea or a big mistake? In this episode we answer that question and give you some actionable steps to manage your third-party partners.  Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience This episode has some examples of what we mean by third party partners and how they fit into an experience. We also explore the pros and cons of outsourcing part of your Customer Experience. Finally, we discuss different ways you can mitigate your risk and manage customer expectations to the best possible outcome for your experience.  Here are a few key moments in the discussion: 03:20 Ryan shares a story about his friend and her troubles with a trampoline installation.         06:21 For the first time EVER in the podcast, Colin complains a bit about an experience he had with Apple. 07:40 We explain that how you position the third-party’s role in your experience might create some separation for the two parts in your customers’ mind.  09:58 We explain how companies can’t contract out part of the experience and then walk away from their responsibility for it. 12:22 Colin shares a story where a hotel saw their airport shuttle service like it was a favor and he saw it as a failed part of their experience, and why that happens. 15:56 Colin shares a term he learned from BMW when writing his first book, “Only-ers” and why you shouldn’t have them in your company. 19:58 Ryan explains how big companies can sometimes make customers feel like they are dealing with a third-party company if they don’t improve the customer journey between departments. 26:42 We share our advice and actionable items to help you manage the parts of your experience you might have outsourced.  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.

It’s summertime. Do you know what that means? That’s right. It’s time for your summer reading list. I bet you thought you were too old for such things.  In this episode,  we share 7 essential books for any Customer Experience professional to read, ideally in a tropical locale with a fruity drink in hand.  Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience From books on Customer Experience to books about psychology to 1990s bestselling business books, we have a wide variety of reading material for Customer Experience professionals. These books will help you understand why customer behavior is the way it is and how you can help move that behavior to a place that delivers customer-driven growth. Best of all, we save the best for last. Here are the 7 books we think you should read this summer: The Experience Economy: Competing for Customer Time, Attention, and Money by B. Joseph Pine and James H. Gilmore The End of Average How We Succeed in a World That Values Sameness by Todd Rose Who Moved My Cheese? By Dr. Spencer Johnson Uncontrolled: The Surprising Payoff of Trial and Error for Business, Politics, and Society by Jim Manzi The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success by Megan McArdle The Intuitive Customer: 7 Imperatives for Moving Your Customer Experience to the Next Level by Colin Shaw and Ryan Hamilton See what we did there? Here are a few key moments in the discussion: 02:56   Colin introduces his first book, The Experience Economy cowritten by Joe Pine, a recent guest on the podcast from a few weeks back.  05:05   Ryan introduces his first book, The End of Average, and explained the basic idea of the book and the implications for Customer Experience. 06:53    Colin recommends Who Moved My Cheese?, a 90s bestseller that changed his life by urging him to start his own global Customer Experience Consultancy. 12:54    Ryan shares a book called Uncontrolled, a book that emphasizes the importance of experimentation. 17:15   Colin gives a brief summary of the seven habits shared in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.       22:19.   Ryan suggests The Up Side of Down, which shares the idea that failure is critical to growth and lessons learned from failure can lead to future successes. 24:40.  We save the best for last with The Intuitive Customer, our book that explores the 7 imperatives for taking your experience to a new level of greatness. 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.

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. The concepts behind behavioral science are powerful stuff. The psychology that drives how people make decisions has far-reaching and critical influences on how people act as customers.  We often hear about small changes that make a big difference on the outcome when you read about the experiments that prove the theories the science produces. However, the theories that play out in an experiment do not always have the same outcome in the real world. Sometimes, the behavioral science works fine, but isn’t as dramatic as the study you read about it. In the worst examples, behavioral science concepts don’t work at all.  In this episode, we explore the 5 rules that will help you set up your business for success in the implementation of the concepts theorized in behavioral science. We love the effects possible using behavioral science in Customer Experience, especially when they, well, work.  Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience Learning about behavioral science is engaging, fun even. However, implementing experience improvements using the theories you enjoyed learning about can be less fun and even a little frustrating if you aren’t getting the results you wanted. The following five rules will help you set up your behavioral-science-inspired Customer Experience design implementation for success: Focus on the goals or problems to be solved rather than applying the theory. You must know what you are fixing to pick the appropriate tool to do the job, which was the subject of another podcast a few weeks ago, “Is This One of the Most Important Jobs in Business Today?” Get granular. Behavioral science doesn’t work in general; it works in specifics. Identify your levers. Determine what parts of the experience are under your control and concentrate your efforts there.  Identify your customers' mindset. Recreating the situation where your customer decides what to buy (and what not to) is essential to effectively applying the behavioral sciences.  Iterate. Behavioral science’s influence on customers works best when fine-tuned over time and measured for success.  Here are some highlights of the discussion: 03:46  Ryan presents how the way we learn behavioral science affects how we want to implement it. 07:26   We discuss the essential nature of getting specific with your actions using behavioral science concepts to drive behavior. 10:40  Colin discusses how people like things in threes, sevens, and so on, and Ryan explains how research has shown that people converge on specific numbers of items. 13:59   Ryan reminds businesses to focus on what they can control when implementing behavioral sciences; Colin explains that the way you manage it should be deliberate. 18:35   We discuss how essential it is to understand your customers’ mindsets when designing your experience and why.  25:05    We explain the importance of fine-tuning your efforts, even after implementation, and why you should measure your results.  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 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.

You might not realize it but the failure of the European Super League in soccer, the pros and cons of vaccine passports, and a brand that took a political stand and paid the price for it all have something in common. These things are part of three news stories that can provide insight into improving your Customer Experience.  So how do they provide insight? Like you can learn from other people's experiences, you can learn from other people's mistakes. Either way, it offers an opportunity for vicarious learning. Vicarious learning is beneficial for avoiding the pain of errors but still getting the benefit of the gained wisdom from it.  We see news headlines all the time about different types of vicarious learning opportunities, both good and bad. However, in this episode, we explore the lessons we can gain from the pain of three organization's Customer Experience mistakes and avoid making the same ones.  Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience There are three news stories that we talk about in this episode that, at first glance, do not seem to be about Customer Experience. However, after taking a deeper dive into the cause of the problem, we discover that Customer Experience is a contributing factor in all three cases. In this episode, we discuss why and how the experience affects the story's outcome and what insight you can glean from the situation.  Here are a few key moments in the discussion: 03:12  The discussion begins with a recap of the failure of the European Super League for soccer and how it shows the importance of recognizing the value you provide customers. 13:47 We talk about the movement for and against vaccine passports in the reopening of different venues and experiences after the pandemic and how that will affect CX. 16:15 The discussion turns to what happens when supply shortages disrupt business as usual after the pandemic, and the best way to handle that for your customers.  22:29  We review what happened to Delta in the past couple of months when Georgia, the state where the company is based, passed voting laws that were hotly contested and they decided to come out on the issue.  27:21  We offer advice on how to choose sides when staying neutral on a contentious topic seems impossible.  28:26  We talk about how framing can change how customers perceive your communication, and the benefits of being deliberate about your strategy regarding these 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 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.

Pricing strategy on its face doesn’t seem complicated. The goal is to get as high a price as you can to ensure you have enough margin to make a profit, while also moving inventory at a sufficient rate. So, the strategy is often to move the price around until you find the sweet spot that hits all these metrics.  However, like most things that have to do with customer behavior, it isn’t as simple as that. There are other variables that can affect your pricing strategy success, and understanding them will help you find that sweet spot faster. In this episode, we investigate pricing strategy and tactics that organizations use to inspire the customer behavior they want. We also talk about the two levels of pricing strategy to consider as well as some practical advice on how you can apply it to your pricing tactics.  Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience Pricing is great in that it produces excellent quantitative data. You can see you sold X amount of product or service at a specific price. Lower the price by ten percent and you can see that you sold Y. Modeling with data can show you a lot more about customer behavior related to price. Unfortunately, what quantitative data can’t always show you about pricing is the psychological effects pricing has on customer behavior. That’s where we come in.  Here are a few key moments in the discussion: 03:58   Ryan talks about the two ways to try to understand pricing and the concept of price elasticity. 10:34   Ryan explains the two levels of pricing strategy for different brands: individual pricing and general pricing image. 13:04   Colin shares a story about what he learned about making mistakes in general image pricing with a grocery store chain in the Southeastern US. 16:25   Ryan explains how the common tactics we associate with pricing (aka, sales) work on the individual level impressions. 17:55  Ryan shares the two general principles for pricing that affect customer behavior around price. 26:05  We share practical advice about what you should do with this 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.

When I was unsubscribing to a service online, I encountered some resistance. My unsubscribing experience included a detailed accounting of all the features to which I would no long have access—in bold, red typeface. It also featured a checklist where I had to acknowledge one-by-one all the benefits I was forfeiting.  It was a wonderful example of a company that takes advantage of the effects of Loss Aversion.  Loss Aversion is part of the bigger concept of Prospect Theory, first introduced nearly 50 years ago by Nobel-prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Loss Aversion describes how we hate losing things much more than we enjoy gaining things.  We discussed the effects of Loss Aversion on customer behavior in this episode, part of our new series The Ten Most Effective Ways to Influence Your Customers’ Behavior. Loss Aversion is the 2nd of the ten effective ways. We also explain how you can use these effects to your benefit when presenting your marketing message and in your Customer Experience. Perhaps most importantly, we give you actionable items you can take to implement these ideas into your organization today.  Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience People hate losing things the most and will often change their behavior to avoid doing so. That means if customers are behaving a way that you don’t like, like unsubscribing, you can steer their behavior to a better outcome by emphasizing what they might lose if they continue in that direction.  Here are some of the key moments in our discussion: 03:49 Ryan explains what Loss Aversion is and how it affects behavior.  05:14   We talk about how this could affect your marketing messaging, with a little strategy. 06:54 Ryan explains the concept of Framing and shares a study about banking consumers in Israel that demonstrates how this works in marketing. 12:26   We talk about how it is essential to understand the effects of losses for your customers. 15:35  Ryan touches on the idea of Prospect Theory and how it relates to Loss Aversion and decision-making. 17:35  We discuss how FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) affects Loss Aversion also. 22:38  We share practicalities of how to apply this to your Customer Experience. 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.

In the early days of my career, I thought the customer was always right. The idea that one should fire a customer sometimes would have sounded like madness to me. However, as I have matured over the following four decades, I learned that sometimes the customer is not right. Sometimes they are really, really wrong, from how they abuse your systems to how they tax your resources to how they talk to employees. You should fire customers in these cases.  This episode explores the situations where it is critical to fire employees and why. Inspired by the article “Firing a Bad Customer in 2021” by Fred Reichheld, prolific author on customer loyalty and inventor of the Net Promoter Score (NPS),   we discuss why you should fire some customers, how you should attempt to manage the situation, and how to go about it once you decide that a customer needs to go.   Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience It seems counterintuitive to tell a customer to beat it when you are in business. It seems like you should want every customer you can find, good, bad, or somewhere in between.  However, some customer relationships are not worth saving. Some cannot be fixed with credits and additional services. Moreover, these relationships often cost you the most in time and headache, and that use up valuable resources that could be spent in other areas. Here are some other key moments in the discussion. 04:46 Ryan explains the 80/20 rule and how it applies to customers.  06:25 Colin shares a personal experience about how loud customers are sometimes considered best customers, even when they are not. 12:25 Colin explains why he likes the rating systems on Uber.  15:13 The discussion turns to how difficult customer relationships can sometimes drain the life out of employees.  18:51 Colin explains a significant danger of paying too much attention to customers that don’t deserve it.  24:19 We share specific advice on how you should manage these customer situations to better outcomes and also the termination of the relationship, if it comes to that.  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.

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. There is a common misconception in organizations that their business customers buy rationally. However, these same organizations also think that their business is built on relationships. This dichotomy comes from a misunderstanding about business customers: they have emotional needs in their business-to-business relationships just like they do in their business-to-consumer ones.  Business customers want many of the same things retail customers do. Business customers share the same emotional needs to feel cared for by the companies they do business with for their business. They need to know they are appreciated and that they can trust the suppliers they use to help them reach their goals.  In other words, they need to feel happy and pleased with their business-to-business Customer Experience. In this episode, we share the 5 rules for managing your Customer Experience in business-to-business relationships, including: B2B is complicated, so you need to simplify it.  Recognize that customer emotions apply. Manage different customers differently. Define the experience to align the organization. Focus on the art of the possible. Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience  Here is a quick summary of why these are the five rules: B2B is complicated, so you need to simplify it. Due to the complex nature of businesses, particularly large corporate entities, it is essential to break down the Customer Experience into smaller, manageable parts.  Recognize that customer emotions apply. Emotions drive value in business relationships the same way they do in personal ones; how business customers feel in your experience is essential to manage.  Manage different customers differently. In your business relationships, you might have multiple contacts with various jobs within an account with different perceptions of your organization; understanding how these individual perceptions define the value your company provides is vital and might require adapting your approach depending upon the contact with whom you interact.  Define the experience to align the organization. It is critical to know what emotions are the most valuable to your organization’s customers and how you want to evoke these emotions with your experience. However, we recommend setting the goal of the emotion and allowing the organization’s departments determine how they will evoke that emotion in their part of the customer process.  Focus on the art of the possible. Not everyone will be on board with your plan, and that’s okay. Some departments will and these early-adopters will score the first wins for the program. Once the other, less enthusiastic departments see the early-adopter’s results, they will come around and join in the effort.  Here are some highlights of the discussion: 03:27 Colin shares some context about the complexity of managing Customer Experiences for large global corporate entities. 07:09 Ryan reviews the concept behind the Dunbar Number, which dictates how many relationships people can manage. 10:57 Colin explains a common dichotomy in thinking he encounters at his meetings with business-to-business clients. 13:40 Colin shares a story about working with a healthcare company and what it taught him about segmenting customers within a single account. 17:35 Colin explains how the Customer Experience manager should empower organizational departments to determine how to evoke the desired emotional outcome from customers in that department’s part of the process. 22:25 Colin shares his advice for managing the departments that buy-in to the process—and how to handle the ones that don’t. Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.  Customer Experience Information & Resources This podcast is sponsored by Verint. Verint helps the world’s most iconic brands build enduring customer relationships by connecting work, data, and experiences across the enterprise. The Verint Customer Engagement Cloud Platform draws on the latest advancements in AI and analytics, an open cloud architecture, and The Science of Customer Engagement to meet ever-increasing, ever-shifting consumer interactions and demands. Download the new Verint research report on the Engagement Capacity Gap, by visiting www.Verint.com/boundless  Customer engagement is critical to your success. Join this three-day, virtual conference to discover tools and techniques that can help you build enduring customer relationships. Register at www.Verint.com/engage 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.