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

This is the Most Significant Thing We Learned in 2020! Like many people, we are not sad to see the year 2020 slip into the past. We look to ringing in the new year with happy anticipation of better things to come. With a vaccine headed to us all and a new appreciation for what we share when things are “normal,” we are all practically giddy at the prospect of sending this year off to the annals of history. However, even a year as challenging as this one presents new insights and opportunities for us all. Every year we usually take time to reflect on what has happened and what we have learned, and this one is no different, even if unprecedented. This episode, we share five significant insights that we gleaned from the notorious year 2020. Key Ideas to Improve Your Customer Experience From the impressive power of human resilience and ingenuity during crises to a renewed appreciation for the most important things in life, we share both personal and professional lessons we learned this year. In this episode, we also discuss what we see for the future in Customer Science and Customer Experience. Here are some highlights of the discussion: 02:27  Ryan shares his first insight about how this terrible year taught him a lot about how humans can adapt to challenging times. 05:36 Colin shares how he remembered to appreciate what he has but also what is most important to appreciate. 07:15 Ryan talks about how he sees the beneficial impact of empathy both customer- and employee-facing. 10:47  Colin explains how the future of Customer Experiences is in the area of Customer Science, which is a fusion of data, technology, and the behavioral sciences. 16:02 Colin explains how the iPhone took existing technology and changed the world and how Customer Science at a similar inflection point. 17:59 Ryan explains why Customer Science is close to changing everything as we know it. 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.

Designing Country Culture into Your Global Experience A dull and awkward presentation in Singapore many years ago taught me an important life lesson: One must know the local culture when presenting an experience to people to evoke the desired response. In this case, I didn't realize it was going to be different to presenting in the USA or UK. So, I kept asking for audience participation like I usually do and hearing crickets in response. It was a long morning. Many organizations with a global presence have probably had a similar situation; what works in one country does not in another. You present your carefully planned and executed Customer Experience from Country A, where it is a wild success, roll it out in Country B, and you get nothing but crickets back.  The good news is that you don't have to keep having this problem. The most successful global organizations know that an overarching strategy is essential, but so are relevant and localized tactics to achieve success. Once I adapted my expectations in Singapore, the presentation went well (i.e., no crickets). You can do the same with your customer experience. Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience In this episode, we discuss the realities of having the same emotional outcome when having Customer Experiences within different countries. The foundational elements of the process will remain the same. However, once you implement the experience you have defined for your organizations, you must adopt the tactics to reflect the country's culture where your customers live. Perhaps most importantly, you need to recognize that localized management and ownership will be the key to your success.  Here are some highlights of the discussion: 03:50 – We introduce the key idea behind a Customer Experience Statement and using it internationally. 09:40 – Colin explains the 20 emotions that drive and destroy value and how that applies to the tactics you use for different cultures. 15:31– We discuss these ideas' practical applications for organizations, starting with a general step-by-step plan for segmentation. 18:15 – We discuss the importance of diversity in the global team and management representation. 20:16- We suggest that many of these nuanced differences are noticed by and affect the subconscious. 21:51 – We explain our recommended actions and the critical nature of measuring your results in your efforts to adapt locally. Customer Experience Information & Resources Please provide us feedback on our podcast in a quick 4 minute survey. Click here for a chance to win a $ 100 Amazon voucher. 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.

 If the Stress Is Becoming Intolerable, This is What to Do If there is one thing 2020 has given all of us, it's a lot of stress. Coping and managing stress is a skill leaders need to relieve the pressure in their lives and help employees manage their stress so they don't pass it on to customers.  I often say, Happy Employees Make Happy Customers, which is also the title of my latest book. However, happy employees are not stressed out, making managing stress a priority for today's leaders.  However, managing stress is easier said than done. To get some help in this effort, we share the advice of Carmen Mohan, MD, FACP, founder of Hello Health. Dr. Mohan started Hello Health, a comprehensive executive health and wellbeing program, to help leaders manage and cope with stress themselves and their teams. Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience  In this episode, we discuss Dr. Mohan's consultative approach to stress management. She says leaders often feel alone in their experience and, even when overwhelmed, push hard to keep going, so they meet other people's needs. She suggests leaders should realize they are not alone and that stress is common among leadership positions. Stress comes from making critical decisions quickly and professional and personal demands pulling leaders in many directions at once. Some people feel stressed because they know other people are struggling more than they are, and they feel guilty that they have it pretty good. Managing this stress is essential. First, it is hard to lead a team to success in a stressed-out state. When leaders are stressed, they often can't get the perspective they need to solve problems in the best possible way. Finally, stressed managers cannot help their teams cope with their pressures, leading to a less than exemplary Customer Experience.  The COVID-19 pandemic isn't helping matters, either. None of us has ever been through a pandemic before, so we don't know what to do. We also do not know when it will end, and uncertainty does not do anything good for anyone's stress level. Add to it the acute pressures caused by the pandemic, like the fear of getting yourself or someone you care about sick or the financial insecurity caused by the shut-downs and stay-at-home orders, among others, and you have a perfect storm of high-stress times and truly anxious people. To combat these effects, Dr. Mohan has a few actionable steps.  Make time for self-care and sleep. Dr. Mohan says that addressing your needs makes you better equipped to handle others' needs, even if it feels like there is no time for it.  Celebrate what you did accomplish so you can rest deeply. Dr. Mohan encourages leaders to write down at least one accomplishment each day to focus on, so the mind can relax and rest deeply at night, giving the best restorative sleep to the body.  Start the day by meeting your needs. Dr. Mohan encourages people to start the day doing something they like, not checking the phone and diving into the day. If your brain knows you will begin the day this way, it will relax more and sleep better.  Find that decompression time you have lost. Many people find that the loss of decompression time resulting from working from home or blurring the lines between work and home life difficult. Dr. Mohan encourages people to take a walk outside to clear their minds. Find a way to keep your thoughts in the present. People who feel anxious or guilty that other people are having problems and are struggling would be well served to occupy their thoughts with the here and now. By keeping your mind occupied in the present with a task, you cannot worry about the past or the future. Here are some highlights of the discussion: 04:28            Dr. Mohan addresses the problem of marginal thinking in stress management for leaders. 07:36            We have a few actionable steps for coping with stressors. 14:18            Dr. Mohan shares how to get your mind to relax enough to get into the deep restorative sleep necessary for stress management. 20:17            Find out the easy fix to "bookend" sleep and help the mind relax during stressful times. 25:04            We cover the importance of finding moments to decompress from work to home life. 26:49            Dr. Mohan addresses how to alieve guilty feelings when you are not struggling as much as other people you know with essential activities. 28:40            We get into the advice for leaders to pass this along to their teams.   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 Five Rules for Measuring and Managing Customer Emotions 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. Ignoring emotion in your Customer Experience strategy is a big mistake and one you can’t afford to make. Emotions are a significant influence on customer behavior with implications for your customer retention, customer loyalty, and, perhaps most importantly, customer-driven growth. Incorporating ways to measure and manage customer emotions is critical for your business strategy today. Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience Managing emotions can feel overwhelming. Many times we hear from clients that they don’t know where to start. However, we have a plan that can set you up for success, empower your thinking, and help you tackle this critical task. In this episode, we discuss The 5 Rules for Measuring and Managing Customer Emotions, which are: Be specific. Define which emotions drive the most value for you. Measure the specific emotions across the customer journey. Design the emotions into your journey maps. Train your people on how to evoke emotions. Here are some highlights of the discussion: 02:58 We discuss why being specific about the emotions is critical and a significant improvement on breaking down emotions into “positive” and “negative.” 05:29 We break down rule number two into two parts: figuring out how customers feel coming into your experience and defining what you want them to feel when they leave. 07:59  Colin shares a story of when a German insurance actuary gave him the idea for research with the London School of business, and the subject of his third book. 15:06  We clarify why you should measure your success with evoking the desired emotion, not only at a top level, but throughout the experience so you can respond appropriately where you should. 19:17 We tell you why your journey maps need you to design emotions into them with specific actions and deliberate strategy. 22:24  Colin explains how his marriage of nearly 40 years has taught him that training people in emotional intelligence is a winning strategy for any business (or marriage, for that matter). 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

Retail is Broken: This is the Solution Some might say that retail is dead, another victim of COVID-19. However, I would argue that it is merely changing but far from finished. The pandemic has hastened changes to physical and digital retail experiences and customer behavior. Still, organizations that recognize and anticipate the shift can adapt and benefit from the new business-as-usual. Key Ideas to Improve Your Customer Experience There are both theoretical reasons and practical reasons why customer behavior is changing. In this episode, we discuss the key ideas of both.  Psychological theory underlays much of our behavior in retail experiences. For example, customers like to touch things when making decisions to inform themselves that they are making a good one about a product. People also use body stimuli in thinking. So, what we buy when we feel warm is different from what we purchase when cold. In theory, we also sometimes make other buying decisions in public than we would in the privacy of our homes in the glow of a computer screen. That also goes for our unplanned purchases; we choose different impulse buys online than in person. From a practical perspective, customer behavior follows some general patterns as well. First of all, we have a well-worn process for decision making for purchases. These adapt to both physical and online experiences. Also, we want different types of retail experiences depending upon our perceived importance of the purchase. In other words, we don’t need a physical experience for commodity items, but we might for a more significant investment item, like technology or appliance purchase. The physical experience is sometimes the reason customers shop with you, whether that’s because it is fun or because being there makes people feel like part of the club. Sometimes, it’s because you are buying something that you feel you need to see, like the fish you will serve to dinner guests (you know, back when having dinner guests was still a thing).  Here are some highlights of the discussion: 01:18 – Colin shares a recent experience of buying a large television for the living room vs. a smaller one for the kitchen. 05:02 – We introduce the four key theories that underly the changes in retail today. 07:28 – Colin shares a story about when he consulted the Prime Minister at 10 Downing Street. (No, really.) 15:13 – We share the practical observations of customer behavior in both types of experiences. 19:18 – We explain that physical experiences often help build confidence for a customer’s buying decision. 20:51 – We discuss how customer segmentation could help determine if customers want a physical retail experience for specific purchases.  27:40 – We talk about what you should consider and the recommended actions when designing your respective physical and online experiences. 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.

Digital Transformation Didn’t Work: This Is What You Should Do Now. Experts estimate that companies wasted around $900 billion in 2018 on failed digital transformation projects. Nevertheless, organizations have spent upward of $2 trillion (with a t) on digital transformations in 2020. How do we know that this is not just a big waste of time and money this time around? This episode of The Intuitive Customer hosts guest presenter Zhecho Dobrev, Principal Consultant for Beyond Philosophy, and our lead for digital transformation consultations. Dobrev shares what is working well, what isn’t, and what organizations should do to improve their experiences. Key Ideas to Improve Your Customer Experience One of the reasons digital transformations are so unsuccessful has to do with preconceived notions of what a company needs to do before they know for sure. Moreover, many organizations do not understand what drives value for customers, even though they think they do. Understanding the Value Drivers for customers in online or digital experiences is essential to success, much like it is with the rest of the Customer Experiences people have with you. Digital transformation success requires you to recognize the moments in your online experience that drive or destroy value for you.  Here are some highlights of the discussion: 03:58 – Zhecho explains how Customer Experience and digital transformation trends have stagnated over the past five years. 09:52 – Zhecho explains the main problem with digital transformation is preconceived ideas of what needs to be done without understanding what drives value.  13:58 – Zhecho explains what four-category value drivers are for digital transformation, which include Economic, Functional, Experiential, and Symbolic Value. 26:29 – We discuss the key takeaways from this research, including the importance of defining which of these categories drives the most value for your organization. 28: 33- Dobrev explains that the next most crucial thing is to determine what experiences can be digital and what should remain human-controlled.   30:24 – We explain the recommended actions that every organization should do with their digital transformation to set themselves up for success. Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey. https://bit.ly/2UholUM 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 happens when you get three Customer Experience Pioneers together to discuss the past, present, and future of Customer Experience? This episode of The Intuitive Customer, for starters. Recorded in celebration of the recent CX day, Colin joins fellow experience experts and champions Lewis Carbone and Joe Pine to talk all things Customer Experience.  Lewis Carbone is the author of Clued In: How to Keep Customers Coming Back Again and Again and the founder of ExperienceEngineering™. Joe Pine is the author of the book that started it all, The Experience Economy. He and his partner, Jim Gilmore, are true pioneers of the Customer Experience movement and the founder of their consultancy, Strategic Horizons, LLP. Key Takeaways There are a few things from this discussion everyone should remember in today's business environment, which include: Each of us has failed at some point during our career in one way or another. For my part, I often operated with the mindset that valuing the emotional connection that the Customer Experience evokes is an opinion everyone shared. However, I learned that tying your work to measurable results is the proper way to obtaining that shared mindset, and it is a value that I espouse to this day. If you don't tie your work to results, you will likely find that your mindset is your own.  Pine made the mistake of underestimating how difficult it would be to get companies to be the first to undertake a Customer Experience improvement program. Failure is a possibility, and, for some organizations, too much of one. Pine learned that what you design and what you deliver might not produce the results you intended when you mix in real-live customers. As a result, he advises his clients to reserve around 20 percent of their budget to make real-world adjustments for those parts of the experience that aren't working as they had hoped.  Carbone said his mistake was not being clear enough with people what the real meaning of Customer Experience is. There is not the depth of understanding that he assumed, and he believes that to fix it, we need a new way of talking about experiences that use distinctive language that better defines the concept for people. The future of customer experience is infused with technology and data. I have a passion for a new concept called Customer Science, which combines technology with artificial intelligence and mountains of data to predict customer behavior. The data-based approach Customer Science provides is an excellent path to anticipating your customers' needs and increasing your emotional bond with them.  Pine agrees, adding that the shift from physical to digital experiences occurring with the COVID-19 Pandemic has accelerated this fusion of technology and psychology. He sees the value that an organization can generate by amplifying in-person experiences with digital ones and capitalizing on their desire for meaningful experiences that they value more than stuff.  Carbone sees the future of Customer Experience in the cultures of the organization.  Champions of the concept should build a culture that echoes the sentiments of their desired experience within their organizations. Moreover, the idea that science and art combine to create a higher level of experience management has begun to transform how companies approach business-as-usual. Carbone says using technology and humanity combined can create what he describes as Experience Management 2.0. There are things you can do right now to prepare for the future of Customer Experience at your organization.  In addition to tying your efforts directly to return on investment (ROI), I advise champions of Customer Experience to determine the lifetime value of customers they serve. Often this amount helps justify expenses for an experience program that demands an organization's resources. Also, I encourage organizations to identify ways to improve the experience that take advantage of the most significant opportunity rather than only fixing the problems. The ROI on delivering a solution for a substantial opportunity is far more valuable than repairing a small problem that has costs associated with it. Carbone suggests deepening your understanding of how customers think vs. what they think. When you understand the role of unconscious thought and emotions and the influence they exert on our actions, you have an opportunity to surpass the benefits of customer centricity and reap the rewards of a customer-driven business model. Pine says preparing for the future means making a few adjustments to your thinking. First, he wants organizations to realize they are in an experience economy, not a service-providing one. Next, he encourages businesses to consider what they would change in their experience offering if they charged admission for it. That mindset is the correct one for innovation and the creation of a good experience that customers think is worth having. Finally, he wants a focus on the individual reactions that highly-customized experiences deliver. To discuss this further contact us at www.BeyondPhilosophy.com About Beyond Philosophy: Beyond Philosophy help organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). We then capitalize on this by improving your customer experience to meet these needs thereby retaining and acquiring new customers across the market. This podcast is produced by Resonate Recordings. Click here find out more.

The 5 Rules for Designing Great Digital Experiences A lot of Behavioral Economics can feel intimidating. However, it doesn’t have to be. The Five Rules Podcast Series is our attempt at giving you an easy entry point into the complex and messy world of Behavioral Science. In 2020, we have all been doing many more online customer experiences than we thought we would. Some of these digital experiences have been excellent, and others were not.  Suppose these are the only experiences that your customers have with your organization this year. How important is it to you that the digital experience is as easy and convenient as possible? We would be surprised if you said anything less than "very important." This episode of The Intuitive Customer shares our five rules for designing great digital experiences. Follow these directives, and you will deliver the kind of online experience that your customers appreciate, leading to the customer-driven growth you need.  What Are The Five Rules? The Five Rules for Designing a Great Digital Experience Design in a digital "nudge." Analyze how customers really behave.  Design your experience to anticipate your customers' needs.  Plan to evoke emotions and measure them.  Humanize technology.  What Should You Do With Them? Design in a digital "nudge." The term digital nudge refers to the book Nudge by Nobel-prize winning economist Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. They suggested that the way you present a choice can influence how people choose. The subtle clues you include can affect how people behave. For example, if you make it seem like the normal thing to do is to participate in the company's 401(k) plan by making people who don't want to opt-out, most people participate in the program. The same concept can apply to your digital experience. We recommend using any number of psychological concepts that are part of the behavioral sciences in your design that nudge people toward the online behavior you want them to have.  Analyze how customers really behave. A significant plus to working in the digital space is that you can measure everything. From how long people stay on the page to what they load (and unload) from their carts to what they look at the longest, you have a plethora of data, enabling you to understand how customers behave—in real life. Moreover, you can test what happens to customer behavior if you change things, and analyze that data, too.  Design your experience to anticipate your customers' needs.  Knowing what you know from the first two rules, you can now design into your digital experience features that anticipate your customers' needs. It could be that you make it easy for them to find their past orders. Perhaps you ensure that you have a shipping calculator available to them or other information necessary to decide. Whatever you choose to do, you must make it easy for them and present an experience that doesn't take up too much of their attention that they would rather be giving to something else.  Plan to evoke emotions and measure them. Just as you should with your in-person experience, your digital experience should have specific actions that evoke a particular feeling that drives value for your organization. We would recommend that you participate in your digital experience as if you were a customer or have someone from the outside do it to provide a fresh perspective of the emotions your present experience evokes.  Humanize technology.  People respond differently to technology than they do to people. Moreover, people sometimes don't like it when they feel like they can't interact with other people. Suppose you use technology to interact with your customers at any point in the digital experience. In that case, we recommend that you ask yourself if that interaction would have a more positive emotional outcome if handled by a human. To discuss this further contact us at www.BeyondPhilosophy.com About Beyond Philosophy: Beyond Philosophy help organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). We then capitalize on this by improving your customer experience to meet these needs thereby retaining and acquiring new customers across the market. This podcast is produced by Resonate Recordings. Click here find out more.

When I am shopping on Amazon, and a product has 3.5 stars, I don’t buy it. Now, 3.5 stars isn’t a bad rating; in fact, it’s above average. However, for me to place that item in my Amazon cart, it needs to have a rating of at least four stars or more. My behavior on Amazon is part of a broader concept called Negativity Bias, and it’s a massive influence on customer behavior.  This episode of The Intuitive Customer discusses the concept of Negativity Bias and how it affects people’s behavior in your Customer Experience. We also share some positive ways you can make negativity work in your favor.  Key Takeaways  Negativity Bias describes how we emphasize negative information over positive and find it more compelling for decision-making. It’s the reason we remember negative reviews more than positive ones. It’s also why we think about what could go wrong in specific situations rather than what could go right.  Here are a few more things you should know about Negativity Bias: We all have a negativity bias. This bias is not reserved for a particular type of person or demographic. A compulsion to remember and focus on the negative is a psychological concept that we all share, and it affects all of us in different ways regarding how we behave.  Negativity Bias is related to Loss Aversion. Loss Aversion describes how we feel more pain from losing things than gaining things makes us feel good. Negativity Bias is a focus on the negative, which is a focus on the potential loss. It can lead to less rational decision-making. However, it can also motivate us to improve the situation too.  Negativity Bias leads to specific actions to protect oneself.  As customers dealing with uncertainty, as we often are when trying a product or service for the first time, we tend to take a what-could-go-wrong perspective. To prevent the potential bad outcome, we take specific actions to avoid it. These actions could include scrolling through customer reviews (focusing on the bad ones), buying only from brand names we know and trust, or looking for referrals from friends and family.   While a little Negativity Bias can do good, too much only leads to bad.  A focus on the negative can lead to good things, like process improvements or problem-solving exercises. However, too much stress there can lead to a skewed world view. It can lead to making poor decisions or missing the good things that are happening in an experience.  Recommended Actions There are a few ways that you can use the Negativity Bias to get a good outcome. These include: Perform periodic checks of negative assessments to ensure that you have a realistic view of the situation. It is essential to determine if the negative feelings you have about your customer experience or business performance are based on objective measures or not. It’s great to use Negativity Bias to motivate improvements, but it shouldn’t squeeze the life out of your organization either. Remember to highlight success and reward good outcomes whenever possible.  Remember that everyone tends to focus on the negative, including customers. When you understand how it works for people’s perception, you can counteract its effects with specific tactics. Look for ways to mitigate the Negative Bias’ poor outcomes for your bottom line by addressing it in your Customer Experience.  Provide people with solutions in today’s negative environment. Without a doubt, a global pandemic inspires quite a bit of Negativity Bias. Your customers feel it, and if you can find ways to be helpful in light of the present challenges, it will pay off later when customers remember this time. In other words, you can build customer loyalty by taking extra care of customers right now when they need you.  Communicate positively. Understand how customers can glean the negative much more quickly than the positive and take special care to positively frame your messaging. Whether in direct customer communication channels or advertising, keeping the message positive is essential to inspiring customer-driven growth. An outside perspective can help you maintain positivity in your experience. Our Experience Health Check, where we pretend we are customers and then give you specific recommendations to improve your experience, can give you a fresh set of eyes on your communication efforts throughout the customer journey.  Remember that fixing problems is good, but not always the best opportunity in your experience. Organizations often want to focus on what is going wrong in experience and fix it. That is a good instinct. However, many times in our Emotional Signature Research®, we discover that customers have other wants and needs that present a much more significant opportunity than fixing the various problems in the experience. While we aren’t saying that you should ignore problems, we are saying to keep an open mind about addressing other opportunities in your experience that might yield a better return on investment in the long term.  To discuss this further contact us at www.BeyondPhilosophy.com About Beyond Philosophy: Beyond Philosophy help organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). We then capitalize on this by improving your customer experience to meet these needs thereby retaining and acquiring new customers across the market. This podcast is produced by Resonate Recordings. Click here find out more.

5 New Rules Guaranteed to Build Trust A lot of Behavioral Economics 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. A great idea is a beautiful place to start when it comes to improving your Customer Experience to benefit your bottom line. When combined with a deliberate strategy and cunning tactics, a great idea is almost enough to make you successful, but only "almost enough."  While these elements are fundamental to your success, affecting a real culture change at your organization is vital to achieving the customer-driven growth you hope to inspire. This episode of The Intuitive Customer shares our five rules for affecting real culture change. With these rules guiding your actions, you are well on your way to fostering the proper environment for your idea, strategy, and tactics to deliver the results you want. What Are The Five Rules? The five rules for affecting real culture change build upon each other. They include: The 5 Rule for Affecting Real Culture Change Create or define a burning platform. Recognize this is a long-term goal. Be clear on your vision for the future. Remember that "you don't make an omelet without breaking eggs." Lead from the top.  What Should You Do With Them? Create or define a burning platform. Change is difficult and a bit painful for people. Therefore, unless the pain of change is less than the pain of staying the same, most people will resist making a change. Consequently, it would be best if you defined the problem and the pain it will cause the organization. Without the burning platform that only change will extinguish, you will have difficulty making meaningful changes in your organization. Just ask Circuit City, Blockbuster, or Kodak.  Recognize this is a long-term goal. If you think you will implement and complete a culture change in six months, I wouldn't recommend taking it on. While you can get an excellent start and even make progress, six months is not long enough to affect the fundamental changes needed to foster customer-driven growth in many organizations. A more reasonable term is three to five years.  Be clear on your vision for the future. It is imperative that you know what you want the culture to change to, and also what things you need to do to change the culture from where it is presently. You need to know what you want to start doing and what you need to stop doing. Moreover, communication (and re-communication) will be vital to get the team on board with your plan.  Remember that "you don't make an omelet without breaking eggs." Despite your best efforts, not everyone is going to approve of your plan or your changes. Some may go so far as to obstruct progress. It would be best to resolve yourself to the idea that you might need to remove someone from their position because they are getting in the way of progress. You can't make a Customer Experience omelet without breaking a few eggs.  Lead from the top. It takes more than words to effect change. People take notice of what you do to support your ideas. Specifically, you should examine how you prioritize your time. For example, if putting the customer at the center of what you do is essential to your plan, you should have time set aside in your schedule to do that for customers, too. When you show your team that you are not asking them to do anything you are not willing to do yourself, you increase employee engagement and improve the Employee Experience.  To discuss this further contact us at www.BeyondPhilosophy.com About Beyond Philosophy: Beyond Philosophy help organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). We then capitalize on this by improving your customer experience to meet these needs thereby retaining and acquiring new customers across the market. This podcast is produced by Resonate Recordings. Click here find out more.