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

How to Make Your Experience Easy and Gain Growth   I hear things like this when I go into an organization: "We want to delight customers at every moment of contact." I nod my head and smile, but secretly I think it sounds exhausting. Moreover, it is unnecessary in many parts of the experience. People many times do not want to be delighted; they want to be done already. Keeping it as easy as possible for customers to get it done is a direct path to gain growth.    Key Takeaways    Whenever you make customers think about something in your experience, you create what we call Customer Effort. A Customer Effort Score measures how difficult a customer thinks it is to work with you as an organization. Like other Customer Experience measures, deriving your Customer Effort Score involves asking your customers how difficult they thought their experience was and then having them rate it on a scale.    There are a few significant takeaways behind reducing Customer Effort and keeping it as easy as possible.      Rational thinking, which is the type that takes a lot of energy to do, is something customers are not super excited to do most of the time. We prefer to use easy, automatic thinking and save our energy for other activities. Humans established this preference over the cour thousands of years, because, for many of these years, securing food was a challenge. We needed to preserve our energy for other things, like avoiding predators.    We also use habits to simplify our thinking. Many times, we learn to do something using the rational side of our thinking. Repetition makes the behavior habitual, which is governed by our automatic and intuitive thinking system.    As a general rule, customers want things easy. However, some specific instances exist where the experience should be a little complicated. These rare occasions usually involve status items, like the American Express Centurion Card, a card so hard to get you can't ask for it; American Express asks you if you want it. Since it isn't for everyone, and it is hard to get, customers like that the experience is challenging. Examples like this, however, are not the norm.    You must make your experience as easy as possible for customers, so you get a low Customer Effort Score and get your customers to come back for more.    Recommended Actions   Authors Matthew Dixon, Karen Freeman, and Nicholas Tobin wrote in the Harvard Business Review the article "Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers." There were five principles they shared help organizations reduce the Customer Effort in your experience, which includes:   Don't just resolve the current issue; head off the next one. I like how this principle is proactive and removes obstacles that would keep customers from doing more business with you.  Arm reps to address the emotional side of customer interactions. When your team is minding the customer's emotions, it eliminates moments in your experience that can cause uncertainty or stress for customers. For example, changing the language reps use with customers can communicate better and put customers' minds at ease.  Minimize channel switching by increasing self-service channel stickiness. You train your customers on navigating your experience, whether you are deliberate about it or not. People have ways that they get what they want based on the experience you design for them. Therefore, creating it without friction is essential. Moreover, we would encourage you to ensure that you weigh the benefits of any changes you want to make to your experience against the hassle and disruption it will cause your most valuable customers.  Use Feedback from disgruntled or struggling customers to reduce Customer Effort. I hope this one doesn't need any additional explanation; it's a no-brainer.  Empower the front line to deliver a low-effort experience. If your company policies are getting in the way of customers having a smooth experience, especially when resolving problems, change them. If your people have the freedom and ability to solve customers' issues right away, it reduces a lot of Customer Effort.    I would add the following two principles to the previous five from the HBR article:   Think about the interactions with the customers that drive the most value for you.  This area is excellent for fulfilling the current unmet needs in your industry. Look for ways to simplify your experience to meet these unsatisfied wants and create competitive differentiation with your competitors. Remember, it doesn't pay to be logical if everyone else is being logical. Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman of Ogilvy UK, and author of Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense says doing things your way differentiates you from the competition and allows for you to satisfy these unmet needs, too.    To discuss this further, contact us at www.BeyondPhilosophy.com.   About Beyond Philosophy: Beyond Philosophy helps 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. Resonate Recordings produce this podcast. Click here to find out more. 

The 5 Rules for Behavioral Journey Mapping   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.   What Are The Five Rules?   We were training customers with journey mapping recently when it became apparent that people didn't understand what journey mapping could do for them. Moreover, they thought they did. To respond, I came up with five precepts for advanced journey mapping skills, which can serve as a guide to your desired outcome.    Before we get into the rules, I should clarify for those of you that aren't familiar with Journey Maps what they are. They are essentially what a customer does in your experience. This exercise is excellent, and I support their use in designing your Customer Experience.    My criticism for journey mapping is that most people only do a superficial version that does not dip much outside their interaction with customers. Moreover, they usually don't indicate why customers do what they do. In many cases, it feels more like a customer process than a journey map, mostly because it isn't going to take you where you want to go.    Our version of journey mapping is called Behavioral Journey Mapping. It is different because it expands past the actual customer interaction where the experience starts and stops. It also identifies how customers feel entering the experience. Also, Behavioral Journey Mapping digs deeper into how each of the moments of the experience influences customer behavior, which is essential if you want to get customers to behave the way you want.    Now, for the rules:   The 5 Rules for Advanced Journey Mapping   Embrace that the journey is rational, emotional, subconscious, and psychological.  Look for the hidden aspects of a customer journey. Define strategically what specific emotions drive most value across the market. Build deliberate memory points.  Identify how to nudge customer decision-making.     What Should You Do With Them?     Embrace that the journey is rational, emotional, subconscious, and psychological. The first step is to understand that it is essential to know what customers do and why they do it. It is also necessary to know how they feel entering the experience. When you have this understanding of all the aspects of a customer journey, from practical to emotional and all the psychological stops in between, the rest of the rules will make more sense and yield more useful actions to get to where you want to go.   2. Look for the hidden aspects of the customer journey. Here is where you begin to plot out what is happening in your Customer Experience. You should include where the experience starts, recognizing it often happens way before the customer ever interacts with your organization. Furthermore, it would be best if you carried the journey map out to the end of the experience, which may conclude long after your organization's last interaction. Furthermore, third-party providers that take over parts of your experience (e.g., shuttle drivers, installers, tow truck operators) are also part of the experience and should make the map.    3. Define strategically what specific emotions drive most value across the market. Now that you have detailed what is happening in the customer journey comprehensively, you can plan how you want to enhance it. A crucial part of this strategy is the emotion your customer feels at the end of the experience. Whatever feeling you choose, from satisfied to safe to appreciated, the sentiment should drive value for your organization, which could mean anything from Net Promoter Score® to customer-driven growth. Then, your job is to design an experience that evokes these emotions. If you don't know what these emotions are, you should do research, like our Emotional Signature® Research, which uncovers the customers' unmet, hidden needs that can drive value for your Customer Experience if you were to meet them.   4. Build deliberate memory points. Memory is vital to your experience. Your customers don't choose you based on the experience you provide; they choose you because of the experience they remember you provide. Therefore, building a positive memory of your experience is essential to your customer-driven growth. Memories form based on the peak experience of the experience and how customers felt at the end, called the Peak-End Rule, first introduced by Nobel-Prize-winning economist Professor Daniel Kahneman. If the peak emotion that occurs in your experience and the one at the end, as identified in your customer journey map from Rule 2 do not drive value for your organization, you need to change them.    5. Identify how to nudge customer decision-making. There will be moments in your experience that present an opportunity to nudge customer behavior to something that you prefer to what is occurring now. Understanding how people make decisions, and the psychological concepts that explain them will help you design your situations to make it easy for customers to make the decision that you want. After all, isn't that what spending all this time and money on customer journey mapping was meant to do?     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.

Mastering the Illusion of Control   Humans often feel like we have more control over things than we do. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary—and even regular common sense—we think that if we do things in a certain way, we can influence what happens around us, particularly during sporting events. This concept is called the Illusion of Control.   Key Takeaways  In this episode of The Intuitive Customer, we delve into the idea of the Illusion of Control and why it is essential to how you design your Customer Experience. The concept has a few key takeaways, including:   The Illusion of Control is pervasive in our daily lives. You can see humans under the influence of the Illusion of Control when they participate in superstitions or pre-game rituals before sporting events. You can also see it in business situations, like when a sales manager criticizes a sales representative for missing quota, which may or may not be within the sales representatives’ control.  The Illusion of Control manifests in several different ways for a Customer Experience. Customers think they decide for themselves, and they do, but they don’t control everything that leads to that decision. The design of your experience has an enormous influence on how people decide to take action. It starts with advertising messages and package design, but other things along the way affect the purchase also. Furthermore, in brick and mortar situations, even the location in the aisle can affect how a customer chooses. The Two-Systems model reinforces the concept. The concept that the Intuitive and Rational Systems in our brains work together to make decisions supports this concept as well. We often say that customers buy emotionally and then justify the purchase rationally. The rational justification that occurs could be our minds trying to take control of our impulses.  The Illusion of Control does not mean it is okay to manipulate people. We believe that deception is wrong. Instead, we encourage you to design your experience to get a particular outcome but leave control in the hands of the customers. After all, that’s usually what customers want anyway.  The Locus of Control is also an essential concept. This concept describes how some people perceive the power as internal, meaning they control how things go by what they do, and others think of the force as external, that someone or something is doing things to them. We all have different ideas on the Locus of Control and they change situationally. For example, many of us feel the pandemic is an external power that is controlling our lives.    Recommended Actions   We have a couple of suggestions for how you can use these concepts to your benefit.  Recognize the changing nature of the feelings of control. Control is something we feel we have, even when we don’t. With control as a feeling, it makes it subject to change. It is essential to recognize this changing nature and the bias it creates and correct for it in your actions.  Consider the Locus of Control in your experience design. It is crucial to determine whether your customers have an internal or external bias for Locus of Control and accommodate those feelings with a customized reaction. Developing a way to manage the side-effects of those biases can help improve the experience for people and encourage customer-driven growth.  Determine your customers’ expectations for the Illusion and Locus of Control. Many times, customers want to feel in control. However, there are times when they want to surrender that control to your organization, particularly in safety situations. Your experience design should meet those expectations, or you could end up with an “area of conflict” with customers.  If you are unfamiliar with customer expectations, do research. With so many things changing in recent months, you might not know what your customers expect. We recommend researching to find out, like our Emotional Signature Edge®. Uncovering these hidden, unmet expectations and needs is essential to designing an experience that facilitates customer-driven growth.      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 Big Mistake People Make with AI     Business leaders of today have to understand the technology of tomorrow. Specifically, one would be wise to understand what AI is, how it works, and what problems it can solve for your business.    This episode of The Intuitive Customer is a conversation with Bikram Ghosh, associate professor of marketing at the Eller College of Management at the University of Arizona, Tucson about AI in business today and what is possible for your business processes.   Key Takeaways   Ghosh studies AI and its overlap with behavioral economics. He believes that the future of Customer Experience management and the way to foster customer-driven growth is AI, and here’s why:   AI is machine intelligence driven by algorithms. The goal is to mimic the human mind. By taking stimuli from an external environment, called inputs, machines try to predict the outcome.   There are many types of AI. Machine Learning is a type of AI where machines attempt to learn from their mistakes. We learn from our mistakes; machines seek to do the same thing by making mistakes, recognizing them, sourcing them, and then fixing them moving forward.   Attitudinal Data refers to how customers talk about products on blogs and social media. From attitudinal data, the algorithm can extrapolate behavioral nuances.   Natural Language Processing makes it possible to detect behavioral nuances, and is a significant area of work in Machine Learning.   Computer Vision is when the machine analyzes micro-expressions or picture data to determine how people react to a product of brand.  This AI helps companies learn how people react to their product or brand from studying customers’ micro-expressions or from picture data analysis.   AI is great at determining how a large group feels in general, but not individually. Machines are improving in these areas, however. Amazon is working on capturing the data about the nuances of customer emotions.   AI is excellent at categorizing groups. This news is excellent as many organizations do not have sufficient segmentation in their customer groups. The potential for segmenting by customer behavior is a possibility in the near future, which would allow for tracking the dynamic nature of customer actions and emotions.   Recommended Actions   Ghosh realizes that it can be daunting for people not familiar with AI to dive into the process. However, he offers some practical tips in this area:   Begin with a form of sentiment analysis. Getting the customer’s emotions allows you group your customers based on how they feel. Decide what the appropriate response would be to each group. Map the outcome variables for the groups and their responses to design the process. Have your AI begin collecting data at every level down to deployment. Track your desired data, whether that is pertaining to customer loyalty, behavioral measures, or whatever else you want.  Here, I would discover what drives value for each group.   Some additional takeaways are:   Use AI to help with your categorizing. Solving many problems starts with effective segmentation for improved targeting. Best of all, AI can do thing your human resources cannot—and faster, too.   Do not use AI at activities that require creativity, judgment, and decision making. That's where humans come in.    Think of AI as complementary to human work. Ghosh recommends that you find parts of your business process that are repetitive or physical that you can automate with AI.   Remember you only have to understand what it can do; you don’t have to program it. Most of us can’t anyway. You hire people to do the programming. Your job is to determine what part of the process you can have them program.   Educating the team about how customer behavior is affected by emotions is essential. Helping people in your organization understand the importance of the emotional experience and how AI can help improve it, is critical as we move forward to the Customer Experiences of the future.     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 Making and Managing Customer Memories   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.   What Are The Five Rules?   I love the subject of customer memories.  From how they form to how they change to how they drive your customer loyalty, customer memories are a crucial aspect of your Customer Experience. Knowing the role your Customer Experience design plays in the formation of customer memories is critical to enabling customer-driven growth. Here are the five rules to bear in mind when making and managing customer memories:   Five Rules for Making and Managing Customer Memories   Embrace that we don't choose between experiences, but between the memories we have of experiences.  Emotions create memories. Map your customers' "fishing nets."   Define what you want a customer to remember.  Discover how your customers retrieve their memories.      What Should You Do With Them?   Embrace that we don't choose between experiences, but between the memories we have of experiences. Full disclosure, this rule is not mine. Professor Daniel Kahneman, Nobel-prize winning economist, came up with it. It is a foundational element of your entire Customer Experience strategy. If you think about it, memories are what make us who we are. Moreover, memory is how we learn and what we use to make future decisions. For all of these reasons, it is essential to have a plan for making customer memories that drive value for your organization.     Emotions create memories. How you feel affects memories in two main ways. The first way is that the strength of the emotion is the catalyst for memory formation. Those things you feel most strongly about are what you remember. The other stuff you didn’t have strong emotions about? Not so much.  The second way feelings affect memories is that they are essential. Professor Kahneman gave us the Peak-End rule, which says that what forms a memory is the peak (or most intense) emotion you felt and how you felt at the end. Therefore, we encourage you to determine what peak emotion you want customers to feel and when, and how you want them to feel when the experience concludes. Then, we want you take deliberate actions to deliver these emotions to customers.   Map your customers' "fishing nets."  There is also the idea that your memories are part of networks, which means that memories connect to one another. An analogy we use to describe this is a fishing net. If each memory is a knot in the fishing net, the connected memories are the knots that are attached to it. Now, if you imagine you have hold of a knot in a fishing net and you are drawing it up to the surface of a shallow pool, you can see that the connected knots will rise with the knot you are holding. Some knots will break the surface while the others hang out just below. We like to think of the knots above the surface of the water as conscious memories, and the ones below are subconscious memories. We want you to see if you can discover what memories customers will associate with the memory of your experience and use that to your advantage in your Customer Experience design.   Define what you want a customer to remember. There are practicalities to consider regarding managing customers’ memories. First, choose what you want the customer to remember. Second, have strategies in place to reinforce these memories. For example, if you manage a theme park and you know your experience has a strong emotion at a particular moment, like the top of the roller coaster as the cars start to plummet down, how can you help customers remember it? Many theme parks have identified that moment as a strong emotion and have cameras that take photos so their guests can see themselves in that thrilling moment right after they get off the ride. Even if the customer doesn’t purchase the pic, that photo reinforces the exhilarating moment in the guests’ memory right away.      Research can help you find these valuable moments in your experience to reinforce. Moreover, research can help you focus on the areas in your Customer Experience that give you the most impact first. Our  Emotional Signature®  Research defines what drives value for your customers emotionally. Then, you can look at the customer process to see when there are moments with potential to evoke that emotion.     Discover how your customers retrieve their memories. Helping your customers create fabulous memories of your experience does not do you any good if they do not remember them at the right time. Understanding how your customers recall experiences is essential. Remember the fishing net analogy we shared? We want them to pull the right knot at the right time and associate the memory to a moment when they make a buying decision in your area. Also, you should be aware that every time a customer accesses a memory, they re-remember it. This tendency can make the intensity of emotions increase. It's great when they get more positive. However, if you experience has the customer repeat what went wrong over and over to different members of your customer service team, you could be making a bad memory worse.   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.

What A Face Mask Can Do for Customer Segmentation   Everyone has an opinion about face masks. Some think they help stop the spread of COVID-19; some think they are unnecessary and a nuisance; others fall somewhere in between. However, what you probably didn't know about face masks is they can help you customize moments of your Customer Experience so that no matter what opinion your customer has, they feel like you understand them.    Key Takeaways    This episode of The Intuitive Customer discusses this essential and relevant chance to participate in customer segmentation. Customer segmentation, you might recall, is the opportunity to take your more substantial groups of customers and put them in groups based on a characteristic(s) they share. In this case, our segmentation example is regarding face masks by asking customers when they wear them to determine how they feel about the global pandemic.    Here are the key takeaways from this episode:   People have had different experiences during the pandemic this far, and it will affect customer behavior. Different countries and states had varying degrees of "lockdown," ranging from none at all to shelter in place. It is essential to understand what conditions your customers had to determine how they feel before they walk through your door.    People will emerge from the pandemic in different emotional states about their safety. Like the conditions they experienced, people have varying degrees of regard for their safety as the world returns to the new normal. Some are terrified and will avoid returning to brick and mortar locations; some flout requirements to wear face masks, calling the pandemic a "hoax." It would be best to know what type of emotional state your customers are in so you can provide the appropriate response in your Customer Experience. We know that in some countries face masks are being politicized. This doesn't matter for this segmentation as we are talking about how Customers Behave.      A Golden Questions helps determine the customers' emotional state regarding the pandemic. If you ask people how they feel about the threat of COVID-19, they probably won't tell you the whole truth, especially if they don't know you. To get to the heart of their feelings, you should ask a different way. A Golden Question is an example of a query that reveals how a customer feels about something without asking them about that something directly. In the case of face-mask segmentation, we think the Golden Question is, "When have you been wearing a face mask?"   We have identified five likely segments of face mask wearers. We have determined the five divisions of face mask wearers here:   Full Metal Jacket: Someone that has been locked in and is venerable or looking after someone venerable.   The nervous face mask: Forced to go out for food shopping or work but is nervous.   The social conscious face mask: They are concern but understand the science. They are not that worried about face mask but realize their social responsibility   The pocket face mask: They have a face mask in their pocket/purse and will see what others are doing or will wear it in certain conditions.   The freedom fighter: Never wear a face mask as I don't want government to tell me what to do. It's all overblown.    It is important not to judge any group. Empathy for each of the groups will make this exercise more successful.    Recommended Actions   Segment your customers into the face mask wearers. Once you have asked your customer the Golden Question about Facemasks, you should then segment them into one of the five groups we identified based on their answers.    Try to step outside your feelings. Like everyone else, you probably identify with one of these groups. You find their feelings easy to understand because you feel the same way. However, we recommend that you try to "step outside your feelings" and see the issue from the other group's perspective.    Use the face mask wearer segmentation to customize your experience (and messaging) for each group. Since each group shares an emotional state about the threat of COVID-19, you can design responses that appeal to each group's unique psychological needs. For example, you can communicate to Full Metal Jacket face mask wearers all the things you have changed to prevent the spread of SARS-CoV-2 in your experience and send a warm, "Welcome Back!" to your Freedom Fighters.    Recognize that what people need now is not what they needed three or four months ago. Customer's needs change based on the situation they experience. Before the pandemic, we would have said that having an easy experience was essential; after the pandemic, I would say safety is paramount. Adapting and responding is key to your ability to navigate the "new normal" successfully.      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.

Never Let a Good Crisis Go To Waste   I am fond of an old saying that goes like, "Never let a good crisis go to waste." Part of the reason I like it is it points out that even something as grim as the COVID-19 Pandemic has a silver lining. In this case, it presents an opportunity to reimagine what you do with customers and take advantage of the environment of change that the "new normal" in business will offer.    Key Takeaways    This episode of The Intuitive Customer explores how organizations respond to the crisis and which ones will be the most successful. There are similarities across industries in how business is handling the changes, some more successfully than others. Also, customers are in a different place than they were at the start of 2020 as well. Here are a few of the key takeaways from what we observe:   There are three ways organizations have responded to our current economic climate:   Reacting: They have changed but believe the changes are only temporary until we return to normal. Responding: They have made changes they intend to continue in the short-term, meaning for at least a year or so. Reimagining: They see the advantage of the disruption of business-as-usual and are using it to pull forward plans they were delaying.   Loss Aversion is at play, also. Businesses are in a loss mindset, which can drive unusually risky behavior. In other words, things are bad, so some companies are willing to try something they otherwise wouldn't be able or ready to try.   Different places have different experiences. Sweden didn't shut down; the UK did. The state of Georgia opened in April and California in June. People have had varying degrees of disruption to their former daily lives and will respond accordingly.    The Kubler-Ross stages of grief model is affecting customer behavior. Where your customers are in the five stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—influences how they feel today. Someone who has accepted the changes will behave differently than someone who denies that the pandemic is real.    There is likely going to be a second wave. Without a vaccine, people are likely in for another wave of "stay-at-home" orders in the fall. Will you be prepared?   Recommended Actions   Knowing that the crisis does present opportunity, we have been advising our clients to do the following as they re-open:   Interpret new customer behavior. Can you observe customer behavior and the emotions that influence them to act that way?  Identify the accelerants that are in your marketplace. What did the pandemic do to change the market in your industry, and can you capitalize on it? (If you don't know, you can find out with research.) Determine if there is a further segmentation. Are there new market segments or customer segmentations you can make based on your customers' experiences geographically or emotionally?  Review your strategy. Do you have long-term plans that you can pull forward to the short-term? Do you have a plan if there is a second wave of infections? Redesign your Journey Maps. Have you introduced new nudges in your customer process that address the emotional needs people have in the "new normal?" Train employees in managing emotional experiences. What have you done to get your customer-facing team ready to handle customers' emotional experience?   To discuss this further, contact us at www.BeyondPhilosophy.com.   About Beyond Philosophy: Beyond Philosophy helps 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 to find out more. 

General Show Notes:   Have you ever driven a long way to a vacation, perhaps with kids in the backseat, and heard the whining query, "are we there yet?" Have you ever wanted to ask that question yourself? It turns out there are good reasons for that. It's called the Return Trip Effect, and we discuss it on this episode of The Intuitive Customer.    Key Takeaways   Assistant professor Zoey Chen from the University of Miami Business School published a paper with her colleague on the concept of the Return Trip Effect titled, "Are We There Yet?" Here are a few key takeaways from our discussion with her.    The Return Trip Effect explains how the trip to an anticipated destination often feels like it takes longer than the trip back. Research narrowed it down to two reasons why it felt this way.    When you go the first time, you see different landmarks for the first time that create time markers. The more time markers you create, the longer the trip feels. On the way back, you do not see them for the first time, so they might not be as notable, creating fewer time markers. The fewer the time markers, the faster the trip feels.    Anticipatory feelings can contribute to how long the trip feels. When you want to be somewhere already, it seems like every second you are not there is an eternity. The return trip home usually does not carry the same anticipatory feelings.    The Return Trip Effect demonstrates how outside influences can affect memories. In this case, feelings are making you remember how long it took to get somewhere. Whether or not it did take longer does not bear the same influence on memory.    We know that most memories are subject to the Peak-End Rule, first introduced by Professor Daniel Kahneman. The Peak-End Rule says that what we remember about an experience is the most intense emotion we felt and how we felt at the end. However, memory sometimes begins before the event, in anticipation of it, which can be the peak emotion.    The Sleeper Effect is a concept that your brain might overwrite a memory over time, replacing the experience with the anticipatory experience. This effect occurs because research shows that positive memories tend to outlast negative memories.    People also remember the unique experience more. The first time makes a significant impression, but the second of third experience of the same thing does not.    People also remember experiences with brands they feel are personally relevant, meaning brands that are part of their identity. For example, Apple is a brand I love and identify with, so I remember my experiences with them more.     The information introduced after an experience, especially close to the conclusion of it while your feelings are still percolating and memories are forming, can change your perception of the experience. Additional information can improve your perception of an experience and also your memory of it.    Recommended Actions   There are seven actions you can take today to help you use what you know about how memories form to design into your Customer Experience a way to enhance customers' memories about yours.    Decide what type of memory you want people to have about your experience. Different strategies enhance different types, so knowing what memory you want customers to have will shape your enhancement strategy.  Strive to make experiences unique. Are you finding ways to create a novel experience for your customers so they remember them more? Consider the post-experience. Have you provided additional information that will improve the experience in customers' minds and thereby improving their memory of it? Remember that endings are essential. Have you designed a deliberate way to end the experience that evokes emotions like happiness and pleasure from customers? Balance building excitement with maintaining proper expectations. Be sure that you can deliver on any promises you make customers. Falling short sabotages your success in creating excellent memories of your experience. Design an experience that reinforces positive memories. People come back to you not for the experience they have with you but for the experience that they remember they had with you.  Be deliberate. Don't leave the memory formation up to chance; be specific and detailed about how you deliver your Customer Experience to create the type of memory that brings customers back for more.    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 to Managing How Your Customers Make Decisions   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.   What Are The Five Rules?   How people make decisions is a complicated and fascinating subject. Understanding the process and the role your Customer Experience design plays in it is essential to providing the platform to encourage customer-driven growth. To that end, here are the five rules to bear in mind when managing customer decision-making:   Embrace the fact that customers don't always make rational choices.  Strive to make customers buy from you intuitively.  Discover your customers' decision-making strategy.  Map your customers' habits.  Design your experience understanding the different ways customers make decisions.   What Should You Do With Them?   Embrace the fact that customers don't always make rational choices. Before you can proceed in this management process, you should first accept that your customers do not make rational decisions all the time. Rationality plays a role, of course, but it not always the driving force behind the yes or no customers give you. This concept applies to the business-to-consumer as well as the business-to-business market. Many organizations have based their experiences on the idea that rational decision-making is the driving force. If you do the same, you run the risk of ruling out ways you can create a competitive advantage. By opening up your solution set to include the emotional in addition to the rational, you not only create a winning formula for winning customers and prospects over, but you also create a competitive differentiation that is hard to beat by your competition.    Strive to make customers buy from you intuitively. Intuitive purchases are automatic and occur without the customers giving it a second thought. This situation is ideal for obvious reasons. However, it requires creating an easy experience that appeals to customers' need for simplicity while also meeting their needs.   Discover your customers' decision making strategy.  There is a multitude of ways that customers use their rationality and irrationality in tandem to make buying decisions. Some methods are based on how you position the offer, others on the customers' tolerance for risk; others are based on how much effort they are willing to put into the purchase process. We recommend determining how your customers make decisions and use that pattern to help you design an experience that leads them to the choice you want. When you can do this successfully, you create a competitive differentiation few organizations are willing to undertake.   Map your customers' habits. Habitual behavior is one of the ways customers make intuitive decisions to go with your product or service. A trigger in your experience signals the habitual response to start. However, your competitors have triggers, too. When you can spot the triggers, either yours or the competition, you understand how to meet your customers or move your customers to a different behavior where you want them to be.    Design your experience understanding the different ways customers make decisions. When you apply the previous four rules in an exercise we call Behavioral Journey Mapping, an advanced take on traditional journey mapping, you can see how the different touchpoints in an experience influence customers' decisions. You can then determine what experience you wish to deliver so that you can take deliberate actions in the appropriate moments to encourage or change customer behavior. The Behavioral Sciences do not work "in general," but instead work "in specific."    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.

Have you ever picked a line at the store only to realize that you chose the longest, most slowly moving line? Have you ever waited forever to receive a shipment and then felt like they owed you an explanation for what could possibly take that long? Have you ever had such a great time laughing and talking in line with other people that you didn’t even notice how long you waited?   If you answered yes to any of these questions, then you are a typical customer with common perceptions of waiting in a Customer Experience. Years ago, David Maister wrote a paper called "The Psychology of Waiting Lines." Maister suggests that sometimes waiting in lines can seem longer than it is. Gretchen Rubin, the author of The Happiness Project, wrote an article on Psych Central that details eight reasons that waits seem longer.   This episode of The Intuitive Customer explores the psychology of waiting and what you can do to mitigate it for customers. We address Rubin’s eight reasons and share what you can do about them to promote customer-driven growth.