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

The 5 Rules for Driving Down Costs Without Affecting Customers A lot of Behavioral Science 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. If you are like most businesses in 2020, you are facing a very different year for your bottom-line performance, and in many cases, it's not a good kind of different. Naturally, many organizations have responded to a tumultuous and tentative market for growth by balancing the business scales with cost-cutting measures. However, if you cut the wrong things in the wrong areas, you can end up making the situation worse. Don't get me wrong; cutting costs is essential in business, even when there isn't a global pandemic. The critical thing to remember is what to cut, when, and how so that you don't wonder later why everything went sideways. This episode of The Intuitive Customer covers my 5 Rules for Driving down costs without affecting customers. They might help you navigate the remaining weeks of 2020 with less turmoil than cutting costs without them. What Are The Five Rules? The 5 Rules for Driving Down Costs Without Affecting Customers Do not think there is one "silver bullet." Do not over-emphasize the easily-measured costs. Strive for balance. Look at the lifetime value of the customer. Select the areas that drive the least value for you. What Should You Do With Them? Do not think there is one "silver bullet." The first step is to avoid thinking that one big cut will make the business all balance out. A proper approach to cost-cutting is to cut a little in many areas, which, when added together, get you the cost savings you need. Perhaps even more importantly, small five percent cuts across several areas will be less traumatic for the organization than one massive one. Do not over-emphasize the easily-measured costs. Some cuts are easy to measure because the direct costs are in black and white. However, there are indirect costs associated with these items too. I would advise companies to consider all the costs for any item on the ledger before making any cuts. It could mean that you get to your goal faster with fewer cuts when you integrate all the costs associated with any item you eliminate. Strive for balance. First off, let me tell you that I have never been involved in a customer experience improvement program that has not resulted in cost savings. That's because poor experiences cost you money, too, in actual amounts and opportunities missed. Moreover, unintended consequences can result from any action, and especially when cutting expenses. Instead, I would ask that you look for ways to reduce costs that don't involve stopping something. It could be that adding budget to specific areas can prevent expenses from piling up in another place and improve the process simultaneously. Look at the lifetime value of the customers. Often, organizations only consider the annual value of a customer. However, depending on your customer lifecycle, that could only be a small percentage of their overall worth. When you consider the customer's real lifetime value, the expenses associated with providing a solution that costs more is less significant. Sure, you are out the expense in the short-term, but the long-term gains far outweigh them. Select the areas that drive the least value for you. Some parts of the experience might be more valuable than you think at first glance. It is essential to consider what customers use and appreciate most when making cuts. What you don't want to do is unwittingly cut the most important part of your experience in the interest of cost savings, and end up taking away what your most valuable customers loved the most. 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.

How Well Do You Know What You Really Want? Have you ever bought a book you thought you should read and then didn't read it? Did you ever buy a variety of yogurt flavors and then throw out some of them after they expired because you never wanted that flavor when it was time to eat yogurt? We do these things because we often overestimate how much variety we want in the future. In psychology, it's called Naïve Diversification Bias, and it means that we are notoriously bad at predicting our future selves' wants. This episode of The Intuitive Customer explores this concept and what you can do about it for your customer experience. Key Takeaways As always, with the behavioral sciences, Naïve Diversification bias isn't the only thing that is happening when we make these forecasting errors. However, it is a significant driver of these decisions to overestimate our desire for variety in the future. Here are a few things to remember about this psychological concept that influences customer behavior: Research shows we choose the same thing in the moment, and more variety for the future. Itamar Simonson, Ph.D., The Sebastian S. Kresge Professor of Marketing at Stanford University, showed in the 1990s that we do this. When his students chose snacks for the next three weeks ahead of time, he saw that they picked more variety than when they decided the snack for the day each week. We all overestimate our need for variety in the future. Naïve Diversification bias is one we all share. Part of the reason we choose more variety in the future is that we think we want more variety than we do. When the future becomes the now, we are content with the same choice, usually our favorite one. Naïve Diversification Bias does not mean people do not want a variety of choices. People like having options, just not too many of them. However, most people don't know that they don't like having too many choices until they face them, and they feel overwhelmed. Mapping out customer behavior can help you identify Naïve Diversification Bias when it occurs. Many organizations participate in journey mapping, which is an excellent way to identify these moments in the customers' process. However, it does not show customer behavior. Behavioral Journey Mapping takes traditional journey mapping to a new level that helps you see what customers do and how their choices could be creating dissatisfaction for themselves. Recommended Actions There are a few ways to mitigate the consequences of this natural bias we all share. Here are our suggestions for combatting its effects in your customer experience: Be able to recognize Naïve Diversification Bias. It is essential to know what is when you see it. Identify where in your experience it occurs and the circumstances that surround that decision-making moment. Understand that customers change their minds. Knowing that regret is not an emotion that drives value for your bottom line, find ways to mitigate the effects of Naïve Diversification Bias in your experience whenever possible. We recommend discovering these moments by mapping customer behavior rather than process. Develop strategies to manage the potential negatives of the bias. To improve the experience for them, offer customers opportunities to remedy their wrong choices. Have a clear return policy or give them regular opportunities to re-evaluate their options in subscription services. Compress the time between choice and consumption. People make choices that create more satisfaction when the timeline between the decision and the time they use or consume the product is short. Whenever possible, it would be best to shorten this interval to facilitate customer satisfaction with their choices. Build filtered-diversification into your offer. When customers make decisions for future consumption, they want options. However, if you present too many choices, you can overwhelm customers. Therefore, we recommend offering a wide variety of products or services and a way to narrow down the field from which the customer can choose. This way, you offer enough choice to satisfy customers and prevent them from getting weighed down from too many options. 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.

I heard a new term that I think has the capability of being the next wave of change in business today. Customer Science. 'Customer Science' is the fusion between technology, behavioral science and data. This new concept is forming now, making this an exciting time for all us interested in customer-driven growth. This episode of The Intuitive Customer explores this nascent concept of Customer Science and what it could mean to organizations seeking customer-driven success. Key Takeaways Customer Science to me in the integration between a number of existing disciplines; Behavioral Science, Technology (AI) and Big data. It is about using science to understand Customers in a much deeper, meaningful way. We often say there is a big difference between what Customers say and what they do. Customer science gets under the skin of what the real motivators of human behavior are using data and technology to inform us. Here are a few more things you should know about Customer Science: Science is how we know things. Science can be defined as a rigorous identification and measurement of phenomena, leading to a systemic understanding which can then be explained by a causal link or theory. In other words, we know more after we use science than when we started. The definition of science helps us define Customer Science. Using the definition of science as a basis, you could define Customer Science as the rigorous identification of systems in customer experiences that help you create theories for customer behavior in future experiences. Companies don't use science on the customer side of the business. Few organizations employ a scientific approach to customer behavior, choosing instead to focus on a company's finance or operations. However, applying those same skills to the customer side could yield excellent results that mirror those achieved in the usual "scientific areas" for business. Customer Science is an idea whose time has come, much like the iPhone was. If you will recall, the technology for taking digital pictures, texting and calling, listening to music, and online shopping were all available to us before the iPhone. What Apple did was integrate all of these existing functions into one device and changed our fundamental understanding of what was possible with a handheld device. Customer Science could do the same with the customer experience and the psychological influences that exist as separate entities, combining them into a robust science that drives customer growth. Data will be the next competitive battleground for organizations. A key ingredient for scientific discovery is data. Collecting data about your customers' behavior is essential for organizations that want to analyze it for ways to identify strategies that encourage customer-driven growth. Recommended Actions You can do a few things to prepare for the use of Customer Science for your organization, including: Recognize that there is external pressure to change. The pandemic accelerated changes for all businesses over the past few months, including increased cloud computing use, digital transformations, and the impending rollout of 5G. All organizations have been changing the way they do things, leading to either good or bad outcomes. Use Customer Science to document how your efforts work or don't. Without science, you can't be sure what causes the needle to move in either direction. The rigor and measurement inherent to science can, and it will enable you to track how things changed. Also, A/B testing can help you see what works and, perhaps more importantly, what doesn't. Research to gather essential data for this effort. If you do not have the data you need to undertake science, research can help you get it. Our Emotional Signature Research® is an example of data gathering that can help you understand why your customers behave the way they do now and what you can do to change their future behavior. 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.

I have the box my iPhone came in. So do many of you, I would guess. Many people keep their iPhone boxes. We keep them for various reasons, and most of them boil down to because we like how they look. It turns out, customers care a lot about how things look, and it influences their buying (and box-keeping) behavior. This episode of The Intuitive Customer explores the research of Claudia Townsend, associate professor of marketing at the University of Miami at the Miami Herbert Business School. She discovered that how things look and how you display items affects how people think about them and, often, whether they will buy them. Key Takeaways There are a few things to remember about esthetics, per Professor Townsend. A deliberate focus on esthetics was once reserved for luxury items but not anymore. In the beginning, luxury brands were the most interested in creating outstanding esthetic design. It was for products that had met every other function and needed a differentiation from the competition. Today, however, the focus on elevated esthetics is universal. Esthetic preferences affect even hyper-rational buying decisions. We are aware that looks drive purchases like cars and clothes, but they also influence which companies stock we buy. In one of Professor Townsend's early papers, she analyzed stockholders' buying behavior after receiving an annual report. The research team learned that how many colors and images the firm used in the annual report affected investor behavior—and this behavior was the same even among experienced investors. The appreciation of esthetics is universal. We all have preferences, even if we don't know fashion or trends. Our appreciation is innate an unconscious. We don't do it consciously. We like what we like. The space between items in a display also affects our buying decisions. In another paper, Professor Townsend did with Julio Sevilla, their research suggested that the amount of space in a display affects the value we assign to objects. When items have a lot of space between them, we think they are more expensive than when they are close together. Professor Townsend says this innate judgment is hard to change. There are two things organizations should learn from this: Recommended Actions There are a few ways you can use this concept to manage your Customer Experience: Recognize that esthetics matter. Customers make buying decisions based on how things look, so your esthetic is a significant part of your Customer Experience. Design a deliberate appeal to your offerings. Consider all the details of your visual effects to appeal to a customer's preferences. Any investment you make here will be worth the money. Don't ignore this effect just because you offer an intangible. Esthetics still matter even when you present a service and maybe even matter more when there is no actual product to use for comparison. Customers will equate things like a clean, organized office with things like professionalism and skill. If a website is hard to use, they might think it isn't up-to-date with its technology. If you don't know what is vital to the esthetics of your design, find out. Researching to find out what matters to people can help you in your design efforts. Our Emotional Signature® research can help you discover your customers' underlying wants and needs to point you in the right direction with your visual appeal. 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.

Why What We Believe Is Sometimes Just Wrong! Many sports fans will tell you their team is the best. However, only one of the sports teams wins the championship and is definitively the best. Moreover, many organizations that never get close to the championship have fans who would say these teams are the best. For this last lot, the claim that their team is "the best" creates some serious conflict compared to reality. The sports fan situation I described is an example of Cognitive Dissonance. Cognitive Dissonance is a universal concept for the behavioral sciences that describes how we can hold a belief contrary to reality. Moreover, the idea explains why we feel uncomfortable when confronted with the facts and will often seek irrational ways to resolve them. This episode of The Intuitive Customer takes a deeper dive into the broad idea of Cognitive Dissonance and the many ways we try to resolve the discomfort it causes. Key Takeaways Cognitive Dissonance is everywhere. It is best to think of it as a behavioral science concept that is like a giant umbrella with many more specific forms of it that fall underneath. Here are a few things to remember about this essential concept: We all have contradictory beliefs that we hold to be true at the same time. Continuing with my sports fan example, I think the Luton Town Football Club is the best team in the English Football League. But, the truth is I know they are not. They are only in the second or Championship level of the four tiers of the league and probably should be playing in the third. Since the best teams play at the Premier level, which is a level up from Luton Town, they can't be "the best." Contradictory beliefs cause us discomfort. Having conflicting feelings bothers us. They create tension that we want to resolve by dropping one of them, but we can't. So, the pressure remains. We resolve the discomfort in different ways. Eventually, we will either change our beliefs to match our behavior or change our behavior to match our ideas. However, when we cannot do this, we resort to irrational methods of resolving the conflict, like finding ways to change our perception of the conflict (i.e., rationalizing our actions). Sometimes we minimize the conflict by making excuses for the behavior. Other times we change our recollection of the story to line up better in our heads with what we believe. Cognitive Dissonance happens at an organizational level, too. Sometimes the brand promise and the actual Customer Experience create the Cognitive Dissonance for customers, creating problems for your customer-facing team. They are left trying to reconcile reality with what the customer feels the marketing promised them. Recommended Actions Wanting to reduce the feelings of Cognitive Dissonance is universal. From a Customer Experience perspective, you want to help ease your customers' uncomfortable feelings about it. Here are a few suggestions on how to manage it in your experiences: Understand Cognitive Dissonance and how it makes people uncomfortable. Customers are often dealing with trying to resolve what they believe with reality, even as customers. When customers have these conflicting feelings, it can affect their behavior. Customer-facing employees should recognize when it is happening and be prepared to help manage them. Employ Cognitive Dissonance reduction strategies. It would be best to find ways to help customers feel less discomfort during their buying decisions. Giving your Customer-Facing team the tools they need to help manage customer emotions to a positive outcome is critical. For example, use humor to recognize the situation and ease the customer's tension. Another way could be to point out ways features or benefits that appeal to the customer's strongly-held belief that appears to them to conflict with the reality of your offer. Recognize that sometimes customers don't understand what they want. People can't always tell you what they want. It's up to you to dig deeper and discover what motivates their behavior. We have Emotional Signature® Research that takes into account the difference between what people say is important to them and what actually is. 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. When you choose to do business with a company, which do you prefer, Company A, that you trust, or Company B, that you don't? If you chose A, then you chose wisely—and you decided to like your customers would. People like to do business with people, brands, or organizations they trust. This episode of The Intuitive Customer shares our five new rules guaranteed to build trust. With trust, you can have the kind of relationship that yields the customer behavior you want to get the customer-driven growth you need. What Are The Five Rules? The five rules guaranteed to build trust are not complicated. Instead, the rules are simple, or at least simple to say. Doing them is a bit more complicated—but still not that hard. Here are the five rules: The 5 New Rules Guaranteed to Build Trust 1. Remember that trust is earned, not given. 2. Be authentic. 3. Be transparent. 4. Do what you say are going to do. 5. Be consistent. What Should You Do With Them? Remember that trust is earned and not given. If you think about it, none of us start off trusting people (in general), which is especially true with businesses. However, if you approach customers with a deliberate strategy with specific actions designed to build your credibility, you can earn people's trust and deepen your relationship with them. Be authentic. You can build trust when you are genuine with people. However, people still won't necessarily believe you are sincere. So, one way to show your authenticity is to offer a contract. Contracts can provide peace of mind that you mean what you say, and if you don't deliver, the customer has recourse. Contracts also help customers relax and let you do what you do without feeling the need to watch you or micromanage the project, which gives everyone a little more room to work. Be transparent. Along with authenticity, letting the customers know everything is another way to prove you are genuine. This policy includes lousy news. There is no point in hiding bad news; the customer will find out anyway, and it will be that much worse that they didn't find out from you. The same goes for mistakes; admitting them and trying to correct them goes a long way to prove that you are a trustworthy company or individual that customers can rely on. Furthermore, suppose you have a good standing with your customers, what Stephen Covey's book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People calls an emotional bank account, customers will usually forgive your mistake without losing trust. Do what you say you are going to do. Actions speak louder than words. So saying you are going to do something isn't enough; you have to do it. If you always do what you say you are going to do, people will learn to trust your words. Provide consistency. The continual delivery of customers' expectations leads to trust. Moreover, it makes a brand promise that can follow you all over the world. For example, people know when they go to a Hilton anywhere in the world, they will get roughly the same level of experience. Another example is being consistent about many of the little things in a Customer Experience. For example, when we choose a specialist for medical care, we don't always know if they are "good" at their job. However, we do know that the office appears organized, that they always listen when we talk and look us in the eye when they speak to us. While these little things do not tell us explicitly that they are good at what they do, they do indicate a level of trustworthiness that helps us move forward without as much stress about it. Don't forget all the little things when you are interacting with customers, because what seems like an irrelevant detail might have more impact on your relationship with customers than you might think. 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.

THIS is the Big Reason You Make Mistakes We make a lot of subjective decisions. Without the guide of "right" and "wrong" to direct us, we weigh the pros and cons and do the best we can. However, our brains can thwart our best efforts for an optimal outcome by focusing on the wrong things. Focalism is a concept that describes how our minds can overemphasize specific points of information over others, and often the wrong ones. Focalism is a reason we often make mistakes. This episode of The Intuitive Customer explores Focalism, why it happens, and what you can do to overcome this natural bias we all share. Key Takeaways There are a few things you should know about Focalism: Objects of Focalism in a Customer Experience tend to be notable, easy-to-remember moments that make for good stories. For instance, if you're evaluating your customer experience and someone was rude to you in a way that makes for a good story, you might overemphasize this moment in your whole evaluation of the experience. When it comes to overemphasizing the wrong things, the person making the decision is who puts the weights on those decisions. However, people are influenced by what's going on around them. For example, if your sales team emphasizes miles per gallon fuel efficiency for a car, then the customer might also. However, the customer could also react by exaggerating the importance of another feature in response. People are not as happy with decisions made using Focalism long-term. A study in the 1970s showed that student participants who justified why they chose a poster for their dorm room didn't keep it hanging as long as those students who chose the one they liked best without justification. We make the best decisions by integrating the information. One way of doing that is by allowing the Intuitive System (fast, automatic thinking) more time while the Rational System (slow, deliberate thinking) is distracted to process information. Recommended Actions We have a few recommended actions that you can use to manage Focalism in yourself and your customers: If you want to make the best decision as a customer, we recommend that you do something else before making it. Focus on something else for a while, and then come back to the decision and see if you have a different perspective. If you manage the experience for your organization, it would be best to look for these attributes that will become the overemphasized focuses of a customer's evaluation later and improve those aspects of the experience. These will be the easy-to-remember moments of an experience. We recommend that you have an A/B test regarding how changes to the experience affect your customer behavior. Have a control group carry on doing what you have always done and another group where you change something, whether it's a suggested or mandatory "waiting period" before they sign up with you or a distracting activity before you push for the close, or something in-between. Then, analyze the results to see which process or experience drove the most value for your customers and your bottom-line. Remember also that Customer Experience has many influences that affect the outcome. Focalism is one of many forces at work at any given moment, so solving it will not necessarily fix all your problems or drive all your success. This part is one of a much more complex system, and it is better to integrate all of that information than solve for the one piece. We recommend additional training on Customer Decision Making to help you identify and manage all the moving parts involved. 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.

Did you know that if you were to write a Customer Experience review on your mobile phone, it would be more emotional than if you did it on your computer? Did you also know you are more likely to tell me your email and or home address and your substance abuse history if I ask you on your mobile? You might be thinking that this can't be true. However, recent findings by Shiri Melumad, Assistant Professor of Marketing for the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania suggest that you would. It turns out that the technology we use to share information affects what we include in the content. Key Takeaways A few different reasons exist for this phenomenon, but what they have in common is they are related to how we feel and where we are when we feel it. Assistant Professor Melumad has a few different critical takeaways from her research for two published papers. We are more emotional in reviews on our phones than on our computers. There are a few reasons for this, which include: One of the critical drivers of more emotional reviews on the phone is the phone's size. The smaller screen and keyboard are more challenging to use, so people want to get to the point and write shorter reviews. The brevity enforced by the phone's size means that what content makes it in is often emotional. People who have experiences in the extreme are more likely to give a review. However, those who had an okay or satisfactory experience are less likely to provide a review. Another influence on the content of the review is temporal proximity. In other words, the closer you are to the experience, the more emotional it is. After you get home, your emotions settle a bit, and your content output reflects that. People are more likely to write a positive review than a negative one on their smartphone-generated content. This slant is the result of our self-presentational concerns. In other words, we don't want to come across as a negative person. The emotional reviews written on mobile phones are more compelling to readers than those written on a computer. Boundary conditions exist for this emotionality. A review of a refrigerator may not be as emotional as your written response to a current events story. There is always a context to your emotional evaluation that might make some information more pertinent in some instances than others. Professor Melumad says there are two important points about these boundary conditions, which include: People are more likely to disclose personal information on their phones than their computers. Everything from their current home address to bankruptcy history found its way into inboxes from mobile phones, per Assistant Professor Melumad. Have the phones with us all the time because they are small when compared to a computer Rely on the phone to help us stay in touch wherever, whenever Use the phone to maintain our closest relationships We really love our phones. Our intense psychological relationship with our phones as a comfort device because we: Using your phone in public leads to Attentional Blindness, which describes how we are so absorbed in our activity, we are unaware of what is going on around us. Assistant Professor Melumad says Attentional Blindness occurs because our cognitive resources are concentrating on using the smartphone, leaving little room for other activity. Recommended Actions There are a few ways to apply this information on behalf of your organization, which include: Realize that mobile phones can help with critical health-related disclosures. Assistant Professor Melumad says this phenomenon would be helpful in contact tracing for COVID-19. People would be more likely to use the app on their mobile. The same concept applies to gather medical information at a doctor's appointment. People might be more forthcoming with personal medical information via the smartphone than they are with other methods. Focus on smartphone-generated content for persuasive reviews. Study participants found the emotional content more compelling than other reviews. Also, it would be best to data-mine the survey to get more candid feedback on your experience since people tend to be more accurate about their wants and needs through their mobile devices. Remember that little things have big effects on customer behavior. Professor Melumad's research reinforces our long-held belief that little things mean a lot in your experience. Figure out what you want to get out of your customer reviews, and use it to target customers appropriately for their smartphone-generated content. 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.

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.