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

How AI will Change CX for the Future Customer loyalty is what most businesses want. The more your customers buy from you, the more you improve your bottom line, not only in increased sales but also in decreased customer acquisition costs. Improving your Customer Experience to foster customer loyalty is often an expense that senior management can get behind. However, there is a common misconception that customers are loyal to you based on the Customer Experience you deliver. The truth is that customer loyalty is based on memory. In other words, customers are loyal to you based on the customer experience they remember you deliver. How memory works is a fascinating thing. There are experiences, thoughts and feelings, and facts and ideas that all mix to comprise them. Also, there are associated memories that connect, some more closely than others. Furthermore, other people’s memories can mix in there too and connect to the personal memories a customer has of your brand. We often compare memory to a fishing net, where each knot of the net represents a memory. If you imagine picking a net up off the floor by a knot, you can picture how all the related knots in the net rise with it. You are holding the one knot, but all the other knots are there dangling close by, too. Artificial intelligence (AI) has some exciting capabilities to create these fishing nets on behalf of your customers. It can analyze past customer behavior to predict their future actions. It can make connections between experiences based on the data it explains. Then, once it has constructed the virtual fishing net, it can tell you what knot the customer wants to make next. But will AI get it right or wrong? This episode of The Intuitive Customer explores the relationship between customer loyalty and the future applications of AI in Customer Experience strategy. We take a look at the complicated way memories associate to influence our behavior. We also look at how AI can mimic this process and use the results to predict customer behavior. Finally, we discuss what you can do to prepare for this technology and how you can use it to personalize a Customer Experience that gives that individual customers what they really want next.   The Intuitive Customer podcasts help you take your Customer Experience to the next level by unlocking the “hidden” aspects of your experience and determining what really drives value for your customers.   To find out more about how your organization’s marketing can improve customer loyalty and retention, contact us at www.beyondphilosophy.com. To subscribe to The Intuitive Customer and never miss a podcast, please click here. This podcast is produced by Resonate Recordings. Click here to see how they can help you.   

1 in 4 Will Lose Their Job in 2020 At the end of 2019, global research firm Forrester predicted that 1 in 4 Customer Experience jobs will be cut in 2020. While we find this prediction grim, we do not disagree. We believe that this reality has been on the horizon for some time now.   There are many reasons why it has come to this point. One of the most significant is a misconception about what Customer Experience is and how it affects the bottom line.   Customer Experience requires an investment in time and resources. It should be no surprise that businesses expect to see a return on investment. When Customer Experience programs lack proper measurement of their results, how can senior management justify their expense?   Another reason Customer Experience as a concept is under fire is because many organizations do not understand what it requires to improve it. They underestimate the importance of tackling the more significant causes of dissatisfaction in favor of smaller (and easier) changes. However, these less significant areas will not produce the results needed to justify the programs moving forward.   I began working in Customer Experience nearly twenty years ago. I was into Customer Experience before it was a corporate term bandied about by consultants and marketing conferences. I have seen it rise into the spotlight and saw the bandwagons roll by, crowded with the latest organizations that decided they should embrace the idea of Customer Experience because “well, everyone else is.”   Unfortunately, many organizations don’t understand how to improve the Customer Experience. One thing I have learned over the years is that Customer Experience is, in many ways, a mindset. Once you have it, you realize how it works and how it is integral to everything that happens at an organization, not the least of which is customer-driven growth for your bottom line.   Many things come together to create success for the concept of customer-driven growth. It is essential to understand what drives value for your organizations and design ways for you to engage customers and promote that value to them. Perhaps most importantly, you need to measure your results, if for no other reason than to prove it works to people who do not share your mindset of putting the customer at the center of everything you do.   In this episode of The Intuitive Customer, we explore the ways that Customer Experience professionals can be a part of the 75 percent that keep their jobs and what they can do to facilitate an environment that nurtures customer-driven growth.     The Intuitive Customer podcasts help you take your Customer Experience to the next level by unlocking the “hidden” aspects of your experience and determining what really drives value for your customers.  To find out more about how your organization’s marketing can improve customer loyalty and retention, contact us at www.beyondphilosophy.com. To subscribe to The Intuitive Customer and never miss a podcast, please click here. This podcast is produced by Resonate Recordings. Click here to see how they can help you.

If I asked you for $100, what would you say? My guess is no. You probably have a rule against giving people money just because they asked you.  But what if I asked you for $1? Most of us would probably be okay with that. Sure, it’s still giving money, but it’s only $1, and that isn’t the same thing. However, by saying yes to giving me $1, you broke your rule about giving people money just because they asked you. It’s not a big deal, of course, but it does make it more likely that if I came back and asked for $5, $10, or $20, that you would give it to me. Moreover, if you discovered that you didn’t mind giving me money, you might say yes the next time I ask for $100.  There is a name for this method of getting people to do what you want. In psychology, it’s called the Escalation of Commitment. In laymen’s terms, it’s called “in for a penny, in for a pound.” We refer to it as making it easy for your customers to say yes.  Escalation of commitment works on more than just money. It also works for time, like volunteering, or effort, like getting someone to work harder or run farther. The idea is you make it easy for someone to say yes to you over something small and then slowly increase the amount of whatever resource you want from them over time.  In this episode of The Intuitive Customer, we explore how Escalation of Commitment works and applies to Customer Experience. We also explain how you can use it to segment your customers to give you an idea of where they are on the commitment spectrum with you. Finally, we caution you on what not to do when getting your customers to yes to avoid creating negative feelings toward your brand and organization.    The Intuitive Customer podcasts help you take your Customer Experience to the next level by unlocking the “hidden” aspects of your experience and determining what really drives value for your customers. To find out more about how your organization’s marketing can improve customer loyalty and retention, contact us at www.beyondphilosophy.com. To subscribe to The Intuitive Customer and never miss a podcast, please click here.

How to Ensure You Make Good Decisions   I am an Apple Superfan. As a loyal customer, I notice all the positive moments in my Customer Experience with them. They reinforce that my brand is the best and buying from them was a good decision.   Moreover, if I ever see an article that is negative about Apple, or positive about a competitor of Apple, I don’t believe it or, worse, don’t read it. I don’t trust that it will be accurate, useful, or trustworthy to listen to that garbage.   My customer behavior here is indicative of Confirmation Bias. The psychological concept describes how people hold tightly to their beliefs and seek out support for what they “know” to be true. It also says that people will resist or ignore information that is contrary to their viewpoint. Moreover, if we do get information that is contrary to our view, we will interpret it in a way that supports our opinion.   Confirmation Bias is why we think that when our team loses, it is because the referees made bad calls, not our beloved team’s performance.   Confirmation Bias is why people with one type of political view watch one new network, and people with the opposing view watch the other one.   Confirmation Bias is why people worked on the three presidential campaigns of US Politician Ralph Nader, even though he did not have support from either Democrats or Republicans and absolutely no chance to win the election.   Everyone is affected by Confirmation Bias. We all have beliefs that, when challenged, trigger our defenses to protect what we know deep down in our hearts to be true by denying the other point of view’s validity. Because we all have it, overcoming Confirmation Bias is challenging and, in some ways, emotionally draining and existentially exhausting.   This episode of The Intuitive Customer explores Confirmation Bias and how it affects our decision-making as humans. We also take a look at how you can overcome your Confirmation Bias to make decisions that improve your Customer Experience, your Work Experience, and your organization’s bottom line.     The Intuitive Customer podcasts help you take your Customer Experience to the next level by unlocking the “hidden” aspects of your experience and determining what really drives value for your customers.   To find out more about how your organization’s marketing can improve customer loyalty and retention, contact us at www.beyondphilosophy.com.   To subscribe to The Intuitive Customer and never miss a podcast, please click here.    

The Biggest Thing We Learned in 2019 If there is one thing we have learned in 2019, it is that customers give us a lot to think about regarding their behavior. How they behave and why are fascinating topics and one that has much influence on our Customer Experience outcomes. As we embark on a new year and a new decade, it is an excellent time to reflect on what we have learned and what made the most significant impact on us regarding customer retention and loyalty.  For example, one concept about Customer Experience that has gradually proven to me to be essential to customer loyalty is the whole area of customer memory. This year, as in years past, we talked a lot about how the customer’s memory of experience forms. From Nobel-prize winning economist professor Daniel Kahneman, memories follow the Peak-End rule. His rule tells us that what customers remember most about an experience is the point when they felt the most emotion (the peak) and how they felt at the end of it. However, this year, I also learned how memories are connected, like a fishing net. We may consciously remember one thing about an experience, but also our subconscious memories attach to that conscious memory. If you picture the conscious memory as one of the lines in a fishing net that you grab with your fingers, the subconscious memories are all the lines of the net that you draw up with it, connected and continuous. The image of it fascinates me because it illustrates how influential and essential memories are in Customer Experience management at a conscious and subconscious level.  This concept is my favorite because we know that people don’t choose your experience based on the one you gave them. They choose it based on the one they remember you gave them. The Peak-End Rule, in this case, has significant implications on how you manage your Customer Experience. The Peak-End rule and the essential nature of customer memory is an example of how the lessons we learn and embrace can change the trajectory of our actions moving forward.    Among other things, this episode of The Intuitive Customer is a year in review, a chance to take stock of what we know now about the reasons that customers do what they do in your experience. Understanding customer behavior and the drivers behind it can help you take your Customer Experience and the results you get from it to the next level in the new year and the new decade.    The Intuitive Customer podcasts help you take your Customer Experience to the next level by unlocking the “hidden” aspects of your experience and determining what really drives value for your customers. To find out more about how your organization’s marketing can improve customer loyalty and retention, contact us at www.beyondphilosophy.com. To subscribe to The Intuitive Customer and never miss a podcast, please click here.

What is Important in 2020? Yogi Berra, the New York Yankees Coach once said, “Predictions are hard, especially about the future.” Predictions can be difficult; it is true. However, they can also be helpful, especially if you are trying to plan for a new year. I have been in the Customer Experience industry since before there was such a thing. When I founded Beyond Philosophy back in 2002, no one was talking about Customer Experience. Then, things changed, and over the next decade, it changed from no one talking about Customer Experience to everyone talking about it. A few years into it, bandwagons formed. Soon after that, people that had no idea about the depth and breadth of the concept of Customer Experience were jumping on it, touting the importance of minding the Customer Experience to anyone who would listen. However, they kept trying the same things they were doing before they heard of Customer Experience and were getting the same results. Looking a new year and a new decade is a time for reflection for me. I have been working in Customer Experience for nearly 20 years now. Bandwagon riders notwithstanding, I am enheartened by the way the broader business world has embraced the importance of putting the customer at the center of everything you do, even if they don’t always understand what the term means. However, we are also at a point where Customer Experience is a concept that has had a fair chance to prove its worth. The results we expected should be appearing in organizations that have taken the idea and applied it to their business model. It is reasonable to expect for the time, energy, and resources to show a return on investment, whether in customer loyalty, customer retention, or even just cold hard cash. So, will we? Like it is for many of these questions, the answer is it depends. On this episode of The Intuitive Customer, I further explain my answer and share my predictions about the fate of Customer Experience. We will look at what led to our current situation and what will carry us onward in the coming year.   The Intuitive Customer podcasts help you take your Customer Experience to the next level by unlocking the “hidden” aspects of your experience and determining what really drives value for your customers. To find out more about how your organization’s marketing can improve customer loyalty and retention, contact us at www.beyondphilosophy.com. To subscribe to The Intuitive Customer and never miss a podcast, please click here.

Why the Strength of Customer’s Emotion is Critical  Customers’ emotions are a critical part of Customer Experience. Our research shows that over 50 percent of a Customer Experience is about customer emotions. Furthermore, we know that emotion drives customer behavior. Having awareness of what emotions your experience evokes when and why is critical to your Customer Experience Outcome.   However, did you know that in addition to being aware of the what, when, and why of customer emotions, you should also know how much intensity they feel them with at any given moment? If not, don’t worry; you are not alone. Many organizations do not pay any attention to the intensity of customer emotions and then wonder why things happen the way they do in their other metrics like sales growth and profitability. The amount of any emotion that a person feels affects many things about Customer Experience. The most important one is how their memory of it forms. According to Nobel-Prize winning economist Professor Daniel Kahneman’s Peak-End Rule, what we remember about an experience is our most intense emotion and how we felt at the end. So, you might be thinking, who cares about their memory of the experience? The fact is you should because people do not choose to come back to you based on their experience; they return based on what they remember about your experience. If they remember how intensely disappointed they were with their experience how likely will they be to buy more from you? For all these reasons, we believe that it is essential that your customer-facing employees can not only recognize the emotion a customer feels, but they should also know how intensely they are feeling it. This episode of The Intuitive Customer explores all the reasons that the strength of customer’s emotions are critical and what effects it has on the Customer Experience. It turns out, the what, when, and why are incomplete until you know the how much, too.   The Intuitive Customer podcasts help you take your Customer Experience to the next level by unlocking the “hidden” aspects of your experience and determining what really drives value for your customers. To find out more about how your organization’s marketing can improve customer loyalty and retention, contact us at www.beyondphilosophy.com. To subscribe to The Intuitive Customer and never miss a podcast, please click here.

Does Giving Gifts Mean More Business? It is the season of giving. No doubt, many of you sent out your gifts to your clients, suppliers, and other business associates already. But will your gifts result in more business? They might, and they might not. Like most things about interpersonal relationships, it depends on a lot of different variables. Researchers study gift giving and have for many years. In the beginning, it was considered a Sociology area, which suggested that gift-giving was primarily an exercise in reciprocity. The idea behind gift-giving was that recipients should return the favor. Because of this fundamental concept, gift-giving became a way to move a relationship forward with someone. Today, research has changed regarding gift-giving. While there is still the fundamental idea of reciprocity at work, there are also new agendas observed in the gift-giving area. One of the essential variables in gift-giving success is the alignment between the giver and receiver. Both parties must be in sync as far as relationship status, agendas, reciprocity, and value. Ironically, this variable is often the one that isn’t, forgive the pun, present. Research on gift-giving shows that misalignment is the norm for when gift-giving goes wrong, and usually, it has to do with agendas. Now, many of you might think, agendas? Besides being nice, is there any other agenda behind gift-giving? It turns out that there is more going on with gifts than you might have thought. Many different agendas exist with gift-giving, and they may or may not help you win more business. This episode of The Intuitive Customer explores all the agendas and misfires on gift-giving and what you can do to optimize them. Guest host Marketing, Professor Morgan Ward from Emory University, shares her insight on gift-giving and what makes it go wrong. Moreover, we talk about what kinds of gifts are best for deepening a relationship and what you can do to become a better gift-giver for business and beyond.   The Intuitive Customer podcasts help you take your Customer Experience to the next level by unlocking the “hidden” aspects of your experience and determining what really drives value for your customers. To find out more about how your organization’s marketing can improve customer loyalty and retention, contact us at www.beyondphilosophy.com. To subscribe to The Intuitive Customer and never miss a podcast, please click here.

Psychology has a lot of influence on customer behavior. When it comes to making decisions, we like to find ways to make them more manageable. Anchoring and Adjustment is a mental short cut or heuristic. We use to help evaluate numbers.  Anchoring and Adjustment help us generate numbers. It works like this: First, there is a base number established either by the individual or an outside influence. Then, you adjust up or down from there. It helps simplify decision making.  For example, if you needed to estimate the height of a tree, it can be hard to come up with an estimate just by looking at it. But if there is a building next to it, and you know how many stories the building has, you can use the approximate building height to determine the baseline. Then, adjust the height of the tree up or down from the baseline as appropriate.  Retailers you Anchoring and Adjustment, too. Neiman Marcus, the luxury retailer, does it in its annual holiday catalog. The “Fantasy Gifts” featured in the opening spread and their sky-high prices make the rest of their high-priced items look like a relative bargain.  However, it isn’t just the upscale retailers who use this psychological phenomenon. Warehouse stores do it, too, by putting their most expensive items right at the entrance of their retail locations. If you see a $3,000 TV upon arrival, won’t the 30-pound jar of pickles seem to be a steal at $50? This episode of the Intuitive Customer explores Anchoring and Adjustment and the influence it exerts on customer behavior. We also reveal how you can follow the lead of retailers of all types to benefit your Customer Experience strategy, as well as your bottom line.   Anchoring and Adjustment is a specific heuristic used to generate numbers; The Intuitive Customer podcasts help you take your Customer Experience to the next level by unlocking the “hidden” aspects of your experience and determining what really drives value for your customers. To find out more about how your organization’s marketing can improve customer loyalty and retention, contact us at www.beyondphilosophy.com. To subscribe to The Intuitive Customer and never miss a podcast, please click here.

The 7 Telltale Signs of a Company NOT Committed to Customers I discovered many years ago that I could determine whether a company was committed to customers pretty quickly. When I thought about how I recognized it, I found that organizations that did not commit to customers had some shared company culture cues that indicated where their focus was. The ideas behind this discovery later became my second book, Revolutionize Your Customer Experience. I developed for the book my Native to Natural™ model, which measures how customer-centric a company culture is. There are four types of companies arranged on a spectrum. It starts with Naïve, which are the least customer-focused companies and are unaware of it. Next come the Transactional and Enlightened stages, which are firms that now recognize the problem and are consciously working to change their behavior to have a customer-focus. Finally, there are Natural organizations, which are the most customer-focused companies that put the customer at the center of everything they do without thinking about it. In our global Customer Experience consultancy, we use the Naïve to Natural model to help organizations realize where they are with their present Customer Experience regarding Customer Centricity. It also helps them see areas where they need to improve to get where they want to go. This exercise requires self-analysis and answering critical questions about the priority placed on Customer Experience. Few companies, if any, would want to be known for not committing to customers. If you asked most senior management a question like, “True or False: The customer should be at the center of everything you do?”, few of them would say false. Therefore, our questions ask about day to day operations and decisions, which are where the rubber meets the road concerning customer focus. This episode of The Intuitive Customer podcast shares the seven questions that get an organization started at determining whether they have the customer focus that they want to compete in today’s crowded and cutthroat business landscape. The answers to these questions reveal the telltale signs of a company that is or, perhaps more importantly, isn’t committed to the customer.   The Intuitive Customer podcasts help you take your Customer Experience to the next level by unlocking the “hidden” aspects of your experience and determining what really drives value for your customers. To find out more about how your organization’s marketing can improve customer loyalty and retention, contact us at www.beyondphilosophy.com. To subscribe to The Intuitive Customer and never miss a podcast, please click here.