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

What is Really Happening on Black Friday? It’s that time of year again: Black Friday sales are next week. A US tradition, Black Friday was named for the idea that it is the day retailers finally move out of the red for the year and into the black of profits. It is also the official kickoff of the holiday shopping season. However, what is really going on here? Why do people trample through the doors of a retailer they likely frequent three times a week most months mere hours after polishing off far too much food than is healthy for them? How to marketers compel people to stand in the dark and cold for hours to shop in their stores? Black Friday is the way it is because of the psychological concept called Scarcity. Scarcity is a motivator like none other for customer behavior—specifically their buying behavior. Scarcity stems from the idea that resources we think are harder to come by are more valuable. In the distant past, our ancestors did not have access to the jumbo pack of Cheetos at their friendly big-box retailer. Instead, they had to compete for food, water, and shelter with other humans. For them, overcoming Scarcity was a matter of survival. No one could argue that buying a discounted giant flat-screen TV for pennies on the dollar one Friday morning in November is a survival instinct. However, the motivations behind our behavior have the same origins. We try harder when something is hard to get. What’s an elbow in the face of your fellow shopper when you are talking about 4k Ultra HD Now, Black Friday is next week in the US, but it is not the only time we see this behavior or even the only country where it happens. The idea of a day of big sales that bring out the animal in us is global. Similar events occur in the UK (the January Sales), and China (Single’s Day). Even other sales in the US can create a frenzy, like Presidents’ Day sales or Labor Day “Events.” In this episode of The Intuitive Customer, we explore the concept of Scarcity and how it affects customer behavior, both good and bad. We also talk about how marketers create the idea of scarcity in the minds of consumers, and the effect it can have on Customer Experience and their 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.

Marketing Yourself We usually talk about how you should use the principles of brand management to deliver excellent Customer Experience. However, brand management is an essential part of your job search, as well. In other words, marketing your Customer Experience has given you everything you need to know about selling yourself. Moreover, it has taught you all you need to know about improving your experience as a person. For example, one of the first things you do in a job search is to determine what position you want. In brand management, we call this a positioning statement. In a job search, we call it, well, a positioning statement. You need a firm positioning statement to ensure that you get a job you want as the next step of your career. Positioning statements are usually followed by building your brand. In brand management, it means that you begin a process that delivers a consistent experience, which creates a reputation for your product or service. In a job search, you have similar needs for a steady reputation. Your reputation becomes your brand, and hiring managers need to choose yours over the competitions’. It turns out, each of the steps and their related support work as you continue along the process of brand management align with what each of us needs to do with our career and current job search. It could be that everything you need to know about marketing yourself you already know from your experience marketing Customer Experiences. In this episode of The Intuitive Customer, we delve into all the things you should do to manage your personal brand in a job search. From marketing yourself to managing the needs of the hiring manager to making strategic moves that serve your long-term goals, you will discover that getting the job you want is a lot like what you want to do at the job once you get it.   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.

Tribalism: Are You In with The In-Crowd? As humans, the need to belong is essential to us. Most of us have a deep need to feel we are part of a broader community that shares our values and interests. In other words, we need to find our tribe.  Tribes are connections between people that form communities, which can be formal or informal. Sometimes tribes are associated with where you were born and from whom, which are the formal types of tribes. However, they can also be the result of where you shop, what you drive, or which device you prefer to watch your cat videos on. The latter is the informal type—and a significant asset to your marketing strategy.  Some brands have been very successful in fostering tribes. As you may know, I love Apple products. I was in Apple the other day, and I had a sense that it was more like a club than a store. As I surveyed the group, I felt like I was with “my people.”  Now, I didn’t know the other people there. It could be that the only thing I had in common with every other person in that store was that I like Apple products. However, that is enough for me to feel like I am part of the group, the In-Crowd, as it were. Also, that feeling of belonging ramps up the Customer Loyalty. The emotional bond you have with your Tribe that is associated with your sense of self makes you feel emotional toward the brand. The connections that form as a result of these feelings form a foundation on which you can build a strong sense of Customer Loyalty with your product or service. When your brand forms a community amongst your customers, you are also creating a tribe. However, it is almost as essential to have people that are not in your tribe to help your tribe thrive. In some ways, having outsiders makes you feel closer as a group.  In this episode of The Intuitive Customer, we discuss what a tribe is, how they can form, and how you can foster one with your brand. You may discover that the community your customers share does a lot of the hard work for marketing your brand and Customer Experience.    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.

People know an expensive brand when they see one. They also can spot a discount retailer at fifteen paces. So, why do they get it wrong so often? They get it wrong because of a concept called Price Image. Price Image is a concept that describes how people form impressions about whether your brand is high- or low-priced based on many non-price indicators. These ideas have a lot of influence on customer behavior. However, the Price Image is different from actual prices. Instead, Price Image is more like your reputation for prices; it would be how your customers describe your prices when you are not around. Another way to look at it is Price Image is where your price and brand intersect. To demonstrate what we mean consider the following: Will an Apple product be the most affordable version on the market? Do you think the airline ticket will be the most expensive one if you buy it from Southwest Airlines? Is Wal-Mart a high-end boutique? As you can see, each brand has a reputation, and none of these questions agrees with it. It is their Price Image, which these brands have carefully cultivated through their Customer Experience choices. However, you don’t have to be careful about it. The Price Image is a product of the details included in your Customer Experience, and they tell customers everything about your prices long before they ever see a price tag. In other words, every brand has a Price Image, whether you were deliberate about what it is or not. So, how is it that people form these impressions? Price Image is the result of two things, the prices themselves and lots of what we call “non-price” information. If you focus on your pricing, you can manage at least part of your Price Image. However, the significant influence is non-price influences. Appearance, atmosphere, employee type, and other environmental factors create these customer perceptions. Unfortunately, a brand’s Price Image is not always correct. Also, it can be challenging to change an established Price Image and tricky to navigate when you try to make the transition. This episode of The Intuitive Customer takes a deep dive into the idea of Price Image and how customers form them about your brand. We discuss what signals you send through your Customer Experience that affect your customers’ perception of price and what you should consider if you want to change that impression one way or the other.   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.

Are We Talking Ourselves Into a Recession You hear it all the time on financial media. “Consumer Confidence is low.” It describes how people think that something terrible is going to happen to the economy, and it affects their spending behavior. Confidence is a feeling, not a fact or a physical item. However, this emotional reaction has serious implications on the economy, as well as your bottom line. Not only is consumer confidence an emotional concept, but it is also contagious. Sometimes having it makes other people have it, too. Other times not having it makes people lose theirs also. So, does that mean when we hear things like, “consumer confidence is low,” and the “stock market was down XX points today,” that we are talking ourselves into a recession? Recessions are an economic reality. They occur when the economy is out of balance in some way or operating inefficiently with its resources. In many ways, recessions get an economy back on track. So, in some ways, we should be grateful for a downturn. However, if you are one of the people caught in an economic correction and lose your job or your livelihood, you likely have a different opinion of it. There are objective or physical forces that can affect whether a recession occurs. For example, natural disasters can disrupt the flow of goods, whether it’s a Hurricane that stops logistics or a drought that kills crops. Also, human-made disasters like wars can affect the economy, too. However, there are also subjective forces that affect the likelihood of a recession. Studies have shown that things like the weather or the win or loss of the British National Soccer Team in the playoffs can affect how the stock market performs. And, yes, things like consumer confidence. This episode of The Intuitive Customer explores how much influence our emotions have on things like the stock market or the economy. We also talk about how confidence—or the loss of it—can be contagious and wreak havoc on both our business and personal bottom line. Finally, we use what we have learned through past recessions to strategize for you to come out ahead of the competition on the other side if we do have a recession.    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.

Unless you serve robots exclusively, your customers are humans. Human feelings influence our actions and drive customer behavior. Therefore, you must design a Customer Experience that makes your customers feel a way that drives value for your organization. In our global Customer Experience consultancy, we have said for nearly 20 years that customer’s emotions account for over half of the outcome in any Customer Experience. At first, people thought we were crazy, but now, many organizations understand the significance of emotions in their Customer Experiences. However, too many organizations do not get specific enough about customer emotions. They are content with determining whether the customers feel positive or negative about their experience or whether the customer’s assessment was good or bad. In our Customer Experience consultancy, we feel like this general approach is not taking customer emotions far enough. We recommend choosing an emotional outcome that is specific and then designing a Customer Experience that has actions built into it to evoke those emotions. In other words, we don’t want the customer to feel “satisfied” with their experience; we want them to feel “cared for” and “valued.” Some organizations have embraced this concept, too. They have designed experiences that evoke feeling cared for and valued from their customers. However, they don’t measure success in this area. Instead, they continue to monitor their operational efficiencies, margin percentages, and sales growth in their measurements. It is a mistake not to measure your success in evoking the proper customer emotions. After all, you wouldn’t tell one of your managers to design a program to achieve a goal and then never keep track of whether it works. That is ridiculous. Only a fool wouldn’t measure their results. However, this emotional perspective to measurement can be challenging for many organizations. Measuring success in a psychological strategy can seem strange and unachievable. Many firms do not know where to begin. That’s where we can help. This episode of The Intuitive Customer explores The Secrets of Measuring Customer Emotions. We review the four essential steps to emphasizing customer emotions as an outcome in your Customer Experience design strategy. Then, we determine how you can measure your success afterward with practical, real-world tactics.   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.

Understanding Customer Habits: A Practical Guide Habits can be excellent or terrible for your Customer Experience. When it is the customer’s habit to buy from you, then there is not a problem. However, when it goes the other way, well, let’s just say some habits are meant to be broken. Understanding what habits are and how they work is vital to your Customer Experience. When you understand customers’ habits, how they form and how they are governed by the mind, you have a much better chance of making those crucial changes in customer behavior to become their habitual brand. So, what are habits? Habits are automatic behavior for a repetitive action that is triggered by a cue. Maybe the cue is a time of day or an activity. Perhaps it is the aisle at the grocery store where customers do most of their shopping. The important thing about triggers or cues is that you must disrupt them somehow to interrupt the automatic response that will follow.  When discussing habits, we talk a lot about the two systems of thinking that we all share. Originally conceived of by Nobel-Prize-winning economist Professor Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking Fast and Slow, there are two systems we use in our thinking. Kahneman called them System One and System Two. System One is fast and emotional thinking and it is always running in the background ready to jump in when needed for making decisions. System Two is slow and deliberate thinking that is used for logic and reasoning. It is not always running, however. Instead, System Two is resting a lot of the time. We used the two systems of thinking in our own book The Intuitive Customer. We called System One the Intuitive System and System Two the Rational System. As it turns out, System One or the Intuitive System is the part of our thinking that handles habits. That means if you want to change behavior you need to appeal to the quick and automatic thinking of the Intuitive System. This episode of The Intuitive Customer takes a deeper dive into habits and how they work in our brains. We also share a practical guide on how we can use the way habits work—and the system of thinking that governs them—to change them for the better.   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 the Secret of Airbnb? I would never be an Airbnb host. Having a stranger staying in my house doesn’t fit with my personality.  That said, there are a lot of people that would do it. Airbnb has over seven million listings in 100,000 cities worldwide and reported revenues of $1 Billion (with a b) in the second quarter of this year. They are so successful; they have plans to become publicly traded in 2020.   That’s saying quite a bit considering that the entire home-sharing platform developed from people’s willingness to allow strangers to stay in their house. But it works.  I might not host for Airbnb, but I do use them. One of the things I enjoy about the experience is that you stay in a place you wouldn’t usually visit.  Having spent my fair share of time in hotels, I am a bit of an expert in that experience. My Airbnb experience is different in a refreshing way.  I began to wonder what the secret to their success was. To find out, we spoke with Joseph Michelli, Ph.D., C.P.S., about his experience with Airbnb when writing his latest book, The Airbnb Way. Dr. Michelli is considered a global guru for Customer Service. He works with organizations and leadership to change their experience to be better for both their customers and their employees. He consulted Airbnb and wrote his book to share the insights he gained from their success.  Dr. Michelli says that there are many things that Airbnb gets right. One of them is that they understand what makes them unique and how they can differentiate themselves from the competition. They also recognize that the emotional connection they can create with guests is what brings their users back again and again. They also see that the Airbnb user and host is a type of community and belonging to it is one of the things that both sides of the equation value.  This episode of The Intuitive Customer explores what Dr. Michelli saw in Airbnb’s business model and approach to employee and customer experience that makes them so successful and disruptive to the hospitality industry. He also explains how technology played a role in changing customer behavior, which paved the way for their success. Also, he shares how they accomplish their branded and elevated Customer Experience across properties, host styles, and cultures around the world. We also discuss how you can apply these concepts to elevate and brand your experience to your business as well.    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. 

A practical guide to Customer decision making When the Nobel-prize winning economist professor Daniel Kahneman wrote his book Thinking Fast and Slow, he introduced the concept that we had two ways of thinking about things. He named them System 1 and System 2. The two systems work together to help us make decisions about things.  When we applied these concepts to decision-making in Customer Experience for our book, The Intuitive Customer, we renamed them. The Intuitive System is System 1, and the Rational System is System 2. The Intuitive System makes instant judgments on things and is always running. You aren’t aware you are using the Intuitive System. The Rational System concentrates on thinking about something and is called into service when needed. You are always aware you are using your Rational System. We discuss the differences between the two ways our brains think about things to make decisions a lot. Often, they don’t agree and come to different conclusions. However, the two systems do not always conflict. Sometimes they run in tandem, serving different functions and complementing one another with their strengths. Sometimes only one of them is working at any given time. Flying solo, the system in play will make the final decision, and the other one won’t interfere. In other words, the two systems are not exclusive. It is complicated how the two systems work together. Understanding the two as well as you can helps you see patterns in customer behavior. Moreover, knowing how the two systems work can help you design a Customer Experience strategy that works with these patterns to make it as easy as possible for customers to decide to go with you. This episode of The Intuitive Customer discusses what the two systems of thinking are and how they interact in our minds when making decisions. We discuss which system is better for what and why the two systems tradeoff tasks. We also give pointers on what you should do with your Customer Experience strategy to take advantage of these tradeoffs, as well as what pitfalls you should avoid when working with this crucial customer behavior concept.   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.

Case Study: RICOH Printers (Canada)  I spend a remarkable amount of time complaining about how organizations get things wrong with Customer Experience. However, not every cause is lost. Some companies get their Customer Experience right, and we can all learn a lot from their journey. In our global Customer Experience consultancy, we have the honor of working with fantastic organizations that are committed to doing the difficult work of improving their Customer Experience from the inside out. One of these companies is RICOH Canada. Years ago, they were facing enormous changes in what can only be described as a declining industry. Moreover, there were few differentiations between the product from the top tier firms from a hardware standpoint. As a result, the printer business was heavily commoditized and highly cutthroat. RICOH Canada decided the only way forward in an aggressive industry with little competitive differentiation was in the Customer Experience. They embarked on a Customer Experience Journey that they are still on today—and with great success. They increased their Net Promoter Score®[i] (NPS) by 34 points over 30 months. Furthermore, in a declining market, they enjoyed a ten percent increase in sales. Since that time, they have climbed another 15 points to an all-time high. A question I always get in my global Customer Experience consultancy is whether business-to-business customers are subject to the same emotional decisions that we have as consumers. The answer is a resounding yes. One thing RICOH Canada understood early was that by enhancing that emotional connection with their business customers, they not only improved their relationship, but they also improved their customer retention and loyalty.  This episode of The Intuitive Customer is the story of how RICOH Canada did it. We spoke with the President and CEO of RICOH Canada, Glenn Laverty to hear how and why they did it. Plus, we will hear about the new challenges they face and what they are doing to address them.   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.   [1] Net Promoter, Net Promoter System, Net Promoter Score, NPS and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Fred Reichheld and Satmetrix Systems, Inc.