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

The Massive Importance of Memory in a Customer’s Experience Customer loyalty is a function of customers’ memories. That is to say, customers don’t choose your experience over another; customers choose the memory of your experience over another. Therefore, we feel it is vital that you ensure your customers have an excellent memory of your Customer Experience. This episode of The Intuitive Customer explores the massive importance of memory for a Customer Experience and how our brain influences what we remember about them. The human memory is imperfect. Our brains hold onto specific types of information when forming memories and let other information go. So, good experiences might not always turn into equally good memories, and vice versa. We could remember things better or worse than they were. Understanding how memories work is essential to building customer loyalty. If you don’t understand how the brain forms memories, you could end up creating the wrong memories about your Customer Experience. To understand how memories work, you must first know the Peak-End Rule. The Peak-End Rule says that what people remember about an experience is how they felt at the moment when emotion was the strongest and how they felt when the experience was over.  When it comes to Customer Experience design, an organization must be clear where the peak emotion occurs during the customer interaction, as well as how the customer feels at the end. These emotions can make or break your chances for customers to form Customer Loyalty. To create the memories you want, you need to evoke the customer emotions that you want. To do that, we suggest you start with these three key questions: What's the experience that you're trying to deliver? You need to define what that is so that everyone on the team is working toward the same goal. What emotions are you trying to evoke? These feelings are your target for the peak of the experience and how it ends to ensure that your customers remember the right things about your brand. How will you deliver these emotions consistently? We suggest walking the experience as if you were a customer yourself so you can see when and where you are evoking emotions you want, and, perhaps more importantly, where you aren’t.  Listen to the podcast in its entirety to learn more about The Massive Importance of Memory on Your Customer’s Experience.   The Intuitive Customer podcasts are designed to explain the psychological concepts behind customer behavior. If you would like to find out from one of our CX consultants how you can implement the concepts we discussed in your organization’s marketing to 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.

Creating a Frictionless Experience  As a global customer experience consultant for nearly two decades, I have never heard a customer say, “Gee! I wish that buying process was just a little more complicated!” Why? All customers want their experiences to be easy. When things aren’t easy in a given moment, we describe that as friction. Every organization needs to find their moments of resistance in a Customer Experience and fix them—before the competition beats them to it.   This episode of The Intuitive Customer explores friction in Customer Experience with special guest Roger Dooley, international speaker, blogger, and author of Friction: The Untapped Force That Can Be Your Most Powerful Advantage. Dooley explains why friction happens, how to find out where it is happening, and how to fix it for your organization’s Customer Experience. People don’t like when a Customer Experience is convoluted. We don’t want to exert too much time and energy making decisions unless it is absolutely necessary. Moreover, when we are tired or distracted, we have even less patience for tricky Customer Experiences. Many times, when there is too much friction in a Customer Experience design, we give up and walk away—a result that is not doing your Customer Loyalty any favors, not to mention your bottom line. Organizations already know friction is a problem. Whenever we talk to clients in our global Customer Experience consultancy, they always tell us that they want to make it as easy as possible for customers to do business with them.  However, few organizations understand what it takes to determine where the friction is in their experience. Often, it takes an outside perspective—usually ours—to point it out to them. So why do companies have problems spotting friction on their own? Dooley says it is because organizations got used to the “way things have always been done.” Also, organizations often neglect to observe customer behavior that will typically reveal a friction-filled moment in an experience. In addition, companies often think that what they have designed in their Customer Experience strategy puts the customer first. However, in our experience, they rarely do this; instead, they are putting the needs of their business first to the detriment of the frictionless experience they want to deliver. Listen to the podcast in its entirety to learn more about Creating Frictionless Experiences for your Customer Experience.   The Intuitive Customer podcasts are designed to explain the psychological concepts behind customer behavior. If you would like to find out from one of our CX consultants how you can implement the concepts we discussed in your organization’s marketing to 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.

We don’t like uncertainty. It affects our lives in many ways, and especially as customers. Consider the fact that we buy insurance. We purchase peace of mind that we are covered if something unlikely (and terrible) happens. Likewise, we buy Powerball tickets in the improbable event that we will win. In other words, we are terrible at estimating the probability of unlikely events, for good or ill. This episode of The Intuitive Customer explores why that is at a psychological level and what you can do about it in your Customer Experience Design. The governing theory that presides over our collective inability to predict the likelihood of unlikely events is Prospect Theory. The brain-child of the Nobel-Prize Winning Economist Professor Daniel Kahneman and his research partner and collaborator Amos Tversky, Prospect Theory explains how we make decisions that involve risk and uncertainty. Two areas of concepts fall under Prospect Theory. The first is the Value Curve and the second is Probability Estimation. The Value Curve explains evaluating the subjective. Loss Aversion is part of the Value Curve and addresses how we hate losing more than we are happy to gain. Also, the Value Curve covers the ideas of Diminishing Marginal Returns, which is why we are sensitive to changes in the status quo, and Reference Points, which are how we usually have a standard that we use to compare two things.  Probability Estimation is our ability to think the most unlikely events are imminent. We overestimate the likelihood of good and bad things happening. For example, we might be sure we are going to be eaten by a shark or convinced we picked the winning numbers in Powerball. Probability Estimation proves that when it comes to human behavior, we are pretty terrible at predicting the future as it pertains to the extraordinary. This particular part of Prospect Theory is inextricably linked to our behavior as customers—and probably more than we think. We all worry about weird things. There is a phrase I love that applies to this concept: I have had many crises in my life, but few of them actually happened.  Managing uncertain moments in your Customer Experience design is essential. People need to know what is coming next and predict the future. It makes them feel comfortable and cared for, critical emotions for forming Customer Loyalty. Listen to the podcast in its entirety to learn more about managing customers’ uncertainty for your Customer Experience.   The Intuitive Customer podcasts are designed to explain the psychological concepts behind customer behavior.   If you would like to find out from one of our CX consultants how you can implement the concepts we discussed in your organization’s marketing to 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 Are Insignificant Things So Significant? Have you ever had the feeling that something about a buying experience didn’t feel right? Chances are if you did, you didn’t buy the product or service. Most times, how a purchase feels is a driver for our customer behavior. This episode of The Intuitive Customer explores why insignificant things are so significant. In other words, why do the little things have such a big influence on what we do as customers? Also, we discuss how you can assess and address the insignificant parts of your experience to influence your customers to keep coming back rather than driving them away. Each of us has two parts of our brains that influence our buying decisions. There is what we call the Rational System, which is logical and methodical, and the Intuitive System, which is emotional and automatic. These two systems work solo or in tandem to help us make buying decisions.  When it comes to your Customer Experience, the Intuitive System is the one that interprets how an experience feels. It is also the system that processes all the little things that occur in your experience, kicking up emotional reactions in the conscious mind that you are aware of, and processing emotional reactions in the subconscious mind that you are not.  The difference between an insignificant part of the experience you are conscious of and one of which you are not is the frequency with which you encounter the insignificant element. For example, if you have several instances where your Intuitive System has processed an emotional reaction to an insignificant element of an experience in your subconscious, it will kick it up into the conscious mind with a caption, “X keeps happening, and I like/don’t like it.” Once you have a few varying insignificant elements causing emotional reactions, they join together to influence the buying decision. In other words, the insignificant elements gain significance.  The question is, are the insignificant moments in your Customer Experience deliberate in their strategy to deliver a positive outcome or have you left them up to chance and are hoping for the best?  Listen to the podcast in its entirety to learn more about Why Are Insignificant Things So Significant for your Customer Experience.   The Intuitive Customer podcasts are designed to explain the psychological concepts behind customer behavior. If you would like to find out from one of our CX consultants how you can implement the concepts we discussed in your organization’s marketing to 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 Customer Emotions Drive the Most Value 15 years ago, in Munich, I was asked a question I couldn’t answer when presenting to an insurance company. The person asking understood what I was saying about evoking the proper emotions in a Customer Experience. No, he wanted to know how much money he would get back by investing in my idea. I didn’t know.  That was in 2004. For the next two years and in partnership with the London Business School, we undertook research to answer that question. After millions of answers from thousands of respondents in hundreds of countries, we discovered the answer. We discuss what we found in our research on this episode of The Intuitive Customer.  We learned there are 20 emotions that either drive or destroy value in a Customer Experience. When I say value, what I mean is whatever an organization is trying to do with the business, whether that is increasing revenue or minimizing costs or increasing loyalty. The value part of this statement is a bit like one of those choose-your-own-adventure books.  The twenty emotions are each part of one of four clusters. These clusters include: The Destroying Cluster: Evoke these emotions, and you will not increase value for your bottom line, but instead lose it. The Attention Cluster: These are the emotions your marketing department is responsible for, meaning they get the customers interested in what you have to offer. The Recommendation Cluster: The recommendation cluster has the emotions that satisfy customers and are also the foundational elements of a trust relationship, which can lead to a recommendation when the customer is asked for one. The Advocacy Cluster: These are the emotions that not only create loyalty but also make your customers your active advocates to their friends and family. Here’s a funny story about the Advocacy Cluster. When the statistician was revealing the results of the study to the group, he referred to the Advocacy Cluster emotions as the “big daddies” of Customer Experience. They are because they deliver big daddy results. Many organizations have made progress about emotions in business. That is to say, they recognize that emotions play a part in business. However, we still have some work to do on being specific. To that end, in our global Customer Experience consultancy, we recommend knowing the answers to the following two questions: What is the emotion you want to evoke? Which emotions drive the most value for your organization? Without the answers to these two questions, you can’t move forward to the Advocacy Cluster, at least not on purpose. You could luck into it, I suppose. However, I always heard that luck favors the prepared. Listen to the podcast in its entirety to learn more about what customer emotions drive the most value for your Customer Experience.   The Intuitive Customer podcasts are designed to explain the psychological concepts behind customer behavior. If you would like to find out from one of our CX consultants how you can implement the concepts we discussed in your organization’s marketing to 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.

Is Facial Recognition Creepy or Is It Just the Future? Technology can analyze people’s facial expressions and determine what emotion they feel. It’s called Facial Expression Analysis and it uses Facial Recognition technology. This technology presents the most authentic option for capturing data on customers’ emotions during your Customer Experience. This technology is the next level of Customer Experience analysis and the future for the industry. Take a look here: https://beyondphilosophy.com/authentic-emotion-recognition/ In some cases, however, it is the now, for facial recognition technology anyway. Big brands like Walmart and KFC use facial recognition technology already. Passengers on Delta can check into flights in the Atlanta airport using facial recognition technology. I unlock my phone and pay for purchases using facial recognition technology. However, one must wonder….is this technology a little bit…creepy? In this episode of The Intuitive Customer podcast, our guest Professor Bill Hedgecock from the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota shares his expertise on facial recognition and facial expression analysis technology and its application in Customer Experience programs. Hedgecock is an academic marketer and an expert in neurology who studies how the brain works in decision-making and often participates in psychology-based research that uses this technology.  Hedgecock begins by defining what the two technologies are:  Facial recognition matches a face it has captured to other images in a database. Facial expression analysis determines the emotions felt based on how the face it has captured looks. As you can see, the data potential for authentic customer emotion capture is enormous with this technology. To be able to determine how a person feels during the different moments of an experience in real time is invaluable to Customer Experience analysis and design. However, like everything else, we have an emotional reaction to this technology. The idea that a camera is recording you during a transaction and analyzing what you might be feeling at different times is, to many people, uncomfortable at best and all the way creepy at worst. The future for data collection is Facial Recognition and Facial Expressional Analysis technology. So how do we get over these uncomfortable feelings about it? More importantly, how do we get our customers over their uncomfortable feelings about our using it?  This episode explores the potential and the pitfalls of this innovative and intimidating software and how it can be used to take your Customer Experience to the next level. In addition, we share important ways for you to help ease your customers uneasiness about its use. Listen to the podcast in its entirety to learn more about Facial Recognition and Facial Expression Analysis technology use for your Customer Experience.   The Intuitive Customer podcasts are designed to explain the psychological concepts behind customer behavior. If you would like to find out from one of our CX consultants how you can implement the concepts we discussed in your organization’s marketing to 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 like choices. They just don’t like choosing, at least not when there are too many options. However, if you give people the option of shopping where there are only two options or where there is a wide selection, people will nearly always choose to shop where there are many choices. Then, when they get there, they can’t make a decision and feel frustrated and disappointed about it. This episode of The Intuitive Customer explores the issues of too many choices and the adverse effects it can have on how your customer feels during your experience because of them. We also share ways that you can make choosing easier in your experience. It’s clear that too many choices don’t do anything good for your Customer Experience. However, too few are a problem, also. Years ago, I was in Moscow at a store that resembles Best Buy. We were undertaking a Customer Mirror, where we act as if we are customers to get an idea of how the experience makes us feel. I decided that I would buy a webcam—this was before they were built-in to the computer. I went to the webcam section and what I saw there left me feeling gobsmacked. There were hundreds upon hundreds of webcams. They were all different in various ways, none of which meant very much to me at the time. I was paralyzed with choices. So, I did what any sensible customer would do; I gave up. My webcam story demonstrates one of the ways that too many choices have negative consequences for your Customer Experience. I lost my motivation. When we have too many options, we feel overwhelmed trying to sort through all the information to find the best option. We run out of energy for choosing so we don’t, and the store doesn’t make a sale.  The other way too many choices have negative consequences for a Customer Experience is that it can change your reference point for satisfaction. If you have more options, you have more chances to pick the wrong thing. However, you can help your customers make choices that will make them feel happy instead of frustrated. You can help them navigate your offerings and feel satisfied with what they pick. First, you have to understand all the psychological concepts at work in the decision-making process.  Listen to the podcast in its entirety to learn more about Why Too Much Choice is a Bad Thing for your Customer Experience.   The Intuitive Customer podcasts are designed to explain the psychological concepts behind customer behavior. If you would like to find out from one of our CX consultants how you can implement the concepts we discussed in your organization’s marketing to 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.

Being the Guardian of Your Service Culture Keeping up your culture of customer service is not easy. Leadership in many organizations find maintaining the customer service culture they have established is a substantial issue. In this episode of The Intuitive Customer podcast, we spoke with three-time best-selling author, coach, and conference speaker Marilyn Suttle. She helps leaders and teams make subtle shifts to create breakthrough success for customers. Her clients have gone on to increase their scores for customer satisfaction and improved employee engagement. Many have also earned awards in their industry. So, what is the secret to maintaining your customer service culture to all these critical gains and accolades? Suttle says it is first defining your customer service culture and then, for leadership to take responsibility for being the guardian of it. Your customer service culture is essential to your organization. It is your competitive differentiator that gives you an identity in the marketplace. Moreover, a customer service culture is more than words on a page, more than your written mission statement, stated values or desired vision for your company. It’s the actions you take day to day and the emotions you evoke in your customers when you interact with them. Suttle recommends you start by defining what your organization’s customer service culture is going to be. Once you have an agreement, you then must establish standards that show you are achieving success and accountability measures to ensure you hit them.  Next is implementation, a part of the process that has its challenges. Sometimes, when an organization lacked a focus on customer service before or had a much different style, change can be difficult for the team and can foster resistance. Also, your leadership team usually wants to show an ROI for all the time and money they have invested in this effort, which only adds to the pressure. However, you are not done with hard times yet. After running the gauntlet of implementation, you now face the task of upkeep and maintenance of the culture as you lose and gain employees and your workforce spreads across the country or even the globe. Suttle has much experience with organizations that have been successful in defining, establishing, and maintaining their customer service culture. She shares her unique insight into what makes it work for them along with many of their best practices that helped along the way. Listen to the podcast in its entirety to learn more about [TOPIC] Experience   The Intuitive Customer podcasts are designed to explain the psychological concepts behind customer behavior. If you would like to find out from one of our CX consultants how you can implement the concepts we discussed in your organization’s marketing to 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.

Brand Or Customer Experience - what comes first?   The ubiquity of brands is undeniable. With the constant exposure to them, we all feel like we know what a brand is. However, when we are asked to explain it, we often fumble. In fact, it is remarkable just how different our answers are. It seems as if no one really knows what a brand is at all. Branding is imperative to having an outstanding Customer Experience. The relationship between your brand and the outcome of your experience, at least in the customer’s eye, has deep roots in customer loyalty as well.     We are often asked which comes first, the brand or the Customer Experience? Sometimes people want to know which is more important. Others simply want to know which of the two should they make the effort to improve? The answers are: neither, neither, and both. Let us explain. Brand is the promise you make to customers. Customer Experience is keeping that promise to customers. Both of these are essential elements to your Customer Experience. Both of them are vital and you can’t work on one without inherently working on the other. Or can you? This episode of The Intuitive Customer takes a deeper dive on the concepts of Brand and Customer Experience, and the complicated relationship they have with one another. We also explain how these two concepts are essential to forming Customer Loyalty. Best of all, we share ways that you can implement these ideas in your Customer Experience in practical terms. Listen to the podcast in its entirety to learn more about branding and Customer Experience.   The Intuitive Customer podcasts are designed to explain the psychological concepts behind customer behavior. If you would like to find out from one of our CX consultants how you can implement the concepts we discussed in your organization’s marketing to 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 Manage Uncertainty My team is the Luton Town Football Club. I heard the manager say about the team that you have to control the controllable. I quite like that phrase and I believe it is the key to managing uncertainty in your business for your customers. Now, he didn’t come up with the phrase. It’s a well-used epithet by many coaching organizations—and not just for football.     The reason the saying is so well-known is it helps us as human beings cope with uncertainty. It means that even as the world is changing, and in some cases going crazy, you can still keep some parts of your experience in check. These are “the controllable” parts.  In some ways, this is how you manage uncertainty. We talked about how to manage uncertainty for yourself, your organization, and your customers in this episode of The Intuitive Customer podcast. Like so many things involving human beings, managing uncertainty is not simple. People don’t like to risk making a bad decision. When they have uncertainty, making decisions is difficult. This feeling falls under the umbrella of the psychological principle of Risk Aversion.   Human beings all have risk aversions, just not about everything and not all the time. Otherwise, no one would smoke or drive fast on a mountain road or invest in race horses. However, as a general rule, uncertainty and risk are things we just don’t like. Managing risk aversion for ourselves and our customers is a vital part of what we need to address in our Customer Experience strategy.  I often ask the following question when I am speaking to groups: Is business going to get easier than it is today or harder? Obviously, the answer is harder. Part of what makes business hard is the uncertainty of it. I once attended a conference for the CBI (Confederation of British Industries). Something one of the speakers said helped me understand how vital certainty is for businesses. It drives how much inventory they produce, how many people they hire, and how they plan for future products and services. Making these decisions is difficult when you are uncertain about the future. Unless you have a special gift, a time machine or an awesome psychic friend, none of us do know the future. That means that uncertainty about the future is built-in to all decisions. Learning how to avoid uncertainty is not an option. Instead, you have to learn how to manage uncertainty.  Listen to the podcast in its . to learn more about [TITLE] for your Customer Experience.   The Intuitive Customer podcasts are designed to explain the psychological concepts behind customer behavior. If you would like to find out from one of our CX consultants how you can implement the concepts we discussed in your organization’s marketing to 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.