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

Customers Are Irrational! Why? What Can We Do About It? Many times, when I talk about irrationality in customer behavior, people in the business-to-business (B2B) arena tune out. However, this is a mistake. All customers are irrational, whether they are making business decisions or consumer ones. This episode of The Intuitive Customer explores customer irrationality. We talk about what we mean by it, how it changes our perception of an experience, and what organizations can do to design Customer Experience strategies that work with irrationality.   Many years ago, I worked at British Telecom (BT). I was leading a team of 15 people in a project to purchase a new CRM for the organization, a large investment with big repercussions for our day-to-day operations. Naturally, you might assume since this was a business decision, I was going to be very “business-minded” about it, which is to say rational or logical. It turned out, however, that when it came time to go with the rational decision to buy one company’s CRM that the team more or less agreed upon, my irrational or emotional side came out. Surprisingly, we went with the emotional decision and chose another company’s CRM. There were a lot of risks with this decision, not the least of which was that it was more expensive than the other product we were considering. Spoiler alert: It worked out well with the CRM we chose. And thank goodness for that!   Your Customers Probably Don’t Know They Are Behaving Irrationally If present-day-me were to travel back to talk to BT-me and say I was behaving irrationally, I likely wouldn’t have believed present-day-me. Most people think they are rational about decisions. What’s more is that we had specifically designed the CRM decision to be as rational as possible. There was a pre-discussion about the CRM systems we would consider and how we would evaluate them fairly. We even had an elaborate matrix that would assist us in making the decision.  But when push came to shove, we went with our instincts, not the company the matrix recommended. Even though we meant to make a purely logical decision, we didn’t, for completely emotional reasons.  Your customers are doing the same thing. The word irrational in this context means how we behave when motivated by emotions. Likewise, rational means how we behave when motivated by logic. Human behavior is rarely motivated by pure logic. Emotions almost always get involved. However, this idea is intimidating to many “business-minded” individuals. When you talk about emotions, you talk about touchy-feely subjects that don’t appeal to people who pride themselves on making rational decisions. That is where the disconnect occurs. Ironically, the rational individuals are making an emotional decision about managing customer emotions.  Listen to the podcast in its entirety to learn more about what customer irrationality is, why it happens, and what you can do about it 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.

One thing many positive Customer Experience stories people tell have in common is they involve a moment that surprised and delighted customers. Customer loyalty consultants refer to it as Innovative Customer Experience, and it is the key to getting your customers to talk about your experience to everyone they know. Author, speaker, and customer loyalty expert Dr. Chip Bell is our guest on this episode of The Intuitive Customer podcast. As a customer loyalty consultant to Fortune 100 Companies, Bell explains how Innovative Service is the kind that gets talked about, and what inspires the customer behavior you want. Bell says that while good Customer Experience is often appreciated, it rarely results in people talking, posting, or tweeting about it. However, when people have a unique experience with innovative service, they talk, post, and tweet about it all the time. Innovative service is the pleasant surprise, the moment they didn’t expect in your experience. Bell describes innovative service as a moment that doesn’t make customers say, “Wow!” but the moment that makes customers say, “Whoa!” These Whoa-moments are what people talk about in person and online.   Innovative Customer Experiences are more than value-added. Bell says they are value-unique. The main difference is that customers expect your experience to be value-added. When they get more than they expected, however, it is unique—and that has a lot more value. Delivering Innovative Customer Experience requires a few important considerations:  When have you been surprised in a good way by an experience or customer service in the past? How did it make you feel about the company? Did it lead to an increase in your business or you recommending them to others? What would be an appropriate and creative moment to deliver in your organization’s experience that would surprise and delight customers? Do you have the proper culture for your front-line employees to deliver Whoa -moments to customers as they see fit in the moment? This episode of our podcast explores How to Create Innovative Service and explains why people feel more loyalty as a result of them. It also will talk about what you can do in your organization to create these Whoa-moments in your CX strategy that will get your customers telling stories about you to all their friends, families, and followers.  Listen to the podcast in its entirety to learn more about Innovative 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.

A significant influence on your Customer Experience outcome is how customers feel during your experience. In our global Customer Experience consultancy, we say that emotions are over 50 percent of a Customer Experience. For good or ill, customer feelings have a profound effect on how they remember your experience also. Despite my belief and routine pronouncement of these facts, I am astonished by how many companies don't bother with measuring customer emotions. Those that do measure customer emotions don’t think about how they will use it. Measuring customer emotions in real time is paramount for your Customer Experience strategy. You need to know when your experience is producing appropriate feelings and, perhaps more importantly, when it is not.   “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” applies to this situation. To measure customer emotions, you need the proper tools to do a job. This episode of The Intuitive Customer talks about the tools you use to measure customer emotions in real time. However, here is some free advice: Before investing any time or money in customer emotion research, be sure you have a plan in place to use it. At British Telecom (BT), I learned the significance of having a plan for the research you receive. I was sitting in a presentation about BT’s customer satisfaction that year regarding our products and services. Our presenter had a “why bother?” attitude. It was apparent to everyone in the room. I couldn’t let it lie. I had to ask why she didn’t seem to care about what she was telling us.   Surprisingly, she told me straight out. “This is the third year you've employed us to do this research,” she explained. “And every year we come back and tell you the same results. And every year you do nothing about it. Why do you bother?” This conversation predates my next reference, but I could swear I heard a distinct Mic Drop.  She was right, of course. We hadn’t a bloody clue what to do with the information she was sharing. Or, perhaps more accurately, could not have cared less about what to do with the research. It was a cultural thing. Also, it was before Customer Experience was the popular concept bandied about in corporate speak today.  Research is essential to take your Customer Experience to the next level. Knowing how your customer feels during your experience and how it influences customer behavior is vital to your customer-centric Customer Experience Strategy. As Customer Experience consultants, we think measuring customer emotions in real time is a crucial aspect of your customer success. Listen to the podcast in its entirety to learn more about How to Measure Authentic Customer Emotions in Real Time 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.

There is a big challenge when measuring customer emotions as you are asking customers how they felt in an experience, as this is done retrospectively, a while after they had the experience. Many times, Customers don't remember how they felt or, for several reasons, they don’t want to tell you. Using technology, you can now measure customer’s emotions in real time! Critically you can measure their AUTHENTIC emotions, i.e: The REAL emotions they are feeling, through the use of micro expressions. These are involuntary, automatic movements the customer makes without even realizing what they are doing. Measuring customer emotions is vitally important as over 50% of a customer experience is about how a customer feels. The key is the authentic emotions. This appears to be a significant challenge for researcher’s in today’s world, as well as getting Customers to answer surveys in the first place.    One key area this Authentic Emotion Measurement is being used by more progressive organizations is in digital transformation. They are using this to understand how the customer feels prior to the transformation and then by testing various ways of undertaking the transformation they can determine which has the most benefit before implementation. Another application is measuring a face-to-face interaction, where the Customer and the employee are both being measured for their emotions. This means you can now understand the emotional interaction between the two parties. Furthermore, this means you can measure the effect of employee training. For example, if an employee is trained on soft skills, what was their customer’s emotions before and after this new training? This is an exciting new development in measuring customer emotions and in this podcast we delve into this in much greater detail. Listen to the podcast in its entirety to learn more about How to Measure Authentic Customer Emotions in Real Time 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.

We often discuss the Intuitive and Rational System and how they work together to help customers make decisions. The Intuitive System is automatic and emotional, and the Rational System is deliberate and logical. What we don’t usually share is that by academic standards, this concept is relatively new. An older theory also explains why we act the way we do as customers, and you need to know about it to promote customer success. This episode of The Intuitive Customer Podcast explores the concept of bounded rationality first introduced by Nobel-Prize winning professor Herbert Simon in the 1960s. We also discuss how this concept applies to your customers’ behavior and your CX strategy.   People Make Decisions within Constraints Herbert Simon was a polymath, which means he was a genius in several fields. He contributed a lot to a lot of different areas. Simon was a city planner, a professor, a psychologist and one of the first computer science professors. In fact, many of the theories that we use today in computer programming are the brain-child of Simon. Simon’s concept of bounded rationality is an essential concept in modern behavioral science. It means that people are rational, but they do not have infinite amounts of rationality. They are logical within constraints. The constraints that Simon refers to are common to all people. We have a limit to our attention span and memory capacity. We only have so much energy to devote to thinking. Often, we don’t have all the information and cannot forecast future events with a ton of accuracy. However, if we were rational all the time, none of these limits or shortcomings would matter. To put it another way, people are not computers. They don’t make rational decisions all the time, but they also don’t make random decisions based on emotional whims either. We use rationality but within the boundaries of the circumstances of the decision-making environment. An example of bounded rationality influencing customer behavior could be opening an email from a retailer you like and seeing a special sale that is going to end in a short amount of time. When you are sorting through the details of the offer, which leave a little to be desired regarding clarity, your work calls to ask if you can come back to the office for an emergency. The decision-making environment you are experiencing, which includes a limited-time offer with murky details and a big crisis at the office that needs your immediate attention, will affect how you make a decision.   Listen to the podcast in its entirety to learn more about how customers make decisions using bounded rationality.   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.

Organizations do not have the luxury of focusing solely on operations these days. Over the past decade, retail as an industry has changed. To survive, retailers must put the customer at the center of everything they do.  That said, not everyone believes it yet.    Not so long ago, I was having a conversation in the C-Suite of a company about Customer Experience. Unfortunately, this company was not into the idea of putting the customer at the center of everything they do. Now, I won’t tell you the name of the company, but I will tell you that when I read the room, I had an image of what it must have been like in the room when Blockbuster decided not to buy Netflix because “streaming is never going to catch on.” Don’t just take my word for it. Take Professor Barbara Kahn’s from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. As a guest on our recent podcast, she spoke about how retailers are winning in today’s hypercompetitive retail market. (Spoiler alert: their strategy is built around the Customer Experience.) Professor Kahn co-hosts a weekly program on Sirius XM Channel 132 called “Marketing Matters,” and her new book, The Shopping Revolution: How successful retailers win customers in an era of endless disruption, discusses the chaotic world of retail. She shares the details of what worked and what didn’t when she had a front-row seat to witness it unfold as the director of the Patty and Jay H. Baker Retailing Center. When she was the director of the center, she spoke with a lot of retailers. She asked them to describe their idea of the perfect retailer. They mentioned a lot of operational details from products to managing inventory to optimizing the supply chain. While their definition included understanding products and building an attractive mix of wares that a customer wants, it didn’t mention the Customer Experience. Kahn decided to research her marketing library to see if there were any frameworks that were about customers, but to no avail. The frameworks she found were product and logistics-focused.  She wasn’t satisfied with these. So, she decided to write her own. The result was the Kahn Retailing Success Matrix, which she included in her book. http://whartonmagazine.com/issues/spring-2018/the-4-best-retail-business-strategies/#sthash.hob4hi4Z.ji6jXm2z.dpbs  This episode of our podcast explores how the Kahn Retailing Success Matrix can help you with your Customer Experience. Listen to the podcast in its entirety to learn more about how The Kahn Retailing Success Matrix could work 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.

Beyond Philosophy won an award named one of the Best Management Consultancy Firms in the UK, by the Financial Times (FT). This was voted on by clients and peers, we couldn’t be more honored or proud. This bonus episode podcast explores how you can take your idea and turn it into an Financial Times Award-Winning consultancy, too. We share our 10-Step Plan for Success and ask our listeners, what would you do if you weren’t afraid?   The 10-Step Plan for Creating Your Award-Winning Business: Recognize that you are an expert in something, and then tell everyone you are. When I started my Global Customer Experience consultancy, no one knew me or even what Customer Experience was. So, I told them, starting my marketing efforts with my first book, Building Great Customer Experiences (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). Then I began conference speaking. Eventually, other people began to recognize I was an expert in customer experience training, which was much better than me saying it. Have an original idea. If you aren’t original, then you aren’t really adding anything of value to the greater business community, or the reputation of marketing consultants in general. Be unique and useful. Be brave. It’s okay to be afraid, better than okay, actually. Fear is an excellent motivator. Focus on your skills. Determine what you are excellent at and what you aren’t. Then, build on those strong skills and focus on using them. Otherwise, you can get out of your area of expertise and lose your way. Give an opinion. Your opinion is why people come to you. You should always have one, even if it isn’t popular. Just be careful how you deliver that unpopular opinion; too much opinion can be as bad as not enough. Know what drives value for your customers. Produce or perish, as they say (do they say that?). If you aren’t getting your customers an outstanding return on investment (ROI), then why should they hire you? Accept when you make a mistake, fix it, and move on. Everyone blows it from time to time. Learn from it and move on. Whatever you do, don’t quit. Success is just around the corner. Appreciate the support you get from friends and family. You need it, so be sure to recognize and reward it as often as you can. Prepare for long hours. Starting your own company is hard work. Period. Remember that consultants are the first to go in a recession. Prepare for the inevitable so you can bounce back when it’s over. Listen to the podcast in its entirety to learn more about my ten-step plan and how it can help you do what you would do if you weren’t afraid. We recommend you spend 5 minutes now and take a short CX Healthcheck self assessment to see how your organization is performing. https://beyondphilosophy.com/cx-assessment/survey/. It’s free and will benchmark how you against hundreds of other companies. By answering a few multiple choice questions, you will understand what you need to do to take your Customer Experience (CX) to the next level.     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.

Psychological theories help explain why people do what they do. As customer experience consultants we believe when you are working on a Customer Experience strategy psychological theory is crucial to understanding the behavior of your customers.   However, psychology is unlike other sciences; it isn’t exact. In fact, you might have to consider much of what psychology tells us is provisional, an impermanent hypothesis that explains what many people do most of the time. Just not all the time. This conditional nature of human behavior theory can be problematic when analyzing customer behavior or attempting to address your customers’ psychology in a meaningful way in the Customer Experience.   This episode of our podcast explores how people make a common mistake when applying psychological theory to their Customer Experience strategy. We also share how to fix it.   It comes down to two significant issues with psychological theory:   #1: Theory needs context to be exact.   Unlike some of its scientific colleagues in the so-called “hard” sciences, most of the psychological theory is contingent. What is valid for human behavior at one time and in one environment is entirely different at another time and in an alternate setting. The variables matter to the outcome of human behavior. A lot.   #2: Psychological theory is complicated.   The complexity of human behavior makes the analysis of it equally knotty. Also, a psychological influence is not usually acting alone; multiple influences are affecting the outcome of human behavior. In addition, the boundaries of the theories can muddle matters, too. All of this to say, psychology is not an exact science with consistently predictable outcomes.   Because of this gray area inherent in human behavior theories, it can be challenging to convince people to change their business-as-usual practices to incorporate the “soft stuff.” Most organizations prefer to stick to their knitting and address concrete principles like price, product, and placement, instead of emotional stuff like human decision-making.   Despite these issues, there is hope for using psychology to optimize your CX strategy. Many organizations are able to apply the theories of psychology to great effect regarding customer behavior and behavioral segmentation, and you can, too.   Listen to the podcast in its entirety  to learn more about how to properly apply psychological theories about customer behavior to your Customer Experience strategy.   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.

The Customer Experience Industry is suffering from a lack of results. Or perhaps it might be more accurate to say, it is suffering from a lack of proof about the results Customer Experience strategy is getting. It is time for all Customer Experience professionals to champion the ROI of their Customer Experience.   The problem is many of our champions do not know how.     We spoke with speaker, author, and CEO of Customer Think, Corporation, Bob Thompson about his recent research and what he thinks the Customer Experience strategy needs to build the business case for its success. He narrowed down the issues to the following: Not enough organizations use their Customer Experience to differentiate themselves from their competition A lack of data exists about the results of Customer Experience efforts, on an individual level, as well as an industry as a whole Too few organizations can demonstrate an ROI in actual figures  An opportunity exists and in a significant way. Moreover, the Customer Experience internal marketing needs to include ROI for Customer Experience. If we don’t, it could mean the resources we have today could be reallocated to another program—one that can produce results.   To be fair, if I were a CEO that had given over a budget for a Customer Experience program that was not able to show me that it had any results, I would not throw good money after bad. We need to make the business case for Customer Experience or suffer the (deserved) consequences.   This episode of The Intuitive Customer podcast explores how Customer Experience consultants and Customer Experience marketers can address these issues and resolve them for their individual Customer Experience strategies. We also share recommendations about what all Customer Experience champions should focus on to solve the problems of the industry in 2019.   Listen to the podcast in its entirety to learn more about what Thompson and the Intuitive Podcast team thinks can fix the problems with the Customer Experience Industry.  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.

Stay Ahead of Your Competition with New Advances in CX Marketing  This podcast discusses the five areas you can address that will change the results you get with your Customer Experience. With a focus on these five key actions, you will not only improve your Customer Experience, but you can also get a jump on the competition in the new year.   5 CX Concepts to Keep You Ahead of the Competition  Focus on the ROI of CX improvement.   Having a record of your return on investment (ROI) for Customer Experience programs is vital. An increase in sales is excellent. But not all ROI is sales-based. You can have an increase in your NPS (Net Promoter Score, which indicates your customers will recommend you to family and friends). You could also see improved Customer Satisfaction ratings, which are great for building a foundation for loyalty. Another area where ROI is apparent is in the costs you save by providing an improved Customer Experience.