The Intuitive Customer - Improve Your Customer Experience To Gain Growth

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Nobel laureate Professor Daniel Kahneman said we don't choose between experiences; we choose between the memory of an experience. If that's true — and the science says it is — then most organizations are investing in the wrong thing. In this episode, Colin and Ryan explore how memories are actually formed, the difference between short-term (working) and long-term memory, and why your brand is really just a memory structure in the minds of your customers. They dig into how heuristics and biases shape what we remember, why humans are relentless pattern-recognition machines, and what all of this means for the experiences you design. It's the first in a three-part series on the topic Colin calls his favorite of all.

In this episode, you'll learn:

Why memory — not the live experience — drives customer decisions, loyalty, and price tolerance
The difference between short-term/working memory and long-term memory (and why most of your experience gets "binned" within seconds)
How memories are stored as a connected network of "nodes," not isolated facts
Why a brand, from the customer's point of view, is simply a memory structure, making brand management a form of memory management
How customer expectations are built from memory, and what that means for "meeting and exceeding" them
Where heuristics and biases come from — what's innate, what's learned, and what's situational
The practical "so what" for designing experiences that customers actually remember

Key quote: "We don't choose between experiences. We choose between the memory of an experience." — Professor Daniel Kahneman

The hosts:

Colin Shaw is a LinkedIn 'Top Voice' with a massive 286,000 followers and 87,000 subscribers to his 'Why Customers Buy' newsletter. Shaw is named one of the world's 'Top 150 Business Influencers' by LinkedIn. His company, Beyond Philosophy LLC, has been selected four times by the Financial Times as a top management consultancy. Shaw is co-host of the top 1.5% podcast 'The Intuitive Customer'—with over 600,000 downloads—and author of eight best-sellers on customer experience. Shaw is a sought-after keynote speaker. Follow Colin on LinkedIn.

Ryan Hamilton is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of 'The Intuitive Customer' book. An award-winning teacher and researcher in consumer psychology, he has been named one of Poets & Quants' "World's Best 40 B-School Profs Under 40." His research focuses on how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence shopper decision-making, and his findings have been published in top academic journals and covered by major media outlets like The New York Times and CNN. His work highlights how psychology can help firms better understand and serve their customers. Ryan has a new book launch in June 2025 called "The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things" Harvard Business Press. Follow Ryan on LinkedIn.

Resources & links:

Kahneman, The Riddle of Experience vs. Memory (TED): https://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_experience_vs_memory
HBR, An Emotional Connection Matters More Than Customer Satisfaction: https://hbr.org/2016/08/an-emotional-connection-matters-more-than-customer-satisfaction
Beyond Philosophy training & resources: https://beyondphilosophy.com

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Episode Summary

Trust is the foundation of every customer relationship. But here's the uncomfortable truth: most businesses assume they have it when they don't. PwC's latest research found that 90% of executives believe their customers trust them highly — yet only 30% of customers actually do. That's a 60-point gap. And it's growing.

In this episode, Colin Shaw and Professor Ryan Hamilton from Emory University break down the five rules that are guaranteed to build genuine, lasting trust with your customers. These aren't theoretical — they're drawn from decades of real CX work, rooted in behavioural economics, and illustrated with the kinds of real-world examples that make you realise how often companies (and people) get this wrong.

What You'll Hear in This Episode:

Why trust is earned, not given — and why that changes everything about how you approach customer relationships
The authenticity trap: why trying to appear authentic is worse than not trying at all
Why you should always tell customers the bad news early — and why hiding it always costs you more in the end
The Fiverr story: how a supplier destroyed trust before they'd even started the job
Why consistency and reliability are not soft values — they're heuristic signals that your customers use to judge whether they can trust you for the things that really matter
How the "emotional bank account" works — and why you need to be in credit before something goes wrong

Quote of the Episode:

"The danger is people will be too strategic about authenticity. The point is not to act like you're authentic. The point is actually to be authentic."

— Professor Ryan Hamilton, Emory University

Resources Mentioned:

Connect with Colin Shaw on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/colinrjshaw/
Connect with Professor Ryan Hamilton on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/prof-ryan-hamilton/
Beyond Philosophy website: https://beyondphilosophy.com
PwC Trust in Business Survey: https://www.pwc.com/us/en/library/trust-in-business-survey.html

About the Hosts:

Colin Shaw is a LinkedIn 'Top Voice' with a massive 286,000 followers and 87,000 subscribers to his 'Why Customers Buy' newsletter. Shaw is named one of the world's 'Top 150 Business Influencers' by LinkedIn. His company, Beyond Philosophy LLC, has been selected four times by the Financial Times as a top management consultancy. Shaw is co-host of the top 1.5% podcast 'The Intuitive Customer'—with over 600,000 downloads—and author of eight best-sellers on customer experience. Shaw is a sought-after keynote speaker. Follow Colin on LinkedIn.

Ryan Hamilton is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of 'The Intuitive Customer' book. An award-winning teacher and researcher in consumer psychology, he has been named one of Poets & Quants' "World's Best 40 B-School Profs Under 40." His research focuses on how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence shopper decision-making, and his findings have been published in top academic journals and covered by major media outlets like The New York Times and CNN. His work highlights how psychology can help firms better understand and serve their customers. Ryan has a new book launch in June 2025 called "The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things" Harvard Business Press Follow Ryan on LinkedIn.

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After more than a decade of companies pouring money, technology, and consultants into customer experience, US customer satisfaction sits almost exactly where it did in 2013. Flat. Now AI arrives as the promised cavalry — and leaders are racing to bolt it onto everything before they understand what they're actually trying to fix.

In this episode, Colin and Ryan separate the smart play from the slow-motion mistake. "AI-first" is sound management: if AI delivers a better, faster, or cheaper experience than a human, use it. But "AI-only" — AI sprinkled over everything like fairy dust because leaders are terrified of being left behind — is where companies quietly automate themselves into a commodity and erode the one thing they can't easily win back: trust.

Using the now-infamous "microwave test" (brilliant for the peas, a disaster for the steak), Colin and Ryan dig into why so much CX investment has produced so little, and why the companies that win the next decade won't be the ones that adopted AI fastest — but the ones who knew exactly what they wanted it to do.

What You'll Learn * Why is a tool used without a strategy just an expensive way to make a bad experience happen faster * The critical difference between "AI-first" (smart) and "AI-only" (reckless) — and how to tell which one you're actually doing * The one question almost no organization can answer — and why you can't deploy AI well until you can * How over-reliance on AI quietly costs you on two fronts: differentiation (the same prediction machine is available to every competitor) and trust (the moment customers feel they have to double-check you, you've lost) * A simple, strategy-first decision framework for where AI lifts the experience and where a human still wins

Featured Insight The companies that win the next decade won't be the ones that adopted AI fastest. They'll be the ones who knew exactly what they wanted it to do — and never lost sight of the most important thing: the customer's experience.

Stats & Sources Referenced * US customer satisfaction flat since 2013 — American Customer Satisfaction Index * Research on cognitive offloading and weakening judgment — Societies, 2025

About the Hosts Colin Shaw is a LinkedIn 'Top Voice' with a massive 286,000 followers and 87,000 subscribers to his 'Why Customers Buy' newsletter. Shaw is named one of the world's 'Top 150 Business Influencers' by LinkedIn. His company, Beyond Philosophy LLC, has been selected four times by the Financial Times as a top management consultancy. Shaw is co-host of the top 1.5% podcast 'The Intuitive Customer'—with over 600,000 downloads—and author of eight best-sellers on customer experience. Shaw is a sought-after keynote speaker. Follow Colin on LinkedIn.

Ryan Hamilton is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of 'The Intuitive Customer' book. An award-winning teacher and researcher in consumer psychology, he has been named one of Poets & Quants' "World's Best 40 B-School Profs Under 40." His research focuses on how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence shopper decision-making, and his findings have been published in top academic journals and covered by major media outlets like The New York Times and CNN. His work highlights how psychology can help firms better understand and serve their customers. Ryan has a new book, "The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things," Harvard Business Press. Follow Ryan on LinkedIn.

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Summary

Artificial Intelligence is transforming marketing faster than almost any technology before it. Brands can now create professional-quality advertisements in hours rather than months and at a fraction of the cost. But as AI-generated creative becomes more common, an important question is emerging: Are brands becoming more efficient while losing some of the humanity that customers value?

In this episode, Ben Shaw and Professor Ryan Hamilton explore the growing use of AI in advertising and marketing. They discuss why customers may care less about how cheaply content is produced and more about whether it feels authentic, trustworthy, and emotionally engaging. They also examine why AI may unintentionally create a flood of mediocre content, why consumers often value effort and craftsmanship, and how marketers can use AI without sacrificing what makes their brands distinctive.

The discussion reveals that while AI is a powerful tool, it is not a substitute for customer understanding, emotional insight, or great strategy.

Best Quote from the Episode:

"The companies that win won't be the ones using the most AI. They'll be the ones using AI without losing their humanity."

Ben Shaw

Key Takeaways:

Customers don't buy efficiency—they buy value, trust, and emotional connection.
AI-generated advertising may lower production costs, but it can also reduce perceived authenticity.
Consumers often use effort and craftsmanship as signals of quality and credibility.
As AI-generated content becomes widespread, "realness" may become an increasingly valuable differentiator.
Unlimited AI revisions can lead to creative dilution and "death by a thousand prompts."
AI won't fix poor marketing strategy; it simply allows marketers to produce more content faster.
Great marketing still comes from human insight, emotion, creativity, and understanding customer needs.
The most successful brands will use AI as a tool, not as a replacement for strategic thinking.

Why You Should Listen:

If you're a marketer, business leader, customer experience professional, or simply curious about how AI is changing the relationship between brands and customers, this episode offers a balanced and practical perspective. You'll learn where AI genuinely creates value, where it creates risks, and why authenticity may become one of the most important competitive advantages in the years ahead.

Resources Mentioned

Ben Shaw - https://www.linkedin.com/in/benshawuk/
Professor Ryan Hamilton - http://linkedin.com/in/ryan-hamilton-49b3321

About the Hosts:

Ryan Hamilton is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of 'The Intuitive Customer' book. An award-winning teacher and researcher in consumer psychology, he has been named one of Poets & Quants' "World's Best 40 B-School Profs Under 40." His research focuses on how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence shopper decision-making, and his findings have been published in top academic journals and covered by major media outlets like The New York Times and CNN. His work highlights how psychology can help firms better understand and serve their customers. Ryan has a new book launch in June 2025 called "The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things" Harvard Business Press. Follow Ryan on LinkedIn.

Ben Shaw is Group Head of Strategy at Smarts, a global PR and Creative agency. Ben also led strategy at BBH and worked client-side with fast-growth start-ups Wheely and Unmind. He's passionate about how brands can challenge culture convention and create ideas people want to spend time with, working on brands like Audi, Google and Burger King. Beyond advertising, Ben champions mental health awareness and rare disease research, drawing on both personal experience and professional curiosity.

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Nostalgia isn't just "remembering the good old days." It's a bittersweet emotion—the strange mix of warmth, loss, pride, and longing that can make you feel good… even when the memory you're describing sounds objectively terrible.

In this episode, Colin and Ryan dig into why nostalgia is so powerful (and why it's everywhere right now). They explore the paradox: people don't just get nostalgic about the happy stuff—they also get nostalgic about the hard stuff, because it becomes part of identity ("I survived," "it made me," "we were close," "look how far we've come").

And for Customer Experience? Nostalgia isn't retro wallpaper. It's an emotional lever tied to belonging, meaning, and identity—exactly the things that shape customer decisions.

What you'll hear in this episode

Why nostalgia is pleasant and painful at the same time
Why people compete over who had it worse
How nostalgia acts like an emotional "anchor" during uncertainty
How brands "clone" nostalgia in advertising—and why it works when it's authentic

Quote of the episode

"Nostalgia isn't about reliving the pain—it's about reliving the meaning." — Colin Shaw

Resources Mentioned

Colin Shaw - https://www.linkedin.com/in/colinrjshaw/

Professor Ryan Hamilton - http://linkedin.com/in/ryan-hamilton-49b3321

About the Hosts:

Colin Shaw is a LinkedIn 'Top Voice' with a massive 286,000 followers and 87,000 subscribers to his 'Why Customers Buy' newsletter. Shaw is named one of the world's 'Top 150 Business Influencers' by LinkedIn. His company, Beyond Philosophy LLC, has been selected four times by the Financial Times as a top management consultancy. Shaw is co-host of the top 1.5% podcast 'The Intuitive Customer'—with over 600,000 downloads—and author of eight best-sellers on customer experience. Shaw is a sought-after keynote speaker. Follow Colin on LinkedIn.

Ryan Hamilton is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of 'The Intuitive Customer' book. An award-winning teacher and researcher in consumer psychology, he has been named one of Poets & Quants' "World's Best 40 B-School Profs Under 40." His research focuses on how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence shopper decision-making, and his findings have been published in top academic journals and covered by major media outlets like The New York Times and CNN. His work highlights how psychology can help firms better understand and serve their customers. Ryan has a new book launch in June 2025 called "The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things" Harvard Business Press Follow Ryan on LinkedIn.

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Everyone's racing to be "AI-first." The problem? Customers didn't vote for it. In this episode, we unpack a practical decision framework for when AI should lead, when humans must lead, and how to avoid automating the very moments that drive loyalty (or churn). We also get into a surprising twist: why AI can sometimes sound more empathetic than people—and what that says about how most service teams are set up today.

What you'll learn in this episode

Why "AI-first" is usually a cost initiative pretending to be a strategy
A simple way to decide human vs AI based on the emotional and situational stakes
Where automation genuinely improves CX (and where it quietly wrecks trust)
Why AI can come across as more patient and empathetic—and why that's a warning sign

Best Quote from the Episode:

"AI-first' is not a strategy. It's a cost program wearing a strategy's suit." - Colin Shaw

Resources Mentioned

Colin Shaw - https://www.linkedin.com/in/colinrjshaw/

Professor Ryan Hamilton - http://linkedin.com/in/ryan-hamilton-49b3321

About the Hosts:

Colin Shaw is a LinkedIn 'Top Voice' with a massive 286,000 followers and 87,000 subscribers to his 'Why Customers Buy' newsletter. Shaw is named one of the world's 'Top 150 Business Influencers' by LinkedIn. His company, Beyond Philosophy LLC, has been selected four times by the Financial Times as a top management consultancy. Shaw is co-host of the top 1.5% podcast 'The Intuitive Customer'—with over 600,000 downloads—and author of eight best-sellers on customer experience. Shaw is a sought-after keynote speaker. Follow Colin on LinkedIn.

Ryan Hamilton is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of 'The Intuitive Customer' book. An award-winning teacher and researcher in consumer psychology, he has been named one of Poets & Quants' "World's Best 40 B-School Profs Under 40." His research focuses on how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence shopper decision-making, and his findings have been published in top academic journals and covered by major media outlets like The New York Times and CNN. His work highlights how psychology can help firms better understand and serve their customers. Ryan has a new book launch in June 2025 called "The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things" Harvard Business Press Follow Ryan on LinkedIn.

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Customer Experience isn't short of activity—it's short of new ideas that actually land. In this episode, Colin and Ryan dig into why genuinely fresh thinking in CX struggles to break through, how industries get stuck in "normal science," and why it feels like we're doing more measurement… without more progress. They explore what a real disruption looks like, the warning signs that a paradigm is reaching diminishing returns, and how leaders can break out of the loop.

Best Quote

"When a paradigm hits its limits, the next move isn't 'do more.' It's think differently—and be willing to ruffle a few feathers." Colin Shaw:

Key Takeaways

Are we measuring more because we're improving—or because we don't know what else to do?
If satisfaction is stagnating, what "accepted" CX beliefs might be holding us back?
What would a real CX disruption look like—and are we brave enough to recognize it when it shows up?

Why You Should Listen

If you've felt like CX is turning into an echo chamber—same language, same frameworks, same playbook—this episode gives you a sharper lens on why that happens and what to do next. You'll hear how paradigm shifts actually work, the signals that the current model is running out of runway, and practical ways to find (and foster) ideas that can genuinely move the industry forward.

Resources Mentioned

Colin Shaw - https://www.linkedin.com/in/colinrjshaw/

Professor Ryan Hamilton - http://linkedin.com/in/ryan-hamilton-49b3321

ACSI National Customer Satisfaction (Q3 2025 press release): https://theacsi.org/news-and-resources/press-releases/2025/11/13/press-release-national-acsi-q3-2025/

PwC Global Workforce Hopes and Fears (psychological safety): https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/issues/workforce/hopes-and-fears.html

About the Hosts:

Colin Shaw is a LinkedIn 'Top Voice' with a massive 286,000 followers and 87,000 subscribers to his 'Why Customers Buy' newsletter. Shaw is named one of the world's 'Top 150 Business Influencers' by LinkedIn. His company, Beyond Philosophy LLC, has been selected four times by the Financial Times as a top management consultancy. Shaw is co-host of the top 1.5% podcast 'The Intuitive Customer'—with over 600,000 downloads—and author of eight best-sellers on customer experience. Shaw is a sought-after keynote speaker. Follow Colin on LinkedIn.

Ryan Hamilton is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of 'The Intuitive Customer' book. An award-winning teacher and researcher in consumer psychology, he has been named one of Poets & Quants' "World's Best 40 B-School Profs Under 40." His research focuses on how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence shopper decision-making, and his findings have been published in top academic journals and covered by major media outlets like The New York Times and CNN. His work highlights how psychology can help firms better understand and serve their customers. Ryan has a new book launch in June 2025 called "The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things" Harvard Business Press Follow Ryan on LinkedIn.

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In this episode, Ryan Hamilton and I dig into the invisible "scripts" that hold everyday customer experiences together—those unwritten psychological expectations about what happens next, what signals mean, and how both customers and employees coordinate without even thinking about it. The trouble is: when technology (like mobile payments, kiosks, or automation) changes the steps, it can quietly break the script—creating uncertainty, awkwardness, and friction that wasn't there before. We explore why these scripts matter, how they differ by culture, and what leaders can do to help customers adopt new scripts without creating "prairie dog" moments.

Best Quote from the Episode

"A lot of customer experiences work because both sides know the script—until something changes and nobody knows what to do next." Professor Ryan Hamilton

Key Takeaways

What "scripts" are you unknowingly relying on in your customer journey—and what happens when they break?
If you introduce new tech, what clear "signal" replaces the old customer behavior that used to communicate intent?
How are you designing for different adoption speeds—early adopters and customers who want the old way back?

Why You Should Listen

If you're rolling out AI, automation, self-service, kiosks, or new payment methods, this episode will help you spot the hidden expectations that make experiences feel effortless—and show you how to redesign the cues and signals so customers don't feel confused, awkward, or abandoned.

Resources Mentioned

Colin Shaw - https://www.linkedin.com/in/colinrjshaw/

Professor Ryan Hamilton - http://linkedin.com/in/ryan-hamilton-49b3321

Monty Python "haggling" clip (Life of Brian): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2iZjxSGca8

Our Workshops: https://beyondphilosophy.com/motivational-workshops/

About the Hosts:

Colin Shaw is a LinkedIn 'Top Voice' with a massive 286,000 followers and 87,000 subscribers to his 'Why Customers Buy' newsletter. Shaw is named one of the world's 'Top 150 Business Influencers' by LinkedIn. His company, Beyond Philosophy LLC, has been selected four times by the Financial Times as a top management consultancy. Shaw is co-host of the top 1.5% podcast 'The Intuitive Customer'—with over 600,000 downloads—and author of eight best-sellers on customer experience. Shaw is a sought-after keynote speaker. Follow Colin on LinkedIn.

Ryan Hamilton is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of 'The Intuitive Customer' book. An award-winning teacher and researcher in consumer psychology, he has been named one of Poets & Quants' "World's Best 40 B-School Profs Under 40." His research focuses on how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence shopper decision-making, and his findings have been published in top academic journals and covered by major media outlets like The New York Times and CNN. His work highlights how psychology can help firms better understand and serve their customers. Ryan has a new book launch in June 2025 called "The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things" Harvard Business Press Follow Ryan on LinkedIn.

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Why do we actively seek out content that makes us angry? In this episode, Colin Shaw and Professor Ryan Hamilton explore the idea of consuming anger as an emotional experience. From doomscrolling and rage-bait headlines to viral customer complaints and outrage-driven media, they unpack why anger is such a powerful, bonding, and profitable emotion — and what this means for Customer Experience.

Best Quote from the Episode "Sometimes people don't just experience anger — they actively consume it, because it makes them feel alive."

Professor Ryan Hamilton

Key Takeaways * Anger is not just a reaction — it's often a deliberate emotional choice * People consume negative emotions (anger, fear, disgust, sadness) because emotion beats boredom * Rage-bait content works because it delivers safe emotional arousal with no personal risk * Brands can unintentionally create rage bait, losing control of the narrative * There may be no emotion that can't be monetized — but that raises ethical questions

Resources Mentioned

Overton's window - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMU0w4MP8Dc&t=5s

Colin Shaw - https://www.linkedin.com/in/colinrjshaw/

Professor Ryan Hamilton - http://linkedin.com/in/ryan-hamilton-49b3321

About the Hosts:

Colin Shaw is a LinkedIn 'Top Voice' with a massive 286,000 followers and 87,000 subscribers to his 'Why Customers Buy' newsletter. Shaw is named one of the world's 'Top 150 Business Influencers' by LinkedIn. His company, Beyond Philosophy LLC, has been selected four times by the Financial Times as a top management consultancy. Shaw is co-host of the top 1.5% podcast 'The Intuitive Customer'—with over 600,000 downloads—and author of eight best-sellers on customer experience. Shaw is a sought-after keynote speaker. Follow Colin on LinkedIn.

Ryan Hamilton is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of 'The Intuitive Customer' book. An award-winning teacher and researcher in consumer psychology, he has been named one of Poets & Quants' "World's Best 40 B-School Profs Under 40." His research focuses on how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence shopper decision-making, and his findings have been published in top academic journals and covered by major media outlets like The New York Times and CNN. His work highlights how psychology can help firms better understand and serve their customers. Ryan has a new book launch in June 2025 called "The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things" Harvard Business Press Follow Ryan on LinkedIn.

Subscribe & Follow

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How will customers decide which decisions to hand over to AI?

As AI agents move to the front of the customer journey, brands are no longer competing for attention. They're competing for selection. And in many cases, they don't even realize they're being bypassed.

This conversation goes beyond tools and technology to examine the psychology of decision-making, trust, empathy, and what happens when AI becomes the primary decision-maker on behalf of customers.

🔑 What We Explore in This Episode

Why AI isn't replacing people—it's replacing decision effort
How customers decide which decisions they're willing to give up
The difference between commodity, complex, and high-risk decisions
Why behavioral segmentation matters more than demographics
How AI can demonstrate empathy—and why that challenges long-held CX beliefs
What it means for organizations when AI mediates the experience instead of them

💬 Best Quote from the Episode

"Once AI becomes the primary interface, organizations stop competing for attention and start competing for selection."

— Colin Shaw

Key Questions Discussed

Which customer decisions in your business are already being outsourced to AI—whether you like it or not?
As customers trust AI with simple decisions, how far up the decision ladder will that trust extend?
If AI becomes the most trusted voice in the journey, what role does your brand actually play?

Why You Should Listen

If you're still thinking about AI as a tool your organization uses—rather than a force your customers are using—you're already behind.

This episode will help you rethink:

Where AI fits in the customer decision process
Why "human touch" alone is no longer a defensible strategy
What leaders must do now to avoid being sleepwalked into commoditization

Resources Mentioned

Colin Shaw - https://www.linkedin.com/in/colinrjshaw/

Professor Ryan Hamilton - http://linkedin.com/in/ryan-hamilton-49b3321

About the Hosts:

Colin Shaw is a LinkedIn 'Top Voice' with a massive 286,000 followers and 87,000 subscribers to his 'Why Customers Buy' newsletter. Shaw is named one of the world's 'Top 150 Business Influencers' by LinkedIn. His company, Beyond Philosophy LLC, has been selected four times by the Financial Times as a top management consultancy. Shaw is co-host of the top 1.5% podcast 'The Intuitive Customer'—with over 600,000 downloads—and author of eight best-sellers on customer experience. Shaw is a sought-after keynote speaker. Follow Colin on LinkedIn.

Ryan Hamilton is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of 'The Intuitive Customer' book. An award-winning teacher and researcher in consumer psychology, he has been named one of Poets & Quants' "World's Best 40 B-School Profs Under 40." His research focuses on how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence shopper decision-making, and his findings have been published in top academic journals and covered by major media outlets like The New York Times and CNN. His work highlights how psychology can help firms better understand and serve their customers. Ryan has a new book launch in June 2025 called "The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things" Harvard Business Press Follow Ryan on LinkedIn.

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What does customer experience look like when AI starts acting on behalf of the customer?

As AI agents increasingly understand customer context, remember past behavior, and reduce friction, they begin to insert themselves between companies and customers.

That shift has major implications for CX, branding, differentiation, and how organizations stay relevant when customers stop visiting websites, apps, and even stores.

This conversation focuses entirely on the customer's perspective, not internal AI efficiency. It's about what happens when customers trust AI agents to search, filter, recommend — and sometimes even buy for them.

Best Quote from the Episode

"When your customer experience isn't good enough, you get replaced by something that is."

— Colin Shaw

Key Questions Discussed

What happens to customer experience when AI starts making decisions for customers instead of customers interacting directly with companies?
If AI becomes the primary filter of choice, how do brands stay visible — and avoid becoming invisible?
Which parts of today's customer journey are most at risk of disappearing altogether?

Why You Should Listen

If you're responsible for customer experience, strategy, marketing, or growth, this episode challenges some deeply held assumptions about how customers discover, evaluate, and choose brands.

Rather than focusing on internal AI use cases, this conversation looks outward — at how customer behavior is shifting and what that means for organizations that want to remain visible, relevant, and chosen in an AI-first world.

This episode doesn't give you a checklist. It gives you something more valuable:

a new way of thinking about where CX is heading — and why waiting is risky.

Resources Mentioned

Colin Shaw - https://www.linkedin.com/in/colinrjshaw/

Professor Ryan Hamilton - http://linkedin.com/in/ryan-hamilton-49b3321

About the Hosts:

Colin Shaw is a LinkedIn 'Top Voice' with a massive 286,000 followers and 87,000 subscribers to his 'Why Customers Buy' newsletter. Shaw is named one of the world's 'Top 150 Business Influencers' by LinkedIn. His company, Beyond Philosophy LLC, has been selected four times by the Financial Times as a top management consultancy. Shaw is co-host of the top 1.5% podcast 'The Intuitive Customer'—with over 600,000 downloads—and author of eight best-sellers on customer experience. Shaw is a sought-after keynote speaker. Follow Colin on LinkedIn.

Ryan Hamilton is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of 'The Intuitive Customer' book. An award-winning teacher and researcher in consumer psychology, he has been named one of Poets & Quants' "World's Best 40 B-School Profs Under 40." His research focuses on how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence shopper decision-making, and his findings have been published in top academic journals and covered by major media outlets like The New York Times and CNN. His work highlights how psychology can help firms better understand and serve their customers. Ryan has a new book launch in June 2025 called "The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things" Harvard Business Press Follow Ryan on LinkedIn.

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How are you really using AI — and how does that compare to others?

In this episode, Colin Shaw introduces a simple behavioural framework for understanding how people are actually using AI today — not in theory, but in practice — and why this matters enormously for the future of Customer Experience.

Rather than treating AI as a technology maturity model, Colin reframes it as a behavioural curve, shaped by confidence, trust, intent, and the consequences of being wrong.

Drawing on real usage examples, ChatGPT analytics, and current research, Colin outlines four AI usage patterns that people tend to move through over time. Most people touch more than one. Very few stay in just one forever.

The episode challenges listeners to ask:

Where am I on this curve?
Where are my customers today?
And where will they be in 3–5 years?

This is Part One of a new AI series exploring the implications of changing customer behaviour — and what organisations should be doing now to prepare.

Best Quote from the Episode "This isn't a technology maturity model. It's a behavioural one. People don't adopt AI in a single way — they move through patterns depending on trust, confidence, and what's at stake."

Colin Shaw, Founder & CEO, Beyond Philosophy

Why You Should Listen If you're:

wondering how AI will really change Customer Experience
unsure whether your organisation is preparing for the right future
or trying to understand how customer decision-making is evolving

…this episode gives you a clear, practical way to think about AI adoption — grounded in behaviour, not hype.

Resources Mentioned

Colin Shaw - https://www.linkedin.com/in/colinrjshaw/

Professor Ryan Hamilton - http://linkedin.com/in/ryan-hamilton-49b3321

About the Hosts:

Colin Shaw is a LinkedIn 'Top Voice' with a massive 284,000 followers and 87,000 subscribers to his 'Why Customers Buy' newsletter. Shaw is named one of the world's 'Top 150 Business Influencers' by LinkedIn. His company, Beyond Philosophy LLC, has been selected four times by the Financial Times as a top management consultancy. Shaw is co-host of the top 2% podcast 'The Intuitive Customer'—with over 600,000 downloads—and author of eight best-sellers on customer experience, Shaw is a sought-after keynote speaker. Follow Colin on LinkedIn.

Ryan Hamilton is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of 'The Intuitive Customer' book. An award-winning teacher and researcher in consumer psychology, he has been named one of Poets & Quants' "World's Best 40 B-School Profs Under 40." His research focuses on how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence shopper decision-making, and his findings have been published in top academic journals and covered by major media outlets like The New York Times and CNN. His work highlights how psychology can help firms better understand and serve their customers. Ryan has a new book launch in June 2025 called "The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things" Harvard Business Press Follow Ryan on LinkedIn.

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Customer satisfaction has barely moved in over 30 years — despite enormous investment in Customer Experience.

In this episode of The Intuitive Customer, Professor Ryan Hamilton and Morgan Ward speak with Forrest Morgeson from the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI).

ACSI has tracked customer satisfaction continuously since 1994 using the same questions and methodology across the entire US economy. And the long-term data tells a story that challenges many comfortable CX assumptions.

Rather than steadily improving as CX practices mature, customer satisfaction rises and falls in cycles — heavily influenced by pricing, profitability, cost-cutting, and broader economic forces.

This episode explores why satisfaction scores stagnate, why record profits often coincide with declining customer satisfaction, and why CX leaders need to think beyond journey maps and empathy training.

Best Quote from the Episode

"Customer satisfaction isn't a straight line. It moves in cycles — and when companies start squeezing for profit, customers feel it."

Forrest Morgeson, American Custoimer Satisfaction Index

Why You Should Listen?

If you work in customer experience, marketing, or leadership, this episode will challenge some of the most widely held beliefs in CX.

You'll gain:

A data-led perspective grounded in 30 years of evidence
A clearer understanding of why satisfaction scores fall despite CX investment
Practical insight into the economic forces shaping customer experience
A more realistic way to think about CX performance and ROI

Resources Mentioned

American Customer Satisfaction Index: https://theacsi.org/the-acsi-difference/us-overall-customer-satisfaction/

Forrest Morgeson - https://www.linkedin.com/in/forrestmorgeson/

About the Hosts:

Ryan Hamilton is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of 'The Intuitive Customer' book. An award-winning teacher and researcher in consumer psychology, he has been named one of Poets & Quants' "World's Best 40 B-School Profs Under 40." His research focuses on how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence shopper decision-making, and his findings have been published in top academic journals and covered by major media outlets like The New York Times and CNN. His work highlights how psychology can help firms better understand and serve their customers. Ryan has a new book launch in June 2025 called "The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things" Harvard Business Press Follow Ryan on LinkedIn.

Morgan Ward is an adjunct marketing professor, weekly expert guest on The Take—11Alive's in-depth news program that explores timely stories through expert insight—With over 20 years of experience advising clients ranging from start-ups to Fortune 500s and publishing in top academic journals, she's passionate about decoding the symbolic and cultural forces that shape consumer behavior. Her work focuses on status, identity, and decision-making across sectors like luxury, retail, and tech. Beyond consulting, Morgan serves as an expert witness in branding and advertising litigation, bringing academic rigor to questions of perception, distinctiveness, and influence.

Follow Morgan on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/morgankward-phd/)

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In this episode of The Intuitive Customer, Professor Ryan Hamilton is joined by Ben Shaw, seasoned brand strategist, to unpack the promises and pitfalls of synthetic audiences - AI-driven research used for faster, cheaper market research.

Synthetic audiences, powered by large language models (LLMs), can replicate customer segments and respond to creative concepts or product questions at scale cutting the time and cost of traditional surveys. But does it come with trade-offs?

Expect lively debate on the AI vs. LLM naming debate, the enduring value of ethnography and nuance, and practical tips for blending synthetic and traditional research to make smarter, more human-centred decisions. From democratising access to consumer insight to questioning the believability of robot-approved ad copy, this candid discussion highlights how to use these tools wisely.

🔑 Key Takeaways 1. Synthetic ≠ Real: Synthetic audiences use LLMs to predict human responses—they're powerful, but they're still not replacements for real people. 2. Direction not Proof: Treat synthetic audiences as a first-cut hypothesis tool i.e.great for inspiration, not yet reliable as stand-alone evidence. 3. Nuance & Minority Voices Matter: AI often defaults to the average response, risking loss of critical insights from edge cases or minority behaviours. 4. Democratisation of Insight: With the right data, teams from product to shop-floor staff can ask customer-centred questions directly. 5. Best Practice: Use synthetic audiences for speed and hypothesis testing, then validate with real humans—especially for high-stakes decisions.

📚 Resources & Mentions * HubSpot CMO Kipp Bodnar "Better, faster, AND cheaper isn't a trade-off anymore" * Harvard Business School study 'Using LLMs for Market Research'

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Sales and Customer Experience—two critical functions that should work together, but too often operate at odds. This week, Colin and Ryan explore how traditional sales tactics can undermine long-term loyalty and create organisational silos. They share personal stories (including Colin's car-buying nightmare) and practical advice for aligning sales with your desired customer experience. If you want to sell AND build trust, this episode is for you.

Best Quote of the Episode: "If you can't proudly stand behind the experience you're creating, you've got a problem." — Colin Shaw

Key Takeaways:

✅ Traditional closing techniques can damage trust, even when they maybe effective ✅ Sales incentives often conflict with customer experience goals ✅ Leadership must deliberately define the experience they want to deliver ✅ Culture matters: a sales-first mentality breeds silos and resentment ✅ Aligning sales and CX is essential for long-term success, not just short-term gains

👉 Got a business challenge you'd like us to tackle? Visit www.BeyondPhilosophy.com/pickle and tell us about it!

About the Hosts:

Colin Shaw is a LinkedIn 'Top Voice' with a massive 284,000 followers and 87,000 subscribers to his 'Why Customers Buy' newsletter. Shaw is named one of the world's 'Top 150 Business Influencers' by LinkedIn. His company, Beyond Philosophy LLC, has been selected four times by the Financial Times as a top management consultancy. Shaw is co-host of the top 1.5% podcast 'The Intuitive Customer'—with over 600,000 downloads—and author of eight best-sellers on customer experience, Shaw is a sought-after keynote speaker. Follow Colin on LinkedIn.

Ryan Hamilton is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of 'The Intuitive Customer' book. An award-winning teacher and researcher in consumer psychology, he has been named one of Poets & Quants' "World's Best 40 B-School Profs Under 40." His research focuses on how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence shopper decision-making, and his findings have been published in top academic journals and covered by major media outlets like The New York Times and CNN. His work highlights how psychology can help firms better understand and serve their customers. Ryan has a new book called "The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things" Harvard Business Press 2025

Follow Ryan on LinkedIn.

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Trust in traditional institutions is eroding. As customers lose faith in advertising, government and even online reviews, they're turning to voices that feel most relatable: peers and communities. Edelman's latest Trust Barometer shows the most credible spokesperson for a company is now "people like me."

Ben Shaw and Professor Ryan Hamilton explore the decline of influencer credibility, the rise of community-driven word-of-mouth, the tension between authenticity and control, and why attention + trust will be the "coins of the realm" for brands in the decade ahead.

🔑 Key Takeaways 1. Trust > control – brands that over-engineer influencer content or product placement erode the very authenticity that made those channels effective. 2. Attention + trust are today's scarce currencies – in an AI-shaped customer journey where deep-fakes, fake reviews and scam sites abound, both are harder to win. 3. Community is the new battleground – brands should put the "social" back into social media: support micro-communities, forums and peer-to-peer validation rather than chase mass reach alone. 4. Influencers ≠ "people like me" anymore – audiences are starting to view most creators as a separate, commercial class. 5. Virtual influencers may be a short-lived novelty – unless treated as fictional characters with entertainment value and transparent intent.

📚 Resources Mentioned / Referenced * Edelman Trust Barometer * G2 crowd / peer-review sites – cited B2B tactic to harness "people like me." * Case notes: Super Bowl celebrity ads vs brand recall, Vodafone Germany's virtual influencer, Colonel Sanders' virtual persona.

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Episode Overview

When everything is one-click easy, do we lose something meaningful? Guest host Dr. Morgan Ward joins Dr. Ryan Hamilton to explore how the right amount of friction in the consumption experience can boost connection, meaning, and long-term use of the product—while the wrong kind just gets in the way.

Quote of the Episode

"Consumption, in some ways, has just gotten too easy." — Dr. Morgan Ward

🔑 Key Takeaways

Easier isn't always better. Ultra-frictionless buying can strip away the identity, discovery, and accomplishment that make buying feel meaningful.
Effort signals value. From "chicken-juice coupons" to the IKEA effect, a little work can increase attachment and repeat use.
Design friction by segment. Introverts may love self-checkout; extroverts crave chatty lanes—know which experience your customers wants
Guide them but don't overwhelm. Keep choice in the journey (it's part of self-expression) but make it manageable and well-scaffolded.
Use friction where it adds meaning. Experiential or identity-laden consumption experiences benefit from challenge and discovery; utilitarian tasks should stay smooth.
Let search be satisfying. Curated discovery, small hurdles, or "surprise" moments can deliver the joy of the hunt without wasting time.

📚 Resources Mentioned / Referenced

· Research example on difficult vs. easy coupons and subsequent purchase

· The classic Better Crocker Effect based on the pancake-mix story (adding an egg restored pride and perceived contribution)

· Discovery mechanics (blind-box/surprise products) and guided choice in retail

· When should there be friction in the consumption experience and when should there not be?

About the Hosts

Ryan Hamilton is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of 'The Intuitive Customer' book. An award-winning teacher and researcher in consumer psychology, he has been named one of Poets & Quants' "World's Best 40 B-School Profs Under 40." His research focuses on how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence shopper decision-making, and his findings have been published in top academic journals and covered by major media outlets like The New York Times and CNN. His work highlights how psychology can help firms better understand and serve their customers. Ryan has a new book called "The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things" Harvard Business Press 2025

Follow Ryan on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryan-hamilton-49b3321/)

Morgan Ward is an adjunct marketing professor, weekly expert guest on The Take—11Alive's in-depth news program that explores timely stories through expert insight—With over 20 years of experience advising clients ranging from start-ups to Fortune 500s and publishing in top academic journals, she's passionate about decoding the symbolic and cultural forces that shape consumer behavior. Her work focuses on status, identity, and decision-making across sectors like luxury, retail, and tech. Beyond consulting, Morgan serves as an expert witness in branding and advertising litigation, bringing academic rigor to questions of perception, distinctiveness, and influence.

Follow Morgan on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/morgankward-phd/)

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In this episode, Colin Shaw shares a recent personal experience with a major brand that imposed a 'gag order' (NDA) after a poor service experience — and how this reflects a deeper organizational issue: silos. Together with Professor Ryan Hamilton, Colin explores why siloed thinking leads to incoherent customer experiences, how internal motivations can conflict with CX goals, and what leaders must do to ensure learning, trust, and advocacy remain priorities. A must-listen for CX professionals and senior leaders alike.

Best Quote:

"Who decides? That is the question every leadership team should ask — and answer wisely."

Key Takeaways:

Organizational silos often lead to decisions that prioritise risk management over customer experience.
Legal and PR functions may act rationally within their remit, but this can result in poor CX outcomes without CX leadership involvement.
Service recovery is a powerful opportunity to build trust and advocacy — if handled thoughtfully.
The presence of gag orders may indicate systemic issues that need urgent attention.
CX leaders must break silos, promote organisational learning, and ensure customer trust is considered in every critical decision.

Register for the 'Unleash AI. Reimagine CX launch event' by NiCE Cognigy

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About the Hosts:

Colin Shaw is a LinkedIn 'Top Voice' with a massive 284,000 followers and 87,000 subscribers to his 'Why Customers Buy' newsletter. Shaw is named one of the world's 'Top 150 Business Influencers' by LinkedIn. His company, Beyond Philosophy LLC, has been selected four times by the Financial Times as a top management consultancy. Shaw is co-host of the top 1.5% podcast 'The Intuitive Customer'—with over 600,000 downloads—and author of eight best-sellers on customer experience, Shaw is a sought-after keynote speaker. Follow Colin on LinkedIn.

Ryan Hamilton is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of 'The Intuitive Customer' book. An award-winning teacher and researcher in consumer psychology, he has been named one of Poets & Quants' "World's Best 40 B-School Profs Under 40." His research focuses on how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence shopper decision-making, and his findings have been published in top academic journals and covered by major media outlets like The New York Times and CNN. His work highlights how psychology can help firms better understand and serve their customers. Ryan has a new book called "The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things" Harvard Business Press 2025

Follow Ryan on LinkedIn.

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Episode Overview

Ever buy something you couldn’t wait to get—and then let it sit in the box for days (or weeks)? You’re not alone. Guest host Morgan Ward joins Ryan Hamilton to explore why we often love the pursuit of products more than the possession of them.

From unopened tools and “someday” sweaters to the viral Stanley Cup craze, they unpack the psychology of anticipation, dopamine, and why the thrill fades once the package arrives.

This episode reveals what’s really driving that “add to cart” impulse—and how brands can design experiences that move customers from wanting to using.

Quote of the Episode “Apparently, the most appealing part of consumption for me is the buying—not the using.” — Dr. Morgan Ward

🔑 Key Takeaways 1. Anticipation feels better than ownership. Dopamine spikes during the chase, making the search itself deeply rewarding. 2. “Maybe later” kills momentum. Adding something to a wish list or cart often satisfies the craving—so we never come back to buy. 3. Trends have expiration dates. When products are tied to social signaling (like the Stanley Cup craze), they must be used now or lose their power. 4. Experience is the new product. Pop-ups, fittings, and even unboxing rituals add emotional value that can’t be postponed. 5. Design for immediacy. Products that promise instant results or gratification inspire customers to open—and love—them right away.

📚 Resources Mentioned / Referenced * The Stanley Cup phenomenon as a case study in social inclusion and urgency * Discussion of anticipatory utility and the hedonic treadmill in consumer behavior * Norton, Michael I., Daniel Mochon, and Dan Ariely. "The IKEA effect: When labor leads to love." Journal of consumer psychology 22, no. 3 (2012): 453-460.

About the Hosts

Ryan Hamilton is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of 'The Intuitive Customer' book. An award-winning teacher and researcher in consumer psychology, he has been named one of Poets & Quants' "World’s Best 40 B-School Profs Under 40." His research focuses on how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence shopper decision-making, and his findings have been published in top academic journals and covered by major media outlets like The New York Times and CNN. His work highlights how psychology can help firms better understand and serve their customers. Ryan has a new book called “The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things” Harvard Business Press 2025

Follow Ryan on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryan-hamilton-49b3321/)

Morgan Ward is an adjunct marketing professor, weekly expert guest on The Take—11Alive’s in-depth news program that explores timely stories through expert insight—With over 20 years of experience advising clients ranging from start-ups to Fortune 500s and publishing in top academic journals, she’s passionate about decoding the symbolic and cultural forces that shape consumer behavior. Her work focuses on status, identity, and decision-making across sectors like luxury, retail, and tech. Beyond consulting, Morgan serves as an expert witness in branding and advertising litigation, bringing academic rigor to questions of perception, distinctiveness, and influence.

Follow Morgan on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/morgankward-phd/)

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In this episode of The Intuitive Customer, Professor Ryan Hamilton is joined by guest host Ben Shaw to explore the high-stakes world of rebranding.

From Cracker Barrel’s logo backlash to Jaguar’s radical design overhaul, they unpack what happens when brands chase new audiences at the expense of their loyal customers. The conversation dives into the tension between rebranding vs. repositioning, why heritage brands face special challenges, how politics and culture can hijack brand decisions, and practical lessons for leaders trying to grow without alienating their core base.

Key Takeaways * Rebrand ≠ Reposition: A visual refresh is not the same as shifting your audience or your value proposition, conflate the two at their peril. * Respect the Core Customer: Growth shouldn’t mean neglecting the customers who got you here; woo them as deliberately as you pursue new ones. * Brand Stretch Matters: Broad idea-driven brands (e.g., Virgin, Crocs) can pivot more easily than heritage or status-driven brands (e.g., Jaguar, Burberry). * Change Carries Political Luggage: In today’s climate, even aesthetic changes can be interpreted as taking sides so plan for backlash and communication. * Experience vs. Marketing: Quietly improving the customer experience often triggers less resistance than highly visible logo or messaging changes. * Segment Conflicts Are Real: Pursuing one segment often pushes you away from another. * Sub-brands Can Create Safe Space: When segments clash, consider sub-brands or status tiers to reduce friction (e.g., Nike’s sport verticals, Burberry’s London/Brit/Brit Prorsum). * Heritage is an Asset and a Trap: Brands built on nostalgia or legacy often risk losing their most valuable equity if they modernise too aggressively.

Resources & Brands Mentioned * Ryan Hamilton & Annie’s book: The Growth Dilemma – on managing relationships between customer segments. * Brand case studies: Cracker Barrel, Jaguar, Burberry, Kohl’s, Nike, Crocs, Virgin, Michael Kors.

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Summary Traditional customer feedback is broken. Post-call surveys and quarterly reports are too slow, cumbersome, and overly focused on the company’s needs rather than the customer’s reality. By the time insights land on a dashboard, the customer has already left—or worse, lost trust.

In this episode of The Intuitive Customer, I (Colin Shaw) and Professor Ryan Hamilton sit down with Devidas Desai, SVP of Product Leader at ASAPP, to explore how AI that listens is reshaping the way organizations understand and respond to customers in the moment.

We delve into why silence doesn’t mean satisfaction, why feedback must shift from lagging indicators to real-time signals, and how AI can transform agents into superheroes rather than script-readers. Along the way, Devidas shares his bold vision for the “death of dashboards” and why the future is “anti-dashboard.”

If you’ve ever felt trapped in a maddening customer service loop (looking at you, broadband companies), this episode will resonate. More importantly, it will show you what’s possible when organizations finally stop treating feedback as an autopsy and start listening in real time.

Best Quote: “AI that listens isn’t about replacing humans—it’s about keeping the human in the loop, so customers get both speed and empathy in the same conversation.”

Devidas Desai, SVP, Product Leader at ASAPP Key Takeaways * Feedback as Autopsy: Traditional surveys and dashboards give you a post-mortem, not a diagnosis. By the time you act, the damage is done. * Silence ≠ Satisfaction: No feedback often means customers have given up on you—not that they’re happy. * Real-Time > Real Late: True customer experience happens in moments, not in reporting cycles. AI that listens can capture sentiment, intent, and context as it unfolds. * Human in the Loop: AI doesn’t replace humans—it augments them. The best systems blend automation with empathy and judgment. * Agent Superpowers: With AI, agents can enter conversations fully briefed, emotionally aware, and guided toward the best next step. Less paperwork, more trust-building. * Anti-Dashboard Future: Forget drowning in charts. The next wave is conversational dashboards where you ask questions, and AI gives clear, plain-language answers. * Trust is the Endgame: Customers, agents, and leaders all need to trust the system. Real-time listening, done right, rebuilds that trust.

Resources:

Devidas Desai, SVP, Product Leader at ASAPP - https://www.linkedin.com/in/devidasdesai/ ASAPP

https://www.asapp.com/

About the Hosts:

Colin Shaw is a LinkedIn 'Top Voice' with a massive 284,000 followers and 87,000 subscribers to his 'Why Customers Buy' newsletter. Shaw is named one of the world's 'Top 150 Business Influencers' by LinkedIn. His company, Beyond Philosophy LLC, has been selected four times by the Financial Times as a top management consultancy. Shaw is co-host of the top 1.5% podcast 'The Intuitive Customer'—with over 600,000 downloads—and author of eight best-sellers on customer experience, Shaw is a sought-after keynote speaker. Follow Colin on LinkedIn.

Ryan Hamilton is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of 'The Intuitive Customer' book. An award-winning teacher and researcher in consumer psychology, he has been named one of Poets & Quants' "World’s Best 40 B-School Profs Under 40." His research focuses on how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence shopper decision-making, and his findings have been published in top academic journals and covered by major media outlets like The New York Times and CNN. His work highlights how psychology can help firms better understand and serve their customers. Ryan has a new book called “The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things” Harvard Business Press 2025

Follow Ryan on LinkedIn.

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This show was recorded in partnership with ASAPP

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In this episode of The Intuitive Customer, Professor Ryan Hamilton is joined by guest co-host Ben Shaw, Chief Strategy Officer at MullenLowe, to explore the enduring role of brand archetypes in marketing and customer experience. They revisit the origins of archetypes in Jungian psychology and the influential book The Hero and the Outlaw (Pearson & Mark), before debating how useful the framework remains today. Together, they discuss the power of archetypes to create consistency, unlock creativity, and guide internal decision-making while also recognizing their limitations, risks of rigidity, and occasional resemblance to horoscopes. The conversation ranges from brand strategy in B2B to the impact of AI agents on future purchasing, highlighting how archetypes can still be adapted, evolved, and made practical for modern brand building.

🔑 Key Takeaways * Archetypes as tools, not rules: Archetypes provide a shared language for teams and a lens for decision-making, but they shouldn’t become a straightjacket. * Sub-archetypes unlock creativity: Going beyond the 12 canonical archetypes helps brands avoid sameness and find distinctiveness in crowded categories. * Accessibility matters: Archetypes are most effective when they make complex strategy simple and relatable—otherwise they risk losing non-marketing stakeholders. * Playing against type: Some of the most disruptive brands (e.g., Liquid Death) succeed precisely by defying category-expected archetypes. * Archetypes in B2B: While not always necessary, they can still be useful to express human needs like trust, security, or freedom, even in highly functional categories. * AI and archetypes: The rise of AI agents in commerce could challenge the role of storytelling in decision-making, but also presents opportunities for brands to encode their archetypes into machine-readable signals. * Healthy ambiguity: Like many frameworks, archetypes work best when used as a catalyst for debate, inspiration, and consistency but not as a rigid formula.

📚 Resources Mentioned * The Hero and the Outlaw: Building Extraordinary Brands Through the Power of Archetypes — Carol Pearson & Margaret Mark * Carl Jung’s theories of archetypes and collective unconscious * Example brands: Liquid Death, Old Spice, Superman, The Beatles * Applications of AI & Large Language Models in creative brand strategy

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Your Customers are Lazy... and Bored: How to Use That to Your Advantage

Show Notes:

This week on The Intuitive Customer, Colin takes a step back and welcomes guest host Morgan Ward to explore one of psychology’s favourite contradictions: why customers cling to the familiar, yet crave novelty. From music playlists to yogurt purchases, from comfort food to product design, Colin and Morgan unpack why we’re wired for both—and how brands can use that tension to create better customer experiences.

Best Quote from the Episode “Familiarity earns trust. Novelty earns attention. Get the balance right, and you earn loyalty.”

Key Takeaways

Customers don’t always prefer the familiar or the new—it depends on context and need.
Status quo bias (familiarity) is driven by loss aversion and cognitive laziness.
Novelty seeking is driven by boredom and our need for optimal arousal.
The best products deliver both—“updated classics” that balance safety and stimulation.
Ask yourself: is your customer seeking comfort or excitement right now? Your answer determines whether to lean into familiarity or novelty.

🎧 Listen in to discover why customers sometimes want the same old thing… and sometimes something entirely different.

About the Hosts:

Ryan Hamilton is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of 'The Intuitive Customer' book. An award-winning teacher and researcher in consumer psychology, he has been named one of Poets & Quants' "World’s Best 40 B-School Profs Under 40." His research focuses on how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence shopper decision-making, and his findings have been published in top academic journals and covered by major media outlets like The New York Times and CNN. His work highlights how psychology can help firms better understand and serve their customers. Ryan has a new book called “The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things” Harvard Business Press 2025

Follow Ryan on LinkedIn.

Morgan Ward is a former marketing professor and experienced brand consultant, now founder of InsightHive—a behavioral strategy consultancy that helps companies apply consumer psychology to real-world brand challenges. With over 20 years of experience advising clients ranging from start-ups to Fortune 500s and publishing in top academic journals, she’s passionate about decoding the symbolic and cultural forces that shape consumer behavior. Her work focuses on status, identity, and decision-making across sectors like luxury, retail, and tech. Beyond consulting, Morgan serves as an expert witness in branding and advertising litigation, bringing academic rigor to questions of perception, distinctiveness, and influence.

Follow Morgan on LinkedIn

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In this milestone episode, The Intuitive Customer undergoes a transformation. Colin Shaw announces a step back from the regular hosting role, prompting a fresh chapter in the podcast’s evolution. Hosts Colin Shaw and Professor Ryan Hamilton introduce two new expert contributors — Dr. Morgan Ward, a consumer psychologist, and Ben Shaw, a brand strategist — to bring fresh perspectives on customer behavior, brand experience, and the future of CX.

Together, the four hosts discuss the state of customer experience today, particularly in light of the stagnant growth in the American Customer Satisfaction Index over the past three decades. They debate metrics versus meaning, the enduring value of physical retail, and the coming wave of non-visual AI-driven brand interactions. The episode sets the stage for a broader, more dynamic take on what it means to truly understand and serve customers in the modern age.

Quote of the Episode "We're using metrics that are more relevant to the business than to the person actually experiencing the brand."

— Dr. Morgan Ward

Key Takeaways

Customer satisfaction has plateaued: The American Customer Satisfaction Index has barely moved in 30 years, despite huge investments in CX. This calls into question the effectiveness of current CX strategies.

ROI needs to be central: CX professionals must link experience improvements directly to financial returns if they want continued investment.

Metrics can be misleading: Overly relying on simplified metrics like NPS can lead organizations astray, especially when they’re gamed or don’t reflect real consumer emotions.

Retail is making a comeback: Resurgence in physical retail’s emotional power especially among younger consumers who crave tactile experiences.

The future is voice-first: How AI-driven, non-visual brand experiences will redefine customer interaction demanding new forms of design thinking.

Dual focus is key: Brands must balance operational improvements today with strategic planning for a fast-approaching future filled with disruptive technologies.

Resources Mentioned

American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI):

www.acsi.org — Independent benchmark of customer satisfaction in the U.S. since 1994.

About the Hosts:

Colin Shaw is a LinkedIn 'Top Voice' with a massive 284,000 followers and 87,000 subscribers to his 'Why Customers Buy' newsletter. Shaw is named one of the world's 'Top 150 Business Influencers' by LinkedIn. His company, Beyond Philosophy LLC, has been selected four times by the Financial Times as a top management consultancy. Shaw is co-host of the top 1.5% podcast 'The Intuitive Customer'—with over 600,000 downloads—and author of eight best-sellers on customer experience, Shaw is a sought-after keynote speaker. Follow Colin on LinkedIn.

Ryan Hamilton is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of 'The Intuitive Customer' book. An award-winning teacher and researcher in consumer psychology, he has been named one of Poets & Quants' "World’s Best 40 B-School Profs Under 40." His research focuses on how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence shopper decision-making, and his findings have been published in top academic journals and covered by major media outlets like The New York Times and CNN. His work highlights how psychology can help firms better understand and serve their customers. Ryan has a new book called “The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things” Harvard Business Press 2025

Follow Ryan on LinkedIn.

Ben Shaw

Ben Shaw is Chief Strategy Officer at MullenLowe UK, having also led strategy at BBH and worked client-side with fast-growth start-ups Wheely and Unmind. He’s passionate about how brands can challenge culture convention and create ideas people want to spend time with, working on brands like Audi, Google and Burger King. Beyond advertising, Ben champions mental health awareness and rare disease research, drawing on both personal experience and professional curiosity.

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Morgan Ward

Morgan Ward, Ph.D. is a marketing scholar and former professor at Emory University and Southern Methodist University, with over two decades of expertise in consumer behavior and branding. She’s worked with clients ranging from start-ups to global brands, helping them translate behavioral science into strategies that resonate in culture and drive growth. Her academic research explores status, symbolism, and the psychology of consumption, and she has served as an expert witness in federal trademark and trade dress cases. Beyond her academic and consulting work, Morgan is fascinated by how cultural shifts shape what people desire, and how brands can both reflect and influence those desires.

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You can theorise about Customer Experience all day, but gaining a Net Promoter score of 90 is not a theory. It shows a great focus and implementation of Customer Experience. This week, we are exploring how this was achieved with Kamron Kunce, VP of Marketing & Customer Experience at RJ Young. https://www.rjyoung.com/

RJ Young has been in business for over 70 years and boasts a world-class NPS score of 90+ — no small feat in today’s hypercompetitive market.

Kamron shares how they’ve transformed their Customer Experience, navigated organisational silos, and are thoughtfully introducing AI into their processes — without losing that all-important human touch.

If you’re wrestling with legacy systems, struggling to turn CX theory into practice, or figuring out how to scale with AI without alienating customers, this episode is packed with practical tips you can take away today.

And, if you're a regular listener, you'll know this one plays right into one of Ryan’s and my favourite themes: breaking down those silos!

Best Quote From the Episode “Customer Experience is everyone’s responsibility. It’s not just about Customer Service — it’s about aligning the whole organisation around delivering value at every touchpoint.” — Kamron Kunce, RJ Young

Key Takeaways ✅ CX must be a core business strategy, not a bolt-on function of Customer Service. RJ Young’s “Make It Right Guarantee” puts this principle front and centre.

✅ Map your Customer Journey — and revisit it regularly. Quarterly and annual reviews keep RJ Young’s CX aligned to ever-evolving customer expectations.

✅ Break down silos with transparency. Weekly cross-functional updates and quarterly company-wide video broadcasts ensure alignment across 700 employees and 9 states.

✅ Cross-functional collaboration is critical. Everyone, including Finance and HR, plays a role in the Customer Experience.

✅ Thoughtful use of AI is the future. RJ Young is leveraging AI to improve backend data insights and operational efficiency, without removing the human element that drives loyalty.

✅ CX + Culture go hand in hand. Embedding CX into your company culture is essential for sustainable success.

Resources Mentioned

RJ Young: https://www.rjyoung.com/

Kamron Kunce: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kamronkunce/

About the Hosts:

Colin Shaw is a LinkedIn 'Top Voice' with a massive 284,000 followers and 87,000 subscribers to his 'Why Customers Buy' newsletter. Shaw is named one of the world's 'Top 150 Business Influencers' by LinkedIn. His company, Beyond Philosophy LLC, has been selected four times by the Financial Times as a top management consultancy. Shaw is co-host of the top 1.5% podcast 'The Intuitive Customer'—with over 600,000 downloads—and author of eight best-sellers on customer experience, Shaw is a sought-after keynote speaker. Follow Colin on LinkedIn.

Ryan Hamilton is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of 'The Intuitive Customer' book. An award-winning teacher and researcher in consumer psychology, he has been named one of Poets & Quants' "World’s Best 40 B-School Profs Under 40." His research focuses on how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence shopper decision-making, and his findings have been published in top academic journals and covered by major media outlets like The New York Times and CNN. His work highlights how psychology can help firms better understand and serve their customers. Ryan has a new book called “The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things” Harvard Business Press 2025

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In this episode of The Intuitive Customer, Colin Shaw speaks with Andy Traba, VP of Product Marketing at NICE, about the company’s new mission: Creating a NiCE World. This isn’t just a rebranding message — it’s a strategic shift toward unified, proactive, and AI-enabled customer experiences.

Andy and Colin explore why AI alone isn’t enough, the dangers of siloed implementations, and why leading organizations are turning to platforms — not point solutions — to orchestrate connected, emotionally resonant journeys.

If your organization is serious about CX transformation, this conversation provides clear guidance on where to start, what to avoid, and how to align internal functions toward a shared customer strategy.

Quote of the Episode “The moment you find success with AI, you’ll want more. That’s why you have to start with a platform — not a point solution — so your entire organization can scale, align, and deliver a truly connected experience.”

— Andy Traba, VP of Product Marketing, NiCE

🔑 Key Topics Covered:

NICE’s Global Happiness Index and the emotional impact of service
Why 37% of customers still get stuck in repeat interactions
The risk of siloed AI and “Frankenstack” technology stacks
Platform strategies for AI orchestration and enterprise-wide memory
Proactive service as the new CX battleground
Segment of one personalization and behavioral science applications
Practical starting points for CX leaders in 2025

📎 Resources Mentioned

NiCE - https://www.nice.com/
NiCE Global Happiness Index Report - https://get.nice.com/2024-intl-happiness-index-report.html
Connect with Andy Traba on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-traba-a75a1b3/

About the Hosts:

Colin Shaw is a LinkedIn 'Top Voice' with a massive 284,000 followers and 87,000 subscribers to his 'Why Customers Buy' newsletter. Shaw is named one of the world's 'Top 150 Business Influencers' by LinkedIn. His company, Beyond Philosophy LLC, has been selected four times by the Financial Times as a top management consultancy. Shaw is co-host of the top 1.5% podcast 'The Intuitive Customer'—with over 600,000 downloads—and author of eight best-sellers on customer experience, Shaw is a sought-after keynote speaker. Follow Colin on LinkedIn.

Ryan Hamilton is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of 'The Intuitive Customer' book. An award-winning teacher and researcher in consumer psychology, he has been named one of Poets & Quants' "World’s Best 40 B-School Profs Under 40." His research focuses on how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence shopper decision-making, and his findings have been published in top academic journals and covered by major media outlets like The New York Times and CNN. His work highlights how psychology can help firms better understand and serve their customers. Ryan has a new book called “The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things” Harvard Business Press 2025

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This podcast was undertaken in partnership with NiCE

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AI is taking over—well, at least some parts of customer service. But how do you know when to automate and when to stick with the good old-fashioned human touch? In this episode, we dive into one of the most crucial decisions organizations are making today: When should you use AI, and when do customers actually need a human?

Spoiler alert: If you let AI handle everything, you might save money—but you could also drive your customers straight to your competitors.

Best Quote from the Episode:

"You don’t want AI handling a $300 million defense contract. ‘Hello! I see you're interested in missile systems. Would you like fries with that?’"

Key Takeaways:

AI Should Enhance, Not Replace – AI can automate routine interactions, but when emotions are high (like fraud issues or complaints), a human is still king.
The Wrong Cost-Cutting Strategy Can Cost You More – AI might save money upfront, but if it frustrates customers, it can drive them away.
Know Your Audience – Some customers love chatbots; others despise them. Testing is critical.
Context Matters – A simple question like checking an account balance? AI can handle it. A frustrated customer dealing with a major issue? Bring in the humans.
AI + Humans = The Winning Formula – Studies show AI-generated emails can be more empathetic than human ones (yes, really!), but the best approach is using AI to support human interactions, not replace them.

Why You Should Listen: If you’re thinking about rolling out AI across your customer experience, stop and listen to this episode first. We break down the risks, the rewards, and how to make sure you don’t end up with a frustrated customer base ready to rage-tweet about you.

Resources Mentioned

Wall Street Journal Article: Turns Out AI Is More Empathetic Than Allstate’s Insurance Reps

https://www.wsj.com/articles/turns-out-ai-is-more-empathetic-than-allstates-insurance-reps-cf5f7c98?utm_source=chatgpt.com

About the Hosts:

Colin Shaw is a LinkedIn 'Top Voice' with a massive 284,000 followers and 86,000 subscribers to his 'Why Customers Buy' newsletter. Shaw is named one of the world's 'Top 150 Business Influencers' by LinkedIn. His company, Beyond Philosophy LLC, has been selected four times by the Financial Times as a top management consultancy. Shaw is co-host of the top 1.5% podcast 'The Intuitive Customer'—with over 600,000 downloads—and author of eight best-sellers on customer experience, Shaw is a sought-after keynote speaker. Follow Colin on LinkedIn.

Ryan Hamilton is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of 'The Intuitive Customer' book. An award-winning teacher and researcher in consumer psychology, he has been named one of Poets & Quants' "World’s Best 40 B-School Profs Under 40." His research focuses on how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence shopper decision-making, and his findings have been published in top academic journals and covered by major media outlets like The New York Times and CNN. His work highlights how psychology can help firms better understand and serve their customers. Ryan has a new book launch in June 2025 called “The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things” Harvard Business Press Follow Ryan on LinkedIn.

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How do you grow your revenues without upsetting your existing customers?

In this episode, Colin Shaw and Professor Ryan Hamilton dive into the new book he has written with Anne Wilson, Senior Lecturer at Wharton.

Published by Harvard Business Review Press, the book is called:

The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things

Available here: https://bit.ly/3ZCN2wD

Professor Ryan Hamilton reveal how brand growth often gets derailed not by bad strategy, but by insufficient attention to how your customer segments relate to each other. You may think your audiences are living on separate islands, but spoiler alert: they’re not. They're watching each other, seeing what the other does, and sometimes they don’t like it and will move elsewhere.

From Crocs to Prius to the Bud Light fiasco (and yes, even neo-Nazis in New Balance sneakers), this episode pulls no punches. It’s a fast-paced, funny, and brutally honest look at why many brands fail to grow—and how you can avoid becoming the following cautionary tale.

💥 Best Quote from the Episode: "If your growth strategy relies on one customer segment not hearing what you're saying to another, it's already a bad strategy." — Prof. Ryan Hamilton

🧠 What You’ll Learn: * Why growth isn’t just about what you offer—it’s about who sees you offering it * The hidden relationships between customer segments and how they impact brand value * Why Bud Light’s attempt to broaden its appeal led to a marketing meltdown * How Crocs turned from a fashion joke to a fashion statement * What to do when the wrong customer segments start adopting your brand * How to spot leader–follower segment dynamics and use them to scale * Practical questions to ask before you launch a growth strategy

📘 About the Book: The Growth Dilemma Ryan’s new book with Annie Wilson is out now! Published by Harvard Business Review Press, The Growth Dilemma explores how inter-segment conflict affects brand growth and what to do about it. It’s innovative, practical, and unlike anything else out there.

Buy it now: https://bit.ly/3ZCN2wD

📣 Get Involved If you're leading a brand, managing customer segments, or thinking about how to grow, this episode is for you.

Reach out to Ryan on LinkedIn if you're interested in:

Workshops
Keynotes
Or just picking his brain over a coffee (virtual or otherwise)

📨 Connect with Ryan: https://bit.ly/3SvsqTh

About the Hosts:

Colin Shaw is a LinkedIn 'Top Voice' with a massive 284,000 followers and 86,000 subscribers to his 'Why Customers Buy' newsletter. Shaw is named one of the world's 'Top 150 Business Influencers' by LinkedIn. His company, Beyond Philosophy LLC, has been selected four times by the Financial Times as a top management consultancy. Shaw is co-host of the top 1.5% podcast 'The Intuitive Customer'—with over 600,000 downloads—and author of eight best-sellers on customer experience. Shaw is a sought-after keynote speaker. Follow Colin on LinkedIn.

Ryan Hamilton is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of the book 'The Intuitive Customer'. An award-winning teacher and researcher in consumer psychology, he has been named one of Poets & Quants' "World’s Best 40 B-School Profs Under 40." His research focuses on how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence shopper decision-making, and his findings have been published in top academic journals and featured in major media outlets, including The New York Times and CNN. His work highlights how psychology can help firms better understand and serve their customers. Ryan has a new book called “The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things.” Harvard Business Press 2025.

Follow Ryan on LinkedIn.

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Have you ever said “thank you” to a chatbot or Chat GPT? Well, you’re not alone—and you might just be weirder than you think. It turns out AI can be more empathic than people. But what do Customers think of AI experiences? Academic research reveals the answers we discuss in this show.

In this special live-recorded episode from the SOCAP Conference, Colin Shaw and Professor Ryan Hamilton explore the psychology behind how customers actually feel about AI—and what that means for your customer experience.

Ryan dives into the latest academic research on AI trust, customer behaviour, and why people treat AI like it’s part of the cast of Friends. Meanwhile, Colin keeps things grounded with real-life examples with his usual “so what?” test.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

Why 50% of customers trust companies less when they know AI is involved
How AI literacy backfires (the more people understand it, the less they use it!)
The subtle “outgroup” bias customers apply to AI systems
Why hedonic recommendations (like chocolate) must come from humans
How one bad AI interaction can poison the well for all future ones
What the hell “personification” means—and why it matters for your brand
The surprising emotional tension behind AI adoption (it’s empowering and scary)

Best Quote from the Episode:

“AI isn’t human, but customers treat it like it is—and that means it’s being judged by human standards. If it screws up once, they’ll remember. And they’ll blame all AI for it.” – Professor Ryan Hamilton

Resources Mentioned

This podcast is sponsored by SOCAP International and IA Solutions, who are both as passionate about improving customer experience as we are.

SOCAP: https://socap.org/

IA Solutions: https://iacallcenter.com/

Research References:

Castelo, Noah, Maarten W. Bos, and Donald R. Lehmann (2019), “Task-Dependent Algorithm Aversion,” Journal of Marketing Research, 56 (5), 809-825.
Dietvorst, Berkeley J., Joseph P. Simmons, and Cade Massey (2015), “Algorithm aversion: people erroneously avoid algorithms after seeing them err,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 144, 1, 114.
Hermann, Erik, and Stefano Puntoni, (2024), “Artificial intelligence and consumer behavior: From predictive to generative AI,” Journal of Business Research, 180, 114720.
Ipsos (2022), “Global opinions about AI – January 2022, https://t.ly/qyyEI
Longoni, Chiara, and Luca Cian (2022), “Artificial Intelligence in Utilitarian vs. Hedonic Contexts: The “Word-of-Machine” Effect,” Journal of Marketing, 86 (1), 91-108.
Puntoni, Stefano, Rebecca W. Reczek, Markus Giesler, and Simona Botti (2021), “Consumers and Artificial Intelligence: An Experiential Perspective,” Journal of Marketing, 85 (1), 131-151.
Santoro, Erik, and Benoît Monin (2023), “The AI Effect: People rate distinctively human attributes as more essential to being human after learning about artificial intelligence advances,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 107, 104464.

About the Hosts:

Colin Shaw is a LinkedIn 'Top Voice' with a massive 284,000 followers and 86,000 subscribers to his 'Why Customers Buy' newsletter. Shaw is named one of the world's 'Top 150 Business Influencers' by LinkedIn. His company, Beyond Philosophy LLC, has been selected four times by the Financial Times as a top management consultancy. Shaw is co-host of the top 1.5% podcast 'The Intuitive Customer'—with over 600,000 downloads—and author of eight best-sellers on customer experience, Shaw is a sought-after keynote speaker. Follow Colin on LinkedIn.

Ryan Hamilton is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of 'The Intuitive Customer' book. An award-winning teacher and researcher in consumer psychology, he has been named one of Poets & Quants' "World’s Best 40 B-School Profs Under 40." His research focuses on how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence shopper decision-making, and his findings have been published in top academic journals and covered by major media outlets like The New York Times and CNN. His work highlights how psychology can help firms better understand and serve their customers. Ryan has a new book launch in June 2025 called “The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things” Harvard Business Press Follow Ryan on LinkedIn.

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How happy are you when you buy auto insurance? If your answer is anything other than thrilled, you’re not alone. In fact, years ago, a UK insurance company tried to convince us otherwise with their tagline “Quote Me Happy.” Spoiler alert: Nobody was happy.

This raises a fascinating question: What role does advertising play in the customer experience, and why is there such a massive disconnect between the ads we see and what we actually get?

In this episode, Colin Shaw and Professor Ryan Hamilton dive deep into the Great Expectation Gap—and they’ve brought in a special guest: Ben Shaw, Chief Strategy Officer at MullenLowe (and, fun fact, Colin’s son). It turns out that years of heated Sunday lunch debates on advertising vs. CX have led to this moment! 🍽️

Together, they explore why marketing often sets unrealistic expectations, how brands can align advertising with reality, and why great advertising can only work if the customer experience delivers on the promise.

💡 Tune in to discover: ✅ Why customers feel frustrated when reality doesn’t match advertising promises ✅ The power of the word "BUT" in advertising and how it reveals hidden customer tensions ✅ The real reason marketing and CX teams aren’t on the same page—and how to fix it ✅ How Apple mastered the art of aligning advertising and customer experience ✅ Why spending more on advertising won’t solve a broken CX (no matter how creative the campaign is)

Best Quote from the Episode: The Brand makes the promise in the Market, the Customer Experience should deliver against that promise. — Colin Shaw

Resources Mentioned

Ben Shaw LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benshawuk/

'Brand Ben' on Tik Tok: https://www.tiktok.com/@benshaw37?_t=ZN-8ujJORxL3SQ&_r=1

Mullen Lowe: https://www.mullenlowe.co.uk/

About the Hosts:

Colin Shaw is a LinkedIn 'Top Voice' with a massive 284,000 followers and 86,000 subscribers to his 'Why Customers Buy' newsletter. Shaw is named one of the world's 'Top 150 Business Influencers' by LinkedIn. His company, Beyond Philosophy LLC, has been selected four times by the Financial Times as a top management consultancy. Shaw is co-host of the top 1.5% podcast 'The Intuitive Customer'—with over 600,000 downloads—and author of eight best-sellers on customer experience, Shaw is a sought-after keynote speaker. Follow Colin on LinkedIn.

Ryan Hamilton is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of 'The Intuitive Customer' book. An award-winning teacher and researcher in consumer psychology, he has been named one of Poets & Quants' "World’s Best 40 B-School Profs Under 40." His research focuses on how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence shopper decision-making, and his findings have been published in top academic journals and covered by major media outlets like The New York Times and CNN. His work highlights how psychology can help firms better understand and serve their customers. Ryan has a new book launch in June 2025 called “The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things” Harvard Business Press Follow Ryan on LinkedIn.

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#CustomerExperience #Marketing #Advertising #Branding #CX

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Episode Summary: Everyone’s talking about AI like it’s some kind of CX fairy godmother—“Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo! Your NPS just went up 50 points!”

Spoiler alert: it doesn’t work like that.

In this episode, Colin and Ryan are joined by Frederic Durand, CEO of Diabolocom, and Collin D. Ehret, Senior Enterprise Sales Director (yes, another Collin… brace yourself), for a no-fluff, practical, and slightly irreverent discussion about what it really takes to implement AI in your customer experience.

Diabolocom

Website: https://www.diabolocom.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/diabolocom/

Frederic Durand

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fpdurand/

Collin D. Ehret

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/collinehret/

This is a must-listen if you're wondering:

Why most AI deployments stall before takeoff
How to avoid drowning in customer data
Why your silos are killing your CX
And how AI can actually make your human interactions better

You’ll hear real-world examples, hard-earned insights, and maybe even a laugh or two (two Colins on one podcast—what could go wrong?).

🔥 Best Quote from the Episode: “AI isn’t a magic wand. If your process is a mess, AI will just make it a faster, more expensive mess.” — Frederic Durand, Diabolocom

🎯 Key Takeaways: * Start small, think big: The best AI implementations begin with narrow, clearly defined use cases—not a 3-year transformation plan with 47 KPIs. * Data is your foundation: If your data isn’t clean, your AI won’t be either. Garbage in = garbage out, just faster and more confidently wrong. * Break the silos: AI can’t fix your customer experience if Marketing, IT, and Customer Service are all playing in separate sandboxes. * Empathy still wins: When AI takes care of the boring stuff, your humans can focus on being... well, human. And that’s what customers remember. * Vendors should act like partners: Don’t buy tools. Build relationships with people who’ve seen the battlefield—and won.

About the Hosts:

Colin Shaw is a LinkedIn 'Top Voice' with a massive 284,000 followers and 86,000 subscribers to his 'Why Customers Buy' newsletter. Shaw is named one of the world's 'Top 150 Business Influencers' by LinkedIn. His company, Beyond Philosophy LLC, has been selected four times by the Financial Times as a top management consultancy. Shaw is co-host of the top 1.5% podcast 'The Intuitive Customer'—with over 600,000 downloads—and author of eight best-sellers on customer experience, Shaw is a sought-after keynote speaker. Follow Colin on LinkedIn.

Ryan Hamilton is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of 'The Intuitive Customer' book. An award-winning teacher and researcher in consumer psychology, he has been named one of Poets & Quants' "World’s Best 40 B-School Profs Under 40." His research focuses on how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence shopper decision-making, and his findings have been published in top academic journals and covered by major media outlets like The New York Times and CNN. His work highlights how psychology can help firms better understand and serve their customers. Ryan has a new book launch in June 2025 called “The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things” Harvard Business Press Follow Ryan on LinkedIn.

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Eight years, 750,000 downloads, and 400 episodes later, The Intuitive Customer is celebrating this major milestone! In this episode, Colin Shaw and Professor Ryan Hamilton reflect on what has changed in customer experience over the years and share their biggest learnings.

📊 The Reality of Podcasting: * Podcasting is booming, with 546 million listeners worldwide. * 47% of the U.S. population (12+) listens to a podcast at least once a month. * Podcast ad spending is projected to hit $4.02 billion in 2024. * But here’s the kicker: + 50% of podcasts die after three episodes. + Only 20% make it past 10 episodes. + Most don’t last three years.

💡 We are in the top 2% of all podcasts globally—thanks to you, our listeners!

Key Takeaways

“Customer experience isn’t just about the experience—it’s about the memory of the experience. People don’t remember every detail; they remember the peak and the end. If you’re not designing for memory, you’re missing a massive opportunity.”

🏆 The Big Customer Experience Lessons from 400 Episodes: 🔹 1. CX is Still a Work in Progress (And That’s a Problem) 🔹 2. Memory Matters More Than You Think 🔹 3. Behavioral Science is the Secret Sauce (That Many Ignore) Resources Mentioned

MasterClass Series: https://beyondphilosophy.com/why-customers-make-instant-decisions-and-how-to-effect-it/

Memory Mini-Series: https://beyondphilosophy.com/our-behavior-is-motivated-by-what-we-recall-so-how-are-memories-formed-memory-mini-series-1-3/

About the Hosts:

Colin Shaw is a LinkedIn 'Top Voice' with a massive 284,000 followers and 86,000 subscribers to his 'Why Customers Buy' newsletter. Shaw is named one of the world's 'Top 150 Business Influencers' by LinkedIn. His company, Beyond Philosophy LLC, has been selected four times by the Financial Times as a top management consultancy. Shaw is co-host of the top 1.5% podcast 'The Intuitive Customer'—with over 600,000 downloads—and author of eight best-sellers on customer experience, Shaw is a sought-after keynote speaker. Follow Colin on LinkedIn.

Ryan Hamilton is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of 'The Intuitive Customer' book. An award-winning teacher and researcher in consumer psychology, he has been named one of Poets & Quants' "World’s Best 40 B-School Profs Under 40." His research focuses on how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence shopper decision-making, and his findings have been published in top academic journals and covered by major media outlets like The New York Times and CNN. His work highlights how psychology can help firms better understand and serve their customers. Ryan has a new book launch in June 2025 called “The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things” Harvard Business Press Follow Ryan on LinkedIn.

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First impressions aren’t just important—they’re everything. Research shows that customers, clients, and even your colleagues are forming opinions about you, your brand, and your business in mere seconds—often before you even get a chance to introduce yourself!

In this episode, Colin Shaw and Professor Ryan Hamilton dive deep into the psychology of first impressions, exploring the fascinating (and slightly terrifying) science behind snap judgments. How fast do customers decide whether they like or trust you? Why do first impressions stick so stubbornly? And most importantly—how can you make sure your business gets it right?

From real-world business insights to slightly embarrassing personal stories (yes, there’s a “matching tie and handkerchief” moment), this episode is packed with actionable takeaways, humor, and behavioral science gold.

If you’ve ever wondered why customers make instant decisions about your brand—and how to make sure those decisions work in your favor—this is an episode you don’t want to miss.

Best Quote from the Episode: "People decide if they like you before you even open your mouth. Customers do the same thing with your business. And once that first impression is locked in? Good luck changing it." – Colin Shaw

Key Takeaways: ✅ Customers form opinions in seconds. Studies show that people can judge competence, trustworthiness, and likability in as little as 10 seconds—or less!

✅ Your rational brain is slower than your gut. Neuroscience suggests that we make decisions before we consciously think about them—then we just make up a story to justify the decision we already made.

✅ Bad first impressions are a business killer. If your website looks outdated, your store is messy, or your customer service rep is unfriendly—customers won’t stick around to give you a second chance.

✅ The Halo Effect can work for you (or against you). One good first impression can positively color how customers see your entire brand. But a bad one? That impression sticks.

✅ First impressions happen multiple times. The moment a customer sees your ad, lands on your website, calls your contact center, or walks into your store—each moment is a new first impression. Make them count.

✅ Be careful what YOU look for. Your own biases affect how you judge customers, employees, and even your team. If you assume someone is a "bad fit," you’ll find reasons to confirm it—even if it’s not true.

🔎 Why You Should Listen:

Want to know how to create the perfect first impression for your business?
Curious about the crazy science behind why people judge in a split second?
Want to hear Colin and Ryan debate whether a “matching tie and handkerchief” can ruin your career?

About the Hosts:

Colin Shaw is a LinkedIn 'Top Voice' with a massive 284,000 followers and 86,000 subscribers to his 'Why Customers Buy' newsletter. Shaw is named one of the world's 'Top 150 Business Influencers' by LinkedIn. His company, Beyond Philosophy LLC, has been selected four times by the Financial Times as a top management consultancy. Shaw is co-host of the top 1.5% podcast 'The Intuitive Customer'—with over 600,000 downloads—and author of eight best-sellers on customer experience, Shaw is a sought-after keynote speaker. Follow Colin on LinkedIn.

Ryan Hamilton is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of 'The Intuitive Customer' book. An award-winning teacher and researcher in consumer psychology, he has been named one of Poets & Quants' "World’s Best 40 B-School Profs Under 40." His research focuses on how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence shopper decision-making, and his findings have been published in top academic journals and covered by major media outlets like The New York Times and CNN. His work highlights how psychology can help firms better understand and serve their customers. Ryan has a new book launch in June 2025 called “The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things” Harvard Business Press Follow Ryan on LinkedIn.

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Trust: it’s the glue that holds relationships together—both personal and professional. Yet, so many businesses get it wrong. In this special milestone episode (yes, 400 episodes!), Colin Shaw and Professor Ryan Hamilton break down why trust is the foundation of every great customer experience and, more importantly, how you can earn it, keep it, and leverage it to drive growth.

From sneaky fees that erode confidence to honesty that wins lifelong loyalty, we’re covering ten essential actions that will guarantee your customers trust you—and keep coming back. Plus, we share some eye-opening research on why people sometimes lie more when they actually like you (yes, really).

If you’re serious about customer experience, this is an episode you can’t afford to miss.

🎧 Listen now to discover: ✅ Why trust isn’t automatic—it has to be earned (and how to do it). ✅ The #1 mistake companies make that destroys trust instantly. ✅ How honesty—especially when things go wrong—can turn a crisis into a customer loyalty win. ✅ The psychology behind why people sometimes lie to be nice (and how this hurts customer relationships). ✅ Why overcommunication is your secret weapon for building long-term trust.

🔹 Best Quote from the Episode: "Trust is built in drops and lost in buckets. You can do everything right for years, but one moment of dishonesty or poor communication can undo it all."

🚀 Key Takeaways:

Customers can smell dishonesty a mile away—transparency and consistency are non-negotiable.
Trust isn’t just about marketing or sales; it’s company-wide, from legal to customer support.
Want to build customer loyalty? Own up to mistakes—your customers will trust you more, not less.
The easiest way to build trust? Do what you say you’re going to do.
People trust companies that communicate often, even when there’s no new update. Silence breeds doubt.

📢 Don’t just read about it—hear it for yourself! Tune in now and learn how to make trust your biggest competitive advantage.

About the Hosts:

Colin Shaw is a LinkedIn 'Top Voice' with a massive 284,000 followers and 86,000 subscribers to his 'Why Customers Buy' newsletter. Shaw is named one of the world's 'Top 150 Business Influencers' by LinkedIn. His company, Beyond Philosophy LLC, has been selected four times by the Financial Times as a top management consultancy. Shaw is co-host of the top 1.5% podcast 'The Intuitive Customer'—with over 600,000 downloads—and author of eight best-sellers on customer experience, Shaw is a sought-after keynote speaker. Follow Colin on LinkedIn.

Ryan Hamilton is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of 'The Intuitive Customer' book. An award-winning teacher and researcher in consumer psychology, he has been named one of Poets & Quants' "World’s Best 40 B-School Profs Under 40." His research focuses on how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence shopper decision-making, and his findings have been published in top academic journals and covered by major media outlets like The New York Times and CNN. His work highlights how psychology can help firms better understand and serve their customers. Ryan has a new book launch in June 2025 called “The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things” Harvard Business Press Follow Ryan on LinkedIn.

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Are we thinking less in the age of information overload? In this episode of The Intuitive Customer, Colin Shaw and Professor Ryan Hamilton discuss the hidden dangers of short-term thinking in customer experience. Businesses are obsessed with quick fixes, but is this addiction to fast results actually damaging long-term success?

Join us as we explore why short-form content gives the illusion of learning, why deep understanding requires more than a 30-second soundbite, and how behavioral science can transform your customer experience for the long haul.

From the pitfalls of Net Promoter Score (NPS) to the psychological magic of the Peak-End Rule, this episode is packed with insights that will change how you approach CX. Plus, hear why Colin thinks AI could be the modern-day version of Google Maps—and why that’s not necessarily a good thing!

Quote of the Episode

“Shortcuts create a false sense of progress. Just because something looks easy doesn’t mean it actually works.”

Key Takeaways: 🔹 Short-form content is tricking us into thinking we’re learning – but real understanding takes time, effort, and curiosity.

🔹 Net Promoter Score (NPS) isn’t the holy grail – It’s useful, but without deeper analysis, it’s just another vanity metric.

🔹 The Peak-End Rule explains why customers remember emotions, not experiences – Learn how to optimize key moments in your CX journey.

🔹 AI is a powerful tool, but it’s not a substitute for real thinking – Automation is helpful, but businesses that over-rely on it risk becoming robotic and disconnected.

🔹 Long-term relationships matter more than quick wins – Sustainable customer loyalty is built through trust, emotional connection, and meaningful engagement.

About the Hosts:

Colin Shaw is a LinkedIn 'Top Voice' with a massive 284,000 followers and 86,000 subscribers to his 'Why Customers Buy' newsletter. Shaw is named one of the world's 'Top 150 Business Influencers' by LinkedIn. His company, Beyond Philosophy LLC, has been selected four times by the Financial Times as a top management consultancy. Shaw is co-host of the top 1.5% podcast 'The Intuitive Customer'—with over 600,000 downloads—and author of eight best-sellers on customer experience, Shaw is a sought-after keynote speaker. Follow Colin on LinkedIn.

Ryan Hamilton is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of 'The Intuitive Customer' book. An award-winning teacher and researcher in consumer psychology, he has been named one of Poets & Quants' "World’s Best 40 B-School Profs Under 40." His research focuses on how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence shopper decision-making, and his findings have been published in top academic journals and covered by major media outlets like The New York Times and CNN. His work highlights how psychology can help firms better understand and serve their customers. Ryan has a new book launch in June 2025 called “The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things” Harvard Business Press Follow Ryan on LinkedIn.

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🔹 Ever wonder why you always end up choosing the medium popcorn, even when you weren’t hungry? Or why some websites magically guide you toward the “best” deal? That’s not luck—it’s behavioral science in action.

In this episode of The Intuitive Customer, Colin Shaw and Professor Ryan Hamilton reveal the power of nudging—tiny tweaks that subtly influence decisions without forcing them. But here’s the catch: sometimes nudges don’t work at all. So, what separates a genius nudge from a total flop? That’s exactly what we’re unpacking today.

🔥 Best Quote from the Episode: "Nudges feel like magic when they work. But throw the wrong nudge at the wrong audience, and it’s like trying to convince a Diet Coke fan to drink Pepsi—it’s just not happening!" – Professor Ryan Hamilton

🎯 Key Takeaways: ✅ Small changes = big impact – A well-placed nudge (like a cleverly designed pricing tier) can significantly influence customer choices.

✅ Choice architecture is everything – The decoy effect, compromise effect, and default bias all play a role in steering decisions without customers realizing it.

✅ Why nudges fail – Not every customer is persuadable. Nudges won't move the needle if someone has a strong preference (like die-hard brand loyalty).

✅ Testing is essential – Don’t just assume a nudge will work. Test different variations in real-world scenarios before rolling them out at scale.

🚀 Why You Should Listen If you’re in customer experience, marketing, or sales, this episode will change how you think about influencing behavior. Learn how to craft nudges that actually work—and avoid the ones that flop.

So, what are you waiting for? Hit play and discover the tiny tweaks that can have a BIG effect!

About the Hosts:

Colin Shaw is a LinkedIn 'Top Voice' with a massive 284,000 followers and 86,000 subscribers to his 'Why Customers Buy' newsletter. Shaw is named one of the world's 'Top 150 Business Influencers' by LinkedIn. His company, Beyond Philosophy LLC, has been selected four times by the Financial Times as a top management consultancy. Shaw is co-host of the top 1.5% podcast 'The Intuitive Customer'—with over 600,000 downloads—and author of eight best-sellers on customer experience, Shaw is a sought-after keynote speaker. Follow Colin on LinkedIn.

Ryan Hamilton is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of 'The Intuitive Customer' book. An award-winning teacher and researcher in consumer psychology, he has been named one of Poets & Quants' "World’s Best 40 B-School Profs Under 40." His research focuses on how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence shopper decision-making, and his findings have been published in top academic journals and covered by major media outlets like The New York Times and CNN. His work highlights how psychology can help firms better understand and serve their customers. Ryan has a new book launch in June 2025 called “The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things” Harvard Business Press Follow Ryan on LinkedIn.

👉 Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app.

Got a nudge story? Connect with Colin & Ryan on LinkedIn and share your experiences! 🎙️🚀

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Discounting—it feels like a surefire way to attract customers, right? Everyone loves a good bargain. But what happens when discounts stop being a tool and start becoming an expectation?

In this episode, Colin Shaw and Professor Ryan Hamilton dive into the dangerous addiction of price discounting—how it lures in customers, why businesses struggle to stop, and the long-term damage it can do to your brand and bottom line.

You'll hear painful stories of businesses that have trained their customers never to pay full price, the psychology behind why discounts are so irresistible, and why, if you’re not careful, your company could end up hooked on discounting like a bad habit.

This episode is packed with insights, humor, and practical advice you won’t want to miss!

Best Quote from the Episode: "We knew we had a problem when one of the executives said, ‘This is like heroin—we can’t stop!’"

Key Takeaways: ✅ Discounting Works—But Be Careful! Customers love a good deal, and discounts create instant excitement. But if you do it too often, you’re not just offering savings—you’re training customers to expect them.

✅ Reference Points Matter A “Was $7, Now $5” deal feels like a win, even if $5 was always a fair price. Discounts give customers an anchor price, making them feel like they’re getting a bargain—even if they’re not.

✅ Big Numbers Win People respond more to “SAVE 30%” than “SAVE $2.” The bigger the number, the better the deal seems.

✅ The Thrill of the Hunt Shoppers love feeling like they “won” at shopping.

✅ The Danger of Training Customers If customers know you’ll discount every two weeks, they’ll never pay full price again. Some companies become trapped in perpetual discounting cycles, losing profit just to keep customers coming back.

✅ Compete on Value, Not Just Price Apple doesn’t run 50% off iPhone sales every Black Friday. Their customers pay full price because they believe in the value. If your business relies on discounts, ask yourself: Would customers still buy from us if we didn’t offer them?

✅ Are You a Discount Addict? If discounts are your main strategy, it’s time to rethink. Are you making real money, or just moving stock? If the answer makes you nervous, it’s time for a change.

Why You Should Listen: This episode is a must-listen for business leaders, marketers, and CX professionals who want to break free from the discount trap and build a pricing strategy that doesn’t just attract customers—but actually makes money.

About the Hosts:

Colin Shaw is a LinkedIn 'Top Voice' with a massive 284,000 followers and 86,000 subscribers to his 'Why Customers Buy' newsletter. Shaw is named one of the world's 'Top 150 Business Influencers' by LinkedIn. His company, Beyond Philosophy LLC, has been selected four times by the Financial Times as a top management consultancy. Shaw is co-host of the top 1.5% podcast 'The Intuitive Customer'—with over 600,000 downloads—and author of eight best-sellers on customer experience, Shaw is a sought-after keynote speaker. Follow Colin on LinkedIn.

Ryan Hamilton is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of 'The Intuitive Customer' book. An award-winning teacher and researcher in consumer psychology, he has been named one of Poets & Quants' "World’s Best 40 B-School Profs Under 40." His research focuses on how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence shopper decision-making, and his findings have been published in top academic journals and covered by major media outlets like The New York Times and CNN. His work highlights how psychology can help firms better understand and serve their customers. Ryan has a new book launch in June 2025 called “The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things” Harvard Business Press Follow Ryan on LinkedIn.

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🚀 Are your departments working together or just co-existing in polite chaos?

Organizational silos are the silent killer of customer experience. Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, IT, Finance, HR—they all have their own priorities, their own goals, and their own version of success. But do those priorities align? More often than not, they don’t, and the result is a disjointed, frustrating experience for customers (and let’s be honest, for employees too).

If you’ve ever tried to resolve a simple issue with a company only to be bounced between departments like a human pinball, you’ve experienced the dark side of silos firsthand.

In this episode, Colin Shaw and Professor Ryan Hamilton dive deep into how silos are sabotaging your business and—more importantly—how to break them down. Colin also shares a particularly painful real-world example of a never-ending kitchen renovation that perfectly illustrates just how badly siloed teams can fail. (Hint: You’ll never look at a home improvement store the same way again.)

💡 Key Takeaways: 🔹 Common goals mean nothing if they aren’t lived out. Every company says “We put customers first”—but do they actually? If your Finance team makes policies that inconvenience customers, the answer is no.

🔹 Measure what matters. If Sales is rewarded for closing deals, but Implementation is penalized for poor customer satisfaction, you’ve got a problem. Aligning incentives across departments is the only way to drive real customer-centric behavior.

🔹 Cross-functional projects prevent disasters. Ever had a marketing team promise something a product team couldn’t deliver? Or a sales team sell a service that implementation couldn’t support? That’s what happens when silos rule the day.

🔹 Job shadowing changes everything. Want your IT team to build better systems for Customer Service? Have them answer support calls for a day. Want your Finance team to be more customer-friendly? Have them sit in on refund requests.

🔹 Socializing isn’t just for fun—it’s strategic. People who know each other personally collaborate more effectively. The simple act of breaking bread (or sharing a drink) can go a long way toward bridging the gaps between teams.

🎤 Best Quote from the Episode: "I once had an assistant who scheduled my meetings across London without realizing she had me zigzagging across the city like a lost tourist. After one day shadowing me, she never made that mistake again. People don’t realize the pain they cause others until they see it firsthand." – Colin Shaw

About the Hosts:

Colin Shaw is a LinkedIn 'Top Voice' with a massive 284,000 followers and 86,000 subscribers to his 'Why Customers Buy' newsletter. Shaw is named one of the world's 'Top 150 Business Influencers' by LinkedIn. His company, Beyond Philosophy LLC, has been selected four times by the Financial Times as a top management consultancy. Shaw is co-host of the top 1.5% podcast 'The Intuitive Customer'—with over 600,000 downloads—and author of eight best-sellers on customer experience, Shaw is a sought-after keynote speaker. Follow Colin on LinkedIn.

Ryan Hamilton is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of 'The Intuitive Customer' book. An award-winning teacher and researcher in consumer psychology, he has been named one of Poets & Quants' "World’s Best 40 B-School Profs Under 40." His research focuses on how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence shopper decision-making, and his findings have been published in top academic journals and covered by major media outlets like The New York Times and CNN. His work highlights how psychology can help firms better understand and serve their customers. Ryan has a new book launch in June 2025 called “The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things” Harvard Business Press Follow Ryan on LinkedIn.

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Pricing. It’s one of the most critical decisions your business will ever make, yet most people approach it like a finger-in-the-air guessing game. But what if you could tap into psychological principles to not just set prices, but make your customers feel they’re getting a great deal? That’s what this episode of The Intuitive Customer is all about.

Join Colin Shaw and Professor Ryan Hamilton as they break down the fascinating—and sometimes hilarious—world of psychological pricing. From late-night infomercials and $400 bath towels to popcorn buckets and outrageous anchoring techniques, we explore why pricing is more than numbers on a tag—it’s a story you tell your customers.

Along the way, Ryan reveals the secrets behind charm pricing, scarcity cues, and the “decoy effect,” while Colin shares how early mistakes taught him the importance of understanding customer perception. (Spoiler alert: guesswork is not a strategy.)

If you want to understand the psychology behind pricing—and how to use it to improve your bottom line—you’ll love this episode. But be warned: you might never look at a price tag the same way again.

Best Quote from the Episode: "The price isn’t just a number; it’s a conversation you’re having with your customer. And if you’re not telling the right story, someone else will." — Professor Ryan Hamilton

Key Takeaways (But You’ll Have to Tune In for the Full Insights!):

Anchoring: The "Big Daddy" of Pricing Why giving customers a frame of reference can make your prices seem more attractive.
Charm Pricing Still Works (But It’s Changing) $0.99 vs. $1.00—what’s really happening in the customer’s mind?
The Decoy Effect: Guide Them to the Right Choice How medium popcorns make large popcorns irresistible.
Scarcity and Social Proof: The FOMO Effect The subtle art of using “only 2 left!” without annoying your customers.
Price Elasticity: Know Who You’re Selling To Some customers care deeply about price changes—others don’t. Do you know the difference?
Signpost Items: First Impressions Matter Why your pricing on milk, batteries, or even AA batteries can shape brand perception.
Price Fairness: Handle with Care Overcharging can ruin trust, even if it makes short-term financial sense.

Why You Should Listen: Whether you’re pricing consulting services, running a retail store, or managing a SaaS product, this episode is packed with actionable insights that will make you rethink how you price—and how your customers perceive your value. Plus, it’s full of funny stories, practical advice, and a healthy dose of British-American banter.

Don’t just set prices. Shape perceptions.

About the Hosts:

Colin Shaw is a LinkedIn 'Top Voice' with a massive 284,000 followers and 86,000 subscribers to his 'Why Customers Buy' newsletter. Shaw is named one of the world's 'Top 150 Business Influencers' by LinkedIn. His company, Beyond Philosophy LLC, has been selected four times by the Financial Times as a top management consultancy. Shaw is co-host of the top 1.5% podcast 'The Intuitive Customer'—with over 600,000 downloads—and author of eight best-sellers on customer experience, Shaw is a sought-after keynote speaker. Follow Colin on LinkedIn.

Ryan Hamilton is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of 'The Intuitive Customer' book. An award-winning teacher and researcher in consumer psychology, he has been named one of Poets & Quants' "World’s Best 40 B-School Profs Under 40." His research focuses on how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence shopper decision-making, and his findings have been published in top academic journals and covered by major media outlets like The New York Times and CNN. His work highlights how psychology can help firms better understand and serve their customers. Ryan has a new book launch in June 2025 called “The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things” Harvard Business Press Follow Ryan on LinkedIn.

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Episode Summary:

Are you evoking the right emotions in your customers, or are you unknowingly driving them away? In this episode, Colin Shaw and Professor Ryan Hamilton dive deep into the fascinating (and often overlooked) world of customer emotions. Emotions are at the heart of every customer experience—from frustration and neglect to trust and happiness, and they’re driving your bottom line.

Colin shares a story about his wife Lorraine’s coat-return drama and unpacks the emotional disaster it caused (hint: she’s not buying from that brand again). Meanwhile, Ryan explains why emotions are “squishy,” why there’s no universal list of emotions, and how organizations can still harness this powerful driver to build loyalty, advocacy, and revenue.

You’ll learn why emotions are always in play, how to identify the ones that drive value, and how to stop evoking the ones that destroy it. Colin and Ryan share practical tips, real-life examples, and the secret to aligning your team around the emotions that matter most.

This episode is a must-listen for anyone serious about improving their customer experience—and their bottom line.

Best Quote from the Episode:

"If I went to the CEO of a company and said, ‘Here’s the emotion your customers are feeling: frustration,’ do you think they’d say, ‘Yes, that’s exactly what we were going for’? Of course not! But if you’re not managing emotions, you’re leaving them to chance—and that’s costing you loyalty and revenue." — Colin Shaw.

Key Takeaways:

Emotions Drive Customer Loyalty and Spending Emotions aren’t just fluffy extras—they’re the bedrock of customer decision-making. Positive emotions like trust, care, and value build loyalty, while negative ones like frustration and neglect destroy it.
Most Companies Don’t Know What Emotions They’re Evoking If you ask your leadership team what emotions they’re trying to evoke, you’ll likely get different answers—or blank stares. That lack of alignment is a significant problem.
Triggers Are Key to Managing Emotions Emotions don’t happen by accident. They’re triggered by specific actions, processes, or interactions. Identify the triggers in your customer journey and intentionally design them to evoke positive emotions.
Practical Exercise: Emotion Safaris Take your team on a safari to experience your customer journey—or a competitor’s—firsthand. Then debrief: What emotions did they feel? What triggered them? Were those the right emotions?
The ROI of Emotions Customers who feel trust and care spend more and are more loyal. Customers who feel neglected cost you money. Managing emotions isn’t just good for customers; it’s good for your bottom line.

Why You Should Listen: This episode isn’t just about theory—it’s about practical steps you can take to evoke the right emotions in your customers and improve your business results. Colin and Ryan’s insights are backed by decades of research, real-world experience, and a healthy dose of humor.

If you’re ready to stop leaving customer emotions to chance and start managing them with intention, this episode is for you.

Resources Mentioned

Emotional Research: https://beyondphilosophy.com/consulting/emotional-signature/

The DNA of Customer Experience: How emotions drive value book: https://beyondphilosophy.com/books/

About the Hosts:

Colin Shaw is a LinkedIn 'Top Voice' with a massive 284,000 followers and 86,000 subscribers to his 'Why Customers Buy' newsletter. Shaw is named one of the world's 'Top 150 Business Influencers' by LinkedIn. His company, Beyond Philosophy LLC, has been selected four times by the Financial Times as a top management consultancy. Shaw is co-host of the top 1.5% podcast 'The Intuitive Customer'—with over 600,000 downloads—and author of eight best-sellers on customer experience, Shaw is a sought-after keynote speaker. Follow Colin on LinkedIn.

Ryan Hamilton is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of 'The Intuitive Customer' book. An award-winning teacher and researcher in consumer psychology, he has been named one of Poets & Quants' "World’s Best 40 B-School Profs Under 40." His research focuses on how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence shopper decision-making, and his findings have been published in top academic journals and covered by major media outlets like The New York Times and CNN. His work highlights how psychology can help firms better understand and serve their customers. Ryan has a new book launch in June 2025 called “The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things” Harvard Business Press Follow Ryan on LinkedIn.

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Episode Summary:

How can you create an environment where your team feels safe to speak their minds without fear of judgment or reprisal? In this episode, Colin Shaw and Professor Ryan Hamilton are joined by Gary Keogh, an expert in psychological safety and a former corporate leader turned coach. Together, they dive into why fostering openness in teams is more than just a buzzword—it’s the secret sauce for innovation, collaboration, and performance.

Gary shares eye-opening stories, practical examples, and proven methods to build trust within teams. Learn how even small behaviors like showing vulnerability, demonstrating curiosity, and expressing appreciation can unlock untapped potential in your organization.

If you’re a leader looking to bring out the best in your team—or just curious about why “none of us are as clever as all of us”—this episode is packed with actionable insights you can’t afford to miss.

Quote of the Episode The moment you create a space where everyone feels safe to contribute, that’s when the magic happens.” — Gary Keogh

Key Takeaways:

Learn what it really means to create a workplace where people feel safe and eager to speak openly.
It’s not about coddling your team or avoiding accountability.
Discover how leadership ego, self-censorship, and rigid cultural norms stifle collaboration—and what you can do about it.
Three practical ways to foster psychological safety: show vulnerability, practice curiosity, and express appreciation.
The Jeff Bezos Approach: Find out why Amazon’s founder speaks last in meetings and seeks out junior team members’ perspectives first

Resources Mentioned

Contact Gary Keogh: http://linkedin.com/in/gkeogh

Website: https://gkexeccoaching.com/

About the Hosts:

Colin Shaw is a LinkedIn 'Top Voice' with a massive 284,000 followers and 86,000 subscribers to his 'Why Customers Buy' newsletter. Shaw is named one of the world's 'Top 150 Business Influencers' by LinkedIn. His company, Beyond Philosophy LLC, has been selected four times by the Financial Times as a top management consultancy. Shaw is co-host of the top 1.5% podcast 'The Intuitive Customer'—with over 600,000 downloads—and author of eight best-sellers on customer experience, Shaw is a sought-after keynote speaker. Follow Colin on LinkedIn.

Ryan Hamilton is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of 'The Intuitive Customer' book. An award-winning teacher and researcher in consumer psychology, he has been named one of Poets & Quants' "World’s Best 40 B-School Profs Under 40." His research focuses on how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence shopper decision-making, and his findings have been published in top academic journals and covered by major media outlets like The New York Times and CNN. His work highlights how psychology can help firms better understand and serve their customers. Ryan has a new book launch in June 2025 called “The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things” Harvard Business Press Follow Ryan on LinkedIn.

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Episode Summary How do you set yourself apart in an ever-evolving professional landscape? In this episode of The Intuitive Customer, Colin Shaw and Ryan Hamilton dive deep into the career lessons they’ve learned over decades of navigating the twists and turns of professional life. This isn’t just another list of career tips—it's a roadmap for thriving in 2025 and beyond.

From mastering long-term planning to embracing the disruptive power of technology, Colin and Ryan unpack the strategies that make all the difference in building a fulfilling, forward-looking career. Plus, they share personal anecdotes (and a few laughs) about lessons learned the hard way.

Whether you’re just starting out, mid-career, or considering your next big move, this episode is packed with advice you won’t want to miss.

The Best Quote from the Episode "If it’s going to be, it’s up to me. Don’t wait for someone else to drive your career—successful people create their own opportunities." – Colin Shaw

Key Takeaways We’re only scratching the surface here—you’ll need to listen to the full episode for the stories and deeper insights behind these points!

Think Long-Term: The best careers are built with vision and intentionality. Treat every role as a stepping stone to something greater.
Leverage Technology: Generative AI and other innovations are reshaping the workforce. Learn to harness these changes instead of fearing them.
Understand Your Strengths: Self-awareness is key—focus on what you’re naturally great at, and let that guide your career decisions.
Build a Reputation That Lasts: Your reputation is your greatest currency. What do you want to be known for?
Deliver, Deliver, Deliver: At the end of the day, results speak louder than words. Always follow through and exceed expectations.

Why You Need to Tune In Sure, you could take the lessons at face value, but what makes this episode unmissable are the stories behind the advice. From Colin’s father’s game-changing advice about “learning your boss’s job” to Ryan’s humorous but insightful realization about his dislike for managing people, these are the kinds of lessons you’ll want to hear straight from the source.

Plus, Colin and Ryan’s banter, humor, and candid reflections make this episode not just valuable, but downright enjoyable. You might even come away with a new mantra for your career—and a laugh or two!

🎧 Listen now and take the first step toward making 2025 your most successful year yet!

About the Hosts:

Colin Shaw is a LinkedIn 'Top Voice' with a massive 284,000 followers and 86,000 subscribers to his 'Why Customers Buy' newsletter. Shaw is named one of the world's 'Top 150 Business Influencers' by LinkedIn. His company, Beyond Philosophy LLC, has been selected four times by the Financial Times as a top management consultancy. Shaw is co-host of the top 1.5% podcast 'The Intuitive Customer'—with over 600,000 downloads—and author of eight best-sellers on customer experience, Shaw is a sought-after keynote speaker. Follow Colin on LinkedIn.

Ryan Hamilton is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of 'The Intuitive Customer' book. An award-winning teacher and researcher in consumer psychology, he has been named one of Poets & Quants' "World’s Best 40 B-School Profs Under 40." His research focuses on how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence shopper decision-making, and his findings have been published in top academic journals and covered by major media outlets like The New York Times and CNN. His work highlights how psychology can help firms better understand and serve their customers. Ryan has a new book launch in June 2025 called “The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things” Harvard Business Press Follow Ryan on LinkedIn.

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Episode Summary In this episode of The Intuitive Customer, Colin Shaw and Professor Ryan Hamilton delve into the fascinating world of customer habits. Colin shares his recent experiences shopping at Publix, Aldi, and Whole Foods, uncovering how deeply ingrained habits shape our decisions as customers. The discussion explores the psychology behind habit formation, the challenges businesses face when trying to change customer routines, and the critical role of segmentation in addressing diverse customer needs. From grocery stores to TSA lines and even Apple’s onboarding strategy, this episode highlights actionable insights for businesses looking to influence customer behavior effectively.

Quote of the Episode "Habits aren't unbreakable chains; they're shortcuts our brains take to save effort. If businesses want customers to change, they need to guide them gently and reward the new behavior."

Key Takeaways 1. The Habit Loop Habits consist of three components: cue, routine, and reward. Businesses need to understand these elements to create or change customer habits effectively. 2. Transition Requires Support Customers resist change when new experiences are disorienting or unclear. Offering onboarding tools, clear signage, or guidance (like Apple’s tutorials or TSA’s segmented lines) can ease the transition. 3. Segment Rewards Customers value different rewards. Some prioritize savings, while others value time or convenience. Understanding and tailoring offerings to these preferences can make all the difference. 4. Habits vs. Exploration While habits streamline decision-making, they can inhibit discovery. Striking a balance—like Amazon’s recommendation engine—allows businesses to support habitual purchases while encouraging new ones. 5. The Power of Familiarity Familiarity offers comfort and efficiency, making it a strong motivator for customers. Businesses need to weigh the risks of disrupting established habits against the potential benefits of change.

About the Hosts:

Colin Shaw is a LinkedIn 'Top Voice' with a massive 284,000 followers and 86,000 subscribers to his 'Why Customers Buy' newsletter. Shaw is named one of the world's 'Top 150 Business Influencers' by LinkedIn. His company, Beyond Philosophy LLC, has been selected four times by the Financial Times as a top management consultancy. Shaw is co-host of the top 1.5% podcast 'The Intuitive Customer'—with over 600,000 downloads—and author of eight best-sellers on customer experience, Shaw is a sought-after keynote speaker. Follow Colin on LinkedIn.

Ryan Hamilton is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of 'The Intuitive Customer' book. An award-winning teacher and researcher in consumer psychology, he has been named one of Poets & Quants' "World’s Best 40 B-School Profs Under 40." His research focuses on how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence shopper decision-making, and his findings have been published in top academic journals and covered by major media outlets like The New York Times and CNN. His work highlights how psychology can help firms better understand and serve their customers. Ryan has a new book launch in June 2025 called “The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things” Harvard Business Press Follow Ryan on LinkedIn.

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Episode Summary In this episode of The Intuitive Customer, Colin Shaw and Ryan Hamilton dive into the predictions shaping 2025 and their implications for customer experience. From economic uncertainty and its emotional impacts to the rise of AI in search behavior, they explore how these trends will influence customer decisions and business strategies. The conversation also delves into the unintended consequences of tariffs, the challenges of AI implementation, and the importance of maintaining a customer-centric culture amidst technological advancements.

Quote of the Episode “Perception is reality, especially in customer experience. Customers’ feelings about the broader world—not just your product—shape their choices.”

Key Takeaways 1. Economic Uncertainty Is Emotional: Confidence, a powerful emotion, drives customer behavior. Economic stability is less about the numbers and more about what customers feel about the economy.\n 2. Tariffs and Customer Choices: Tariffs create unintended consequences for customer experience, from higher costs to reduced competition and choice. Policies that seem disconnected from customers often have profound impacts.\n 3. The Shift in Search Behavior: AI tools like ChatGPT are reshaping how customers find answers, creating new challenges and opportunities for businesses to differentiate themselves in an AI-driven landscape.\n 4. AI Projects Must Prove Value: Without clear goals and success metrics, AI initiatives risk failure. Businesses must align AI with tangible improvements in customer experience.\n 5. Customer-Centricity Trumps Technology: A customer-first culture remains essential. Advanced technologies, including AI, will only deliver value when built on a foundation of empathy and understanding.

Links Mentioned in the Episode * Forbes article by Adrian Swincoe: https://www.forbes.com/sites/adrianswinscoe/2024/12/17/15-customer-experience-predictions-for-2025/

About the Hosts:

Colin Shaw is a LinkedIn 'Top Voice' with a massive 284,000 followers and 86,000 subscribers to his 'Why Customers Buy' newsletter. Shaw is named one of the world's 'Top 150 Business Influencers' by LinkedIn. His company, Beyond Philosophy LLC, has been selected four times by the Financial Times as a top management consultancy. Shaw is co-host of the top 1.5% podcast 'The Intuitive Customer'—with over 600,000 downloads—and author of eight best-sellers on customer experience, Shaw is a sought-after keynote speaker. Follow Colin on LinkedIn.

Ryan Hamilton is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of 'The Intuitive Customer' book. An award-winning teacher and researcher in consumer psychology, he has been named one of Poets & Quants' "World’s Best 40 B-School Profs Under 40." His research focuses on how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence shopper decision-making, and his findings have been published in top academic journals and covered by major media outlets like The New York Times and CNN. His work highlights how psychology can help firms better understand and serve their customers. Ryan has a new book launch in June 2025 called “The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things” Harvard Business Press Follow Ryan on LinkedIn.

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Quote of the Episode "If something feels off, it probably is. Trust your instincts and push for clarity—because informed customers are empowered customers."

Episode Summary In this episode of The Intuitive Customer, Colin Shaw and Professor Ryan Hamilton discuss the all-too-common experience of feeling ripped off. Drawing on Colin’s personal experiences with home repairs and unexpected costs, they delve into the anatomy of being taken advantage of as a customer. Together, they explore the power dynamics, manipulative tactics, and psychological cues that underpin these interactions.

From high-pressure situations to unnecessary upsells, the hosts provide insights into recognizing when you’re being overcharged and how to protect yourself. Along the way, they share actionable tips for consumers and lessons businesses can learn to build trust and transparency with their customers.

Key Takeaways 1. Red Flags of Being Ripped Off:

* Urgency and High Demand: When time is short, and demand is high, you’re more likely to encounter inflated prices.
* Irrelevant Questions: Excessive or unrelated inquiries can signal attempts to upsell or gauge your lack of expertise.
* Upselling Early: If a provider pushes additional services before addressing your core issue, proceed cautiously.
* Manipulative Sales Tactics: Techniques like “calling the manager” or creating false scarcity are designed to wear you down.
* Unease: Trust your gut—if something feels off, it probably is.

Power Dynamics and Information Gaps:
- Service providers often have the upper hand in terms of expertise and resources, which can lead to exploitation.
- Customers should ask detailed questions, break down costs, and research to close the information gap.
- Lessons for Businesses:
- Transparency and honesty foster long-term trust and customer loyalty.
- While exploiting urgency or knowledge gaps may yield short-term gains, it damages reputation and drives customers away.
- Practical Tips for Consumers:
- Avoid rushed decisions and gather multiple quotes when possible.
- Demand clarity on costs and don’t hesitate to negotiate.
- Recognize manipulative tactics and assert your rights as a customer.

About the Hosts:

Colin Shaw is a LinkedIn 'Top Voice' with a massive 284,000 followers and 86,000 subscribers to his 'Why Customers Buy' newsletter. Shaw is named one of the world's 'Top 150 Business Influencers' by LinkedIn. His company, Beyond Philosophy LLC, has been selected four times by the Financial Times as a top management consultancy. Shaw is co-host of the top 1.5% podcast 'The Intuitive Customer'—with over 600,000 downloads—and author of eight best-sellers on customer experience, Shaw is a sought-after keynote speaker. Follow Colin on LinkedIn.

Ryan Hamilton is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of 'The Intuitive Customer' book. An award-winning teacher and researcher in consumer psychology, he has been named one of Poets & Quants' "World’s Best 40 B-School Profs Under 40." His research focuses on how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence shopper decision-making, and his findings have been published in top academic journals and covered by major media outlets like The New York Times and CNN. His work highlights how psychology can help firms better understand and serve their customers. Ryan has a new book launch in June 2025 called “The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things” Harvard Business Press Follow Ryan on LinkedIn.

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Episode Summary:

In this special end-of-year episode, Colin Shaw and Professor Ryan Hamilton reflect on 2024, sharing personal and professional lessons learned throughout the year. The conversation dives into themes of resilience in both life and customer experience, the vital role of community, the need for balance, and the hype surrounding AI.

Key Takeaways:

Resilience Matters: Colin discusses how personal resilience during a home crisis parallels the resilience required in customer experience. He explains how understanding customers' emotional journeys (e.g., the grief cycle) can improve support and satisfaction.
Community is Key: Both hosts underscore how community support during tough times can be mirrored in the business world, where fostering a sense of community can strengthen customer loyalty.
Communication & Transparency: Ryan shares insights on the role of clear communication in managing customer expectations and protecting processes. It’s not just about better ideas; it’s also about maintaining trust.
Balanced Approach: Colin and Ryan advocate for a balanced customer experience strategy that combines quantitative measures with a focus on emotional and behavioral insights, and a mix of human interaction with technology.
AI and the Hype Trap: Colin warns against getting swept up in the AI hype. While AI holds great promise, organizations should prioritize strategic, integrated implementations over rushing to adopt the latest tools

About the Hosts:

Colin Shaw is a LinkedIn 'Top Voice' with a massive 284,000 followers and 86,000 subscribers to his 'Why Customers Buy' newsletter. Shaw is named one of the world's 'Top 150 Business Influencers' by LinkedIn. His company, Beyond Philosophy LLC, has been selected four times by the Financial Times as a top management consultancy. Shaw is co-host of the top 1.5% podcast 'The Intuitive Customer'—with over 600,000 downloads—and author of eight best-sellers on customer experience; Shaw is a sought-after keynote speaker.

Ryan Hamilton is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of 'The Intuitive Customer' book. An award-winning teacher and researcher in consumer psychology, he has been named one of Poets & Quants' "World’s Best 40 B-School Profs Under 40." His research focuses on how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence shopper decision-making, and his findings have been published in top academic journals and covered by major media outlets like The New York Times and CNN. His work highlights how psychology can help firms better understand and serve their customers. Ryan has a new book launch in June 2025 called “The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things” Harvard Business Press. Follow Ryan on LinkedIn. Subscribe & Follow

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We are frustrated. Despite years of effort across industries, customer satisfaction has only seen marginal improvement since the 1990s.

By marginal improvement, we mean it went up four points. That’s right, four.

This stagnation suggests a need for deeper cultural and operational changes to prioritize customer experiences truly.

Our discussion in this episode revolves around four key customer-centricity levels: Naive, Transactional, Enlightened, and Natural. These stages represent an organization's maturity in focusing on customers, from the least to the most advanced.

Naive Organizations focus internally and lack regard for customer needs, often viewing the customer as secondary to operational goals.
Transactional Organizations acknowledge the importance of the customer but treat interactions as isolated transactions, usually emphasizing efficiency over empathy.
Enlightened Organizations offer a more cohesive and emotionally engaging experience, understanding that customers seek meaningful interactions.
Natural Organizations are the pinnacle of customer-centricity, with cultures that fully align employee and customer experiences. These companies anticipate customer needs and prioritize creating memorable, personalized moments

Organizations are encouraged to evaluate where they stand on this spectrum and start implementing changes in nine core areas: people, customer strategy, systems, measurement, channels, expectations, marketing and branding, processes, and leadership. Embracing these changes may require a cultural overhaul, but the rewards include increased customer loyalty and satisfaction.

In this episode, we dive into the concept of customer centricity and explore the journey organizations must take to shift their focus more closely to the customer. The journey from Naive to Natural isn’t easy, but it is essential for brands that want to build genuine, long-term customer relationships.

Here are a few other key takeaways from the discussion you will learn:

Customer centricity is not just about enthusiastic service—it requires a deep cultural shift within the organization.
Organizations must balance rational, efficiency-focused goals with emotional aspects to create a holistic customer experience.
Success depends on how well leadership integrates customer-focused values into every level of the organization.
The nine organizational areas identified help companies assess and improve their customer focus.
True customer-centric brands are often those that consider both customer and employee experiences as interconnected.
Moving towards "Natural" status requires significant effort and incremental improvements rather than a one-time overhaul.

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Growth is essential for businesses. However, new customers with varying needs, preferences, and identities often accompany growth. Worse, these new customers can annoy or alienate your current customers.

So, how do you grow without making your current business blow?

Today, we explore the central challenge of growth: expanding your customer base without sparking conflicts between different customer segments. Ryan's new book, The Growth Dilemma, which Ryan co-authored with Wharton Senior Lecturer in Marketing Annie Wilson, Ph.D., addresses this dynamic in-depth, and we discuss how companies can better manage these conflicts to keep all customers satisfied and engaged.

As brands grow, they tend to attract diverse customer segments with unique expectations and behavior. This diversity can create tensions between groups, especially when one segment's actions or values clash with another's.

For instance, a brand known for its exclusivity may see conflict when a more mainstream audience starts to adopt it, or a company that appeals to one political ideology may face backlash when it attracts customers from an opposing one.

We delve into the four main types of conflict that can arise between customer segments and explore solutions for each. For example, these brands dealt with some of them when:

Patagonia faced a brand image shift when corporate buyers began over-associating the brand with Wall Street, diverging from Patagonia's environmental ethos. The company responded by limiting corporate orders, thereby preserving its original image.
Younger users leave Facebook because their parents' generation heavily uses it. Exclusivity can be key to maintaining engagement from specific age groups or communities on social platforms.
New Balance once faced a backlash after a policy stance was misinterpreted by extremist groups, forcing the brand to distance itself from these associations publicly.

Ultimately, understanding and managing these potential conflicts requires brands to identify sources of friction early on and employ various strategies to keep segments separate when needed. Segmenting offerings, using sub-brands, or creating distinct product lines are all ways to cater to different groups without diluting brand identity or customer satisfaction.

In this episode, we also offer actionable advice on navigating the complex terrain of customer segments and brand management and setting up companies for smoother, more inclusive growth. Whether you're a business leader or a marketer, this episode is packed with insights into balancing growth with customer harmony, ensuring each segment feels valued without alienating others.

This episode also includes ways to:

Recognize the importance of managing inter-customer relationships to foster sustainable growth.
Understand how Functional Conflicts often arise in omnichannel setups and ways to resolve them.
Learn about Brand Image Conflicts and how brands can address image tensions, as Patagonia did.
Distinguish between Identity and Ideological Conflicts and why one often influences customer group dynamics more than the other.
Gain insights into using segmentation strategies, like sub-brands or distinct service channels, to reduce conflict.
Discover how a clear brand identity can attract and repel certain customers and why that might benefit or hinder growth.

Be the first to hear about pre-order and launch dates and invitations to exclusive book launch events for The Growth Dilemma, published by Harvard Business Review Press!

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Deborah has a pickle. She is considering implementing a Loyalty Scheme but isn't sure when and how to do so. She thought we could help.

We can help. The first question, then, is easy. Now. These things work. They don't create real loyalty, but they get people to keep buying from you, giving you more chances to earn loyalty.

It's the second question, how, that's a little trickier.

Many companies create these programs to foster loyalty, but often, they work more as reward systems, encouraging repeat transactions rather than building emotional attachment.

For example, although frequent flyer points, like Delta's SkyMiles, incentivize repeat bookings, they don't necessarily create genuine loyalty. Loyalty, we argue, is a deeply emotional connection rather than just a series of repeat transactions.

We explore the psychological principles behind why customers participate in rewards programs and why they might hoard rewards rather than redeem them. A concept called Medium Maximization explains why people often "save" points or miles, viewing them as a bridge to future rewards and experiencing reluctance to part with them. This phenomenon works in favor of companies, as it increases customer engagement without necessarily incurring a cost.

Additionally, the Goal Gradient Hypothesis illustrates how people accelerate their efforts toward a reward as they approach it, which is why punch-card systems, for example, are so effective.

While rewards programs have significant benefits, they can also have downsides. Complex or restrictive redemption policies can damage the customer experience, as can the use of extrinsic motivations that may unintentionally reduce intrinsic motivations.

For instance, when a daycare chain imposed a fine on late pickups, late arrivals increased as parents viewed it as a trade-off rather than a rule. Companies should, therefore, be cautious about unintentionally undermining genuine, behavior-based loyalty with overly complicated or restrictive rewards systems.

In this episode, we discuss customer loyalty programs' true purpose and impact. Ultimately, we recommend keeping loyalty programs simple and transparent. Avoid blackout dates or complicated redemption processes, as these can frustrate customers and reduce the program's value. At their core, loyalty schemes are tools to encourage spending rather than create loyalty, so Deborah—and you—should design them with that goal in mind.

Additional Takeaways to Listen for In This Episode:

How extrinsic rewards, like points, can decrease intrinsic motivation and affect customer behaviors.
The importance of aligning a rewards program with customer behavior patterns and preferences.
How Idiosyncratic Fit influences customers to engage more deeply in programs where they feel they have an advantage.
Examples of how poorly designed loyalty schemes can backfire and damage customer relationships.
The pros and cons of different reward types, like points versus cashback, and how this impacts customer satisfaction.
Understanding competitive rewards programs can help you refine your offering to stand out.

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Why do customers tell you everything is fine when you ask them face-to-face but then give you a less-than-optimal rating later in a survey? Is everyone duplicitous, or are customers stricken with experience amnesia as soon as they make it to the car park?

It turns out that it is neither a character flaw nor a medical condition that causes it. We explore what does in this episode.

Let’s face it. It’s a frustrating issue that can make getting accurate and timely customer feedback hard. We begin with a real-life example: a restaurant experience where Colin and his friends told the manager everything was fine with their dinner despite a long wait for food. Later, they reflected on the experience more critically, but the moment to provide that feedback had passed.

Colin blames it on being British. That may be part of the cause, but other things are happening here, too, and it isn’t uncommon.

Our listener, Dave Hillman, has encountered this dilemma in his business. His customers express satisfaction face-to-face but provide lower scores on feedback surveys. Why does this happen, and what can businesses do to get more upfront and honest feedback?

We unpack several reasons why in-person feedback can differ from post-experience feedback. We explore factors like the fear of conflict, the desire to avoid awkwardness, and how personal guilt can deter customers from raising issues. We also look at how companies might unintentionally make it harder for customers to share feedback at the moment.

Anonymity, timing, and how feedback is solicited also play significant roles. For instance, collecting feedback immediately after the experience can result in more accurate data as perceptions change over time. We also discuss how phrasing questions differently in person versus on surveys can lead to varying responses.

In this episode, we also provide strategies for businesses to balance both types of feedback—immediate and delayed—and ensure that all input, regardless of when it arrives, is valuable and actionable.

In this episode, you will also learn:

The cultural reasons behind why people avoid giving critical feedback in person.
How post-experience reflections, like a football match example, shift perceptions over time.
The role of sampling bias and how it can skew survey results.
Why anonymity encourages honesty and how it lowers personal costs in sharing feedback.
The importance of identifying what truly drives value for customers to guide feedback collection.
The benefits of using independent third-party surveys to remove bias and get more accurate results.

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Let's talk about government and Customer Experience. It might surprise you that government and Customer Experience have a tighter relationship than you think.

Many organizations, particularly in the private sector, recognize the importance of providing great experiences to keep customers satisfied and loyal. But should governments do the same for their citizens? Can a well-run government improve societal well-being by focusing on efficiency, transparency, and user-friendly services?

In this episode, we explore the government's role in delivering experiences to citizens through essential services or regulatory actions that impact organizations and their customers. Historically, a poorly managed experience with the government has significant consequences (cue: the Boston Tea Party). But beyond extreme cases, day-to-day interactions with government agencies also influence our quality of life.

We start by asking why government agencies should care about CX at all. Using real-world examples, such as the surprisingly smooth process of renewing a passport or the convenience of services like Global Entry at airports, we see how an efficient government improves employee morale and public satisfaction. Plus, efficient government departments can save money, attract top talent, and increase citizen trust.

Beyond service delivery, governments play a vital role in regulating experiences for private companies. Markets can become exploitative without proper regulations, leaving customers vulnerable to poor practices. We look at examples of beneficial regulations, like the Truth in Lending Act, which protects consumers from misleading financial products, and the Americans with Disabilities Act, which ensures accessibility for all.

However, regulation is a delicate balance. Too little oversight can lead to exploitation, while too much can stifle competition and innovation. Some laws—like those that mandate thousands of training hours for hairstylists or forbid self-service gas stations—seem overly restrictive and detrimental to the customer experience. Finding a middle ground that protects consumers without creating unnecessary barriers is key.

Join us as we discuss governments' critical role in shaping experiences and why every government, like a business, should aim to improve the CX it delivers to its citizens.

More Key Moments in the Discussion:

How efficient government services influence national life satisfaction.
The impact of "bad profits" in the financial sector and their regulatory solutions.
Why governments can't afford to ignore inefficiency for long.
Examples of overregulation stifling innovation in U.S. states.
The link between government CX and economic growth.
How the White House's consumer protection initiatives aim to improve daily life.

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Taking unproven routes can lead to exciting new possibilities. However, it could also lead to potential failure. That's what makes life interesting, isn't it?

Optimistic thinking has led to groundbreaking achievements, like the moon landing in the 1960s. However, it's important to strike a balance between hope and realism.

In today's episode, we explore the concept of optimism bias and how it plays a role in the "AI Hype Cycle." We discuss the pros and cons of optimism and why it can be risky and rewarding.

For those of you who don't watch MBA videos as a hobby, this video summarizes the Hype Cycle's importance and how it relates to the recent trend toward leveraging Big Data.

So, what is this hype cycle we keep referring to?

The Gartner Hype Cycle maps out the lifecycle of new technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI). Starting with initial media excitement, the Hype Cycle often leads to inflated expectations, followed by disillusionment as challenges arise. However, innovation doesn't stop there. As understanding improves, we reach a more balanced "slope of enlightenment," eventually leading to the "plateau of productivity," where technology adoption becomes more widespread and realistic.

The discussion touches on AI's current status in the Hype Cycle, questioning whether we are at a turning point where initial optimism is waning. Some organizations overestimate the short-term benefits of AI, hoping it will be the silver bullet to solve all their problems, only to face disappointment when things don't work out as expected.

Like many other innovations, AI is more complex to implement than initially imagined, and optimism can sometimes blind organizations to its true limitations. Managing expectations is key: while optimism is necessary to drive change and innovation, one must temper it with caution and realistic planning.

Ultimately, this episode encourages listeners to temper optimism with practicality regarding new technologies like AI. Small, calculated risks are encouraged, but organizations should avoid placing all their bets on one solution. Balance is key to navigating the Hype Cycle successfully.

More Key Points Discussed in This Episode:

Understanding the pros and cons of optimism bias in business decision-making.
An overview of the Gartner Hype Cycle and how it applies to AI.
Why the initial excitement around AI may not meet short-term expectations.
The risk of overhyping new technologies and the consequences of inflated expectations.
The importance of balancing optimism with realism in the implementation of AI.
Strategies for navigating the Hype Cycle without falling victim to disillusionment.

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Over the course of three years, Maersk Line improved its Net Promoter Score (NPS) by an impressive 40 points, resulting in a 10% increase in shipping volumes. Even more remarkable, this growth occurred during a global shipping decline.

But can other companies replicate Maersk’s success? Or are case studies like this more cautionary tales than roadmaps?

We explore the value of case studies in business, particularly how they can be used to highlight the application of concepts and theories in real-world situations.

The Power and Pitfalls of Case Studies

Case studies are powerful. People love stories, and case studies tap into this by offering relatable and engaging narratives that illustrate both challenges and solutions. For businesses, they’re a great way to demonstrate bona fides to clients and showcase what can be achieved through strategic change.

However, case studies have their pitfalls, too. Maersk’s results were exceptional, but not every company is positioned to follow the same path.

In the Maersk example, the company was at a unique juncture—facing market pressures and a history of mergers that led to a decline in Customer Experience. Their leadership was open to new ideas, and they had the right project manager in place to lead a global CX transformation.

The pitfall is many companies believe they are the same and will get the same results because they too are having a problem in Customer Experience. However, the specifics of one company’s success may not translate to another unless the conditions, challenges, and resources are aligned.

In this episode, we discuss why case studies are best used for inspiration and education, not as one-size-fits-all solutions. It’s crucial to extract the underlying principles—like customer focus and strategic leadership—rather than overgeneralizing from one company's experience.

In this episode, we also explore:

The origins of using case studies as a teaching tool in business schools.
How benchmarks are created and why they can be risky when generalized.
The role of mental models in simplifying business decision-making.
Risk aversion in organizations and the desire for examples to follow.
The "silver bullet" mentality and why people seek easy solutions.
The dangers of using case studies as the sole resource for business strategy.

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If there is one thing that academics know how to do, it’s publish new research. It seems that umpteen studies are published every hour. It can be overwhelming to keep up with it all.

So, we undertook it to help you with this week’s episode.

We explore three fascinating studies in the realm of consumer behavior with insights from Dr. Morgan Ward, a Professor of Consumer Behavior at Emory University. From the influence of sound on social status to the role of streaks in motivating behavior and even how firms should use AI to deliver news to customers, this episode provides a wealth of information for businesses looking to understand and serve their customers better than they do today.

Social Status and Product Sound

Dr. Ward’s research delves into how consumers choose products based on the sounds they emit, linking these choices to social status. The study finds that people often seek status through two main channels—dominance and prestige. Some customers buy noisy products, like a Harley Davidson, to assert dominance, while others opt for quiet, high-end products, such as Dyson fans, to signify prestige. Ward emphasizes that understanding the status-seeking motivations of your target audience can help businesses design products that appeal to specific social power desires.

Key Takeaway:

Customizing product sounds can signal social power, appealing to customers' status-seeking behavior.

The Gamification of Behavior Through Streaks

Ward also discusses the role of streaks in consumer behavior, particularly how brands use streak-based incentives to encourage continued engagement. Apps like Duolingo, Snapchat, and Headspace all capitalize on the idea of maintaining streaks to motivate daily usage. However, there are tradeoffs. Extrinsic motivators like streaks can sometimes overshadow intrinsic motivators, leading to a decrease in overall enjoyment and, ultimately, participation. Ward warns businesses to consider when streaks are appropriate carefully and to balance the motivations that drive consumer behavior.

Key Takeaway:

Streak-based gamification can motivate, but businesses should carefully balance extrinsic and intrinsic motivations.

AI vs. Human Interaction:

Finally, Ward shares research on when companies should use AI versus humans for customer interactions, particularly around delivering good or bad news. Interestingly, the research suggests that AI should handle bad news because customers perceive it as more impartial. In contrast, a human best delivers good news to create a personal connection. These findings affect how businesses structure customer service strategies and use AI.

Key Takeaway:

AI is better suited for delivering bad news, while human interaction is more impactful for delivering good news.

Additional things you’ll learn in this episode:

How cultural differences affect consumer status-seeking behavior.
The psychological impact of losing a streak and how it influences future behavior.
Why some products benefit more from gamification than others.
The future implications of AI-human interaction in customer service.

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Colin doesn’t sit in aisle 13 when he flies on an airline. It’s silly but true. He also fancies his red knickers on days when he is speaking in front of large crowds.

While this errs on the side of too much information, it also foretells the topic of this week’s episode: superstitions and how they influence our decisions as customers and otherwise.

Many of us hold on to irrational beliefs that are common sense, even when they defy logic. Airlines, for instance, often skip row 13 because of widespread discomfort with the number, including Colin’s, despite no real reason to avoid it.

But how do these seemingly irrational habits affect customer behavior, and what can businesses learn from them?

Customers often engage in superstitious practices, particularly when they feel powerless over a situation. Colin recounts a story of Asian customers choosing construction equipment based on serial numbers they considered lucky. In this case, selecting a machine wasn’t just about quality or functionality but also about seeking control over the unknown.

Humans are pattern-seeking creatures. Our minds are hardwired to find connections between things, even when none exist. Superstitions help people feel like they have some control, which influences customer behavior.

While some superstitions, like avoiding row 13, are passed down culturally, others are more personal. For example, the host tells a story about football fans ordering fries at a pub, believing it would help England score a goal. While everyone knew it wasn’t logical, the collective belief became a fun ritual.

Superstitions also manifest in business. Companies sometimes hold onto outdated practices with no rational basis. The host shares an example of an advertising agency insisting on a six-word phrase at the end of ads, not because of any research but simply because "that's how it was always done." These business practices, like customer superstitions, can become embedded over time without questioning their effectiveness.

In this episode, we discuss why businesses should understand and acknowledge that customers and companies aren’t always logical. We also explore how accommodating these irrational beliefs can lead to better customer experiences. Rather than dismissing superstitions, companies can work with them to create a more comfortable and personalized environment for their customers.

Additional things you’ll learn in this episode:

How mental models shape customer behaviors
The connection between biases and superstition in decision-making
Why businesses often cling to irrational processes
How to spot and eliminate unnecessary "superstitious" practices in your company
Ways to accommodate and even leverage customer superstitions for a better experience

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Hurricane Debbie dumped 17 inches of water in Colin's home.

It was a traumatic experience, from wading through the murky water to the neighbor’s house—hoping not to encounter the alligators that usually hang out nearby—to watching a team of 12 recovery professionals sweeping through and gutting what remained inside after the water subsided. The experience has been emotionally draining, especially since they didn't have flood insurance, making the cost of repairs overwhelming.

It exposed the emotional nature of these circumstances and reminded us of what is important when treating a distressed customer. This episode explores the Customer Experience lessons learned along the way.

The story begins with the frantic search for help after the flood. With no time to gather multiple quotes, a friend recommended Servpro, a disaster recovery company. While Servpro did a great job, one small misstep—using the term "demolition"—upset the host's wife, highlighting the importance of language and empathy in high-stress situations. Despite the upsetting circumstances, Colin and his wife appreciated the team's professionalism and sympathy.

We also touch on a less positive customer service experience with the cable company. While their technician was helpful and empathetic, the initial process during the phone call didn't consider the host's extreme situation. The rigid, unempathetic procedure highlighted how companies, like the cable provider, can improve by empowering their employees to handle unique circumstances flexibly.

While getting coffee, the lack of empathy from a cheerful barista served as another example of how businesses can fail to acknowledge customers going through difficult times. While we recognize that coffee chains do not specialize in disaster recovery, it was still a missed opportunity for them to show empathy in a moment requiring more than routine friendliness.

A frustrating visit to a self-storage facility was another eye-opener. The company had implemented a tablet/virtual receptionist system, which lacked the human touch, particularly during hurricane season when people needed help the most. Companies should be prepared to offer a more hands-on, empathetic approach to meet heightened demands during extraordinary times.

The episode is a call to action for companies to build flexibility and empathy into their Customer Experience strategies, especially during times of crisis. Businesses that show genuine concern for their distressed customers during challenging times will create loyal customers for life, while those who don't may lose them.

In this episode, we also dive into:

The emotional toll of disaster recovery and its impact on Customer Experiences.
How language choice can impact a customer's emotional state.
The importance of empowering employees to handle unique customer situations.
Why self-service solutions may fail in high-stress scenarios.
The critical role empathy plays in building customer loyalty, especially during crises.

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Customer feedback is critical to managing and improving your customer experience but it isn’t easy to get. Worse, it isn’t always useful and enlightening on what you are doing well, or perhaps more importantly, not so well.

In this episode, we tackle a common problem many businesses face: how to get more actionable customer feedback. Our guest, Tim Waterton, Chief Revenue Officer of HappyOrNot®, brings over 20 years of experience in helping companies gather and analyze customer insights. Waterton shares valuable tips on making the feedback process seamless, efficient, and impactful.

One of the main insights Waterton offers is the importance of capturing feedback at the right moment—immediately after the Customer Experience. According to him, this approach ensures that businesses collect more accurate feedback as people's recollections of their experiences fade quickly. He suggests that feedback should be short and simple to encourage participation, using tools like micro-surveys (e.g., quick emoji selections).

Waterton also explains the difference between feedback and reviews. Feedback is company-initiated, where you ask the customer directly, while reviews are customer-initiated and usually more detailed. Both have value but serve different purposes in understanding the customer experience.

A key takeaway is the balance between positive and negative feedback. While many companies receive mostly positive feedback, focusing only on the negatives or positives can skew your understanding. You need both to find areas of improvement and highlight what's working well.

We also warn about the dangers of over-automating customer experiences. Colin shares an example of a milkman who improved efficiency but lost personal connection with customers, ultimately losing Colin’s wife's business. This cautionary tale is a crucial reminder that companies must balance efficiency with the human touch, especially in the age of AI and automation.

We wrap up with practical tips on gathering meaningful feedback, including choosing the right channels, keeping surveys relevant and concise, and acting on the feedback you receive.

In this episode, you'll also learn:

The difference between feedback and reviews and why both matter
How to avoid "survey fatigue" and keep customers engaged
The role of micro-surveys in capturing real-time feedback
The importance of balancing automation with personal interaction
Why acting on feedback is crucial to improving Customer Experience

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One of the benefits of being in business and academia for years is that we have a lot of experience running workshops. This episode is a brain dump of all the stuff you won’t learn in a book but is critical to the successful outcome of your program.

The first and perhaps most critical step is breaking the ice. By setting a relaxed and open tone, you ease participants into the session, ensuring they’re ready to engage. A simple question at the start can do wonders—something as quirky as asking attendees to share something strange about themselves. This activity breaks down barriers and injects some fun into the proceedings, setting the stage for a lively and productive workshop.

As a facilitator, it's vital to approach the workshop without a predefined answer or outcome in mind. Your role is to guide participants in finding solutions, ensuring participants take ownership of the results. This approach fosters a deeper connection to the material and encourages lasting change.

For instance, when working with a client like Maersk Line, the world's largest shipping company, it’s important to ask the right questions and provide tools rather than answers. This method leads to better results and enhances the participants’ sense of accomplishment.

Also, flexibility is key when it comes to planning your workshop. While having an agenda is important, adjust it as discussions evolve, allowing for deeper exploration of ideas and ensuring that everyone is on the same page.

Similarly, consider the group dynamics when dividing attendees into smaller teams. Mixing personalities and ensuring a balance of perspectives can prevent dominant voices from stifling creativity and lead to more innovative solutions.

In this episode, we dive into these essential strategies for leading a workshop that leaves a lasting impact. Drawing from years of experience, we explore practical tips to ensure your workshops are engaging, effective, and memorable for all participants.

If you listen, you will also learn the following:

Ryan wrote a script for Broadway, and Colin is married to his stepsister. No, really.
How to effectively manage group dynamics by balancing personality types and seniority levels.
The importance of having a clear goal for the workshop and aligning all activities towards achieving it.
Why off-site workshops can prevent distractions and boost creativity.
The significance of determining the ideal team size for different workshop activities.
Techniques to ensure follow-through on workshop outcomes back in the workplace.
The impact of physical space on group energy and interaction during the workshop.

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Claire Dunwood has a pickle. She wants to know how to manage rising customer expectations with fewer resources than she used to have. This episode seeks to help her—and you—do exactly that.

It’s pretty common to hear problems like this today. Responding to rising expectations is easy when there is no limit to the resources you can throw at it. Doing that same thing on a budget is a different kettle of fish.

We kick off by exploring how expectations form. Expectations for experiences, even for those we've never had, are often built from adjacent or similar experiences, drawing on memories, media, or past interactions. Therefore, customers have preconceived notions about how their interactions with your brand will unfold, even before they’ve engaged with you.

Claire noted that customer expectations seem to be constantly rising. Effective management of rising expectations requires identifying which aspect of the expectations is rising—rational, emotional, or sensory—and whether it aligns with your business goals. We discuss the importance of focusing on the aspects that drive the most value for customers rather than trying to meet every rising expectation.

A key takeaway is the importance of focusing on what matters most to your customers, as highlighted by the Blue Ocean Strategy. This approach suggests excelling in the most important areas to your customers and letting go of everything else. Knowing your customers well is essential, as it helps you decide which expectations to meet and which to disregard, ensuring that you spend your resources wisely.

In this episode, we share practical strategies for managing customer expectations, including understanding customer needs, proactive communication, setting clear boundaries, maintaining consistency, and leveraging technology. These strategies help balance the demands of rising expectations with the reality of limited resources.

In this episode, we also talk about:

The formation of customer expectations from adjacent experiences
The categorization of expectations into rational, emotional, and sensory
The concept of outcome-based prioritization when resources are limited
The role of transparency and proactive communication in managing expectations
How to decide whether certain customers are worth the effort based on their expectations and profitability
Examples of businesses effectively setting and exceeding customer expectations
The importance of staying agile and responsive to customer feedback

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Personalization is a developing area in Customer Experiences. With AI driving what could be possible, many of you might be wondering how you can best leverage its capability in yours. To that end, we invited our special guest, Graham Hill, Ph.D., to explore the rapidly evolving field of Personalization in Customer Experiences.

With decades of experience in customer relationship management (CRM) and Customer Experience, Hill shares valuable insights into how personalization, particularly with the help of AI, is reshaping customer interactions and driving business results.

Hill explains that personalization operates on a continuum, ranging from broad, branded communications to highly individualized content tailored to a single customer’s needs.

He also emphasizes balancing mass and personalized communication within a marketing strategy. While mass communication builds general brand awareness, personalized and individualized content can significantly enhance customer engagement and drive sales.

Hill discusses the impressive impact of personalized communications, noting that customized content can be up to nine times more effective and individualized content up to 44 times more effective at eliciting customer responses than generic communications.

However, he warns against over-personalization, advising businesses to consider their goals and the specific problems personalization can solve before investing heavily in these technologies.

Hill also critiques traditional segmentation methods, advocating for outcome-based segmentation instead. By understanding what customers are trying to achieve and how they measure success, businesses can design more effective personalized communications that resonate with customers at different stages of their journey.

The episode also features a case study from Hill’s work with Toyota Financial Services, where implementing personalized communication in the repurchase management program led to a significant increase in response rates—from 10% to 35%. Hill’s approach underscores the importance of clear goals, continuous improvement, and a customer-centric focus in personalization efforts.

In this episode, we also explore: * The balance between mass communication and personalization in marketing strategies. * The significant impact of personalized and individualized content on customer engagement. * The importance of outcome-based segmentation for effective personalization. * The dangers of over-investing in new technologies without clear goals. * Practical steps for understanding customer needs and enhancing key interactions through personalization. * The role of AI tools in supporting but not overshadowing simple, effective personalization efforts.

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Fair Warning: this episode regarding excuses was prompted by recent experiences with tradespeople during Colin’s kitchen renovation.

No one likes excuses, least of all your customers. Lately, Colin has been hearing many amazing excuses about why something can or cannot be done in his kitchen project. It got him thinking about excuses and why people make them. Today’s episode explores the ideas of excuses and what they tell us about human behavior.

Consider examples like long call center wait times blamed on “high call volume” or companies deflecting responsibility for faulty products or order issues by passing the buck to manufacturers. These situations highlight the commonality of excuses in everyday interactions.

It is important to understand the difference between an excuse, which is used to avoid blame, and a reason, which acknowledges the cause of a problem and usually is followed by steps to make it right. Additionally, we explore the psychological motivations behind excuse-making, including our innate desire to see ourselves as right, and how this plays into consumer behavior and decision-making.

One important concept that supports our behavior around blame is Confirmation Bias. When avoiding blame, we tend to favor information that supports our existing beliefs (i.e., that it is not our fault), even in trivial matters.

Additionally, we delve into the concept of Fundamental Attribution Error, where we are more likely to attribute others’ mistakes to their character while excusing our own based on external circumstances. This human tendency to avoid blame and protect our ego is universal. However, the consequences bear a sharp contrast to the benefits of taking responsibility, especially in leadership roles.

A case study from the UK’s Post Office scandal illustrates the severe consequences of excuses on a larger scale, where avoiding responsibility led to widespread harm and even imprisonment. From this, we draw lessons on the importance of honesty and accountability in both personal and professional contexts.

In this episode, we explore the fine line between a reason and an excuse and examine how they function in various Customer Experiences.

In this episode we also discuss:

The psychological need for self-preservation and its impact on excuse-making.
How Confirmation Bias affects our decisions and perceptions in everyday life.
The difference between taking responsibility and deflecting blame in customer service.
Real-world examples of excuses versus reasons in customer experience.
The potential long-term damage of excuses to trust and relationships.
Strategies for handling mistakes and building stronger customer relationships by owning up to errors.

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In this episode, we tackle a thought-provoking question from one of our listeners: Is it ethical to use urgency as a marketing tactic?

This question sparked a deep conversation about the ethics of digital marketing, particularly the use of scarcity to drive sales.

We feature insights from Daniel Bisett, partner and CXO at WeRock DM, and Marketing Professor at UT McCombs, who shares his thoughts after watching "The Social Dilemma" and wrestling with the impact of digital marketing on mental health.

Bisett discusses the ethical concerns of creating false urgency in marketing, comparing it to the stress and pressure felt by consumers during high-stakes purchases, like a kitchen remodel. He argues that manipulating customers with "FOMO" (Fear of Missing Out) can lead to hasty, anxiety-driven decisions, which ultimately harm the customer and the brand’s reputation.

Instead, Bisett advocates for building trust and long-term relationships by offering genuine value rather than pressure-filled transactions.

Bisett’s message and our subsequent discussion challenge marketers to reflect on their tactics and consider the long-term implications of their strategies, not just for their business, but for their customers' well-being.

In this episode, we further explore whether using behavioral science in marketing crosses ethical lines, especially when marketers understand more about customer behavior than the customers themselves. We also delve into the nuances of ethical intent, the role of empathy, and the importance of transparency in marketing practices. We also discuss how companies can ensure they are not just making sales but also treating customers with dignity and respect.

In this episode you will also learn:

The ethical implications of using behavioral science in marketing.
The difference between needs-based selling and manipulative sales tactics.
The role of empathy in ethical marketing decisions.
How intent and transparency can help marketers stay on the ethical side of business.
Real-life examples of ethical and unethical marketing practices.
Strategies for building long-term customer relationships based on trust and value.

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In this episode, we dive deep into the concept of empathy and its significance in Customer Experience Management. We challenge common perceptions of empathy, explore its connection to emotional intelligence, and examine how both concepts can enhance your experience management efforts.

We begin with a discussion on the importance of Emotional Intelligence (EQ), referencing some compelling statistics:

Emotional intelligence influences 58% of job performance.
90% of top performers at work have a high EQ score.
The demand for EQ skills is projected to grow six-fold in the next three to five years.
Employees with empathetic leaders report a 76% increase in engagement and a 61% boost in creativity.
Restaurants managed by individuals with high EQ see a 22% annual profit growth.
EQ interventions in the workplace can reduce employee turnover by 63%.
75% of Fortune 500 companies have utilized EQ training tools.

Our guest, Sandra Thompson, an emotional intelligence coach from Evolution, shares her insights on empathy within the context of EQ. She emphasizes the necessity of using empathy skills, which involve asking questions and truly listening to understand another person’s feelings and interpretations, rather than projecting our own emotions onto their experiences.

We also explore the idea that traditional empathy might be too contextual, as emotions are personal and can lead to misunderstandings if the emotional context differs. Thompson’s concept of “walking in the customer's shoes” is dissected, with the notion that while some shared experiences can foster empathy, unique contexts might still cause disconnects.

We break down empathy in emotional intelligence into three approaches: bad (not caring), good (walking the experience as if you were a customer), and better (experiencing as a customer and asking questions to understand their feelings). This layered approach is essential for effective experience management and creating genuine connections with customers.

In this episode we also explore:

The impact of empathy on job performance and employee engagement.
How empathy and emotional intelligence can reduce employee turnover and increase profitability.
The role of emotional intelligence in leadership and its effect on creativity.
Strategies for developing and implementing emotional intelligence skills in the workplace.
Real-life examples of how empathy and EQ improve customer experiences.
The importance of self-awareness in emotional intelligence and managing personal emotions.
Practical tips for enhancing empathy skills through active listening and inquiry.

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In this episode, we challenge the conventional wisdom of customer-centricity and discuss why firing a customer is sometimes necessary. While it may seem counterintuitive, knowing when to let go of a customer can benefit your business in the long run.

We outline five critical rules to help you determine when it's time to part ways with a customer:

Rule #1: Fire customers if they cost too much. Some customers drain more resources than they generate in revenue. It's crucial to track these costs accurately and address the imbalance. If you can't rectify the situation, it's time to let them go.

Rule #2: Fire customers if they don't align with your brand. Your brand's values should resonate with your customer base. If a customer's values conflict with yours, maintaining the relationship can harm your brand's integrity and alienate your core audience.

Rule #3: Fire customers if they don't fit with your future. As your business grows, some customers might no longer fit your strategic goals. Prioritize resources for future growth by letting go of customers who don't align with your long-term plans.

Rule #4: Fire customers if they are too risky. If a customer's business model or payment practices pose a significant risk, it's safer to part ways. Overcommitting to one client or taking the undue risk can jeopardize your business stability.

Rule #5: Fire customers if they abuse your employees. Support and protect your employees from abusive customers. Ensuring a respectful work environment is critical for employee morale and long-term success.

Understanding these rules will help you make informed decisions about maintaining customer relationships that align with your business goals and values. Sometimes, the best way to move forward is to let go.

In this episode, we also explore:

The importance of knowing your customer cost metrics and tracking them accurately.
How to handle awkward conversations with customers about cost imbalances.
Examples of brand alignment, including the Colin Kaepernick and Nike story.
Strategies for soft-firing customers without abrupt severance.
Recognizing when your growth trajectory requires pruning your customer base.
Identifying and mitigating business risks associated with certain customers.
The impact of customer behavior on employee well-being and company policy.
Insights on post-pandemic changes in customer behavior and their effect on businesses.
The balance between customer-centricity and business sustainability.

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In this episode, we explore the role of AI in customer experiences and whether it will replace human interaction. Ali Cudby, CEO of Alignment Growth Strategies, shares insights on leveraging AI to build customer relationships effectively. We discuss practical AI tools that enhance customer experiences and streamline efficiency.

There are a couple of helpful AI tools Cudby mentions. For example, Synthesia generates AI voiceovers for video scripts, making updates easy and translating content for global audiences. Also, Absorb uses AI to create prompts-based presentations, reducing time and effort. Cudby describes how these tools allow for more accurate customer communication while freeing up time for personalized interactions where it matters most.

Cudby (alicudby, Alignment Growth Strategies), the author of Keep Your Customers, emphasizes that while AI is a valuable tool, it cannot replace genuine, personalized experiences delivered by empathetic humans. Customers must feel seen, heard, and valued to build trust and loyalty.

The episode also highlights the importance of context in customer experiences and how AI can assist without overshadowing human value. We also touch on the potential risks of AI, such as the creation of fake videos, and the importance of verifying authenticity, especially during critical times like elections. Schema matching helps us identify inconsistencies in AI-generated content, ensuring we make better judgments.

The discussion includes the concept of Blue Ocean Strategy, which advises focusing efforts on what drives the most value for customers. By maximizing resources in areas that matter most, businesses can avoid spreading themselves too thin and achieve greatness.

In this episode, we also discuss:

The significance of AI tools in customer education and training.
The balance between AI efficiency and human empathy in customer interactions.
The impact of AI on content accuracy and time management.
Real-life examples of AI and human synergy in customer service.
The role of schema matching in identifying AI-generated fakes.
Strategies for optimizing customer experiences using the Blue Ocean concept.
The importance of context in understanding customer emotions and needs.
How to determine the value AI brings to your customer experience efforts.
The potential pitfalls of over-relying on AI in areas where human touch is crucial.

Keep Your Customers: How to Stop Customer Turnover, Improve Retention and Get Lucrative, Long-Term Loyalty

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Friction occurs when a customer has to work or think hard during an experience. Many times, friction is accidental or the result of organizational apathy. In these instances, friction is a bad thing.

Friction is rarely a good thing in a Customer Experience. However, there are times when it can be beneficial.

For example, when your bank uses two-factor authentication to ensure you are who you say you are. This friction enhances customers’ feelings about an experience.

So, how do you know the difference? It depends on the context.

For example, Disney and Apple have annoyed Colin. Typically, he sings these two brand’s praises, so this friction surprised him.

Both require Colin to make appointments for his experience, which bugs him. Disney has a new program where you book appointments before you arrive to ride an attraction at a certain time. They charge for it, too. Apple requires you to book an appointment in one of their locations rather than turn up with your questions. (But Apple doesn’t charge for this service.)

While Colin is still determining if the Disney program will improve the experience, he is sure this new process will be more hassle than the previous one. Time will tell whether it will be worth it.

Regarding Apple, the friction of booking an appointment has benefited Colin. He isn’t turned away because everyone is “too busy” to deal with him when he arrives at his appointed time.

So, while Colin would rather Apple was always available when he shows up at a retail location, making the appointment—and the friction it introduced—has provided value for him.

In this episode, we delve into friction in Customer Experiences, exploring when it's beneficial and detrimental. We provide examples illustrating how friction can enhance or hinder customer interactions, shedding light on its nuanced role in shaping perceptions and behaviors. By understanding the multifaceted nature of friction, businesses can unlock new opportunities for customer engagement and loyalty.

You will also learn the following:

The advantages of removing friction and making things easier for customers.
The prevalence of accidental friction stems from neglect or apathy rather than deliberate strategy.
Examples of deliberate friction in various industries, from amusement parks to luxury restaurants, and the underlying psychological mechanisms at play.
The importance of finding the right balance between security measures and customer convenience, avoiding excessive friction that may deter or frustrate customers.
Strategies for strategically managing friction to align with broader business goals while prioritizing customer satisfaction and ease of interaction.

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Colin has a bone to pick. No, it's not with cable providers this time. It's with the tradespeople involved in his latest home reno project. They are living up to the poor reputation that precedes them, and he has a list of complaints.

Key problems included inaccurate pricing, disdain for previous workers' efforts, lack of collaboration, excessive use of jargon, and poor time management. The disconnect between different trades, reminiscent of organizational siloes in corporate environments, often exacerbates problems.

These issues often leave customers frustrated and distrustful. Drawing from personal experience with Colin's kitchen renovation, we highlight common problems that contribute to the negative perception of tradespeople and discuss ways to enhance their Customer Experience.

It is important to note that many tradespeople excel in their work and customer service, proving that good practices do exist. It's just that none of those lot are currently working on Colin's project.

A significant issue is information asymmetry—customers often lack the knowledge to assess the necessity of additional work, creating a sense of vulnerability and distrust. Other industries, like customized software solutions, face similar challenges where the contractors' expertise far exceeds that of the clients.

Some tradespeople and firms have addressed these issues effectively. For example, an electrician's memorable and self-aware tagline, "No Malarkey with Mr. Sparky," engaged Colin enough to hire them to fix his electrical mishap. He liked the acknowledgment that sometimes contractors do provide more than their share of malarkey. This example underscores the importance of clear communication and reliability in building customer trust.

In this episode, we not only humor Colin's need to rant, but we also explore why tradespeople have the reputation they do and what they should do about it.

We also look at what you can learn from their mistakes to benefit your organization.

In this episode, you will also learn how to avoid these mistakes with tips like:

Use Effective Communication Strategies: How tradespeople can improve customer interactions by avoiding jargon and clearly explaining their work
Set Realistic Expectations: The importance of accurate initial quotes and timelines to build trust and prevent customer frustration
Employ Collaboration: Strategies for enhancing coordination between different trades (or organizational siloes) to ensure smoother project completion
Develop Customer Education Tactics: Methods for educating customers about the work undertaken to reduce information asymmetry and build confidence
Implement Customer Experience Systems: The value of structured approaches to ensure consistent and positive customer experiences across the trades
Learn from Other Industries: Insights from how software firms handle project management and customer relations to avoid cost and time overages

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Did you ever have an imaginary friend? If so, you already have a leg up on this week’s episode. Chances are you created a mental model of your imaginary friend and could predict with 100 percent accuracy how they might react to a given situation.

A mental model is a detailed creation of an imaginary customer that helps you determine how a real-life customer might react to a given situation. However, unlike the imaginary friend, science and data develop the imaginary customer, not creativity.

As we conclude the Masterclass Series about the intricate world of Customer Experiences and the myriad factors that shape customer behavior from a behavioral science perspective, today’s episode pulls everything together. We discuss why you should create mental models of imaginary customers to understand why your real-life customers do what they do.

Traditionally, advertising professionals crafted detailed fictional personas, like an imaginary friend from childhood. Then, they targeted their messages to these fictional customers to hone their brand messages. Today, marketers continue this practice by segmenting customers into groups with specific characteristics, creating a persona that represents the group, and tailoring messages for each persona.

AI presents an intriguing opportunity to enhance this approach, enabling AI to predict customer responses by accurately simulating real-world behavior. This practical application holds immense promise.

However, relying solely on intuition is inadequate for constructing precise mental models. A wealth of data is necessary to uncover the underlying motivations and psychological triggers of customer behavior.

Understanding the context in which customers make decisions is another critical element of creating effective mental models. Factors such as current emotions, memories of past experiences, and the situational context can significantly influence decision-making. Also, we discuss how Daniel Kahneman’s two-system model from "Thinking, Fast and Slow" explains the interplay between rational and intuitive decision-making processes.

This final installment of our Masterclass Series underscores the significance of customer personas or mental models in comprehending and anticipating customer reactions to diverse marketing strategies. Our discussion emphasizes the criticality of incorporating comprehensive data into these models to ensure accurate predictions of customer reactions, particularly in the context of incentives. The discussion also highlights the challenges of integrating such data into AI models.

In this episode, you will also learn:

The historical development of customer personas in advertising
The potential future role of AI in creating and predicting customer personas
The limitations of relying solely on intuition for customer behavior predictions
The significance of memories and emotional drivers in customer decision-making
Why nutrition labels did little to encourage obese people to make better food choices
The impact of situational context on customer choices

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You know that friction in a Customer Experience is a problem that needs fixing. However, do you have that same perception of workplace friction?

If you feel the friction at work, you probably do. But if you don't, you likely think little of it, if at all. Doing work for money requires a certain amount of friction, right?

However, if the friction impacts employees and decreases employee morale, it can be a significant problem. One might even say it is a problem worth fixing.

In this episode, we delve into workplace friction and its impact on employee productivity and morale with Christophe Martel, founder and CEO of FOUNT. Martel, an expert in eliminating workplace friction, shares his insights on how reducing friction can transform employee experience, leading to happier and more productive teams.

We define workplace friction as anything that makes it harder for employees to do their jobs. This friction manifests in various ways, such as messy interactions, poor intra-company team collaboration, lack of established rules, and inadequate systems for settling disagreements. While most companies recognize friction in Customer Experience is detrimental, many organizations overlook its impact on employees.

Martel explains that workplace friction is an evolving concept that varies from person to person. Unlike organizational friction, which slows down processes company-wide, work friction is more acute and usually affects frontline employees. It often arises unintentionally from policies or changes designed to meet departmental goals, complicating interactions for customer-facing staff.

FOUNT addresses structural friction by identifying and resolving issues through data collection and analysis. By understanding employees' specific tasks, FOUNT helps organizations implement solutions that improve productivity and morale. Martel emphasizes that solving work friction leads to happier employees and yields operational benefits, making the company more efficient and profitable.

One key takeaway is that productive employees are long-term employees. Contrary to the popular belief that people leave managers, Martel argues that they leave because of work friction. Managers often absorb friction for their teams but lack the authority to make systemic changes. As a result, friction becomes ingrained in company processes, persisting even when everyone acknowledges it doesn't work.

Martel advocates for open communication between frontline employees and senior managers to identify and address work friction. He also highlights the potential role of AI in reducing friction, though its effectiveness depends on user adoption. AI tools can help when properly deployed based on insights from work friction data.

We discuss why addressing work friction requires a clear understanding of its causes and a commitment to making systemic changes. We also hear about how Martel's approach with FOUNT demonstrates that reducing friction can significantly improve employee satisfaction, productivity, and overall company performance.

Listeners will also learn:

How to identify different types of workplace friction
The importance of data in understanding and resolving friction
Examples of structural friction and how to address them
The role of managers in mitigating or exacerbating friction
The potential impact of AI tools on workplace productivity
Practical steps for fostering open communication and gathering actionable insights from employees
The financial benefits of reducing work friction in large organizations

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Customers can tell you why they do something, But they might be wrong.

It's not that customers are stupid. No, it is quite the contrary. Customers' thinking and decision-making are complicated; multiple things happen simultaneously.

Sometimes, the reason customers do things is hidden, even from the customers themselves. In our penultimate masterclass episode, we explore how you can get at these hidden motivations when designing a Customer Experience that surprises and delights customers.

In this episode, we delve into the hidden motivations of customers, particularly focusing on Confirmation Bias. This bias is a psychological tendency in which people seek information confirming their beliefs and discount contradicting them. It plays a crucial role in customer decisions, often without them even realizing it.

For example, one significant influence is the desire to be right, to see oneself as competent and knowledgeable. Confirmation Bias stems from this need, as people seek information that validates their opinions and disregards contrary evidence.

This bias manifests in various ways. One is brand loyalty.

For example, Apple enthusiasts might blame themselves for device issues rather than consider a fault with the product. This self-blame reinforces their loyalty, even if the product doesn't work perfectly. Similarly, loyal users of the social media platform X (formerly Twitter) overlook its problems to maintain their positive view of the service.

Confirmation Bias is also evident in political beliefs. Studies show that exposure to opposing viewpoints makes individuals more extreme in their views rather than moderating them. This reaction occurs because engaging with opposing views requires more cognitive effort and emotional resilience, as it threatens one's sense of being right.

In business, Confirmation Bias occurs when companies resist new findings that contradict their existing strategies. For instance, in our Emotional Signature® research, organizations often find that the real drivers of customer satisfaction differ from the assumptions. While these insights are valuable, accepting them is challenging because it feels like the organization must admit to past mistakes.

Recognizing and addressing hidden motivations is essential for businesses, so tune in to gain insights into the complex world of customer motivations and how to leverage these understandings for better business outcomes. We will explain why it is crucial to go beyond surface-level feedback and analyze customer behavior to uncover these deeper drivers.

In this episode, we also discuss:

The role of evolutionary psychology in understanding customer motivations.
Techniques for uncovering hidden customer needs.
How Confirmation Bias affects brand loyalty and customer satisfaction.
The impact of cognitive effort and emotional resilience in accepting opposing views.
Strategies for supporting customers in justifying their purchases.
The importance of being open to new information and challenging one's own biases.

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Sanjay Patel faces a challenge many of us can relate to: how to get senior executives to buy into your program.

Dealing with senior management can be nerve-wracking, as I learned twenty years ago when my heart rate spiked during a presentation to the CEO and C-suite. Today, I've mastered strategies for these situations.

In this episode, we discuss how to deal with them effectively and get what you want.

For example, it starts by being confident in your knowledge. Senior executives are usually clever and ambitious, knowing a lot about various topics but often not much about Customer Experience (CX). When discussing CX or any program you are knowledgeable about, remember they can learn from you. They wouldn’t talk to you otherwise. Respect your expertise and believe in yourself. If you don’t believe in your ideas, why should they?

So, yes, confidence is key, but avoid being overly technical or jargon-heavy. Overcomplicating your message can make you seem like you’re covering for something. Instead, align your message with what the CEO cares about most. For example, if the CEO is focused on cost-cutting, explain how your CX program can save costs. Understanding and addressing their needs will help you get through to them.

You should also keep your questions simple. Surprisingly, the higher you go in the management chain, the simpler the questions should be. Simple questions like "What experience do we want to deliver?" engage the senior team effectively. Avoid complex questions that convolute your message. Being clear and relevant is more important than appearing clever.

Additionally, using examples from within the organization or from customers helps illustrate your points effectively. Personal stories make your message digestible and relatable. For instance, Colin always asks his clients to think about a good or bad experience they had recently. By asking your audience about their own good or bad customer experiences, you can help them understand the importance of emotions in CX.

Finally, senior management values opinions. When asked, state your opinion clearly and respectfully. And be straightforward; senior management can easily detect dishonesty.

Today’s episode explores how to convince senior management to support your program. . Ultimately, persuading senior management is a sales job. So, we talk about how to sell your idea by meeting their needs.

In this episode, you will also discover:

How to frame your expertise in a way that resonates with senior executives' priorities.
Techniques for simplifying complex ideas to ensure clarity in communication.
The importance of aligning your proposals with the company's strategic goals.
Methods for using storytelling to make your case compelling and memorable.
Strategies for addressing tough questions with confidence and transparency.
Ways to gather and present evidence that supports your proposals effectively.

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This episode is the sixth in an eight-part series on Unlocking the Psychology of Customer Experience. Here, we explore the psychology we have regarding how human beings deal with predicting unpredictable outcomes. The discussion focuses on biases that influence how people perceive and assess probability and risk, impacting their judgment and decision-making processes.

We begin with a common bias in these situations, the Gambler's Fallacy. In this scenario, individuals predict future random outcomes based on past results. It feels logical but isn’t and often results in poor decision-making.

For example, casinos will often put the results of the past few Roulette rolls to give patrons a history of what has happened with the wheel. Some gamblers might use this history to predict what is likely to happen next.

However, the marble doesn’t have a memory of what just happened or any control over what happens next. The next roll will be as random as the last roll. The history of the Roulette wheel is meaningless; it only serves the casino by exploiting patrons' inability to realize the random nature of the spin and taking their money.

Another bias we discuss is the Hot Hand Fallacy, which influences people to believe that a streak of success in sports or other areas is sustainable despite statistical evidence.

The Gambler’s Fallacy and the Hot Hand Fallacy are not any more logical or rational than one another. The Hot Hand Fallacy differs because, at least, an athlete’s performance or a business outcome isn’t random. However, it isn’t any more likely to be right.

We also examine the Overconfidence Bias, which reveals how individuals tend to be overly confident in predicting outcomes, leading to misguided decisions. The Dunning-Kruger effect, a related phenomenon, highlights how individuals with limited knowledge of a topic may underestimate their competence.

Colin is guilty of this regarding his ability and drive to learn about his SLR camera’s more nuanced settings. He opts for the automatic settings instead.

Moreover, the Endowment Effect is discussed, illustrating how people overvalue items they perceive as their own, influencing their willingness to part with them. The Hindsight Bias is also explored, revealing how people tend to believe that past events were more predictable than they were.

In this episode, you will also learn the following:

The importance of ongoing learning and adaptation in navigating the complexities of human decision-making.
The implications of these biases for customer experience design and decision-making in business.
Strategies for mitigating the impact of cognitive biases on judgment and decision-making.
Real-world examples of how these biases manifest in various contexts, such as investing, sports, and customer interactions.
The role of awareness and education in addressing biases and improving decision-making processes.
Practical steps for incorporating insights from behavioral economics into experience design and business strategy.

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Regarding Customer Experiences and the behavioral sciences, there is seldom only one thing happening at a time. There are usually a lot of things happening at once. This masterclass episode, the fifth in a series of eight, explores economic biases and how they create flaws in our decision-making logic.

For example, one key bias discussed is the Sunken Cost Fallacy, where people need help to walk away from investments, leading to subsequent mistakes. Loss Aversion is another bias explored, highlighting how we feel losses more acutely than gains. This bias influences behaviors like resisting salary reductions and preferring to face a potential layoff (where one would lose all their salary) because we can’t imagine losing any part of our present income.

The Endowment Effect, stemming from Loss Aversion, emphasizes how we overvalue items we perceive as our own, leading to decisions like overpricing sentimental possessions. It’s why grad students can’t bear to part with their gift in exchange for a gift of equal value. It’s also why economist Richard Thaler, University of Chicago, can now add “Nobel-prize-winning economist” in his bio.

Ultimately, these economic biases reveal that people aren't always logical, and irrational factors often influence our decision-making processes. In this episode, we discuss why and what you can do about it in your experience design.

In this episode, you will also learn the following:

Strategies for recognizing and navigating economic biases in customer experience management.
Examples of how these biases manifest in everyday situations, such as purchasing decisions and salary negotiations.
The importance of understanding irrational decision-making in designing effective customer experiences.
Practical steps for leveraging insights from economic biases to enhance customer interactions and outcomes.

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Surge pricing, a form of dynamic pricing, involves raising prices during spikes in demand to balance supply and demand. It is a rational economic solution to manage demand effectively, but it can generate negative emotions among consumers who feel they're being unfairly charged. Surge pricing is a specific flavor of dynamic pricing or, depending on your perspective, price discrimination.

Surge Pricing is commonly seen in ride-sharing services or airlines, where prices increase during peak times to encourage more drivers to hit the road. Examples of surge pricing include Uber's increased fares during rainy weather and airlines charging higher prices for last-minute bookings or peak travel times.

In addition to ride-sharing and airline industries, surge pricing can be observed in other sectors, such as bars offering happy hour discounts to attract customers during off-peak hours. However, it doesn’t work in every situation and can damage your customer relationships.

Surge pricing has its good points. It can increase revenue and manage demand effectively. However, to do so, this dynamic pricing strategy must be balanced with customer-centric considerations and strategic communication to avoid negative perceptions.

In this episode, we explore the particulars of surge pricing and explain how effective communication is crucial when implementing dynamic pricing strategies. Customer communication can ensure customers understand the rationale behind the pricing changes and feel they're receiving fair value.

In this episode, you will also learn the following:

Examples of surge pricing in various industries, including hospitality and energy.
The role of strategic purpose in dynamic pricing implementation.
Why effective communication helps stave off disaster when implementing dynamic pricing strategies.
How framing dynamic pricing changes can influence consumer perceptions.
Balancing the benefits to the customer with revenue optimization goals.
There is a need for flexibility and supply management to support dynamic pricing strategies.

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Various motivational biases and emotions shape customer experiences, emphasizing the need for a holistic approach to designing experiences. For example, the customer’s mood significantly impacts the customer’s decision-making processes.

Today's discussion highlights why understanding the customer’s mood and managing customer emotions helps you achieve your desired experience outcomes. It also identifies twenty emotions driving or undermining value, stressing the necessity of specificity in emotional goals.

We also cover the Affect Heuristic and Mood Management Theory, two prominent theories in psychology that are particularly relevant to our discussion on the role of emotion in decision-making. Here’s why:

The Affect Heuristic suggests that our intuitive choices are often guided by emotional responses, with a preference for positive experiences. This has practical implications for businesses in terms of designing customer experiences that evoke positive emotions.
Mood Management Theory posits that our decisions are often driven by the desire to regulate our mood, seeking pleasure or alleviating discomfort. This theory helps us understand the role of mood in decision-making and its potential impact on customer experiences.

Context, culture, and age also influence mood and emotional responses. We discuss how cultural predispositions and life stages shape emotional goals and needs (which also explains why Colin’s Smiley Face Buttons on Etsy won’t sell like hotcakes in England).

In this episode, we underscore the importance of recognizing and understanding the impact of mood on decisions. We also explore the power of positive thinking in shaping perceptions and responses to reality while acknowledging its limitations in influencing external outcomes. Additionally, we advocate for a diagnostic approach to customer emotions and behavior and capitalizing on positive or managing negative moods.

Here are a few key points we make in the podcast:

Mood significantly influences decision-making processes, so understanding and managing customer emotions, which we covered in another episode recently, are crucial for designing effective experiences.
Specific emotional goals are essential for achieving desired outcomes, so if you don’t have them, you should make them now.
Context, culture, and age also influence mood and emotional responses.
Why Colin and Ryan represent both the best and the worst culture has to offer regarding positive or negative outlooks on life.
Positive thinking can shape perceptions and responses to reality but can’t change reality; so think positive but work hard—and don’t walk barefoot over a field of hot lava because you “think you can.”

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This has been created in partnership with NICE.

AI is a significant development in experience management, but many organizations need help with its implementation. While experimenting with AI, like ChatGPT, offers a glimpse of its potential, it's challenging to understand how AI fits into the broader tech stack and business systems.

In today’s episode, Elizabeth Tobey, Head of Marketing for Digital and AI for NICE ) NICE, an AI platform, shares insights on effectively using AI to enhance experiences.

This video summarizes what I see happening in many organizations regarding implementing AI.

Tobey says that many organizations have told her they don’t know where to start. She emphasizes the importance of beginning with impactful AI use cases and setting clear KPIs to measure success post-deployment. NICE's suite of solutions helps identify pain points within a company, enabling targeted AI implementations, such as Enlighten XO, which stands for experience optimization.

However, implementing AI requires overcoming siloed approaches and investing in third-party solutions due to resource limitations and expertise within organizations. Customizing AI models for specific customer experiences is crucial, as different experiences require different approaches.

In other words, you don’t want the same experience buying a luxury car as returning running shoes. One must feel posh and comprehensive, while the other should be quick and easy. (We’ll let you guess which is which.)

Tobey advises that to sell AI within an organization, one should focus on solving business problems rather than promoting AI. Managing expectations about AI capabilities is essential, as AI alone cannot solve all problems. Instead, AI should complement existing technology, culture, and business objectives.

Tobey suggests clearly understanding success criteria and providing data to potential partners to demonstrate realistic outcomes. Building relationships with partners invested in success ensures alignment with business needs and fosters growth opportunities.

In this episode, we will also discuss:

The importance of understanding AI nuances and use cases across different organizational roles.
How AI solutions should align with existing technology and business objectives.
The role of partnerships in AI implementation and success.
Managing expectations and avoiding overreliance on AI.
The evolution of AI technology and its potential impact on businesses.
Customizing AI solutions to address specific business challenges.
Leveraging AI to enhance customer experiences and drive business growth.

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A Master Class Part 3: Unlocking the Psychology of Customer Experience

In the third episode of our Master Class series on the Psychology of Customer Experience, we delve into how other people influence our behavior. Understanding these theoretical dynamics is practical, empowering you to design effective Customer Experiences.

Robert Cialdini's research on influence is a cornerstone of understanding social dynamics and persuasion techniques. In this episode, we rely heavily on his groundbreaking work.

First, let’s consider Social Proof. Social Proof is a concept that describes how the actions and preferences of others influence people. Two examples that demonstrate how this works are the idea of trending, or the tendency to like something if others do, and the fear of missing out (FOMO), which drives people to join in activities or trends.

Reciprocity influences behavior, too. Reciprocity is the idea that people respond positively to kindness and favors. Many times, people who have been on the receiving end of kindness will return that behavior.. However, acts of kindness that inspire reciprocity must be genuine. If they come with the expectation of something in return, they will not produce the same results.

Scarcity is a persuasive tactic that capitalizes on the limited availability of a product or service to create a sense of urgency and desirability. It can be seen in online shopping carts indicating low stock or limited time offers presented during a cruise.

In this episode, we provide an overview of many of these social dynamics that influence customer behavior in your experience. Understanding social dynamics and influence can inform strategic decisions in customer experience design, including marketing campaigns, sales techniques, and product positioning. Best of all, Colin uses his serious “Master-Class” voice, which tells you that he really knows what he is talking about.

In this episode, you will also discover:

The concept of Social Proof and how it influences consumer behavior.
The power of Reciprocity and how acts of kindness can drive customer loyalty.
How Scarcity tactics can create a sense of urgency and increase demand for products or services.
Examples of these influence techniques in real-world scenarios, like online shopping cart messages and to-good-to-be-true cruise line offers.
The importance of considering social influences throughout the customer journey.
Strategies for leveraging social dynamics to enhance customer experiences and drive sales.

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Quality assurance is crucial in Customer Experience Management, and assessing call center operations provides valuable insights into an organization's customer-centricity. The subject of today’s episode is the result of our None of Use is Clever as All of Us feature. One of our listeners, Jamie Scott of Evaluate Agent shared his thoughts on Quality Assurance and the problems organizations have regarding this area.

Observations and conversations with call center agents reveal operational inefficiencies and training gaps that impact the overall customer experience. Scott highlights key issues with traditional quality assurance practices and offers insights into leveraging AI for enhanced customer service.

Scott emphasizes the importance of viewing AI as a tool rather than a replacement for human agents and advocates for analyzing all customer interactions to gain comprehensive insights. He underscores the need to focus on the emotional aspects of customer interactions and suggests using AI to predict and diagnose customer sentiments across various channels.

However, challenges such as siloed AI implementations and focusing on rational data in quality assurance metrics hinder progress in this area.

In this episode, we explore Scott's topic and how it can help you with your Quality Assurance efforts. Despite these challenges, there are actionable strategies for customer service and quality management professionals.

In this episode, you will also discover:

The significance of assessing call center operations for understanding an organization's customer-centricity.
Insights from Jamie Scott on leveraging AI and overcoming challenges in quality assurance practices.
The importance of viewing AI as a tool to enhance human decision-making rather than a replacement for human agents.
Strategies for analyzing all customer interactions to gain comprehensive insights and identify areas of improvement.
The need to focus on emotional aspects of customer interactions and incorporate emotional metrics into quality assurance practices.
Practical tips for implementing a top-down approach to delivering the desired customer experience and measuring targeted emotions across all customer touchpoints.

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A Master Class Part 2: Unlocking the Psychology of Customer Experience

In this episode, we continue exploring the psychology behind Customer Experience, focusing on the role of memory. Customer loyalty hinges on how memories are formed and retained. Therefore, understanding memory formation is crucial for designing impactful experiences.

Memory formation begins with encoding, where new information is processed and stored in the mind. Encoding involves several effects, including the Primacy Effect, which prioritizes remembering initial experiences, and the Recency Effect, which emphasizes recollecting recent events. Additionally, the Frequency Effect highlights the importance of repeated actions in memory retention.

Retrieval effects determine how stored memories are recalled. Professor Daniel Kahneman's Peak-End Rule suggests that people remember the most intense emotion experienced during an event and its conclusion. This rule applies to evaluative memory, shaping overall perceptions of past experiences.

Memory also has structure. Memory structure resembles a fishing net, with individual memories as knots connected to form a net, which represents the larger memory network. Retrieving one memory often triggers the recall of associated memories, along with the emotions and experiences linked to them. It’s helpful to picture the fishing net at the bottom of a shallow pool and imagine pulling it by one of the knots to the surface. You get the knot you grabbed, but all the connected knots come along, too.

Strategically managing memory formation involves planning for encoding, recall, and structure. Tactics such as leveraging primacy and recency, incorporating humor or emotional connections, and providing follow-up reminders can enhance memory retention. It's crucial to prioritize memorable aspects of the experience and reinforce positive memories over time.

Considering the interconnected nature of memory concepts, such as the relationship between encoding and recall, helps design experiences that leave a lasting impression. For instance, understanding how customers perceive value allows you, as a professional, to highlight key features that resonate with your target audience, instilling confidence in your ability to create memorable customer experiences.

In this episode, we discuss how memory plays a significant role in driving customer loyalty, making it essential to proactively shape how customers remember their experiences. By being deliberate about memory formation, businesses can create meaningful connections and foster enduring relationships with their customers.

In this episode, you will also learn:

The importance of encoding and retrieval in memory formation.
Strategies for enhancing memory retention, such as leveraging Primacy and Recency effects.
The role of emotional connections in shaping memorable experiences.
The significance of follow-up communication in reinforcing positive memories.
How memory structure influences the recall of associated experiences.
The interconnected nature of memory concepts and their implications for experience design.

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A Master Class: Unlocking The Psychology of Customer Experience

With this episode, we begin an eight-part series exploring customer behavior and the psychology that drives it. Each part will delve into the various psychological aspects of Customer Experiences, offering practical advice on understanding and influencing them. Our focus today is on why customers make quick decisions and how you can sway those decisions in your favor.

Understanding customer behavior is complex and influenced by multiple factors, a concept known in academic circles as high causal density. There's no one-size-fits-all solution for a perfect Customer Experience transformation; it requires a combination of approaches.

Human nature often seeks shortcuts for cognitive tasks, leading to heuristic processes. Heuristics, or mental shortcuts, simplify decision-making. We discuss four common heuristics:

Anchoring and Adjustment: People use familiar examples to estimate values quickly, which can lead to biases, especially in pricing strategies.
Focusing Effect: When faced with information overload, individuals focus on crucial details to aid decision-making. Recognizing what customers prioritize can influence their choices.
Availability Heuristic: Our brains estimate likelihood based on easily accessible examples. Understanding what information customers readily recall helps shape perceptions.
Representativeness: People often categorize based on stereotypes or representative traits. Recognizing customer expectations can guide your design approach.

Considering these heuristics, we emphasize the importance of first impressions, understanding customer values, managing expectations, and aligning your design with customer decision-making shortcuts. Recognizing the diversity in customer decision-making preferences is crucial, and segmentation plays a vital role in tailoring experiences.

This episode explores various influences and group psychological concepts tied to customer decisions. Our goal is to provide a holistic understanding of experience psychology, making you more agile in grasping customer behavior and creating plans for compelling experiences that encourage return visits.

In this episode, you will also learn:

The significance of first impressions and their impact on customer anchors.
How to identify valuable areas for customers and use them for effective comparisons.
The role of customer expectations and how to align your design with their anticipated experiences.
The importance of providing information shortcuts to simplify decision-making.
Strategies for segmentation to cater to diverse customer decision-making preferences.
The overarching theme of simplification as a design approach offers customers shortcuts to decision-making and potential sales.

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In this episode, Colin and Ryan tackle a listener's question about the psychology of customer loyalty, delving into its emotional and relational aspects.

Loyalty, they explain, goes beyond mere repetition of behavior; it is rooted in deep emotional attachment and often requires sacrifice. Drawing parallels to personal experiences, such as loyalty to sports teams (Lutown Town Football Club, recently reinstated in the Premiership) and brands like Apple (naturally), they highlight the importance of trustworthiness and the willingness to go the extra mile in fostering loyalty.

They emphasize the significance of loyalty in defining one's identity and sense of belonging, likening it to tribalism. Even in non-tribal contexts, individuals exhibit loyalty to specific brands or products, creating a sense of community. Through personal anecdotes and examples, Colin and Ryan illustrate how businesses can earn loyalty by prioritizing customer needs and making sacrifices for their benefit, ultimately fostering long-term relationships.

Moving beyond misconceptions about loyalty in business, Colin and Ryan encourage organizations to define loyalty in terms of sacrifices made by both the customer and the organization, fostering a two-way relationship. They offer practical strategies for fostering customer loyalty, including recognizing the emotional connection between the organization and the customer, defining loyalty for the organization, and being loyal to customers by delivering on promises and treating them with respect.

In this episode you will also learn:

Loyalty is rooted in deep emotional attachment and often requires sacrifice.
Loyalty plays a crucial role in defining one's identity and sense of belonging.
Businesses can earn loyalty by prioritizing customer needs and making sacrifices for their benefit.
Defining loyalty involves considering sacrifices made by both the customer and the organization.
Practical strategies for fostering customer loyalty include recognizing the emotional connection, defining loyalty for the organization, and being loyal to customers by delivering on promises.

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“Did I tell you about the time I …”

These seven words are one of many ways we signal one of our favorite things is coming next: a story. We can’t get enough of stories and look for them everywhere, from news to conversations to the commercials we can’t avoid on TV. Stories are an essential part of the human experience.

In today's world, storytelling is crucial in various aspects of business, including marketing.

Human fascination with narratives stems from their ability to captivate attention, evoke emotions, and aid memory retention. Stories provide context, making information easier to recall, and create emotional connections that reinforce memory.

Businesses leverage storytelling to establish their brand identity, often highlighting humble beginnings or overcoming adversity. Effective storytelling goes beyond mere anecdotes; it persuades and simplifies complex concepts, making them relatable to the audience. For instance, Ikea's narrative of cost-saving design innovations clarifies the correlation between low price and high quality.

In marketing and persuasion, storytelling proves instrumental in communicating abstract ideas and influencing consumer behavior. By tapping into emotions and personal experiences, storytellers can make their points resonate with the audience. Stories simplify complex concepts, facilitate self-awareness, and enhance brand perception.

In this episode, we explore why storytelling is such a powerful tool in a marketer's toolbox and how you can tell compelling ones to your customers.

You will also learn:

The importance of storytelling in marketing and communication.
How narratives aid memory retention and emotional connection.
Examples of successful brand storytelling like how Ikea helps us buy their assemble-it-yourself furniture because it’s far more affordable that way.
The effectiveness of storytelling in persuading and simplifying complex ideas.
Strategies for crafting compelling stories, including emotional resonance and relatability.

If you have a story you want to share with us, please send us a video or audio for our None of Us Are As Clever as All of Us Feature. We’d love to hear it and might feature it on the podcast and in the newsletter.

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Personalization is an excellent tactic for your marketing efforts. However, only some people like this personalization; some feel they're being watched. Therefore, it is important to remember that context and who's doing the personalizing matter.

Picture this: Colin’s at his go-to fishing store, Discount Tackle. The manager knows him, we chat, and he recommends a lure. Even though Colin can snag it cheaper elsewhere, the personalized touch keeps him coming back.

We've all got our versions of this – the local diner, your loyal barber, or maybe a small biz that fuels your hobbies. Small businesses nail personalization. But big companies? They play the tech card, crunching data to determine "personalized" offerings—not always a slam dunk.

Why? With technology, the data sometimes gets too personal, and without a personal relationship supporting it, you're left feeling like the company is stalking you, not helping you.

The trick is to balance personalization and privacy without making it weird. Discount Tackle gets it. They add value to Colin’s fishing game. Spotify does well with personalization, too. It has cool features, like Spotify Wrapped and DJ playing mode, that enhance the music and user experience but aren't creepy.

But then there's Facebook. Facebook dives deep into Colin’s life for personalized ads, which he doesn’t appreciate, nor do they enhance his experience. Remember: we do not pay for Facebook, but they're cashing in on us.

Graham Hill on LinkedIn – he's all about putting the "customer" back in personalization. His take? Check your spam emails; they're not overly personal. He wants to see marketers’ user personalization to send the message to the right people at the optimal time.

We want personalization for a few reasons. It's like getting invited to an exclusive club when it's done right. Sainsbury's in England sends Colin discounts on stuff he buys. It is cool, not creepy. We also like familiar stuff. Plus, we appreciate the effort.

In this episode, we explore the balance between personalization and privacy. We explain why brands should always consider who you're talking to, how you're doing it, and why.

In this episode, you'll also discover:

The Balancing Act of Personalization: Learn how to balance personalizing interactions and avoiding the "too much information" zone.
The Differences Between Small vs. Big Business Tactics: Uncover how small businesses ace personalization in face-to-face talks while larger corporations use tech and the tradeoffs involved.
Value and Purpose Dynamics: Explore the critical role of value and purpose in personalization and how it can make or break customer relationships.
Why Trust and Context Matter: Understand the significance of trust and context in personalization and why it's not just about data but the emotional connection.
The Critical Nature of Adding Value, Not Just Selling: Shift your perspective from collecting data for sales to providing genuine value, making customers feel respected and appreciated.

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Customer emotions heavily influence experiences and motivate actions, yet these motivations are often hidden, even from the customers. Organizations must uncover these hidden motivations to serve their customers better. The "Jobs to Be Done" framework, popularized by Clayton Christensen at Harvard Business School, provides a lens through which to view customer motivations.

Eckhart Boehme, Founder and Managing Director of Unipro Solutions, emphasizes the importance of aligning customer experiences around the idea of jobs to be done, helping organizations grow faster by understanding what customers seek to achieve through their products or services.

The Jobs to Be Done framework shifts focus from product features to customer motivations, urging businesses to understand the underlying needs driving customer behavior. It prompts companies to ask what customers are buying and why they are buying it.

Boehme also introduces the Wheel of Progress, a tool designed to help organizations understand customer journeys and progress through four phases: awareness, expectations, experience, and tradeoffs. This tool facilitates collaboration and strategy formation based on meaningful data.

This episode explores why understanding customer motivations is essential for effective marketing and product design. While uncovering these motivations may not be intuitive, it is a worthwhile endeavor that can lead to powerful insights and better decision-making.

Here are five other things you will learn in this podcast:

The significant influence of customer emotions on experiences and actions.
The importance of uncovering hidden customer motivations for effective business strategies.
How the "Jobs to Be Done" framework provides a valuable perspective on understanding customer needs and motivations.
The role of tools like the Wheel of Progress in visualizing and understanding customer journeys.
Research and analysis are necessary to uncover customer motivations and make informed business decisions.

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Colin has been ghosted. He was surprised, considering he is married and has been for decades.

However, his ghosting experience didn’t come from a romantic partner but a professional one. Since ghosting appears to be spreading into many interactions, we thought we should discuss it here.

Ghosting, where someone suddenly stops communicating, has become more common, thanks to technology making it easier to cut off contact. It often happens online, like in dating apps, leaving one wondering what went wrong.

Even social invitations are not immune. Despite sending out monthly invites to friends, many don't respond, which feels rude. The ease of digital communication is eroding traditional manners.

Professional settings aren't spared either. Job candidates get ghosted by companies during interviews, and vice versa. It's surprising how these communication norms are changing, and we need to stay aware of these shifts.

Take LinkedIn, for instance. Contacting people about products or services can take time and effort. Some think not responding is rude, while others argue it's acceptable. It shows how communication norms differ across platforms.

Despite these changes, we should keep our communication personalized and well-researched. Understanding the norms of each platform and maintaining in-person connections can help avoid being ghosted. Following older norms, like sending thank-you notes after interviews, can set us apart positively.

In this episode, we discuss ghosting and why it happens. We also discuss how to navigate these changing norms with respect and awareness.

In this episode, you will also discover:

What ghosting is and why it happens in interactions today
What the primary motivation is for ghosting is
How understanding the norms of each platform and maintaining in-person relationships can help reduce the chances of being ghosted
An excellent, if time-consuming, strategy can yield the results you were hoping for if you want to access people who think ghosting is acceptable behavior
Why Ryan almost lost a job because he isn’t a “Thank You Note” guy
What type of response Colin will welcome on LinkedIn and which ones he will ignore

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"What's the one thing we need for a stellar Customer Experience?"

If we had a dollar for every time clients asked us this, we’d, well, have quite a few dollars.

The question is understandable. This unspoken desire for a silver bullet solution echoes across industries. We all want a silver bullet solution that will fix our problems, whether for weight loss, financial growth, or, in Colin’s case, for playing the guitar.

The problem is that there isn’t one for CX improvement. Or guitar, frankly. Achieving mastery in guitar isn't about shortcuts—it's about hours and hours of practice. Likewise, crafting a remarkable CX demands dedicated effort, not a quick fix. Yet, the allure of a silver bullet persists.

The quest for a single, transformative action stems from a human penchant for simplicity, urgency for instant results, and an aversion to complexity. Many wish to sidestep the nuanced challenges of CX improvement, preferring an easy remedy. It's a journey fueled by a lack of CX expertise, feeling overwhelmed by the myriad CX considerations, and the appeal of past CX success stories with simple solutions.

In this episode, we explore seven reasons we want silver bullet solutions. Perhaps more importantly, we offer a realistic perspective on embracing the truth: CX improvement demands dedication and a holistic approach. By understanding the reasons behind the silver bullet mindset, businesses can navigate their CX journey with a clearer understanding and realistic expectations.

In this episode you will discover:

Why our psychology drives us to crave straightforward solutions, overlooking the intricacies of CX enhancement.
How our love for immediate results fuels the search for quick fixes and why we shy away from the multifaceted challenges in CX, seeking simplified remedies.
What guitar solo Colin would play if he had a magic wand, or, magic guitar pick.
The influence of exceptional cases and how they reinforce the belief in silver bullet solutions.
How our old pal Risk Aversion weighs in by leading us to seek shortcuts instead of embracing comprehensive CX strategies.

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You will have a customer crisis. We apologize for being so direct, but the fact is customer crises are inevitable. When it does happen, will you be able to navigate it to an acceptable outcome? Do you have a comprehensive approach?

We doubt it. Few organizations do.

Most think a customer crisis isn’t going to happen to them or that they will be able to manage it when it does with their business-as-usual approach.

They are wrong. It will, and they won’t.

Others think they do have a plan, even if they came up with it when the main method of communication with customers was some form of physical correspondence. They have it in a binder on a shelf back by the disconnected fax machine, just above paper files and right next to their Blackberry charger.

To be fair, they do have a plan, technically, but it lacks relevancy and will probably result in winging it at the moment of crisis.

When it comes to customer experience, even the best-managed companies encounter challenges. The inevitability of a customer crisis necessitates a proactive approach, emphasizing the art of staying composed in the face of adversity. In this pursuit, five fundamental rules emerge to guide organizations through the intricate landscape of customer crises.

We share these rules and why they will help in this episode. The journey through customer crises demands a holistic and proactive approach. By embracing these rules, organizations can navigate the complexities of customer crises with composure, transparency, and a commitment to continuous improvement.

Here are some of the things you will learn:

Starting with the obvious, we make the case that a well-thought-out plan is essential in managing customer crises effectively and that you likely have the foundations of one built already in your present customer service scheme.
We share how reminding cruise passengers a watery death on the journey is a possibility by having an evacuation drill upon leaving port is a great way to start the cruise experience—and a relationship built on trust.
We explain how actively listening to customers and showing empathy is critical to maintaining composure during a crisis, especially for frontline employees, who face the barrage of raw, disappointed customer emotions first.
Why news should always be shared, good or bad, and that transparency and honesty take precedence over withholding information during a crisis.
The essential nature of reviewing the whole problem, what you learned, and how you plan to avoid it happening again in the future will move your customer relationships forward in a positive way once the negative incident is behind you.

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Have you ever come across the Abilene Paradox? It's when everyone agrees to do something that no one really wants to do.

Jerry B. Harvey coined "The Abilene Paradox" based on a family incident. They ended up driving 50 miles each way across the scorching Texas desert to Abilene for dinner, even though none of them wanted to go. They all thought everyone else wanted to go, so they reluctantly agreed. Politeness led them to a hot, dusty adventure that none of them enjoyed.

This reminded me of a recent experience. I had plans with friends, but as the weekend neared, I wasn't up for it. I decided to bow out and texted the group. Surprisingly, many others in the group thanked me for speaking up because they didn't want to go either. It made me wonder who initiated the plan in the first place.

In work settings, I recall something similar. I remember being in meetings where the boss suggested something not so great. Nobody spoke up because, well, the boss is the boss. Challenging the boss could make someone look foolish, so everyone went along. This conformity can lead organizations down a problematic path.

So, what can you do to avoid the Road to Abilene?

This episode explores how to avoid such situations in your organization. The good news is there are effective ways to manage it, with strong leadership and a robust communication process being crucial.

In this episode, you will also learn:

The various reasons we find ourselves in such situations that often involve avoiding conflict, fearing consequences, or having poor communication systems within the team.
How to encourage open communication and foster an environment where team members feel safe expressing their opinions without fear of backlash.
What the benefits are of constructive dissent, where leadership encourages team members to voice differing opinions and ideas, leading to better decisions and avoiding the pitfalls of silent conformity.
Which essential leadership skills matter most here, and why there is value in listening to diverse perspectives
The specific strategies organizations can use to avoid falling into the Abilene Paradox trap, ensuring that decisions and plans are based on genuine agreement and understanding.

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A hidden impact exists regarding your experience management return on investment (ROI). It is often overlooked because it lurks between a specific moment in a customer process and the behavior resulting from it. However, uncovering and understanding this hidden impact is critical for comprehending its implications on the bottom line.

Emily Davidson wanted to know how to determine the value of her Customer Experience initiatives, a challenge many in the field face. So, she asked us—and we were glad to tell her. What Emily needs is the insight provided by our Emotional Signature research.

The Emotional Signature was developed years ago in collaboration with the London Business School. It resulted from millions of questions posed to thousands of business professionals across hundreds of countries, leading to the identification of the Emotional Signature®.

The Emotional Signature gauges how experiences make individuals feel and how those emotions correlate with the value assigned to the experience. For instance, an experience infused with friction and frustration might yield an Emotional Signature that disappoints customers, resulting in undesirable behavioral outcomes. Conversely, positive emotional connections can enhance outcomes.

Emotions drive customer behavior, influencing actions beyond what survey responses might indicate. A case in point is how Disney Theme Parks discerned that guests, when surveyed, requested salads, but their behavior demonstrated a preference for junk food. This discrepancy showcases the nuanced nature of customer desires and the importance of understanding the specific feelings driving behavior.

In this episode, we explain to Emily and our other listeners how the Emotional Signature Research provides a data-driven approach to understanding the intricate relationship between emotions, customer behavior, and organizational values. While optional for those already convinced of the emotional impact on customer behavior, it is a powerful tool for skeptics requiring tangible evidence before investing resources in experience improvements.

In this episode, you will discover the following:

The key to measuring emotional impacts on ROI is how organizations often don’t even know when you ask them and how you can figure it out for your organization.
The twenty emotions, ranging from joy to frustration, that drive or destroy value for organizations.
Why granularity about customer emotions is crucial, and why the ubiquitous oversimplification of emotions as positive or negative won’t work.
A basic explanation of Structural Equation Modeling, a widely accessible statistical technique, and who to assign it to on your team (hint: it’s the one who is best with numbers).
How sorting through what customers say they want but don’t drive value and what customers don’t say they want but do is crucial for making informed decisions that impact the bottom line positively.

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Have you ever noticed that spending cash is harder than using a credit card? You are not imagining things. Different payment methods carry varying degrees of discomfort when used.

Cash tends to have the most painful impact, followed by checks. Credit cards offer a lesser discomfort than cash or checks. With advancements in payment technologies like contactless cards or smartphone transactions, the potential exists for these methods to generate even less discomfort than traditional credit cards.

So, how can businesses leverage these insights into payment methods to assist customers in handling their emotional response to spending?

To put it simply, the answers lie in Mental Accounting and Reframing.

Mental Accounting plays a pivotal role in how customers navigate their emotions regarding spending. It serves to alleviate guilt and elevate happiness in spending scenarios. Thus, it's crucial to consider mental accounting within the broader context of managing customers' emotional experiences.

In this episode, we explore where your customers are emotionally relative to the purchases they make and how guiding them to an improved mental accounting from your business perspective is essential. It turns out that messages that acknowledge and address customers' emotional responses to spending can be a powerful strategy in enhancing their overall satisfaction and engagement during transactions.

Here are some other key moments in the discussion:

04:09 Ryan explains how money can be spent on anything, however the biases we create using mental accounting help us manage our emotions regarding our spending.
07:20 Colin associates a podcast with Joe Pine regarding how customers value their time in experiences differently depending on the type of timed transaction it is.
17:43 We discuss the importance of understanding what mental accounting your customers are using and working with that to help them feel more satisfaction with their purchase.
21:08 We explore how financing in the mix can change the spending experience for customers.
28:09 We share the key takeaways from Mental Accounting and how you can leverage it to improve your experiences with customers.

About Colin Shaw

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has over 294,000 followers and 78,000 subscribers to his LinkedIn newsletter ‘Why Customers Buy’. The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for four years.

Colin is a renown keynote speaker and undertakes consultancy work and educational workshops to help organizations improve their Customer Experience.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

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Exploring ethics is challenging. Given its abstract nature, it is a tough subject for learning and discussion.

That said, we never falter in the face of a challenge. We developed five principles of professional ethics we believe are vital to revisit periodically.

Are they rigid guidelines? Do they offer absolute answers? Are they timeless?

Not quite.

Ethics evolve over time, and what's acceptable today might not be so in the future. Nevertheless, ethics, much like any skill, can be nurtured, honed, and enhanced.

It's intriguing to note the limited emphasis organizations place on ethics training. Perhaps there's an antiquated belief that either you possess ethics inherently, or you don't. It's possible that some organizations subscribe to the notion of, "If your parents didn't instill it, we won't either."

In this episode, we unpack the five rules of professional ethics. These five principles serve as a compass, aiding in constructing a framework for achieving the best outcomes and comprehending the path taken, ensuring it can be replicated successfully.

Here are some key moments in the discussion:

05:41 We start with the first rule about setting your own personal boundaries, and whether or not it’s okay to kill your boss.
10:05 After introducing the second rule, which gets deeper into the influence of context, we learn where Ryan gets demonstrations for his lessons on ethics (spoiler alert: It’s Netflix).
20:51 The third rule talks about regulating the environment, whether that’s changing the culture or walking away from it.
25:04 We go against what we usually say about intuition and encourage you to trust your gut…but only this time!
28:24 We announce the last rule, which is a warning that nothing is perfect; finding the best solution is the best you can do in some situations and accepting that is essential.

Did you know we have a YouTube Channel too? Check it out here.

About Colin Shaw

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has over 294,000 followers and 78,000 subscribers to his LinkedIn newsletter ‘Why Customers Buy’. The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for four years.

Colin is a renown keynote speaker and undertakes consultancy work and educational workshops to help organizations improve their Customer Experience.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

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Practicality is essential. Great ideas you can’t do anything with in the real world are a waste of time.

Bob Black, one of our avid podcast listeners, likes our concepts about eliciting particular customer emotions. But he doesn’t know how to do that in practical steps. So, this episode gives them to him.

Bob isn’t alone. Numerous organizations struggle with eliciting specific emotions in their customers. While most acknowledge the significance of customer emotions in shaping experiences, many falter when asked about the particular emotions they aim to evoke. Often, organizations gravitate towards vague terms like "positive" or "favorable." These are not emotions; they are adjectives that describe emotions.

So, the first practical step in evoking a specific emotion is pretty simple: One must have a specific emotion in mind to evoke it.

In this episode, we dive deeper into the step-by-step process of evoking specific customer emotions. We also discuss how training, AI technology, and tried and true low-tech mystery shopping can help, too.

Here are some other key moments in the discussion:

04:24 We hear about Bob Black’s pickle regarding the practicalities of applying the concept of evoking specific emotions, which many organizations share.
08:28 Colin discusses his work in emotions at the beginning of his adventures into Customer Experience, including identifying the 20 emotions that drive and destroy value.
13:23 We share one of the biggest obstacles to success in evoking customer emotions—and it probably isn’t what you think.
19:37 The discussion turns to context and why it is essential when looking for clues into customer behavior.
25:15 Colin shares his biggest sales tool, which is low tech and accessible to any organization: having the experience as if you were a customer.
29:42 We point out the more advanced practical steps of evoking emotions, starting with an assessment of processes.

About Colin Shaw

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has over 294,000 followers and 78,000 subscribers to his LinkedIn newsletter ‘Why Customers Buy’. The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for four years.

Colin is a renown keynote speaker and undertakes consultancy work and educational workshops to help organizations improve their Customer Experience.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

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Have you ever heard the following?

Then, Bob’s your uncle.

It’s the difference between chalk and cheese.

On your bike, then.

If you haven’t and you don’t live in the UK, Colin wouldn’t be surprised. They are British idioms and when he employ these expressions with his American pals, they usually don’t know he is talking about. However, his friends and family on the other side of the pond do.

It demonstrates the importance of the words you use to communicate and how easy it is to miscommunicate or not communicate at all. Language holds a pivotal role in shaping your customer experience.

Our interest in the significance of language ignited recently when we received a None of Us Are as Clever as All of Us video from Shane Smith (ssmith@everetics.com) at Everetics, a consultancy specializing in customer support and service. Smith emphasized the crucial role of language, highlighting how words carry weight beyond what our conscious mind perceives. Being mindful of employing positive language instead of negative words can remarkably enhance the customer experience without any cost.

In my tenure as a global Customer Experience Consultant, we've trained many employees on the impact of language choices. Raising awareness about how we convey messages significantly influences customers' perspectives.

Smith pinpointed innocuous phrases used in interactions, such as "No problem" or "I don't disagree." While the phrases convey positivity—indicating there's no issue or that there is agreement with the other person—the inclusion of words like "problem" and "disagree" introduces negativity subconsciously, perhaps making the listener feel defensive. Defensiveness is not a positive interaction with a brand, even at a subconscious level.

It's akin to framing; how you package information alters its perception. Similarly, how you phrase prices or present choices can influence customers' decisions. So, why be casual about the language employed in customer communication?

In this episode, we explore the topic of language choices and how you can employ them in your experience also.

Here are some other key moments in the discussion:

03:21 Colin quizzes Ryan on a few British idioms, and Ryan does okay considering he’s from Ohio.
07:07 We lead into the video submitted by Shane Smith regarding the importance of choosing your words carefully in customer interactions.
11:46 We give our first thoughts about Smith’s ideas, and agree that neither of us thinks scripts are a great idea for customer interactions.
16:17 Colin shares a story about how Apple uses language brilliantly with their training on “Feel, Felt, Found” when talking to customers.
22:20 Ryan gets philosophical, summarizing an argument about the effects of language that has been going on for a long, long time.
25:19 We share how you can also submit a video to the podcast with our None of Us Are as Clever as All of Us feature.

About Colin Shaw

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has over 294,000 followers and 78,000 subscribers to his LinkedIn newsletter ‘Why Customers Buy’. The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for four years.

Colin is a renown keynote speaker and undertakes consultancy work and educational workshops to help organizations improve their Customer Experience.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

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This has been created in partnership with YouGov.

Our listeners will enjoy $ 500 off their first survey from YouGov. Click here.

Customer research has some big problems. You might think the big problem with customer research is not asking the right questions. But it isn’t.

Then, surely it’s asking the wrong people the wrong way, right? But that’s not it either.

The biggest mistake people make in customer research is not doing it often enough.

Let me explain. Frequently, clients hand me their most recent customer research—and it’s from seven years ago. Seven years constitutes a significant timeframe in the realm of customer markets.

Consider the preceding seven years and the transformative impact they had on the world:

We grappled with a nearly two-year-long pandemic that brought the world to a standstill and dealt a severe blow to businesses.
This global crisis spurred an unprecedented acceleration in the digital transformation of analog experiences, reshaping how people communicate, work, and shop.
Our return to the new normal revealed double-digit inflation across various consumer goods, significantly disrupting spending habits.

When grocery bills rival what individuals used to allocate for car payments, and car payments align with previous spending on mortgages, the available disposable income diminishes. Consequently, people's responses to survey questions may change a bit.

In this episode, we explore the problems of customer research, how to avoid them, and a powerful new tool that can help you unlock customer insights like you have been doing it all your career.

In addition, you will also learn:

Which restaurants survey respondents think Colin and Ryan are more likely to frequent based on their pictures
A must-have three-step system for developing customer surveys and the new platform that makes it accessible for anyone to get started
How many murders it takes to be a mass murderer, and how many chainsaws Ryan has in his garage even though he is not a lumberjack (or a murderer or any sort)
How surveys showed that nearly two-thirds of customers don’t realize the influences that drive their behavior as customers
What you should do to improve the customer insights you ascertain from your customer research efforts

Hosts:

Colin Shaw, Founder & CEO Beyond Philosophy

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as a ‘Top Voice’ and as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has over 283,000 followers and 82,000 subscribers to his LinkedIn newsletter ‘Why Customers Buy’.

Professor Ryan Hamilton, Emory University

Ryan is an award-winning teacher and researcher in the field of consumer psychology.

Guests:

Brian Reitz

Contact: brian.reitz@yougov.com

This has been created in partnership with YouGov.

Resources and Links Mentioned:

Beyond Philosophy Website
YouGov Website

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We want to hear from you. Simply record a video with your thoughts, ideas, reactions, lists, or whatever else you have to offer, and we might discuss it on the podcast. It’s called None of Us Are As Clever As All Of Us. To learn more, click here.

Justin Stafford (justin@customersmarts.co), founder of a Customer Smarts shared how sports can teach us how to improve your Customer Experience.

Justin's metaphor holds true in various scenarios. In sports, not every player on the field has an equal chance of scoring, but for the team to succeed, they must collaborate seamlessly.

Similarly, in many organizations, sales teams often occupy the flashiest roles. They wield significant influence due to their role in closing deals. However, just as in sports, the flashy players, like the quarterback in American Football, rely on their team, especially the offensive line, to execute their tasks effectively. Ignoring their support can hinder their performance—and leave them picking turf the out of their helmets.

Justin's sports analogy remains relevant here. While sales teams may clinch deals, departments such as finance, IT, and operations need to align with the sales strategy. Ultimately, all departments should work together to enhance customer value.

As a devoted season ticket holder at Luton Town Football Club, I'm thrilled to share that they have earned a promotion to the English Premier League, where they compete against well-known teams like Tottenham Hotspur, Arsenal, and Manchester City. I've noticed parallels between the dynamics in football and Justin's insights from AFL.

In football, forwards often command higher salaries compared to other positions, such as the left back. The left back's role mainly involves defensive work and may not be as glamorous. In contrast, center forwards often receive double the pay compared to other players on the team.

In this episode, we explore the concept introduced by Justin. Plus, we share our thoughts on the concept, including whether Colin really knows anything about the AFL.

Here are some other key moments in the discussion:

02:03 We explain our new feature, None of Us is as Clever as All of Us and how you can be a part of it.
04:48 Justin shares his thoughts about how sports teams and their game-winning strategy is a good analogy for an organization that wants to pursue customer centricity in their experiences.
13:28 We refer to a past podcast about how departments like Finance affect the experience, and why it is essential to have everybody working together for a common goal.
21:56 Colin explains some interesting details about Luton Town Football Club’s field, which might surprise you, particularly if you are in the ladies’ room during halftime.
24:17 We both share what we liked best about Justin’s metaphor about the AFL and Customer Experiences.

Did you know we have a YouTube Channel too? Check it out here.

About Colin Shaw

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has over 294,000 followers and 78,000 subscribers to his LinkedIn newsletter ‘Why Customers Buy’. The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for four years.

Colin is a renown keynote speaker and undertakes consultancy work and educational workshops to help organizations improve their Customer Experience.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

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Per Statista, the amount of e-commerce losses to online payment fraud in 2022 since 2020 is $41 billion. If you think that is bad, get this: it’s supposed to rise to $48 billion by the end of this year.

But wait, there’s more. Messente, a dedicated business messaging platform, notes the surge in package delivery scams. TransUnion's published a study that unveiled a staggering 1500% spike in shipping fraud between 2019 and 2021, likely spurred by the flourishing ecommerce landscape and the surge in digital solutions post-pandemic. What’s more, a 2023 study highlighted that nearly half of all fraudulent emails and texts revolved around package delivery.

Clearly, fraud is on the rise and that means organizations have to protect themselves. So, two-factor authentication, text confirmations, codes, and retinal scans (not really) should be part of every transaction then, right?

Not so fast. Customers don’t like getting hassled during their purchases with extra steps or queries that question whether they are who they say they are. Some might get annoyed enough to create some significant abandonment issues in your e-commerce channel.

So, how do you balance the need to prevent fraudulent activity in your interactions with customers and the need to provide and easy and excellent customer experience? In this episode, managing partner and CEO of Messente Uku Tomikas joins us to explain.

Here are some other key moments in the discussion:

05:07 Tomikas explains that the next big thing in fraud is using AI for it; marking perhaps the first use of AI in customer experiences that Colin isn’t enthusiastic about.
07:07 We begin our discussion about how to be diligent about fraud and security while still providing an easy and excellent customer experience.
13:00 Tomikas explains how organizations are handling this balancing act currently and how their efforts can unwittingly make it easier for fraud to occur.
21:03 We talk about the particulars of how AI can get into the mix with these tricks and personalize the fraud attempts.
27:17 We share the practical advice we have for organizations to deal with this threat without driving customers around the bend with security hurdles.

This has been created in partnership with Messente.

About Colin Shaw

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has over 294,000 followers and 78,000 subscribers to his LinkedIn newsletter ‘Why Customers Buy’. The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for four years.

Colin is a renown keynote speaker and undertakes consultancy work and educational workshops to help organizations improve their Customer Experience.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

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Picture this: Your customers, like individuals, operate on habitual inclinations. So, if they habitually favor a competitor’s product or service, how does one instigate change? Here, we present seven potent ways to turn the tide.

But before diving into these transformative strategies, let's peer into the psychological underpinnings of habits. They possess distinct characteristics:

A cue within our environment kickstarts the habitual response.
This cue triggers an automatic reaction stemming from ingrained memories.
The reward at the end reinforces the habit loop, solidifying its existence.

The crux lies in our Intuitive System. This part of our brain swiftly recognizes this cycle and transforms it into an automatic routine.

Colin’s Intuitive System has influenced his habits enormously as a customer. In the realm of modern convenience, Colin’s shopping mantra revolves around a singular hub: Amazon. Be it the fleeting wish for something or a dire need, Amazon stands as his go-to, an ingrained habit so sturdy that breaking it seems an arduous feat for anyone.

However, daunting doesn't equate to impossible. In today's episode, we delve into the art of habit transformation, uncovering seven strategic pathways to overhaul routines and maximize returns on investments.

Here are some other key moments in the discussion:

04:10 Ryan explains the habit cycle, and what each point of it has to do with our brain’s way of processing information.
09:24 We discuss the importance of recognizing these cycles in customers behavior and how that translates into your strategy for changing it with our first two rules.
18:31 We explain how to craft a winning strategy for changing customer behavior (spoiler alert: it involves making it easy and rewarding for the customer).
24:17 The discussion turns to how you can help things get easier and feel more rewarding by educating and reinforcing your desired customer behavior with rules 5 and 6.
31:49 Colin reviews and summarizes the seven rules and how they can help.

Did you know we have a YouTube Channel too? Check it out here.

About Colin Shaw

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has over 294,000 followers and 78,000 subscribers to his LinkedIn newsletter ‘Why Customers Buy’. The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for four years.

Colin is a renown keynote speaker and undertakes consultancy work and educational workshops to help organizations improve their Customer Experience.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

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It’s the most wonderful time of the year, and time for one of our favorite traditions: looking back on what we learned. Each of us has three things we learned in the past year that we think can help all of us moving forward into 2024.

Reflection is a key part of the growth process. That’s why we are excited to continue our tradition of reflecting on the past year and what we learned during it.

Moreover, it's essential to take note if no changes have occurred. A lack of progress signals a need for reassessment.

Sometimes what we learned was personal, but it has implications for the business world. For example, you may have heard Colin share about his wife, Lorraine, and her back surgery this year—a major undertaking that necessitated extensive physical therapy during recovery.

Lorraine has diligently worked through it, making gradual changes that have cumulatively resulted in significant progress. Pre-surgery, everyday activities like walking or solo grocery shopping were challenging for her. Now, she can accomplish these tasks without enduring constant pain.

The transformation wasn't immediate. Initially, Lorraine relearned walking using two sticks, then transitioned to just one stick, and now, she confidently walks without any sticks at all.

The same principle of gradual improvement through diligent effort holds true for Customer Experiences. Achieving a customer-centric organization isn't an overnight switch. It evolves over time, with incremental enhancements fostering a culture and experience centered around customers.

In this episode, we look back at what we learned in 2023 and how it can help us in 2024. As it turns out, we are smarter than we were last year, and we hope after this episode you will be, too.

Here are some other key moments in the discussion:

03:36 Ryan kicks off the lessons learned by explaining how hard work and luck led to his new book deal—for the second book he pitched this year.
06:14 Colin shares his first lesson about how he sees organizations about to make the same mistakes they did 25 years ago with the Web, but this time with AI.
09:20 Ryan talks about how even he, an introvert that doesn’t like people, needs other people in his community to have his back.
12:47 Colin tells the story about how he remembered that most people are trying to do the right thing, even if sometimes it feels like the opposite is true.
14:57 Ryan shares that by stepping up and taking on a new challenge he took a step back to realize how much he enjoys this part of his job.
17:20 Colin talks about how his wife’s recovery from surgery taught him that small changes can make big change happen, if you are patient and keep doing the work.

Did you know we have a YouTube Channel too? Check it out here.

About Colin Shaw

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has over 294,000 followers and 78,000 subscribers to his LinkedIn newsletter ‘Why Customers Buy’. The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for four years.

Colin is a renown keynote speaker and undertakes consultancy work and educational workshops to help organizations improve their Customer Experience.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

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This year has undeniably been dominated by the rise of AI, bringing both positive and negative outcomes. We host Alex Mead, Global Customer Service Experience Director of Alvarez & Marsal (alexmead@sky.com), to discuss this crucial topic and its implications for experiences.

Mead envisions that AI will significantly reduce customer effort in their experiences. He anticipates a future where customers can simply ask, "Where's my order from two days ago?" and that's all it takes for AI to swiftly provide the desired information.

In this scenario, Mead highlights two crucial aspects. First, AI will grasp natural language interfaces, a concept that has been evolving for at least the past three years. This means we can communicate with AI as if we're conversing with a human, whether through speech or text. Second, AI will promptly authenticate the speaker and retrieve the requested information, cross-referencing it against various data points and platforms in under a second.

Some of you might be thinking, "Don't we already do this with devices like Alexa?" You certainly do, and it works seamlessly.

However, Mead emphasizes that the significance lies in the widespread adoption of this capability. While organizations like Amazon have already implemented it, the prediction is that many more organizations will follow suit in the coming years.

Furthermore, Mead envisions AI going beyond information retrieval. AI will also discern or intuit whether the provided information places the customer on a path of contentment or dissatisfaction.

In this episode, we hear what Mead thinks about AI and the pathways for its utility in experiences in the short and long term. We also talk about what all this functionality of the AI of tomorrow means to you in managing your experiences today.

Here are some other key moments in the discussion:

04:11 Mead kicks off the discussion about AI with his predictions for the short term, meaning the next one to five years, and it might surprise you to hear how easy it will be for customers.
11:51 We discuss examples of how future AI-enabled CXs will have more proactivity than they do today.
16:38 We learn about the Customer Service Experience and why it is essential to understand what it is and when it occurs for today’s organizations.
21:44 Mead explains how to implement an AI strategy for the organization that is cohesive and drives the goals of your entire company rather than one siloed department.
31:57 We all share the key takeaways we have from the discussion and how organizations should use this information today.

Did you know we have a YouTube Channel too? Check it out here.

About Colin Shaw

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has over 294,000 followers and 78,000 subscribers to his LinkedIn newsletter ‘Why Customers Buy’. The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for four years.

Colin is a renown keynote speaker and undertakes consultancy work and educational workshops to help organizations improve their Customer Experience.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

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The Future of Customer Research Teams: Innovating for Success in 2024 and Beyond

AI's enthralling me these days, and it seems the world's caught in the same spell. One realm set for a profound AI makeover is customer market research—a topic worth diving into since it's likely on many of your radars too. Exciting or nerve-wracking—depends on which way you look at it.

Qualtrics recent article, "AI Will Revolutionize the Market Research Industry" suggested a couple of thought-provoking stats I thought I would share:

Threat or Boon? 83% of researchers view AI as an opportunity, with only 7% seeing it as a threat.
Job impacts? 26% believe AI will birth more market research roles, 35% anticipate a reduction, while 39% reckon it won't budge the job landscape.

Clearly, the consensus leans toward AI significantly boosting the market research scene, yet there's no majority stance on its implications for customer insight or market research job stability.

Historically, technologies swept through industries like a forceful wave, sometimes obliterating old norms while birthing new frontiers. Should the AI tide wash over market research, it might erode traditional roles while seeding a fresh bloom in the industry. The upshot? Jobs will morph—both in nature and in the entities they serve.

So, where's the compass pointing for customer insights? Alyona Medelyan, CEO of Thematic (alyona@getthematic.com) in Auckland, New Zealand submitted a video for our None of Us Are as Clever as All of Us program, shares her thoughts.

In this episode, we discuss Medelyan’s video and how the AI winds are steering us into uncharted waters, with the market research ship set for a profound voyage.

Here are some other key moments in the discussion:

02:50 Colin shares the stats from Qualtrics regarding the future of AI and customer insights and market research.
07:53 We roll the video from Medelyan, and talk about our first reactions.
13:37 Colin gets into one of the problems he sees with customer insight teams in the larger organization and what that does to the information shared.
16:57 Ryan explains the how AI is excellent in creating categories, and demonstrates his SAT-level mastery of fancy-sounding academic words.
19:24 We get into the opportunities this affords us regarding preparing for the transformation AI promises to the area and making the most of it for your organization.

Did you know we have a YouTube Channel too? Check it out here.

About Colin Shaw

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has over 294,000 followers and 78,000 subscribers to his LinkedIn newsletter ‘Why Customers Buy’. The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for four years.

Colin is a renown keynote speaker and undertakes consultancy work and educational workshops to help organizations improve their Customer Experience.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

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During a recent discussion with a valued client, I uncovered an interesting revelation. While they were delighted with their repeat business, which they attributed to customer loyalty, a closer look at the repeat business statistics painted a different picture. What I observed wasn't a steadfast commitment from their customers; rather, it appeared to be inertia.

This prompted my realization that these customers might easily switch to a competitor if a tempting offer came along.

Now, you might be wondering, aren't loyal customers the ones who keep coming back for more? They certainly are, but not all repeat business is a result of loyalty. In some cases, it's due to inertia, and distinguishing between the two is what we'll delve into today.

First, let's establish clear definitions for customer loyalty and inertia. Loyal customers intentionally choose your product or service because they have a genuine emotional connection with your brand. They can articulate why they prefer your offering. In contrast, inertia is about automatic and habitual purchasing. It's a decision made almost unconsciously, and individuals might struggle to explain why they chose your product.

Reflect for a moment on the people in your life to whom you feel truly loyal. Typically, you'd think of family and close friends. These are relationships rooted in deep emotional connections. Surprisingly, it's these very emotions that underlie brand loyalty.

For many organizations, measuring loyalty can be challenging, but they often track repeat business. The issue arises when they treat other types of repeat buying – the inertial and the habitual – the same way they view loyalty, failing to distinguish between them.

In this episode, we talk about how to make this distinction. This approach separates loyal customers from those who buy out of habit or inertia. We also talk about how to develop strategies that nurture genuine customer loyalty.

Here are some other key moments in the discussion:

02:03 We discover how Colin decided to cover this topic from his recent client meeting.
05:29 Ryan shares his mini framework that he teaches his grad students, the three groups of repeat business motivations.
10:19 Colin shares how he discovered that he wasn’t really as loyal to Delta Airlines as he thought he was.
18:28 We share our list of telltale signs that you have customer loyalty.
23:24 We discuss how extrinsic and intrinsic motivation is different and it affects customer behavior.
26:51 We share our final thoughts about this topic and what you should take away from the conversation.

Did you know we have a YouTube Channel too? Check it out here.

About Colin Shaw

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has over 294,000 followers and 78,000 subscribers to his LinkedIn newsletter ‘Why Customers Buy’. The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for four years.

Colin is a renown keynote speaker and undertakes consultancy work and educational workshops to help organizations improve their Customer Experience.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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Unleashing the Power of AI vs. Human Touch: Which Delivers a Superior Customer Experience?

I often say, "None of us are as clever as all of us." However, sayings are more useful when they can spur action. So, we have a proposition for you:

If you have something you want to say about experiences or technology, statistics, or reports, feel free to share them via video. To learn more, click here.

To that end, Tom Martin, CEO at Glance, has submitted one about AI.

Tom makes an excellent point. As we develop AI into our systems, we will need to determine what AI will replace, what it will augment, and what it will add.

AI presents opportunities to shift some routine tasks from human employees to virtual ones. However, shifting of tasks should mean reducing head count. Instead, AI should be a way to help employees pay more attention to the needs of customers.

Moreover, we should be realistic about the power of AI. It isn’t magic; it can’t solve all our problems. What it can do is be a powerful tool that we can leverage and develop over time.

We have been here before, too. I had a system that was going to be the best thing that ever happened to my organization 20 years ago. That was the fantasy. The reality was quite different.

And let’s not forget the internet. It took years for it to be what it is today. AI will likely follow a similar path.

In this episode we explore the points made by Tom in his video along with our take on AI and Customer Experiences. Perhaps most importantly, we implore organizations to remember that AI doesn’t replace your employees; it enhances what they can do for customers.

Here are some other key moments in the discussion:

04:28 We listen to Tom’s video and why he thinks leading with humans creates a better AI strategy.
09:48 Both Ryan and Colin share their thoughts about AI and the next frontier of business, including Colin’s frustrations with the phrase, “high call volumes at the moment.”
18:10 Colin shares a story about a new system implementation program that didn’t live up to his hopes and dreams for it 20 years ago, and how that applies to organization implementation with AI.
20:23 Ryan explains the Hype Cycle and how it applies to the implementation and adoption of AI.
26:50 We both share out thoughts about the future of AI in organization and what you should take away from the discussion.

Did you know we have a YouTube Channel too? Check it out here.

About Colin Shaw

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has over 294,000 followers and 78,000 subscribers to his LinkedIn newsletter ‘Why Customers Buy’. The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for four years.

Colin is a renown keynote speaker and undertakes consultancy work and educational workshops to help organizations improve their Customer Experience.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

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My client is disappointed with their results. Their experience improvement efforts have been successful, but not as wildly successful as they had hoped.

When my client shared this with me on a recent call, I was neither surprised nor perplexed about what was going on with them. Getting the whole organization to embrace the customer requires more than most organizations think.

You see, when you start an improvement program, you want some quick wins. So, you address the most obvious areas first, fixing problems and enhancing interactions by defining how you want customers to feel about you when it’s over. These elementary steps are necessary, important to prioritize, and, to many companies’ chagrins, just the beginning of the process.

Every department in the organization plays a role in the Customer Experience. However, not every department realizes it. Some of them think their insular role inside operations puts a big barrier between them and how the customer feels about the organizations. But it doesn’t; in fact, that barrier doesn’t exist.

In this episode we explore the steps you take to get these internal departments to look past the non-existent barrier they think is there and understand how what they do affects the experience. We explain how you can then leverage their buy in to get to the outstanding results that you expected but are still waiting to realize.

Here are some other key moments in the discussion:

06:33 Colin explains what he plans to do to address this problem, starting with first step, which might surprise you in its simplicity.
09:07 We explain the many ways that Human Resources plays a significant role in the Customer Experience and embracing customer-centricity.
13:21 Ryan explains that first-ordered thinking might be getting in the way of your efforts to help other departments see the effects of their actions on the experience and what you can do about it.
18:40 We discuss the ways that finance is essential to the experience, and, spoiler alert, it has to do with $$$$.
23:33 Colin makes a point that Legal, which definitively needs to protect the company, also needs to be customer centric and how they can be without getting disbarred.
26:31 We share the last example of how IT has become one of the most essential parts of the experience, especially when you consider the importance of managing the organization’s online presence and technology integrations.

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Did you know we have a YouTube Channel too? Check it out here.

Follow Colin on LinkedIn HERE.

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Regret is a powerful emotion. One might not think it has a place in a marketer’s messaging toolbox. However, you might be surprised to learn that in addition to being a powerful emotion, it can also be a powerful tool.

The reason we regret things depends on the situation. We can regret a purchase we made. We can regret a purchase we didn’t, too. What we regret and how we respond to it requires understanding how regret happens.

Inside each of our minds, we have three selves. There is the Actual Self, the one we are despite any notions we might have. There is also the Ought Self. This self is the one with obligations and responsibilities. Then, there is the Ideal Self, which is who we want to be. Regret is often a conflict between the Actual Self and one of the other two.

What we regret and who we blame has a lot to do with comparisons between these selves internally. Also, these comparisons might differ depending upon the customer segment to which the individual belongs. Therefore, to use regret as a marketing tool, it is essential to understand what comparison your customers are making and to what standard or value they hold.

In this episode, we explain the psychology of regret, how it drives our future behavior, and what to do about it if it happens to your customers after buying your product or service. We also discuss how you can use it to create improved experiences with no regrets for your customers.

Here are some other key moments in the discussion:

01:49 Colin explains how he was once a Sony Superfan and how it led to one of the purchases he regrets nearly every day.
03:49 Ryan explains how Colin’s perception of self plays a role in his purchase regret regarding the television by explaining the different selves we each have.
10:23 We get into the idea that how much regret we feel has a lot to do with how much control we think we had regarding the decisions made.
14:53 We discuss the impact of regret in customer experience settings and start a discussion about how an organization could respond.
19:04 Ryan explains that people regret different things in the short term vs. the long term.
25:46 We both share our final thoughts on the key takeaways a marketer should have about how to leverage regret in their messaging.

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Did you know we have a YouTube Channel too? Check it out here.

Follow Colin on LinkedIn HERE.

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It’s pickle time again here on the podcast. This time John has a pickle with his new business. He wants to know some ways that he can get other people to help him sell his products and services. We knew several ways, eight in fact, and they might help you, too.

One thing to consider when you listen to this list is how each of the tactics gets you what you want. In some cases, you might discover that our suggestion doesn’t. Or at least it doesn’t get you what you want right now. Later, once you have worked your way down the “to-dos” with your marketing and sales, one of the ones that didn’t work then would now.

For example, with Beyond Philosophy, Colin didn’t like the first tactic, Affiliated Marketing. He felt that by getting into a relationship where he was contractually bound to suggest a specific company might compromise his integrity to his clients. So, Colin has carefully avoided that one.

However, that might not be the same for your business vertical or philosophy. It’s these goals for the communication or tactic that should drive these decisions for which ways work best for your business.

In this episode, we help John with his business pickle—and some of you, too—with our eight suggestions for what you can do to get other people to sell for you.

Are you “in a pickle” at your firm, too? Tells us about here and we might feature your pickle on an episode of the podcast.

Here are some other key moments in the discussion:

06:09 We share the first tactic, Affiliated Marketing, which allows you to recruit others to present and close your product on your behalf.
10:03 The second tactic, Referral Programs, is another way you can leverage the relationships you have to make new ones.
17:48 We discuss Joint Ventures, including some that worked well and some that didn’t.
21:07 We encourage John to sponsor a sports stadium, or at least a local soccer team, because sponsorships are a great way to build awareness.
26:09 Ryan and Colin share final thoughts about how John’s new business can use these tactics to get other entities selling for him.

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Did you know we have a YouTube Channel too? Check it out here.

Follow Colin on LinkedIn HERE.

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Colin sometimes struggles with a glass-half-empty disposition. He blames it on being born British. He felt it keenly when gathering the following 14 statistics for this episode. There are a mix of game-changing opportunities, including missed ones, and some acute risks facing organizations next year.

Ryan is American, a population Colin characterizes with as a glass-half-full disposition. He hopes by sharing these numbers gathered from reputable sources, that his American cohost might view these numbers with a bit more positivity.

Will Colin be disappointed? Maybe, maybe not.

For example, one statistic says by applying certain principles, organizations can expect 85 percent increase in sales growth and more than 25 percent in gross margins. It sounds great because it is.

However, another statistic shows that only 30 percent of organizations have improved their experiences enough to satisfy customers over the last ten-plus years, and it’s getting worse not better. It does not sound great because it isn’t.

This episode explores 14 statistics from reputable sources that present some compelling numbers regarding the whole Customer Experience movement—and what can happen if you ignore it or focus your efforts on less impactful components. From opportunities to risk, don’t miss out on this episode before you start planning your next year.

Here are some other key moments in the discussion:

05:31 We get into the first statistic from Gallup and how it can really sell the experience program to the revenue-oriented and a second from them about the emotional nature of deciding.
11:53 Colin shares his statistic from the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) regarding how 70 percent of organizations remained flat or decreased customer satisfaction and that the index is at its lowest point since 2006.
19:14 We discuss the merits of growing existing customers versus recruiting new ones, but that 44% percent of companies still focus on customer acquisition, even though the probability of selling to an existing is 60 percent.
23:06 Colin shares a statistic from Emplify that explains why customers will pay a higher price to buy from you.
27:52 We discuss the last stat from Zendesk which explains how quickly you can lose a customer and what these stats revealed about Customer Experiences.

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Did you know we have a YouTube Channel too? Check it out here.

Follow Colin on LinkedIn HERE.

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When a Stanford professor brings snacks to class, it’s fun. But you can bet it’s also an experiment, and he’s probably testing how people make choices for today and for todays that will come in the future. It turns out, that timing matters a lot when it comes to the decisions we make.

The professor we are referring to is Professor Itamar Simonson, marketing professor at Stanford University and his research surrounding customer decision-making. He learned that students who chose their snack at each class tended to choose the same one. However, students that chose a snack on one day for three future classes tended to have more variety.

Why the difference? It turns out that people like to make the same decisions over and over, especially about things like what to eat for a snack or dinner. But we are much more optimistic about how much our future selves will want something different.

What about new choices? People do make them, particularly when they are for the future, but most times we are content to make the same choice over and over again.

In this episode, we discuss why we are like this, why we sometimes think we won’t be like this someday, when we are better person, and why you should understand how to accommodate this customer behavior in your experience.

Here are some other key moments in the discussion:

02:22 Ryan shares the example from Professor Simonson and how people chose differently when it is for that day of class or for future classes.
08:12 Colin brings up the famous marshmallow test that researchers did by convincing children not to eat a marshmallow right away so they could get two; few kids made it, though.
14:42 We discuss how when it comes to things like breakfast or food in general, we tend to make the same choices, but other times we don’t, but usually for the future, when a better version of ourselves exists.
22:08 Ryan shares what can happen if people continue to make choices to buy things they don’t use and how it can backfire on your experience.
25:40 We share practical advice about what you can do with this information to provide the proper experience for the future selves your customers want to be and the actual selves they are today.

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Did you know we have a YouTube Channel too? Check it out here.

Follow Colin on LinkedIn HERE.

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Poor Irene Beard. She is in a pickle, and she needs our help. A strong believer in brand, Beard is starting a new company and asked us for help getting people to take away what she wants them to about her company’s brand. Beard’s question brings up some interesting concepts regarding brands, their origins, their evolution, and their existence for organizations today.

Before we get into any of that, it is essential to remember that your brand is a tactic. It communicates the value you provide customers. Brand is a tool in your toolkit that can adjust your strategy and deliver the experience that wins over the hearts and minds of customers and keeps them coming back for more.

Today, branding is all about the value you provide customers. What that value is varies by organization. Some brands offer value by doing one thing really well. Others deliver value in several areas. The success of your brand isn’t whether it provides one value or many; success depends on understanding what your customers value and delivering that.

In this episode, we explore the areas of value a brand usually provides and what an organization can do to ensure that their brand delivers the right ones to customers.

Are you “in a pickle” at your company, too? Tells us about here and we might feature your pickle on an episode of the podcast.

Here are some other key moments in the discussion:

01:34 We discuss Beard’s business pickle and why branding is an excellent focus for anyone in business today.
03:23 Ryan explains how he appreciates that Beard is already on the right path by concerning herself what customer think, because that is key for branding.
08:00 We believe in frameworks to organize thinking, and begin the discussion about ours, which has four parts.
15:42 Colin shares a story about spending way too much on athletic shoes given the level of play of his ten-year-old on the pitch, and how branding made it happen.
19:55 We explore brands that have done a good job with branding and why, as well as the differences one should expect in brand strategy depending upon the type of brand it is.
27:33 We get into the practical takeaways for Beard, and anyone else struggling in this area, to get the right branding for her new company.

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Did you know we have a YouTube Channel too? Check it out here.

Follow Colin on LinkedIn HERE.

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So, you think the sale is in the bag. The customer signed the paperwork and everything. However, when you log in the next day to email, there is a cancellation. You think, what happened?

People change their minds all the time for a lot of different reasons. Sometimes, it is about something they ordered or bought; sometimes, it is about paint color or springing for the upgrades. Why they change their mind has a lot of influences, and understanding how a customer’s mind works can help you manage these situations to the best possible outcome.

The customer’s mind is a complicated thing. We think of ourselves as unitary, meaning the only version of ourselves. However, psychology shows we have multiple versions of ourselves that activate under different circumstances. These versions might not always agree on the decisions made, so once a new version gets control, it might reverse a previous version’s decision.

Plus, these versions of us also have two ways of thinking. There is the fast and automatic thinking provided by our Intuitive System and the slow and deliberate thinking employed by the Rational System. The outcome could be quite different depending on which system controls the decision. Moreover, sometimes the Rational System will come in and overrule the Intuitive System later, which can be the impetus behind that cancellation you just saw.

In this episode, we explore why customers change their minds and how you can build into your experience ways to manage this. So, go ahead and listen; the future version of yourself will thank you for it.

Here are some other critical moments in the discussion:

03:50 We introduce the concept that we have multiple versions of ourselves and multiple thinking systems that influence decision-making and mind-changing.
07:50 Ryan shares a story about research showing how one can reach different decisions and sometimes less-than-optimal results.
11:05 Colin explains how the two systems of thinking work off each other about decisions, and Ryan explains how wish lists on purchases rarely come to fruition.
16:55 We share a practical example of customers changing their minds in the real world on a buying decision and how the company responded to manage this change.
20:40 We talk about Cognitive Depletion and how it affects customer behavior.
26:35 We share practical tips and suggestions that can help you manage customers’ changing minds in the future.

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Did you know we have a YouTube Channel too? Check it out here.

Follow Colin on LinkedIn HERE.

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For many of us, planning can be an area of opportunity. We underestimate how much time something will take and how much time we will have available for something, particularly regarding project completion. However, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky explained why we do this, and we will tell you what we can do about it.

Kahneman and Tversky call this phenomenon the Planning Fallacy. Our optimism about our future selves and the abilities and resources available causes it. For this reason, it rarely occurs on a tight timeline; we are far less optimistic about our right-now selves. We know we can’t do it right now.

There are a few reasons besides optimism that cause this problem, too. For example, we tend to focus on certain details and ignore others (Focalism). Or we might be wishful thinking. We want to finish the project by then, so why not pick that date?

In this episode, we explore why so many of us are victims of the Planning Fallacy and what we can do about it in our own work and the work of our organizations. If you listen to this podcast, your future self will thank you.

Here are some other key moments in the discussion:

04:02 We introduce the idea of the Planning Fallacy and explain what it is and how it affects us.
08:15 We discuss why it’s different when considering something with a short timeline, meaning an imminent due date.
11:10 Colin shares an example he frequently encounters on Emotional Signature projects, and why it isn’t his fault they miss their optimistic deadlines.
19:36 Colin points out that different departments organizationally can contribute to the problem and that these departments should learn The Power of Saying NO.
21:29 Ryan shares more contributing factors to why we victimize our future selves with the Planning Fallacy.
29:42 We share practical advice about what you can do to ensure that your past self doesn’t get your future self in a bind.

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Did you know we have a YouTube Channel too? Check it out here.

Follow Colin on LinkedIn HERE.

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Sometimes it’s a “processing” fee. Sometimes it’s called an “admin” fee. We have even seen it labeled “convenience fee,” a refreshingly candid explanation for it. However, they are always additional fees, and if you have them in your pricing, they might have terrible implications for your customer experience.

However, they might not. Unfortunately, there isn’t a lot of scientific evidence that points to a definite negative effect on additional fees for a customer experience. For my part, it leaves a sour taste in my mouth when I get hit with one, so, my presumption is that I am not alone.

However, our listener Brian Williams wrote into us with a pickle. His company is facing rising costs and are debating the merit of raising prices over additional fees and vice versa. Unable to decide—or just wanting an outside perspective—they wrote to us to find out what we think.

It is a quite a pickle. Probably one that some of you are facing, too. There isn’t a clear-cut answer either. However, there are some important considerations that can guide a decision to go one way or the other.

In this episode, we explore these considerations, the possible fall out from them, and give our opinion on what Williams and his company should do.

Are you “in a pickle” at your firm, too? Tells us about here and we might feature your pickle on an episode of the podcast.

Here are some other key moments in the discussion:

01:48 We present Williams’ business pickle and why this is such an area of interest today, and for more than Ryan and his academic friends.
04:21 Colin shares a couple of instances where additional fees soured his experience.
07:57 Ryan gets into the theory behind what’s going on with additional fees and why they are so common in an era of inflation.
17:32 We introduce the topic of tipping and how it is a form of Two-Part Pricing also, and becoming too steep and too ubiquitous to sustain itself in the U.S.
26:24 We explore whether additional fees are a form of transparency, and what the fall out can be from listing out fees as line items in pricing bids.
29:23 We share our advice for Williams, and anyone else facing this same problem.

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We can be grumpy about the restaurant experience. This self-awareness is key, especially when we realize that our behavior closely resembles the behavior of two grouchy Muppets heckling Kermit and Fozzie from the balcony.

However, it’s easy to see that every business can learn from restaurants that bungle these moments of the experience.

We are aware this episode is a grumpy rant. Moreover, not everyone will agree with the things that we think restaurants do wrong. What drives us mad could be the very thing you love most. However, the fact we differ on these points demonstrates a critical overarching theme of this podcast: segmentation matters, and accommodation is key to deliver an excellent experience.

Restaurants that choose to ignore these criticisms have a right to do so. Moreover, if they prefer to cater to a specific segment of customer that prefers the way they do things, that is their prerogative. Some restaurants have been extremely successful by doing this and we do not fault them for it. We don’t eat there either, but that’s beside the point.

In this episode, what we hope to achieve by airing our grievances is to point out how these moments in the restaurant experience demonstrate moments that every experience design could have. For your business vertical, whatever it may be, we hope that the common experiences of dining out—or ordering to go—help illustrate these concepts and help you improve your experience.

Plus, it sometimes feels good to complain.

Here are some other key moments in the discussion:

03:41 Colin kicks off the complaints by pointing out that some restaurants do not understand the business they are in, and therefore, do not send the right signals with their experience.
06:39 Ryan describes a restaurant experience that could use a little spruce up in the post-pandemic takeout vs. dine in experience.
11:32 We discuss the importance of managing the key interactions in an experience by properly training the team to put customers first so people remember that experiences can be time well-spent.
16:29 We remind our listeners that the little things add up and can burn you in the customer’s evaluation of how you did at the end of the experience.
19:17 Colin refers to an article out of Cornell that explains how what restaurants leave off the menu cause customers to spend more than they would have thought.
24:30 We summarize what we would change about these things that drive us mad at restaurants and that you can apply to your experience, too.

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A podcast listener is in a pickle! Catherine wants to establish that her firm is known for low prices. However, she wants their reputation to avoid seeming cheap or low quality.

Cheap and low quality is brand promise few firms want to make. However, many brands want to have a reputation for low prices and high quality. Unfortunately, this brand promise is challenging to get right. Most customers don’t believe such a thing is possible.

However, it is possible. Amazon got their start with a reputation for low costs for high quality books. Over time, they built a brand known for service, delivery speed, and continuous improvement, which customers view as hallmarks of high quality. These examples are non-price influences that affect the price image.

For example, if you walk into a shop where they are serving complimentary espresso or champagne, you know that the prices are going to be high even before you see a price tag. By contrast, if you walk into a shop where everything is piled on a fold up table and supervised by a single, sullen employee scowling at their phone behind a makeshift counter, you know prices will be low.

In this episode, we explore the ways Catherine can establish her firm’s reputation for low prices without seeming cheap or low quality. We also give you practical advice that will help you make the case to your customers that you are the best deal in town.

Here are some other key moments in the discussion:

03:26 We talk about brands that have done an effective job of establishing themselves as affordable and high-quality.
05:49 Ryan starts off the discussion of how to achieve this tricky feat by explaining all the influences that affect a customers’ perception of a company’s price image.
17:19 We talk about reference points and how they affect price evaluations.
22:22 The discussion turns to how communication of how you are doing this amazing thing of providing high-quality items at low prices so customers can accept it.
27:48 Ryan summarizes his advice in practical ways that Catherine, and you, can apply these strategies to overcome this pricing challenge.

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Did you know we have a YouTube Channel too? Check it out here.

Connect with Colin on LinkedIn HERE.

Follow Colin on Twitter HERE.

Click HERE to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

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Is your data ready? Is your team ready? Are you ready? Being ready is critical to the successful implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) to improve your customer experience.

The next competitive battleground for organizations will be predictive experiences, or experiences that anticipate customers’ needs. The ability to make these predictions is AI-driven. However, to do so accurately requires data, lots of quality data.

Herein lies the rub for many organizations. Their data house is full of siloed data and isn’t ready for AI analysis. So, firms need to be sure that they address this challenge before devoting a ton of time and resources to the implementation.

However, there is another challenge, too. Many organizations might think they want to implement AI, because it’s so cool and people like to have the coolest, newest thing. But, in some cases, AI might not be the best fit. It isn’t magic; it has some things it does well and some that it doesn’t. Knowing what problems your organization has can help you decide whether AI can do the right things for you right now.

There’s a lot to consider before implementing AI in your customer experience. What ready means and how AI can improve customer experience are two areas that are not always well understood by organizations. Moreover, the size of the firm has little to do with the understanding; big companies are struggling the same way little ones are, albeit in different areas.

In this episode, we host The Agile Brand podcast host Greg Kihlstrom, (www.gregkihlstrom.com) Principal Chief Strategies for GK5A, on this week’s episode to explain how organizations can get ready and what AI is positioned to provide organizations.

Here are some other key moments in the discussion:

03:45 We ask Kihlstrom to explain some of the common issues he sees in the introduction of AI and technology.
09:25 Ryan lead Kihlstrom into talking about how organizations are faring with implementation, who is and isn’t having a great go at it, and where it is going in the future.
20:19 Kihlstrom explains how the most innovative companies are using AI to the extent it can provide proactive experiences.
25:49 Colin shares his worries that too many organizations will not use a unified approach in implementation.
35:25 We all share our advice about implementation and what organizations should do to make this work for them.

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Did you know we have a YouTube Channel too? Check it out here.

Connect with Colin on LinkedIn HERE.

Follow Colin on Twitter HERE.

Click HERE to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

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We are very judgmental, particularly when it comes to prices. We can always tell whether something is a good or bad deal. The fact that some of the ways we do this are not as accurate as others doesn’t even occur to us.

Knowing that customers have different ways they evaluate your pricing that are sometimes inaccurate shouldn’t upset you, though. It’s a bonus to realize it. Once you understand how people judge your pricing, you can use strategy to present it better and maximize your pricing to gain profit.

There are three basic ways that customers evaluate your prices. These have varying levels of simplicity and accuracy. The most accurate way is not the easiest, naturally, and vice versa. However, these three ways come together to deliver the good-deal-bad-deal message to your customers’ consciousness.

Some retailers are wise to these judgmental ways. They use customers’ natural propensity to compare pricing when communicating their offer, so it comes out on top against competitors. However, some choose a different tack, which doesn’t always make it easy to compare.

Still others spend their time building a reputation for low pricing while offering a few high-priced things alongside hoping that no one does the math. Since we don’t always do the math, it works.

In this episode, we explore the three ways that customers evaluate your pricing and why. We also talk about how you can present your prices in the best possible way to tip the scales away from bad deal to good.

Here are some other key moments in the discussion:

03:17 Ryan kicks off the discussion with a story about shopping for milk at Costco, and why he was wrong (and his wife was right) about the best deal for milk.
05:22 Colin shares one of his favorite YouTubers that covers things like pricing, and reveals some retailer tricks of which every consumer should be aware.
07:13 Ryan shares the three ways that people evaluate pricing, starting with internal reference pricing.
09:37 We discuss how external reference pricing also influences our pricing evaluations, and sometimes even across product categories.
11:53 Ryan explains the third category, which is price image, an evaluation we gravitate toward when we don’t have as much information.
19:32 We share the two dimensions that organizations should consider when they anticipate how customers will evaluate pricing.
22:06 We explain how price images form and how they influence our decision making.
34:19 We wrap up with some practical ways you can leverage this understanding to present your pricing in the best possible way to customers.

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Did you know we have a YouTube Channel too? Check it out here.

Connect with Colin on LinkedIn HERE.

Follow Colin on Twitter HERE.

Click HERE to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

To learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services Click here.

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It stinks to wait around for something as a customer. Whether it’s in a waiting room or a hot sweaty line at a theme park, none of us are usually very excited about waiting around for something. However, it’s a fact of life that customers have accepted over time.

It also stinks to know that your experience makes customers wait sometimes. You probably would rather that your customers didn’t have to wait around and could get down to business spending money with your organization. However, despite your diligent efforts, you still have some time where customers are waiting around.

Instead of throwing your hands up in the air and accepting defeat, we have a few strategies that can help manage this bump in your experience’s road. Eight of them, in fact.

Now, to be fair, our tips come from David Meister’s article, "The Psychology of Waiting Lines." That said, this paper has excellent tips for you.

In this episode, we talk about Meister’s eight areas and how you can emulate other organizations that have made the waiting experience a little less painful for their customers.

Here are some other key moments in the discussion:

02:37 We explain that sometimes customers have to wait, but it doesn’t have to be terrible while they do, thanks to the paper by Meister that defines what makes waiting so terrible.
03:31 Distraction is key and helps with the problem of making your customers feel like their time is occupied with more than just waiting around for you.
07:23 We use the examples of customer behavior on airplanes to explain the Meister’s concept about how people want to get started waiting, even if it is only to wait in a new position afterward.
10:49 We explain how Uber manages the third area, uncertain waits are longer than certain waits, well by letting you know the car is coming and when.
15:17. We talk about a related area of communication about waits pertaining to Meister’s area that unexplained waits feel longer than known waits and why kids don’t get it.
19:18. Unfair plays a big role in how waits feel; just ask anyone in a Disney line watching the fast pass ticket holders blow past them.
27:17 We end on the 8th area, which is that solo waits feel longer than group waits, because misery loves company, doesn’t it?

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Waiting around for a customer experience is rarely a good thing. When customers are waiting for you, that’s usually a sign that not waiting would have been difficult or inconvenient (read: expensive) for your company. However, not valuing customers’ time is probably the most expensive mistake you can make.

Then, of course, there are the times when the waiting is part of the experience. For example, the Peter Pan ride at Disneyland has several rooms you pass through before you get to the ride that set the mood and build anticipation of the adventure to come. When you skip it, you get to the ride faster, but you miss out on the building of the anticipation.

Part of what makes the Peter Pan wait more beneficial than your average waiting around situation for an experience is that it make the waiting more enjoyable. Many would also argue that the ride—and the park itself—provide value to customers who are waiting.

So, waiting isn’t always bad; like many things we discuss on the podcast, it depends. However, it does always reveal how internally focused you are and whether you place importance on the value of customers’ time.

In this episode, we explore what it means about your focus when customers wait and how you can manage or enhance the waiting experience to engage and enhance customers’ time spent with you.

Here are some other key moments in the discussion:

02:59 After sharing some stories about waiting that made him feel cross, Colin explains that you need to value customers’ time in your experience.
10:33 We discuss how Disney manages wait time by offering Fast Track to reduce queue wait times, and signs in line that estimate how much longer you have to wait before the ride.
16:17 We talk about when waits are good for building anticipation; and how sometimes the wait is even better than the experience.
24:21 Ryan explains that his kids are excited about some changes to Minecraft that are coming that they had to wait for; and what they were waiting for might surprise you.
26:59 We suspend the conversation, and explain that listeners will have to wait to hear about the rest of the topic on next week’s episode. (See what we did there?)

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I get mad when people waste my time. It’s probably why I have such a beef with cable companies and organizations’ call centers that have long hold times. Wasting someone’s time is also a waste of an opportunity to deliver an excellent customer experience.

The source of my ire is likely tied to time being our most precious resource by some estimations. Therefore, when you waste it, you are careless with something with a finite supply. Some of us have more than others available—or left as the case may be.

So, when an organization wastes customers’ time, it can be one of the worst things they could do to increase customer loyalty and customer-driven growth. Would you want to be anxious to return to an experience that wasted yours? Not bloody likely, I say.

By contrast, saving time is among the most essential things you could do for a customer. People will pay a premium for it, too.

Regarding time and customers, one of the most essential things you can do is to make it worthwhile. In other words, any time customers give you should return to them as a memory of time well spent.

The ideas expressed thus far here are not ours. Time progression is a critical area that key opinion leaders in the experience economy are exploring these days.

In this episode, we host Strategic Horizons’ Joe Pine, author of The Experience Economy and co-founder of the concept of Time Progression, to discuss what that means and how it can influence how customers respond to your experience.

Here are some other critical moments in the discussion:

03:22 Colin asks Pine to explain the concept of Time Progression to the listeners who have yet to become familiar with it.
09:49 We discuss organizations doing interesting things with time analysis that companies would be wise to emulate and those that have decided to take up more customer time that companies should not.
19:25 Pine explains why healthcare is a transformational experience, so it should do better with patients’ time progression.
26:02 We discuss where we think SMART products should go, as Pine wrote in HBR in his article, "Are Your Digital Platforms Wasting Your Customer's Time?"
28:53 Pine shares his practical tips for how to improve your performance regarding time progression with customers.

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We have all been there. We think we did something great, and we look forward to getting the feedback that tells us so. Unfortunately, when we do get the feedback, we discover that we weren’t quite so great as we thought we were. It’s a matter of perception and understanding this concept can help avoid this mismatch in the future.

One of our listeners, Damien, found himself in this pickle recently. His organization has delivery stats that paint a glorious picture of achievement. However, the customer surveys do not paint delivery with that brush at all. So, Damien asks, why the discrepancy?

The problem could be a challenge with perception. The internal organization has one perception of performance, the customers have another. If perception is reality, which one matters?

(Hint: say the customers. Okay, not a hint so much as a gimme, but we do our best here.)

From a psychological perspective, perception isn’t the correct term. In fact, psychologists would only have perception as one part of what is going on here. To summarize, psychologists would submit that perception applies only to receiving the information through our senses. How we interpret and compare the perceived experiences to our expectations is the reason for the discrepancy.

In this episode, we take a deeper dive on what is happening here to Damien’s organization, and what they—and you— can do about it.

Here are some other key moments in the discussion:

02:05 We hear about Damien’s pickle and why he needed our help. (Do you have a business pickle, too? Tell us about it here.)
05:00 Before we move further into solving Damien’s pickle, we define our terms in the style of psychology.
10:24 Ryan ignores Colin’s request to get practical by exploring a very heady and philosophical example, Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.
17:10 Colin explains how you can learn more about perception, interpretation, and evaluation of an experience and how it relates to memory by shopping for a TV in a showroom.
21:51 Colin shares a story about how he thought the Princess Lunch at Disneyland Paris was expensive; for the record, he didn’t go alone but brought along his grandchildren.
27:20 We share our practical advice for how to understand how there was such a discrepancy in perception between Damien’s organization and customers, and what to do about it.

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18 months. That was the timeline Colin gave himself to move from a sales job to a general manager post. It was a long time ago now, the kind of thing one remembers when they look back over a decades-long career.

However, it also worked. Colin did make that transition, moving throughout departments and learning new skills, and always with the goal of moving to general manager.

Ryan, being from academia, teaches an introductory marketing course to his MBA students. It’s a class they take first semester when their enthusiasm and exuberance are high.

This abundance of energy also drives them to his office during office hours, hoping for some career advice. As an academic, Ryan has some for them, but recognizes that there is always room for more.

In this episode, we explore the key insights we have gained over the spans of our careers and share them with you. From taking advice from Colin’s father to learning how to navigate the political quagmires that many organizations foster, we give you some areas to focus on to get where you want to go.

Here are some other key moments in the discussion:

04:06 We kick it off by explaining that over the years we have seen jobs come and go and job come from out of nowhere that can change the course of a career for good or ill.
08:39 Colin shares some advice he learned from his dad, which on its face seems simple, but in truth is the one thing everybody looks for and appreciates.
12:30 We talk about the importance of looking down the road in a career rather than on the part right in front of you; you don’t want to be 50 or 60 and realize that you were headed the wrong way.
17:19 We share a strategy that seems counterintuitive, that sometimes the way forward is taking a step back or sideways.
20:17 Colin discusses how there is always something to learn, even in a bad job, so don’t forget to notice what you shouldn’t do in your career.
25:00 We talk politics (no, not those politics), and how you can use them to your advantage when you understand them in your organization.

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At first glance, authenticity appears straightforward. To be authentic, one simply needs to be genuine in their thoughts and actions. However, as is often the case with our discussions in the podcast, the subject becomes complex under scrutiny.

Our motivation to discuss authenticity stems from a podcast listener's request. They find themselves grappling with authenticity in their experience and want to know how to improve and leverage it to generate growth with their customers.

Consider the Sherlock Holmes Museum in London. It has meticulously recreated Holmes's apartment. As part of the London School's team, Professor Kent Grayson, MA, PhD, a scholar fascinated by authenticity, would engage museum visitors by posing a seemingly absurd question: Is the apartment portrayed in the museum authentic?

However, it’s a silly question. It cannot be authentic since Sherlock Holmes himself lacks authenticity.

Nevertheless, individuals earnestly responded to Professor Grayson's query. Some offered genuine critiques, pointing out anachronistic furniture pieces and other details. It was ironic that the attendees thought that the fictional place inhabited by an imaginary detective was inauthentic because the end table was from the wrong period…but there it is.

In this podcast, we discuss authenticity and how it matters in Customer Experiences. What we discover is elementary, our dear Watsons.

Here are some other key moments in the discussion:

02:05 Ryan explains about the London Business School Professors research about the authenticity of the Sherlock Holmes Museum.
07:02 We discuss how a thing doesn’t have to be real to be authentic; it just has to feel real.
13:22 Colin explains that every experience is authentic; however, what it reflects about an organization might not be what customer want or value.
20:38 We cover the idea that the customer perception is key, so making customers feel an experience is authentic is essential.
30:03 We discuss the key takeaways that we have from this discussion and how it can help your experience.

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Have you ever noticed how many vitamin options there are at a drug store? If not, you should know there are hundreds. It is bloody overwhelming.

All these vitamins got us thinking about differentiation. If your product isn’t that different from another, like a B-12 vitamin, how do you differentiate yourself from the competition?

Vitamin companies are not alone here. One of our listeners wrote in with a business pickle about differentiation on how to have it in an ever-competitive market. The answer lies in the experience.

But how? What does differentiation even mean? And what does B-12 do for you anyway? (It does lots of stuff, by the way; you should probably take it if you don’t get enough.)

When you are too close to something, you might have a hard time seeing what your differentiation could be. Your usually helpful depth of offering knowledge can be a hinderance. The nuances of competitive improvement might be authentic but too deep in the minutiae to distinguish you.

In other words, your competitive advantage might be real, but really boring to your customers. So, instead of coming up with something that is a competitive differentiator, you come up with this minor detail, emphasizing something the customer doesn’t care about or doesn’t recognize they should.

Therefore, it takes an outside perspective sometimes to see what is possible regarding differentiation. And sometimes, this differentiation from the outside is disruptive and turns everything in your industry on its ear.

In this episode, we explore the ways our listener and you can differentiate yourself from the competition. As a bonus, we package it into five rules that you can use to drive your actions.

Here are some other key moments in the discussion:

06:44 We kick off the discussion with the first rule, which tells us that different means different and not just a little different. (They do get better, we promise.)
10:07 We get into the discussion about how disruption is often the key to differentiation that matters; otherwise, everyone ends up chasing the same goals and having little variance from one another.
17:50 We introduce the third rule, which is define the Who and the How Much, two key areas for besting the competition.
22:49 Rule number four says what are you going to differentiate on, meaning what area of your offering will be your competitive advantage.
25:35 We introduce the last rule, which is shamelessly bias, that experience is the hardest thing for your competitor to copy.

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Many organizations are making a common mistake when it comes to AI. They fail to capitalize on the potential to enhance Customer Experiences through this powerful technology by building it incorrectly. By changing their strategic approach, they could gain a significant competitive advantage.

Take, for instance, a telecom company that developed an AI system to detect customer churn. While it successfully identified customers likely to churn, it fell short in explaining why they were leaving.

Here's the issue: AI models excel at predicting customer behavior but lack the ability to establish meaningful connections and provide context for the data. It's akin to Deep Thought from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy revealing that the answer to life, the universe, and everything is 42. It may be a correct answer, but we're left without understanding the underlying context.

The mistake lies in how organizations set up their AI systems. The outcome resembles the ambiguous answer of 42. What we truly need is the context that explains the reasons behind it.

In this episode, we explore the mistake many organizations are making with AI and what might happen if the Flat Earthers get a hold of it. Chances are their answer will be about as useful as 42.

Here are some other key moments in the discussion:

- 01:42 Colin kicks it off by asking how to link together The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Flat Earthers, and Artificial Intelligence, and how that relates to the opportunity inherent in AI systems.
- 09:11 We describe the difference between machine learning and deep learning under the larger umbrella of AI work, and why machine learning might have biases written into its code.
- 14:44 Colin explains what Flat Earthers have to do with all this, and explains what they believe, suggesting that listeners watch this clip from the ABC News YouTube channel.
- 20:08 Colin share the big danger of all this, particularly when you consider the parts of Customer Science that are coming as a new wave of change.
- 29:16 We share our big takeaways from the discussion and how organizations would be wise to improve their AI strategy.

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Did you know we have a YouTube Channel too? Check it out here.

Connect with Colin on LinkedIn HERE.

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Did you know we have a YouTube Channel too? Check it out here.

Connect with Colin on LinkedIn HERE.

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Click HERE to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

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You wouldn’t think to look at it that The Magic Castle hotel in Los Angeles has been ranked in the top ten hotels on TripAdvisor, but it has. A converted apartment building has turned its unassuming appearance into an excellent experience for its guests, and how they do it isn’t that big of a thing, quite the opposite. It’s the little things make a big difference in their customer satisfaction.

In this case, it’s things like a popsicle hotline that makes this small hotel a surprisingly successful one. People who use the hotline—aka a red phone with a sign over it that reads, “Popsicle Hotline”—poolside receive a popsicle from the staff.

Now, people remember this small thing when they talk about their experience. However, there are countless little things that happen in an experience that they don’t remember. These little things often create value to customers. However, since they don’t always remember them later when asked, they keep them a secret. In other words, they can’t tell you because they didn’t remember that moment specifically.

In this episode, we explore the little things in an experience that create value for customers and what you can do to leverage these types of moments in yours.

Here are some other key moments in the discussion:

04:48 We both share many small things that can occur in an experience and how they create value.
09:34 We get into the idea of nudges and how they can affect our judgment of quality for an experience.
13:51 Colin shares an example of how small things can also change an experience and customer behavior at the same time, which just might save the world.
20:11 We talk about how you can apply this idea of convincing people to change in your experience with a little nudge and how to leverage that for experience improvement.
24:02 Colin explains how the Emotional Signature can help in your efforts to determine what are some of these “secret” things that matter to customers.
28:21 We share our practical advice for applying this concept of improving small things for people in your experience.

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You probably don’t say no to people enough, especially if it’s to your boss. Like most of us, you are conditioned to cooperate with others, which means we usually say yes to most requests to avoid conflict. However, learning to say no in the right way, might also avoid conflict while simultaneously giving you back control over your life.

We host author Vanessa Patrick, Associate Dean for Research, Professor of Marketing, and researcher in the Consumer Behavior Marketing field, to talk about this right way to say no based on her book, "The Power of Saying No: The New Science of How to Say No to take Charge of Your Life." Patrick addresses this critical skill in her book, as well as its relationship to saying no to ourselves through self-regulation or self-control.

Patrick’s past research often depicts self-control as an upbeat version of self-discipline. Self-control serves as a reflection of your values, rather than self-imposed constraints. Patrick believes defining and defending these boundaries to others enables you to make decisions that create more fun and happiness in your life, particularly regarding the things you already said yes to.

In this episode, we explore the idea of personal policies, or the rules we set that should guide our decisions. Calling it compassionate self-control, Patrick says this approach facilitates having your needs driving your decisions. It also means that instead of looking out for cues from other about how to respond to these requests, we look within ourselves.

Here are some other key moments in the discussion:

01:29 Ryan introduces our guest and who then talks about her past research and explains how that led to the premise behind her new book.
06:16 Patrick explains the three competencies she identified that are essential to the “Art of Empowered Refusal.”
16:01. We discuss the significance of personal policies to guide your decisions and the two forms they can take to aid in that effort.
25:06 Patrick explains the importance of using empowering language, especially when talking to ourselves.
32:05 We discuss the practical applications of this concept in your life and how you can leverage Empowered Refusal in your life and work.

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Your customers are having a relationship with your brand right under your nose. Do you know if it’s a strong, healthy one?

Our connection with brands is much like any other relationship in our lives, with some being healthy while others are not. Unfortunately, it's not uncommon for people to form codependent or dysfunctional relationships with brands. Therefore, it's essential to build strong brand relationships with your customers.

Despite being legalistic trademarks, brands have become an entity, almost human-like, with which people form a personal connection. The corporate structure with its trademarks, colors, taglines, and messaging guidelines are irrelevant to customers.

What matters is the brand's presence in customers' minds, memories, thoughts, and emotions. Creating an attachment is crucial.

Stephen Covey, the author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, introduced the concept of the Emotional Bank Account years ago, which can apply to these relationships customers have with your brand. Emotional Bank Accounts have positive and negative deposits in them all the time, only the assets held within are how we feel about the brand.

Just like we have these accounts with people in our lives, brands also make deposits and withdrawals in these accounts.

In this episode, we explore the ideas behind these five rules and how they help you form a strong emotional bond with your customers with a robust deposit history in their emotional bank accounts, ensuring their loyalty to your brand.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

01:29 The podcast begins with the idea of brands and what they are.
08:04 We kick off the five rules, with the first one, “Focus on emotional benefits and value to your customers, not just on product features.”
19:13 We talk about the importance of storytelling and why it matters in branding.
20:25 Ryan explains that trust is foundational to the relationship but not the place to stop and why.
23:48 We share the final rule and explain why people need practical ways to make emotional connections, not wispy, ethereal concepts that don’t mean anything in the real world.

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Getting your new program initiatives accepted requires overcoming a lot. So, to help you get that done—and impress your boss doing it—you need to have a winning strategy.

The corporate budget is a funny thing. Getting approval on a budget in the corporate world doesn’t mean you get to spend it. Quite the contrary. You often have to get the budget approved for what you might spend and then when you want to spend it, you get approval again.

When you read it written out like that, it sounds super inefficient and completely silly. However, my guess is that many of you that are responsible for a budget know exactly what we mean.

Plus, change is hard for people. As a champion of a business program that would result in significant change, you are already going to have a challenging time getting that approved.

This episode helps you get through this inefficient and silly process successfully, and impressing your boss while you do it. We share our tips and tricks for handling this process with clarity, influence, political awareness, realism, credibility, and professionalism.

Here are some other key moments in the discussion:

1:32 Colin shares a personal story about getting permission to spend his corporate budget, what he did to get it, and how it led to this podcast.
05:43 We share the first one about being clear about the goal and how numbers are essential to these discussions.
13:44 Now we explore how the good clear ideas you have that are supported by numbers need this critical spin so people can hear what you mean, followed by a foray into managing company politics.
21:52 We get into credibility, which is essential to convincing people to follow your way of thinking.
26:40 To round out the discussion, we get to the most important one, the one you have the most control over, professionalism.

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Organizations often fail to consider the context in which customers enter the experience, assuming that every customer is the same. However, recognizing the context of a customer's experience is crucial to developing an effective customer strategy.

Context is an omnipresent factor in customer experience. Depending on a customer's context, we must create a customized experience.

For instance, while working on a project for one of the cellular phone companies in the United States, we discovered that they treated customers who had lost their phone or had it stolen in the same manner. This oversight neglected the importance of context.

Consider how you would feel if you had lost your phone in the back of a taxi. Most likely, you would feel foolish, right? Now, consider how you would feel if your phone was stolen. You might feel outraged, or scared, or both, which are different emotional responses than how you might feel after leaving your phone in a cab.

Despite this, the mobile company treated both types of customers in the same way. They immediately requested the account number from both. However, we convinced them to determine what happened first, followed by ensuring the customer's safety if their phone was stolen. This simple change had an enormous impact on their experience design and outcomes.

Thus, segmentation is a vital aspect of anticipating context. People bring unique perspectives and expectations to their experience. While segmentation is only one factor that can determine context, it is an excellent starting point.

In this episode, we explore why context is crucial to customer experience design and how you can improve your understanding of your customer’s context.

Here are some other key moments in the discussion:

- 03:10. We discuss how Kenneth Cukier’s TED talk about “Big Data is Better Data” and how having data isn’t enough to predict how people will interpret it.
- 07:12 Colin tests his theories with Ryan, who has his own context, which is always a fun activity.
- 10:20 Ryan shares an interesting demonstration of different contexts clashing in a researchers work with an isolated tribe in the Pacific.
- 14:20 Colin shares his recent insight about diversity, which he describes as a “blinding flash of the bloody obvious.”
- 18:09 We get into a discussion about changing a person’s context gracefully and the skills needed here.
- 27:48 We share our advice for helping organizations improve their experience understanding and using context in experience design.

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Journey Maps can be useless exercises. That’s right…we said it. However, these often-used tools don’t have to be as useless as they usually are. Journey Maps are only useless if you don’t include the customer’s emotional journey in them.

Emotional journeys are the “squishy stuff” associated with why customers buy from you. Since customer’s feelings are challenging to itemize, many organizations tend to leave them off. However, the result is a customer process, not a journey map.

After all, without this information, how can you expect to predict and anticipate customer behavior? Moreover, how can you design an experience that is so well positioned for customers’ needs that they come back for more (and more)?

In this episode— and at the behest of a very complimentary listener who says we actually taught them something (!!)—we explore how you can integrate customer behavior, and the emotions that drive that behavior, into your journey maps. We show you how all the things we talk about on this podcast apply in a practical way and can produce practical results, like an ROI.

Here are some other key moments in the discussion:

04:10 We explain how we will demonstrate the application of behavioral sciences concepts to a standard Journey Map that we made up about booking a hotel online.
12:15 We go through each of the ten concepts we agreed upon before the show, and then Colin adds a bonus one at the end, catching Ryan off guard.
21:29 Using the checklist of (now) 11 concepts, we begin taking you through the process of applying each one to the booking a hotel online journey map, starting with Customer Segmentation, and so on through the list.
27:05 Ryan points out that many times, changes in how organizations serve customers can have an inadvertent effect on how an experience ends, which is detrimental to the emotional journey.
32:58 Colin shares a personal story of how a rental car company bamboozled him into getting a car he couldn’t afford after a long-haul flight across the pond, and it cost the company money as a result.
37:00 We share our final tips and key takeaways from this exercise and how it should help you have a more complete picture of the customer journey.

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Having a high IQ isn’t the most important thing for leadership. It helps, but intelligence isn’t enough to make a great leader.

It turns out that IQ without EQ, or emotional intelligence, doesn’t inspire teams to meet or exceed their goals. This EQ concept, popularized by Daniel Goleman, has been a crucial component of the leadership conversation for several years.

Similarly, customer service representatives with high EQ are crucial for the emotional management of customers. The ability to understand and manage emotions is a crucial factor in ensuring customer satisfaction.

EQ involves the ability to identify and manage our own emotions and the emotions of others, as well as understanding your reactions to situations and how they may affect others. In other words, leaders and customer service representatives who can remain calm and objective in stressful situations are more effective in their roles.

In this episode, we will delve into the concept of EQ, what it entails, and its impact on leadership and customer service strategies. We will explore the five realms of EQ, starting with knowing your emotions.

Here are some other key moments in the discussion:

03:26 We introduce EQ and Goleman’s concept of the five realms of it, and how the first concept of it helped in Colin’s recent weight loss efforts.
08:50 Colin shares a story about how 30 years ago as a middle manager he went to a 360-degree feedback event that fundamentally changed how he thought about himself.
12:51 Ryan talks about how he likes that unlike intelligence, EQ is something you can work on and improve, no matter what you were given naturally.
17:11 Colin talks about the most silent transaction he ever had at the grocery store, and why that employee might be in the wrong position in the store.
20:30 We explain how well you deal with change is an essential part of EQ, particularly if you have some work to do.
28:55 We summarize what we learned and how developing EQ can help one’s leadership as well as improve the Customer Experience their organization delivers.

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Vijay, one of our listeners, drew my attention to a deficit in my content regarding customer strategy. He asked if we had anything on customer engagement. After a search of both my hard drives (computer and memory), I realized that I didn’t. To remedy this giant hole in our content, we recorded this podcast.

Now, part of not having any content on the subject means I didn’t have a definition ready for the term. However, like anyone would these days, I fixed that with an internet search. I found an excellent one at HubSpot, another great one at Salesforce, and third at Qualtrics. Each of these definitions was unique and oddly familiar. However, together they do a great job of defining the general outline of the concept. To summarize them, let’s say that customer engagement is about interacting with customers in a connected way through a variety of channels to build an emotional connection with them.

In a recent podcast with Customer Experience pioneer Joe Pine, we explored the idea of time well spent. One addition I might make to the combination definition from my previous three sources is to deliver an experience that a customer thinks of as “time well-spent.” Often when customers feel this way about your product, service, or experience, they will recommend it to their friends and family—which is an excellent indication of engagement.

In this episode, we explore the concept of customer engagement and how you can craft a winning strategy for it in your experiences. Plus, we fill a hole in our content to satisfy Vijay’s request and feel better about the job we are doing engaging you with our content.

Here are some other key moments in the discussion:

03:53 We share definitions regarding Customer Engagement and how we agree and disagree with part of them.
10:44 We discuss how finding a new idea in marketing is essential, so, reengaging old concepts under a new name is fine if it means solid strategy comes back into fashion.
17:02 We revisit the idea first shared by Pine on an earlier podcast about how engagement is also about time, from giving it to you to thinking of what was spent with you as a good investment.
20:52 Ryan offers his critique about the concept of customer engagement and a common mistake many organizations make when trying to improve it.
22:43 Colin share his key takeaways about the concept and how you can apply a practical strategy for engagement moving forward.

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If you have been listening to us for a while now, you probably know about our “I’m in a Pickle” podcasts and the “5 Rules” series. If so, and you’re a fan, today is your lucky day because this podcast is a mash-up of both series. Not only that, but we also added in 5 more bonus rules for 100% more rules.

It seems that quite a few people in our audience have a pickle. They want to start a consultancy but don’t know what to do. So, we are here to help.

In this episode, we explore the 10 rules for building a successful consultancy and how they apply to your success. While we can’t guarantee that you will be successful if you follow them, we know that you won’t be if you don’t.

Here are some key moments in the discussion:

02:47 Colin kicks off the rules by encouraging to read an old book for some new thinking and to challenge yourself to be brave.
13:20 Ryan explains the critical mistake many entrepreneurs make when starting a new venture and how you can avoid making the same one.
20:41 We discuss providing value to your customers and how you can tell if you are doing that.
24:39 Colin gets practical about something that there is never enough of in a new business, money, and how to make sure you get what you are owed.
27:44 We wrap up the rules by explaining what you shouldn’t do, even if there is good money in it.

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One of our listeners has a pickle. They did research that told them a product was just what their customers wanted, so they developed and launched it. But now, there are no sales. They want to know what went wrong. We suspect we might know.

Research is a double-edged sword. It has the power to give us answers we want but not always the answers we need. Many things we do, deliberately or otherwise, affect what we hear.

In addition, sometimes our sources are unreliable. Customers have different mindsets when they answer a question on a survey and when they make a buying decision. So, what they tell you on a survey might be quite different than what they do as customers.

In this episode, we take a deeper dive into these ideas of what went wrong for our listener’s product launch. We also share some practical advice to avoid making these mistakes in the future.

Here are some other key moments in the discussion:

02:43 We discuss the pickle our listener, who wishes to remain anonymous, wrote into us about.
06:36 We talk about how survey questions can lead your respondents to an answer, called Push Polling, which is very well explained in this comedy program from the UK, Yes, Minister."
11:28 Colin talks about where he thinks the real crux of the problem is for his listeners’ pickle, not understand the customers real underlying motivations.
16:55 We discuss the concept of what we hire product and services to do for us, like a job, and how some buying decisions satisfy two different roles.
19:02 Colin shares a story about a major product launch that cause major headaches for his organization back in the day.
25:30 We share the practical advice for our listener’s pickle and how you can avoid making these same mistakes in your product development.

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Did you know we have a YouTube Channel too? Check it out here.

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We will admit it. We have made mistakes in our lives. It’s only natural that some of the calls you make in your journey are going to be bad ones. Believe it or not, we are thankful for them. One learns a lot from one’s mistakes or at least that is the hope.

Some of the calls were good ones, though, and we are thankful for those, too. Perhaps, even we two, like the blind squirrel, can find a nut once in a while.

One of the great things about having a podcast is that we can share information. In this episode, we share some stories about things that have gone wrong. Our hope is that you can learn vicariously through us without having to suffer through similar pains yourself. Similarly, we share some of our triumphs, too, with the hope that these success stories might help some of you as well.

Here are some other key moments in the discussion:

02:50 Colin shares what he learned about choosing the right companies for his career goals by mucking it up in his 20s with one company worse than the next.
07:01 Ryan explains how he learned that loyalty isn’t always a two-way street when he experienced his first layoff at a startup.
10:26 We learn how recruitment is a bit like a fairy tale in that you have to kiss a lot of frogs to find the proper prince or princess.
14:00 We discuss the importance of having a plan rather than crossing one’s fingers and hoping for the best.
17:08 Colin tells us what he would have done differently at the beginning of his consultancy rather than the decision he made that almost bankrupted it.
21:28 We both share out successful decisions, from continuing to pursue a degree to establishing a priority for work-life balance to adopting a mindset of continuously learning.

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Did you know that FOMO, or Fear of Missing Out, is a powerful motivator for customer behavior? Organizations today should find ways to leverage the power of FOMO with their customers.

I was surprised to learn how much of an addiction social media was for some people and how it linked up with feelings of FOMO. You might be as surprised by these statistics from 2021 as I was:

51% of people visit or log into their social media more now than two years before
27% of people wake up and check their social media accounts
45% of users said they couldn't wait for more than 12 hours to check their social media accounts
20% of users can't waste time for more than an hour without checking their feeds
69% of people think if they don’t check Facebook and other platforms that they will miss important events

In this episode, we explore what FOMO is and how it affects what we do and why. We also talk about a couple of practical (and ethical) ways you can leverage its power to increase the profits for your bottom line.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

Regret, even the anticipation of regret, is a huge part of FOMO. These feelings are associated with Loss Aversion, which describes how we hate losing things more than we enjoy gaining things. If we feel like we missed out, we are losing out on the chance to be a part of something—and we really don’t like that feeling.

Here are some other key moments in the discussion:

03:58 Ryan defines FOMO and explains how social media and FOMO go hand in hand these days.
10:56 We connect FOMO with other emotions, like regret, and feeling included, or excluded as the case may be, and explain how avoiding these emotions can be powerful motivator.
14:33 We connect the idea that FOMO is part of some marketing team’s goal for an experience; they want FOMO to occur with their followers for things like celebrity
21:02 Colin shares some more stats about the emotions tied to FOMO and how they are on the destructive side.
24:40 We share three practical things you can do for your customers that use the power of FOMO (in a good way) for your experiences and to the benefit of your customers.

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This Podcast produced in partnership with Zuper™.

You are probably underestimating the importance of a vital part of your Customer experience. Most organizations do. However, neglecting to address it can have negative impact on your customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, and customer advocacy.

Dying to know what it could be? Well, the area that is often underestimated in importance is the impact of your field service engineers. Often the face of your company, these team members deliver a critical part of your customer interaction. Underestimating the significance of this part of your experience is a critical mistake.

Field service is a term not everyone is familiar with. However, you are familiar with them even if you don’t know what they are called. Field service describes the people that install, repair, and upgrade your equipment. Their ubiquity is such that they are a part of everyday life. In fact, you probably saw a few at work in some capacity today; you just didn’t know what they were called.

In this episode, we host an expert in Field Service on our recent podcast, Michael Israel (MichaelIsrael@Zuper.co), Head of Field Service Evangelism at Zuper. Israel has worked in customer and field service for over 50 years. He has managed domestic and international field service operations, including 12 years at IBM. He's also been in management and executive roles with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) providers and field service software applications with Oracle and SAP.

Here are some other key moments in the discussion:

02:05 Colin introduce Israel, and Israel shares some of his related experience that led him to becoming an expert in Field Service, as well as what the area entails.
10:11 We get into a discussion of the changing attitude for the service side of a customer experience, from viewing it as a cost to seeing it as profit center.
20:38 Colin asks why more organizations don’t embrace adopting software to manage this part of the experience; Israel’s response might surprise you.
24:23 We discuss the opportunity for a lot of companies regarding training and who does a good job with leveraging performance in this area.
27:29 Israel gives us a glimpse into the future of field service and what technology will do to enhance this critical area.
30:37 We all share our key takeaways and practical applications for organizations that want to address field service in their experiences.

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A lot of the behavioral sciences can feel intimidating. However, it doesn’t have to be. The Five Rules Podcast Series is our attempt at giving you an easy entry point into the complex and messy world of Behavioral Science.

This podcast is full of bad advice. If you do follow the five rules we present, we guarantee you will fail. We realize this might be different than our usual Five Rules episode content. However, we think that presenting the way to fail might be the way to help you succeed.

(How’s that for a different kettle of fish?)

For example, if you want to fail, we have the rules that will help you do it. They include doing any or all of the following:

Not understanding the marketplace.
Ignoring customer feedback.
Failing to adapt to change.
Not being authentic.
Overlooking diversity and inclusion.

In this episode, we explore why our five rules, otherwise known as what not to do in business, lead to failure for many brands you know, and in some cases, remember from before they crashed and burned. We share what we have learned by watching brands make silly mistakes (and hope none of you will make the same ones.)

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

The critical thing to remember here is that we don’t want you to do these things. Instead, we encourage you to learn from these mistakes. So, if anything, we are telling you to break these five rules instead of following them.

Here are some other key moments in the discussion:

04:07 We kick it off by explaining how if you don’t understand the marketplace, you are sure to blow it with them, hastening your descent into failure.
10:53 We abandon all pretense of being organized, and share all five rules at once and then fit our examples under the various rules.
12:08 We discuss business guru Charles Handy’s S-curve from The Empty Raincoat about how things ebb and flow in performance, and when is the best time to change.
19:50 Colin relates the five rules back to an article he read, “15 Famous Brands Who Failed to Innovate,” and how hubris plays a role.
23:46 Ryan explains how Victoria Secret might have fared better over time if they had more diversity and inclusion built into their leadership.

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Fads come and go. From Tamagotchi’s to fidget spinners, we have seen plenty come and go. However, one fad that will never go out of style is treating your employees as the valuable resource they are. So, to answer our own question, Employee Experience is not just a fad and is definitely the future of a successful organization.

We are fired up about this today because one of you, Praveen Kumar is in a pickle and he asked for our help. He wanted to know how to build an excellent Employee Experience. Not surprisingly, we had plenty of advice about it.

You see, so much of what we talk about on this podcast applies to customers. However, it also applies to employees. People are people, whether they are buying or selling. So, until your employees are robots, you should be managing both experiences.

In this episode, we explore the question of how to build an excellent Employee Experience. We also share some advice on how to implement the advice practically and successfully, which is more than we can say for bringing back the Thighmaster.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

One thing that might be a fad is what we call this area. For our part, we like Employee Experience because it goes with Customer Experience, and it uses alliteration. So, we don’t think the idea behind it will fade, but the terminology might. And we are okay with that.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

06:23 Colin explains how we are all experiential animals, so it is essential to ensure that experiences work for us, or there are negative consequences.
10:46. We discuss how the Customer Experience and the behavioral science theories that we relate to it also apply to the Employee Experience.
13:26 Ryan explains how Reference Points are essential in the conversation about Employee Experiences.
20:56 We address the various ways you can use Customer Experience advice to manage your Employee Experience efforts.
26:10 Colin gets into how a previous podcast about the 5 Rules of Leadership are essential here also.
29:11 We both offer our last bits of advice for Kumar and anyone who wants to build an excellent Employee Experience.

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I have been watching the American Customer Satisfaction Index for over 20 years. Many years, there wasn’t anything too surprising in the report. However, recently there has been, and it isn’t good news for most organizations.

After nearly two decades of investment in customer experience, only 20 percent of organizations have managed to improve their customer satisfaction scores—leaving the vast majority, 80 %, having failed to do so.

One has to wonder, has it been worth it? We have been working on delivering experiences that surprise and delight customers for years.

So, why aren’t they surprised and delighted? Why, despite all our best efforts, are the numbers going the opposite direction?

Before you blame COVID for all this, it is important to note that these trends began long before that, although the pandemic did nothing to help matters. Nor is it a problem of customers having unreasonable expectations. Research shows that as satisfaction declines, so do customer expectations.

It turns out that there are a number of variables that could be contributing to this decline in customer satisfaction, which offers a lot for organizations to learn.

We invited an expert, assistant professor Forrest Morgeson, from the marketing faculty at the Broad College of Business at Michigan State University and the director of research at the Customer Satisfaction Institute to share his insight. In this episode, we explore what this means to customer experience then, now and in the future. Where we are going with experiences, might surprise you.

Here are some other key moments in the discussion:

02:41 We introduce our guest, Forrest Morgeson, assistant professor of marketing at the Broad College of Business at Michigan State University and the director of research at the Customer Satisfaction Institute at Michigan
05:53 Morgeson answers my question about how satisfaction can be down at this point in time with two salient reasons.
15:46 Colin shares a story about apathy and how what he saw 20 years ago might be happening in C-suites all around the world as we gape into the void of a recession.
22:44 We ask Morgeson to explain what the data shows about satisfaction within industry, and what he tells us might surprise you.
26:59 Morgeson shares his predictions for what will happen next regarding customer satisfaction and changes in experiences.

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One of our listeners, Clive Hearst has a bit of pickle he needs our help with today. He wants to know whether he should invest the time and money in getting his MBA. He wants to know what the true value is of an MBA, and whether it is a must-have for his career. The answer depends on a few things.

It might surprise you to know I don’t have an MBA. (Or maybe not). However, I have experience, and much of it leading teams and driving experiences for people, but I didn’t pick that up in a classroom or an internship. I learned it on the streets, and in interactions with clients, bosses, and subordinates.

I probably won’t get an MBA. I am closer to getting a fishing boat and a new tackle box than a degree at this point. However, I still say probably because there is a part of me that says, “never say never.” Part of me is interested in an MBA and I have to wonder why…

So, does an MBA have any value or is it just a piece of paper? In this episode, we try to help Hearst answer these questions for himself and shed some light on the current state of the MBA in today’s business environment.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

There should always be deliberate goals for everything we do in business, and that includes post-graduate education. Post graduate education in this case is an MBA, but the same goes for a Ph.D., law school, or medical or dental school, any other programs too. Part of the decision should always be one’s plans for what they will do with the education in which they invest.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

04:53 We start with one of the most important questions a person should ask themselves when considering getting their MBA, and the rest of everything will depend on the answer.
06:27 Ryan explains how MBA programs are structured and how long a person can expect to be in one, depending upon the program they choose.
09:54 Colin asks Ryan to explain some of the key advantages of getting an MBA, and the answer might surprise you.
13:04 We discuss the increased earning potential that can occur from getting an MBA, and how it sometimes doesn’t, and why.
20:20 Ryan explains how the most prestigious MBA programs tend to require several years’ experience before getting one and why that is.
24:50 We discuss how MBA programs are changing and what type of MBA might be a good investment for today’s business employee.

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Time is our most valuable resource. It’s a resource that you aren’t able to get any more of, no matter what you do, and you are losing more of it every second.

When you look at it like that, asking people for their time a much bigger deal that you might have considered at first. Therefore, when you are spending it with them, you should make the most of it.

Moreover, you are competing for customers’ time. So, when they do give it to you, they are going to evaluate whether that was a good move afterward. If you are careful with it, you can end up on the bad side of an evaluation and a losing side of the battle for their attention in the future.

Joe Pine, author of The Experience Economy, writes about this battle for customer attention and how they evaluate time given to you in a recent article. We also hosted him on a recent podcast where he shared his three categories for customers’ evaluations of time given to your organization. They include time well saved, time well spent, and time well invested.

In this episode, we discuss these three categories and what they mean to organizational experiences. We also talk about how some organizations do it well, and some waste our time unapologetically.

Here are some other key moments in the discussion:

03:22 Colin explains how the three categories of customer evaluation of time as Pine explained in the article and on the recent podcast created an Aha! Moment that rivals some of the most significant in his career.
08:10 Colin shares a story about calling his health insurance company and how they did not respect his time, how that could result in his finding a new provider, and how they will never know why.
12:39 We share an example of a company that takes their service and elevates it with the theatrical to create a time well spent evaluation.
22:44 We get into time well invested, and what expectations customers are likely to have before they would give an organization a positive evaluation in this area.
25:33 We share our final thoughts on what is happening here regarding the battle for customer’s time and how you can leverage this insight for your organization.

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Price increases are part of today’s business environment. Unless you live on the moon, you are experiencing them from your suppliers, too, and will pass those on to your customers also. However, if you handle the price increase the wrong way, you will also likely be losing some of those customers, too.

One of our listeners, Alan Flower, has a pickle regarding the need to increase his prices without losing his customers. Since our advice not to raise prices or to decrease prices instead will end up with him going out of business, we came up with a few other, more practical, ideas.

The fact is no one wants a price increase. So, on its face, it seems like an impossible scenario. However, it might surprise you to learn that there are ways to increase a customer’s price, maintain your company’s margins, and keep most of your customers.

In this episode, we explore the many ways you can soften the blow of a necessary price increase to retain as many customers as possible while doing what you need to do for your bottom line.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

Communication is the underlying theme of this exercise. Many of the suggestions we make during this podcast relate to the “how” of communicating. However, the why of it is just as essential, so be sure that you pay attention to both when you inform your customers of an impending price increase—or face their wrath instead.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

03:51 The first suggestion we make is to set proper expectations, which includes giving people time to adjust to the news; upping prices without warning will not get this price increase process off to a very good start.
07:25 Ryan explains how using framing is an essential way to manage the outcome of the price increase conversation, and that without it, you can make a mess of this process pretty fast.
11:06 Colin shares some things not to do, deceptive practices that you might get away with, until you don’t, and then the consequences can be severe, like Shrinkflation.
17:35 We explore sweetening the offering with companion products or services that add value, a situation that make a price increase much more palatable to customers.
19:34 We look at the value in delaying a price increase or taking it incrementally instead of all at once.

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How long does it take to choose a craft beer at a big box liquor store? Four hours.

That’s what it felt like anyway. Why did it feel so long? Too many choices. In fact, when I was done, I needed a beer to recover from the exercise of choosing a beer.

Of course, if there had only been a few, I would probably complain that there hadn’t been enough options for craft beers.

The fact is, we like having choices, until we don’t. There is a point where not enough choices becomes way too many and the end result is the same, a negative experience and sometimes a lost sale.

In this episode, we explore the negative effects of too many choices on your bottom line. From overwhelming customers to elevating their expectations, what you offer has a significant effect on what people buy—or don’t.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

There are two ways choice affects customers psychologically. First, too many choices can make people give up on deciding and wander off. Second, the plethora of options can increase the expectations for what a customer wants out of the transaction, and often keeps them on the hunt longer for the perfect choice. Neither is an outcome that is doing great things for an organizations bottom line.

Here are some other key moments in the discussion:

05:52 Ryan shares the results of research conducted at a Grocery Store in California that tested how many jam options was too many (Spoiler alert: It was more than six).
09:14 We discuss whether there is an optimal number and what considerations would go into determining that.
12:22 Colin explains how his TV shopping has increased his knowledge about TV offerings while also making him feel more anxious about choosing one.
21:33 Ryan uses dating opportunities to explain how more choices can change what you expect out of a date and Colin explains how he ends up in the matrimonial doghouse because of his lack of romanticism.
24:25. We share what firms can do to make decisions easier for people and maximize their decision potential in different offering scenarios.

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I have written seven books, countless articles, and tons of keynote speeches, not to mention thousands of emails. As a writer, through and through, I know how difficult it can be to stare at a blank screen watching that blinking cursor wondering where to start.

But a new AI-powered chatbot might make my life a whole lot easier, and yours, too.

It’s called ChatGPT, and it has the potential to change how we create things and make the power of AI accessible to everyone. It is a conversational chatbot that can process requests and, if you want, write things for you. It has written poetry, code for applications, the copy for a Ryan Reynold’s MINT mobile company commercial, and more.

Unfortunately, it also means ChatGPT is accessible to high school students that need to write a five-paragraph essay about Romeo and Juliet. If there is one group where ChatGPT is unwelcome, it’s the teacher’s lounge at any high school or college.

In this episode, we discuss how ChatGPT might change the way organizations do things moving forward.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

We also discussed what some of my readers on LinkedIn think of the AI technology in ChatGPT. Igor Rodrigues likes how it handles context. Sergei Liashenko thinks it could be useful for staff training. Graham Hill worries that if too many people leverage the technology, we will lose the distinctions between organizations that often provide a competitive edge.

We would love to also hear your insight. To subscribe to the newsletter and weigh in, please click here.

Here are some other key moments in the discussion:

02:41 We introduce what ChatGPT is and how we have been working with it, and how it differs from what other technology we have encountered.
07:54 Colin shares some of the ways he thinks it will serve as a writing assistant for him moving forward, and Ryan explains how it has completely wrecked the educational essay.
16:51 Colin shares some of the responses he got from readers of the newsletter on LinkedIn.
22:53 We share what the 8th imperative would have been for our book, The Intuitive Customer, if we had leveraged the AI, and it was surprisingly good.
24:32 We share our insights about what you should take away from this topic and apply it in your organization.

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If you have customer segments that read like the drink sizes on a fast-food menu, then this podcast is one you really need. The fact is many organizations get customer segmentation wrong. So, we came up with some critical questions that can get it back on track.

One of our listeners is in a pickle and it has to do with their firm’s segmentation. Vijay Patel’s sales haven’t been what he hoped, and he wondered if the problem might be targeting the wrong customers. We think they might be, too, but probably not for the reasons Patel thinks.

Many organizations use databases to segment their customers based on easy-to-collect data, like demographics, industry vertical, or total annual sales. While this information is useful, it is incomplete. We discuss what needs to be included to make these numbers mean anything for targeting.

In this episode, we explore what are critical questions an organization should be using to create customer segments that lead to effective targeting. And to be clear, they don’t use the words “small,” “medium,” or “large.”

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

I have had a terrible time with UPS recently. I sent a package 2-day priority international and ten days later, I still don’t have it. Plus, I have had no luck getting answers about what happened to it. In part, I am to blame because I don’t have a lot of experience with shipping things via UPS. However, part of the problem is UPS because they don’t have a targeted experience for inexperienced shippers like me.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

05:12 We share a pickle from Vijay Patel who asks us how to ensure that their customer segmentation is correct.
07:27 Colin talks about one of the best segmentations he has ever experienced in Hartsfield Airport in Atlanta, where they separate leisure and business travelers.
11:42 We lead into the first question about segmentation and how it should serve your organization.
14:25 Colin poses the next question about the data used to segment customers and whether it is meaningful for this exercise (spoiler alert: if it involves small, medium, and large, then it isn’t).
18:18 Ryan explains selection bias and how it can doom your efforts by missing an enormous opportunity for your business.
21:04 We explain how using databases can lead to stereotyping and how that is sloppy marketing.
25:18 We discuss psychographics and how it applies to segmentation, and why it might not work either and what we know will work better.

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Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 35,000 subscribers.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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It’s a new year so we decided we needed an update. A few years ago, we gave you some rules for gaining growth. But times have changed, and so the rules need to change, too. Therefore, we took another pass at the questions that can help your organization gain growth in 2023.

In some ways, these are more like provocations than questions. However, we aren’t picking a fight. We are, however, trying to be provocative. In fact, we usually ask them because we know that people can’t answer them. We want them to realize that they don’t know these answers and get them thinking about it so we can help them move forward.

The first two questions you are probably familiar with already. They set the stage for what we are trying to uncover. Then, we move into specifics about what customers want from your experience. Next come the future questions that explore areas about where you should be trying to go and the tools you can use to get there. Finally, we get into a question about my absolute favorite part of experiences, memory.

In this episode, we explore what we ask and why. We also talk about what they need to realize from their answers and how it can help them gain growth in the new year.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

One company we helped move forward was Maersk Line, the world’s largest shipping company. We hosted one of the successful leaders of this organization on another episode to share the five rules for a highly successful implementation. One of the things Maersk shared is that these questions made a difference in their improvement program—which is saying something since they improved their scores by 40 points over 30 months.

Here are some other key moments in the discussion:

07:36 After we discuss Maersk line, we get into our second strategic question that explores how customer-centric your organization is, and how that affects your growth. 10:21 We get into an area that we are devoting a whole episode to soon, which is about how people describe their experience with you, as well as what they really want and what drives value for them, all crucial areas to answer for your experience. 18:34 This kicks off the future part of the strategic questions, where we talk about predicting customer behavior and using Customer Science to be successful at it. 20:42 Ryan takes a 2,000-word detour to express how he agrees with Colin, much to his chagrin and Colin’s supreme delight. 28:19 We talk about Colin’s favorite subject memory, and why it matters so much to make them deliberately in your experience. 29:31 We summarize the seven strategic questions and how you can actually work on them on top of everything else you have to do—and why you should make time for them.

Did you know we have a YouTube Channel too? Check it out here.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 70,000 subscribers.

How can we help? Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services. Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

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In sales, it can be tough to know when a customer is no longer deciding but already decided—unless, of course, they tell you that out loud. So, it is incumbent upon you to read the signs that a customer has decided to buy.

For example, I like to make drawings with pen and paper during my sales presentations with a contact. Then, I position the pen toward them during the discussion as an invitation for them to pick up and draw a little bit, too.

If they do, it’s a good sign. Scribbling away on my pad of already scribbled paper, I know that the contact is engaged and interested in how my services will help them achieve their goals.

However, there are several signals that a person sends when they are ready to buy. One of our listeners, Jason Bradley wrote in with a business pickle wanting to know what some of these signs are. In this episode we tell you and explain the psychology behind it.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

03:19 We present Jason’s business problem, how other listeners can send in their questions for us to answer on the podcast, and how Colin can tell a person has made a buying decision. 7:20 Ryan presents the Rubicon Model and how it applies to our psychology around decision making. 14:35 Ryan talks about the differences in our mindsets before and after decision-making, and how it applies to political discussions. 20:41 We discuss how people have a preference for action and feel invulnerable after making a decision as part of their psychological need to be right about it. 26:19 Colin shares a story about a sales training that taught them how to get through Death Valley, and, no, it wasn’t a desert survival tip.

Do you have a business pickle? Tell us about it here.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 35,000 subscribers.

How can we help? Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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Every so often, I get a chance to chit-chat with colleagues of mine about the future of customer experience. This time, my colleagues were pioneers in customer experience, Lou Carbone (Experience Engineering.com) author of Clued In, and Joe Pine (StratgicHorizons.com), author of The Experience Economy. We discussed what we see changing in CX.

We all think we are at a turning point in the movement. There are a lot of things that the recent pandemic has broken. However, organizations haven’t fixed all of them. Add in the inflation rates that are crippling the economy and affecting customer behavior, and you have a good idea of the state of things these days.

However, my colleagues and I agree there are also exciting things on the horizon. Customer experience enjoyed its first academic nod. We also see CEOs taking a new interest in creative thinking and open-mindedness. Customer science looms on the horizon.

In this episode, we explore the potential for the new year in the customer experience movement and combine the powers of decades of experience to guess what will happen in 2023. We see significant changes coming and share what we see and what you should do about it.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

The state of affairs today in customer strategy is dire. The American Customer Satisfaction Index is at its lowest level in 17 years. From 2010 to 2019, two-thirds of organizations still needed to improve customer satisfaction. Forrester predicted that one out of every five people in Customer Experience would lose their job in the next twelve months.

Here are some other critical moments in the discussion:

02:53 Carbone discusses how too much business thinking is still stuck in the industrial age and how we should change that.
08:31 Pine describes how experiences are about people’s time, not wasting it but making it well-spent.
12:51 Colin threatens to sing Abba’s “Knowing me Knowing You.”
20:00 Carbone announces a milestone for customer experience management, getting a nod from academia.
27:36 Pine shares ideas about developing new measurements for success in CX beyond the traditional that might track customer sentiment more than today’s measures.
36:11 We share our predictions for the new year and what organizations should focus on.

Did you know we have a YouTube Channel too? Check it out here.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 70,000 subscribers.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

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A lot of the behavioral sciences can feel intimidating. However, it doesn’t have to be. The Five Rules Podcast Series is our attempt at giving you an easy entry point into the complex and messy world of Behavioral Science.

Bad leadership leads to bad Customer Experience. To have a great Customer Experience, you have to have great leadership.

It reminds me of rabbits.

When my kids were little, we kept rabbits in a hutch. One day, I let the rabbits out to enjoy a little freedom in the garden. But, when I put them down, they hopped right back in the hutch.

I had taken over a call center team at the time. The rabbits’ behavior resembled my team’s. The hutch represented all the constraints built up in the call center culture. The team were much more comfortable hanging out in these constraints than finding a way to do more for customers.

It fell to me to change the culture. Over time, my call center team were hopping throughout the garden of customer centricity, but it required focus and effort on both our parts.

In this episode, we explore the role of leadership in Customer Experience and the 5 Rules guaranteed to increase your effectiveness as a leader.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

07:18 We start off the rules with an essential one about self-awareness; how you project yourself in your head does not always translate to the perception of your leadership by your team.
11:26 Colin introduces rule number two, which explains that you have to understand that you do not need to be the cleverest to be the leader.
16:54 We discuss The One Minute Manager, by Ken Blanchard, which emphasizes where your followers are and how ready they are to follow your lead.
20:49 Colin refers to one of his favorite leadership aphorisms, “None of us is as clever as all of us,” which speaks to leveraging the strengths of the team to create a better output rather than serving in despotic rule.
26:10 Colin emphasizes ensuring you maintain the critical individual relationships with team members that are necessary to your team’s culture, a critical concept in Ken Blanchard’s follow up book, The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey.
28:36 We round out the rules with a crucial part of leadership, loyalty, which goes both ways but starts with the leader.

Did you know we have a YouTube Channel too? Check it out here.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 70,000 subscribers.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

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The end of a year is always a nice reminder to reflect on time passed. It’s a regular milestone where you can check in on your experiences and remember the lessons gained from another trip around our sun.

This year has been an interesting one. With a foot half-in, half-out of the pandemic, continuing supply chain issues, rising inflation rates all over the world, and a war in Ukraine, one might even say awful.

However, like any year, everything isn’t awful. There have been moments, professionally and personally that have been exceedingly positive and have changed us for the better, even if it was just a little bit.

In this episode, we each share a professional and personal lesson learnt from this year. From a description of the world’s ugliest knife (which you can see for yourself at minute 19:26 on our YouTube Channel of the podcast) to the significant realization I had that AI is just our bias written in code shared by our guest Broderick Turner, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Marketing at Virginia Tech., and founder of TRAP LAB, a few months ago, there is sure to be something for everyone—or at least some thing to entertain you.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

04:37 Ryan explains how this year taught him that businesses should quit waiting for things to get back to normal; the future is the next normal.
11:24 Colin shares what the revolving door on 10 Downing Street experience this year in the UK reminded him about business and philosophy.
19:26 Ryan explains that learning something new can make you feel more ready to adapt to change, and then showed the knife he made himself, which he describes as the world’s ugliest knife.
23:32 Colin reminds us all that history repeats itself, which means that the skills we learned long ago might come in handy again; so, if you can manage it, don’t forget those lessons.

Did you know we have a YouTube Channel too? Check it out here.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 70,000 subscribers.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

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Ah, yes! It’s the most wonderful time of the year. When we reflect upon the passing year and make plans for the New Year: what we want to keep, where we want to be, and how we need to change. Then, we make them, our New Year’s Resolutions.

However, in just a few days’ time, we will have failed at keeping these resolutions (again) and forgotten all about it.

There are a number of psychological reasons why change is hard, and much of it has to do with habits. Habits are part of our Intuitive System, which is the fast automatic thinking we use to save energy instead of dragging out our Rational System, the slow, deliberate thinking we sometimes use. We get a cue, which triggers an automatic response, that gives us a reward.

However, habits can be broken once you understand where you need to intervene. With a few tricks and some real motivation, you can kick a bad habit or even start a good one.

In this episode, we explore why some people are successful with their New Year’s Resolutions and win, and why some people fail and lose out on the benefits of meeting the challenge for change in the New Year. (If you want to be a part of the first group, we suggest you listen. Want to be in the second group? Keep on rolling with your present strategy.)

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

Habits are a giant part of New Year’s Resolutions. Usually, we want to stop having bad ones, i.e., start losing weight and exercising, quit biting nails, or to stop smoking or drinking so much. However, sometimes we want to start good new habits, i.e., floss more, take up a new hobby or learn a musical instrument, or subscribe to a fantastic newsletter on LinkedIn (hint, hint). Below are some moments in the podcast that can help with either direction you are going with this in the new year:

03:16 Colin shares a little bit about his personal weight loss journey and how what he learned there made it clear that psychology is a big part of success or failure with resolutions.
09:14 Ryan explains why using the Framing Effect on your project can be persuasive in these goals.
11:10 We get into change management and how habits are an integral part of that process.
15:00 Ryan explains how the two-system of cognition, and more specifically, the Intuitive System play a role in habitual behavior and why that is.
20:01 Colin explains how similar failures often happen with Customer Experience programs, too, but that those failures say a lot more than many people think they do.
25:55 Ryan explains why goals and reaching them is one thing, staying there is another.
27:21 We close with an excellent suggestion on how to be successful, based on a story from the actor Terry Crews on how to build a good habit for going to the gym, and it’s not what you probably think.

Did you know we have a YouTube Channel too? Check it out here.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 70,000 subscribers.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

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Going viral is the goal of any passionate social media poster. Posting your content and watching as the views and shares grow exponentially is the dream for marketers trying to build a brand online.

Unless, of course, the viral post is about how you broke a guitar during a customer’s flight and then showed “indifference” to their complaint. (Looking at you, United Airlines.) That’s a nightmare.

The trick is actually doing it—and for the right reasons, not a customer service failure. In an environment where there is infinite amounts of content to compete with, getting a post to go viral is a victory few marketers have the pleasure of experiencing.

In this episode, we explore how to get people to collaborate with you in your efforts to create viral content on social media and the essential elements of the content that encourage people to share it.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

When you want a person to do something, you have probably heard that you should explain the benefits they will enjoy from doing so. It’s no different with social media. Your content should have a benefit that appeals to the sharer and collaborator, and a benefit to whom the person shares it. Therefore, a hearty laugh, a heartfelt “awe,” or an unrealized and epiphanic insight are never a bad way to go.

Here are some other key moments in the discussion:

04:38 Ryan explains how framing plays an essential role in getting people to share your content.
09:47 Colin shares an example of what not to do with your experience that encourage people to share content about you with the infamous (and hilarious), United Breaks Guitars video.
14:04 We share a key insight about how to make something go viral, and it’s not your awesome brand message.
18:34. Colin introduces the idea of internet trolls and everyone piling on as meeting an essential human need to be a part of something.
25:25 Ryan covers a past campaign with Dunkin’ Donuts and Charli D’melio that had all the elements that make a social media campaign go viral.
28:54 We summarize the secret formula ingredients for you and how you can use them in your customer strategy.

Did you know we have a YouTube Channel too? Check it out here.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 70,000 subscribers.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

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Customers are fickle. Or at least they appear to be. What once may have exceeded your customer’s expectations one day becomes ordinary the next. That’s because People become less sensitive to change as things improve. It’s called Diminishing Sensitivity, and it’s the reason that sometimes you have to work harder to “Wow!” your customers.

If you gave $100 to a poor person and a millionaire, it would have completely different effects on their daily lives. While the millionaire would be polite and appreciative of the extra cash, the poor person would feel the difference made by the money far more.

In some ways, your customers are the millionaire in this scenario. Your excellent Customer Experience has made them less sensitive to your improvements. However, if your experience is next to terrible, improvements feel a lot more like $100 to a poor person.

Diminishing sensitivity can be seen across many different industries. For example, the difference in graphics between the video game Football for the Atari 2600 and Madden’s NFL 10 was astounding. However, when you compare Madden 10 to Madden 12 and 14, the difference is noticeable, but not astounding. It ceases to be something that amazes and becomes something to be expected.

In this episode, we explore the concept of diminishing sensitivity and how it can affect your customer experience and your customers’ perception of it. We also talk about what you can do to continue to improve.

How Can I Combat Diminishing Sensitivity?

While it would be easy to say you should constantly push the boundaries of your product or service, this is not necessarily realistic. As we have seen with the iPhone, constant improvement eventually bores consumers. Therefore, it’s essential to occasionally disrupt the market with more significant improvements to keep your customers hooked.

Here are some other key moments:

03:33 Ryan introduces the concept of diminishing sensitivity and the minds behind the concept.
09:07 Colin and Ryan discuss how the iPhone is an example of diminishing sensitivity.
15:09 Colin admits that he likes to find companies that need his help that haven’t gone as far into their experience journey because you can enjoy significant impact quickly.
19:14 Ryan and Colin explain how other large organizations have navigated the tricky bit of continuous improvement after enjoying those initial gains.
25:50 Ryan and Colin go over the “curse of improvement” and what you can do to avoid it.

Did you know we have a YouTube Channel too? Check it out here.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 35,000 subscribers.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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Recession is a natural step in the economic cycle, but it’s easy to get overwhelmed by all of the bad news. When economic downturn occurs, we all feel it.

Corporations tend to cut back in a downturn, neglecting things like customer experience. To differentiate yourself from everyone else, you should double down on these services while others cut back.

Nobody looks forward to a recession, but being prepared and aggressive can help alleviate its effects. Don’t let yourself get left by the wayside while there is such a great opportunity to grow.

In this episode, we do not minimize the downsides of economic recession, but rather show that not everything has to be terrible. We discuss what to do when things get bad, and how to focus on the upside of a recession.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

The most crucial part of dealing with a recession is preparing ahead of time. If you're caught blindly by the oncoming decline, you and your business could wipe out. While we may not officially be in a recession yet, planning as though we were will leave you far more prepared for the times ahead.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

02:50 We first discuss the effects of recession on the larger economy and its necessity to the business cycle.
10:09 Ryan explores the effects of breakdown on breakthroughs and innovations in corporate structure.
14:29 We look at how changing before change is forced upon you can help your business during recession.
17:36 Colin discusses how speeding up when others slow down can improve your success during downturn.
22:19 We give our personal advice to both companies and individuals concerned about the oncoming recession.
24:37 We explain why customer service is one of the most important aspects of succeeding businesses during times of recession.

Did you know we have a YouTube Channel, too? Check it out here.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 35,000 subscribers.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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Claire Hillman, a loyal listener, a subscriber to our NL, Why Customers Buy, and viewer of our podcast on our new YouTube Channel is in a pickle and needs our help. She asks, Should I move to where my customers are or move them to where I want to be?

Now, our first reaction was to tell Claire that she should absolutely meet customers where they are. After all, isn’t that the customer-centric thing to do?

However, it occurred to us that at one time, we waited in line at the airport to check in, wrote out our bills on paper checks to mail back through snail mail, and bought DVDs and CDs that we had to store on specially made racks in our homes.

We did these things because we hadn’t moved to digital check-in, automatic bill payment, and streaming. If organizations hadn’t moved us to these efficient and easy ways to simplify these tasks, we might still be making small talk with the airline employee or licking envelopes.

Since we see that many things that we do today are not the way we used to do things—and realize how much better the experiences are with the new way—it might not be the best things to meet customers where they are. Instead, it might be better to move them where you want them to be.

In this episode, we explore the finer points of moving customers to where they want to be and how to manage this process for your organization. You might be surprised to know that giving customers exactly what they want isn’t always the best way to handle your customer strategy.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

Another area where some customers might have not realized was a benefit to them is Self-Service, particularly at the supermarket. However, other customers are never going to want to serve themselves there. What is happening here is the idea of customer segmentation. Some customers love taking matters into their own hands; others feel like it’s losing something from the experience to have to handle things themselves. How you move these groups to where you want them to be requires a careful look at the value you bring to the experience and framing the change in a way that appeals to each segment.

Here are a few other key moments in the discussion:

02:51 We learn about Claire’s pickle and how our first reaction was replaced with the idea that it depends on where your customers are and where you are trying to move them.
4:50 Colin shares a story about how self-service at a supermarket showed him how organizations train customers to try new services and having front-line employees there is a great way to do it.
07:58 We discuss how customer segmentation and understanding what customers value is an essential part of managing the process for moving customers, or you can move some of them right out the door.
13:57 Colin describes how he gets his wife Lorraine to update her iOS on the iPhone, a task she detests, by showing her a couple of new features she is sure to value, which is a great example of what to do with customers.
16:48 Colin explains how the Focus feature that came out on Apple’s last iOS for the iPhone demonstrated how different people care about different things (customer segments), so getting them to change using the same strategy can be difficult.
23:22 Ryan explains how meeting customer might also mean taking into consideration their cognitive state, and what resources they have for deciding to move forward when you position the change.
26:15 We both share our practical advice for what you can do with this information to move customers where you need them to be.

Do you have a business pickle? Tell us about it here.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 35,000 subscribers.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

View Details

A lot of the behavioral sciences can feel intimidating. However, it doesn’t have to be. The Five Rules Podcast Series is our attempt at giving you an easy entry point into the complex and messy world of Behavioral Science.

As if the world isn’t crazy enough—with the war in Ukraine, the cost-of-living crisis, the looming threat of recession, and the ostensible beginnings of catastrophic climate change— we learned a flesh-eating bacterium (Vibrio vulnificus) is running rampant in Florida, infecting people as it thrives in the brackish floodwaters left in the wake of Hurricane Ian.

It’s bloody stressful these days.

With so many things we can’t control, feeling uncertain about the future economy is normal. However, uncertainty is a difficult environment in which to move forward with business.

Colin thought maybe he was feeling so pessimistic about everything because he is getting old. So, he polled his followers on LinkedIn a few days ago to see what they thought. He asked them,"What are you expecting the business environment will be over the next year?" The results might surprise you.

However, no matter how we all feel about the future, into it we go anyway. So, in an effort to help us all cope with the road ahead, we present the 5 Rules for Managing Uncertainty in this episode, which you can also watch on our YouTube Channel.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

Uncertainty is a difficult environment for decision making. Often, we look for ways to mitigate these feelings using short-cuts in decision making to move forward. It’s also why we like to say a decision was a no-brainer. If the best way forward was so obvious that we didn’t have to think about it much, we have much more certainty about it. Certainty is definitely our preferred state when we decide things.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

01:49 We start off by explaining the situation behind the poll and what Colin and Ryan think about the future. Spoiler alert: they don’t agree.
05:35 We share some participant insights, first from René Bomholt and then from Andrew Safnauer, who tell us that it will be different in various parts of the world and that thinking about having a recession is the surest way to ensure there is one.
08:57 We share the first rule, to recognize that uncertainty will happen, and it will be uncomfortable.
15:07 We talk about the positives of uncertainty in rule number two, which is to remember that the upside of uncertainty is it provide opportunity, especially to disrupt things.
17:57 Colin shares why he likes to wear his Luton Town Football Club shirt—even though the team isn’t as good as he wishes it was—and how an ex-manager was the inspiration for Rule #3, control the controllables.
22:27 We get into Rule #4, which is to be alert and prepared; because being flat footed and unprepared is never a winning response to uncertainty while having more information and a plan is.
24:25 We explain why the last rule, hoping for the best while planning for the worst, is an excellent way to cope with uncertainty, and why it can pay off for you no matter which way things go.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 35,000 subscribers.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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A lot of the behavioral sciences can feel intimidating. However, it doesn’t have to be. The Five Rules Podcast Series is our attempt at giving you an easy entry point into the complex and messy world of Behavioral Science.

As if the world isn’t crazy enough—with the war in Ukraine, the cost-of-living crisis, the looming threat of recession, and the ostensible beginnings of catastrophic climate change— we learned a flesh-eating bacterium (Vibrio vulnificus) is running rampant in Florida, infecting people as it thrives in the brackish floodwaters left in the wake of Hurricane Ian.

It’s bloody stressful these days.

With so many things we can’t control, feeling uncertain about the future economy is normal. However, uncertainty is a difficult environment in which to move forward with business.

Colin thought maybe he was feeling so pessimistic about everything because he is getting old. So, he polled his followers on LinkedIn a few days ago to see what they thought. He asked them,"What are you expecting the business environment will be over the next year?" The results might surprise you.

However, no matter how we all feel about the future, into it we go anyway. So, in an effort to help us all cope with the road ahead, we present the 5 Rules for Managing Uncertainty in this episode, which you can also watch on our YouTube Channel.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

Uncertainty is a difficult environment for decision making. Often, we look for ways to mitigate these feelings using short-cuts in decision making to move forward. It’s also why we like to say a decision was a no-brainer. If the best way forward was so obvious that we didn’t have to think about it much, we have much more certainty about it. Certainty is definitely our preferred state when we decide things.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

01:49 We start off by explaining the situation behind the poll and what Colin and Ryan think about the future. Spoiler alert: they don’t agree.
05:35 We share some participant insights, first from René Bomholt and then from Andrew Safnauer, who tell us that it will be different in various parts of the world and that thinking about having a recession is the surest way to ensure there is one.
08:57 We share the first rule, to recognize that uncertainty will happen, and it will be uncomfortable.
15:07 We talk about the positives of uncertainty in rule number two, which is to remember that the upside of uncertainty is it provide opportunity, especially to disrupt things.
17:57 Colin shares why he likes to wear his Luton Town Football Club shirt—even though the team isn’t as good as he wishes it was—and how an ex-manager was the inspiration for Rule #3, control the controllables.
22:27 We get into Rule #4, which is to be alert and prepared; because being flat footed and unprepared is never a winning response to uncertainty while having more information and a plan is.
24:25 We explain why the last rule, hoping for the best while planning for the worst, is an excellent way to cope with uncertainty, and why it can pay off for you no matter which way things go.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 35,000 subscribers.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

View Details

What if we told you that we know how you could develop a superpower? You can. We know you can because the method for it it was developed by a Yale’s assistant professor of marketing that was once a door-to-door salesperson and someone who has performed open-heart surgery on a pig.

The superpower you can develop is influence and it is essential if you want to make changes in your organization. As champions of Customer Experience, we don’t need to tell you how crucial it is to get people to change. Influence and consensus building can help you get there, and our guest will tell you how.

In this episode, we talk with climate philanthropist Zoe Chance (zoechance.com) Ph.D., author of Influence is your Superpower: The Science of Winning Hearts, Sparking Change, and Making Good Things Happen. Chance shares with us why she wrote the book, some constructive criticism for the Customer Experience movement, suggestions for a winning strategy, and step-by-step instructions for how to gain support for your ideas.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

One of the reasons Chance wrote the book was because she felt like other tactics written by thought leaders for influence were too transactional. Her methods are softer and built upon a foundation of mutual benefit. In fact, she jokes that her agent wanted to call the book Influence for Nice People. While she rejected the title, she doesn’t reject the premise and hopes that she can do some good with her strategies. Climate change is a topic so important to Chance that she is donating half of the profits from her book to go to 350.org, a global network of climate activists seeking change through the power of ordinary people.

Here are a few other key moments in the discussion:

02:19 We introduce Chance and some of her accomplishments, including the aforementioned open-heart surgery performed on a pig.
05:52 Ryan asks Chance why she chose such a well-written about topic like influence for her book, and Chance explains why she had more to say on the topic.
13:05 Chance explains that the psychology behind influence is the same whether you are convincing people to go to a restaurant or resolving a multi-million-dollar purchase.
17:17 Chance explains to Colin the two big ideas she has for why some organizations do not address the improvement they need in their experiences the way he would like.
21:43 We discuss the intention-behavior gap and how it plays a significant role in influence and getting people to change.
23:46 Chance shares her secret to influencing group decision, including the step-by-step strategy for “working around the roots,” as the Japanese say.
29:36 Ryan asks Chance about the chapter she has on saying no, and what she says about it might surprise you—it has a lot more about getting people to say yes than you might think.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel here.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 35,000 subscribers.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

View Details

Neither of us is much of a runner. In fact, to get us to run with any kind of speed would require some motivation—like a tiger chasing us. That’s because fear is a powerful motivator. Fear is also a powerful tool for marketers to get customers or potential customers to care about something.

So, why does fear motivate us so much? Safety is an important value for all of us. When it is threatened, we notice. In other words, fear is a strong emotion, which makes it hard to ignore or control. In some cases, you might even have an involuntary response as the fear you feel taps into something primal. Michael McIntyre provides an engaging and comedic perspective on this topic here.

When you have something to sell, it can be challenging to cut through the clutter to get people to care about what you have. In fact, getting people to care about anything can be challenging, whether there is a potential sale involved or not. That’s one of the reasons that marketers find themselves using it; fear can get people to care.

Political ads are big fans of this type of marketing. Campaigns use the opponent’s platform and voting record to scare voters about what the opponent might do if elected. Of course, the candidate campaign ad creators want voters to choose would never do those things. So, fear motivates the voters to give their vote to the political campaign’s candidate. It’s genius, and very common.

In this episode, we discuss why fear motivates humans, how marketers can use it effectively and what marketers should avoid. Plus, we decide which mask Colin should wear for Halloween. Don’t miss out on the exciting debate.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

Among other ways, Loss Aversion, which is part of the larger behavioral science concept of Prospect Theory, is part of the equation in using fear as a marketing tool. You might remember that Loss Aversion describes that in our minds, losses loom larger than gains. To put it another way, we hate losing things more than we enjoy winning things. Loss Aversion is why we are sometimes motivated to respond to a marketing offer. We don’t want to risk losing something.

Here are a few other key moments in the discussion:

03:46 We talk about our newest part of the podcast, video; click here to subscribe to the Intuitive Customer video feed for the podcast.
05:36 We talk about how fear is a tool used by marketers because it is a powerful emotion that causes people to care about things they might not have before.
08:45 We review the concept of fear aversion, FOMO, and how these can feed into these marketing messages.
15:43 Colin recalls the work of British comedian Michael McIntyre and his bit about wasps and bees, which demonstrates how we sometimes try to control our very real fear.
18:36 We explore why fear is so motivating to us and why we seek it out in “safe” spaces.
20:56 We explain how fear appeals are motivating, but you should do these things if you want them to work and avoid some other things to keep it from backfiring.
31:05 We share our practical suggestions for what you should do with this information.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel here for more content.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 35,000 subscribers.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

View Details

This week on our podcast and Intuitive Customer YouTube channel, we address a listener’s “Pickle” with our “I’m in a Pickle” feature. You might remember that a Pickle is our term for a business problem that might be addressed with customer strategy and/or the behavioral sciences. We hadn’t featured one for a while, so we thought it was time to dig into a new one.

This week, we hear from a frustrated and disappointed insurance professional named Tonya Dunn who wants to know why, after all their Customer Experience improvements, they still aren’t seeing the results they expected. She wants to know what we think the problem is and what we think they should do.

Customers are complicated and so are the reasons they do what they do—or don’t do— in an experience. In our listener’s case, the thing they are not doing is recommending them to their friends and family.

This problem is not unusual, nor is it insurmountable. However, it usually requires taking a hard look at what an organization is doing to improve and where they might have veered off course from a successful customer strategy to manage customer behavior.

In this episode, we take that hard look at what might be going on with their improvement program and how the organization might change what they are doing to get back on course and start getting those referrals rolling in the door.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

First of all, it’s important to note that there is rarely one reason something like this happens. Like many things, there are several reasons that this can happen with a Customer Experience program. There are theoretical reasons that could influence the results our listener is getting and tactical ones, too. We discuss them all in the podcast.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

03:02 We hear about the pickle and why Colin chose this one to feature on the podcast.
04:07 We talk about the theoretical reasons that our listener isn’t getting the results she wanted, starting with a favorite topic, Reference Points.
13:26 Ryan talks a little about the Evaluative Heuristic, which is something we use when comparing complicated or hard to understand things in a decision.
17:23 Colin talks about some tactical problems that could be happening, starting with how organizations sometimes focus on the wrong parts of the experience.
23:04 We discuss why it is essential to identify what customers value the most when choosing what to invest your time and resources into improvement.
27:21 We wind down the discussion and share our recommendations for our listener (and anyone else out there with a similar problem) about what to do about this pickle.

Do you have a business pickle? Tell us about it here.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 35,000 subscribers.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

View Details

Organizations need to embrace that emotional side of their experiences. Not only to design an experience that surprises and delights their customers, but also so their Artificial Intelligence works to provide useable insight. Combining the emotional data into the formula with concepts from the behavioral science side will make it so organizations can understand what and why their customers do what they do.

However, I worry that they don’t.

You’ll remember that Customer Science is the fusion of data, the behavioral sciences, and artificial intelligence (AI). Today, we will discuss what role AI plays in predicting customer emotions and how they affect customer behavior.

AI isn’t perfect. Yet. We did an interview with Broderick Turner, Ph.D., from Virginia Tech about AI recently. Turner explains his skepticism about AI since he views AI as opinions written in code.

However, imperfect or not, AI technology gives us some options we didn’t have before. Applied intelligently and with a deliberate approach, AI has the potential to solve problems, and help us achieve goals.

This episode is the second of a series of podcasts we did with Beyond Philosophy’s own Zhecho Dobrev (@ZhechoDobrev), author of The Big Miss: How Organizations Overlook the Value of Emotions. We talked with him before on our podcast a month ago about how emotions drive customer behavior. This week, we dive a little deeper on this concept, and explore how emotions affect the insights we get from Customer Science. If you’d like to read a bit more from Zhecho on emotional attachment being a key factor in customer-drive growth check out this article here.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

In the book, Dobrev shares research about AI. It looks at the typical customer journey touchpoints and how much value do each of those drive. Also, Dobrev examines where emotions and customer relationships affect the outcome, and how much value those provide. Now, he is analyzing how AI uses each of those customer journey mapping touchpoints, meaning the customer infinity lifecycle thinking about the brand, learning about the product, purchasing experience, and all the other points until we get to customer retention.

Here are a few more key moments in the discussion:

03:36 We talk about the recent podcasts that led to this one, including the first one with Zhecho a little while ago, the podcast we did on Customer Science, and an episode we had with a guest, Broderick Turner, about how opinions make their way into AI code.
08:30 Dobrev explains that regarding AI in the Customer Science mix, it should include customer emotional data, as they are the main drivers of customer behavior; otherwise, the insights it has gleaned may not be authentic drivers of behavior.
10:43 Dobrev shares three organizations that have done a great job using AI to understand how emotions affect and drive customer behavior and why it helped.
20:26 Colin shares how a previous podcast, one about the book, The Myth of Experience, demonstrates one of the problems with AI, which is that organizations don’t have the data they think they do and how that leads to problems with their application of it.
29:09 Dobrev shares his plans about what is next for AI and experience, and his effort to piece together a strategy that can improve all experiences moving

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 35,000 subscribers.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

View Details

This podcast was created in partnership with Streem

Delta thinks I am a liar. Or at least it felt like they did on this phone call with me. If we had a video option, the entire experience would be better for both sides, and I would have the flight I wanted. Video can be the untapped jewel of your experience design, and we will explain why.

The problem was a schedule change that put me out of Boston instead of Atlanta. I wanted to switch the flight back to Atlanta on a different one that was the same price but was unable to do so on my own online. So, I called the contact center. Unfortunately, they had a different fare on their system than I did, so I felt they didn’t think I was telling the truth. During that phone call with Delta, I wished I could show them what I had on my screen so they could trust me.

I had a similar experience with my doctor. I had pain in my chest and wanted to indicate to the doctor where it was without seeing him or giving him a 400-word description. The video was not an option, so it was a wordy description in stops and starts.

In this episode, we talk with special guest Jóhann Hannesson, Lead Product Manager and the head of Web Development at Streem, about using video in a Customer Experience. Hannesson says that video could be the missing link between your customer who has a problem and the expert they are talking to in the contact center who, through video, can help them faster.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

So, why do humans prefer video in these situations? There are two answers. First, there is a level of information exchange that words do not always have. You are not always depending on a customer that is not necessarily an expert in communicating the problem with terms concisely and accurately with the contact center. Second, it facilitates communication by allowing people to talk and look at the problem together. Video allows the customers and contact centers to work together on the situation.

Here are a few other critical moments in the discussion:

01:55 We introduce our guest host, Jóhann Hannesson, Lead Product Manager and the head of Web Development at Streem.
05:55 Hannesson explains how interactions with a contact center have friction when they rely on non-expert customers to communicate with expert contact center employees and how video can help resolve them in practical ways.
15:21 We learn that not only does video make calls easier for the customers, but they also improve the employee experience, too.
22:00 Hannesson explains how video has improved customer contacts and helped resolve issues more efficiently.
25:07 Hannesson shares a specific case study that used video to reduce repeat home visits.
29:22 We all share our practical advice about how to use video to improve the metrics that matter most to your organization (and that none of us are footballers, in case you were wondering).

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as a 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' He has 290,000 followers for his work. Shaw is the Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected it as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 35,000 subscribers.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

View Details

When it comes to the behavioral sciences, I love their take on memory. I love it so much, that we did a podcast mini-series on it in three parts.

In the first part, we talked about why memories are essential to experiences, when we use them to decide sometimes, and how memories form.

The second part covered how memories are connected and the different types of memories we have.

In this final episode of the memory mini-series, we explore how we store, retrieve, and forget memories.

Why all this hullabaloo about memory? Simply put, I think too many organizations underestimate the significance of the effects customers’ memories have on their bottom line. Memories are essential to experiences. They connect us to our past and drive our behavior in the present. In many ways, memories define us.

Memory is also essential to customer loyalty and retention. Nobel-Prize-Winning economist Professor Daniel Kahneman explained it all to me ten years ago and I never forgot: customers don’t choose between experiences; they choose between the memories of an experience.

In this episode, we discuss how we retrieve, store, and forget memories. However, we also talk about what you can do with this information to ensure that when customers are sorting through their memories of your experience, they come back for more every time.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

In our Memory Maker Training, we cover the importance of memories to your experience and how to train your employees to create excellent and lasting ones of your experience. This training builds upon your choice of the experience you want to deliver customers, whether that’s making them feel valued or cared for or something else in that moment. These memories are reinforced by the words, phrases, body language and tone used by your team.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

04:01 Ryan gets the discussion started by going over how our minds store memories and the influences on that process.
12:12 We learn how SOHCAHTOA from trigonometry is an excellent example of mnemonic devices that help us remember things and why.
13:57 Colin explains how an app called What Three Words uses an easier to remember way to pinpoint your location than coordinate numbers.
16:05 We discuss the Zeigarnik Effect and how it helps us retrieve memories, along with some other interesting tools.
26:41 We discuss how we sometimes misremember things, as studied by Elizabeth Loftus and presented on her TED Talk.
31:24 Ryan and I get into the “So what?” of memory and how you can apply what you have learned practically in your customer strategy.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 35,000 subscribers.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

View Details

When it comes to the behavioral sciences, I love their take on memory. I love it so much, that we did a podcast mini-series on it in three parts.

In the first part, we talked about why memories are essential to experiences, when we use them to decide sometimes, and how memories form.

The second part covered how memories are connected and the different types of memories we have.

In this final episode of the memory mini-series, we explore how we store, retrieve, and forget memories.

Why all this hullabaloo about memory? Simply put, I think too many organizations underestimate the significance of the effects customers’ memories have on their bottom line. Memories are essential to experiences. They connect us to our past and drive our behavior in the present. In many ways, memories define us.

Memory is also essential to customer loyalty and retention. Nobel-Prize-Winning economist Professor Daniel Kahneman explained it all to me ten years ago and I never forgot: customers don’t choose between experiences; they choose between the memories of an experience.

In this episode, we discuss how we retrieve, store, and forget memories. However, we also talk about what you can do with this information to ensure that when customers are sorting through their memories of your experience, they come back for more every time.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

In our Memory Maker Training, we cover the importance of memories to your experience and how to train your employees to create excellent and lasting ones of your experience. This training builds upon your choice of the experience you want to deliver customers, whether that’s making them feel valued or cared for or something else in that moment. These memories are reinforced by the words, phrases, body language and tone used by your team.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

04:01 Ryan gets the discussion started by going over how our minds store memories and the influences on that process.
12:12 We learn how SOHCAHTOA from trigonometry is an excellent example of mnemonic devices that help us remember things and why.
13:57 Colin explains how an app called What Three Words uses an easier to remember way to pinpoint your location than coordinate numbers.
16:05 We discuss the Zeigarnik Effect and how it helps us retrieve memories, along with some other interesting tools.
26:41 We discuss how we sometimes misremember things, as studied by Elizabeth Loftus and presented on her TED Talk.
31:24 Ryan and I get into the “So what?” of memory and how you can apply what you have learned practically in your customer strategy.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 35,000 subscribers.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

View Details

Memories do not exist alone. They are networked…and this network isn’t a bunch of the same kind of information arranged in neat order and categorized by type. It’s a network of different memory types intermingling facts and feelings, procedures, and judgements, all influencing each other in interesting ways.

Memory is what creates customer loyalty. It doesn’t matter what parts of your customer strategy you design. If customers don’t remember that you did it, it won’t matter later.

It’s for this reason that we love the subject of memory. So, we did a mini-series about it.

In this episode, the second part of a three-part mini-series on Memory, we build on the concepts we shared in the first episode. We talk about the memory network and how it works. We also discuss the different types of memories. Plus, we get into one of my favorite concepts from the “father of the behavioral sciences,” Nobel-Prize-winning economist Professor Daniel Kahneman, the Peak-End Rule.

It's sure to be an episode you will never forget.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

There are a lot of things that memories are. They are facts, procedures, feelings, and evaluations. One thing they are not is a sole existence. We kick off this episode with an explanation of the network of memories that makes it clear what we mean.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

02:53 Ryan explains his metaphor of a fishing net to describe how memories connect to each other in our minds.
11:06 We discuss the different types of memories and how they form.
15:39 Colin explains how sometimes organizations can design experiences that train customers to use them, like the site where he buys his sheet music for the guitar.
19:04 We get into how habits are a type of memory, albeit and automatic and subconscious one.
22:13 Colin tells a story that is sure to mean that his daughter will never let him babysit his grandchild again.
23:55 Ryan explains Episodic memory, which is the one that is most like what experienced champions should do for their customer strategy.

You can listen to part 1 of our mini-series on memory here.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 35,000 subscribers.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

View Details

Memories do not exist alone. They are networked…and this network isn’t a bunch of the same kind of information arranged in neat order and categorized by type. It’s a network of different memory types intermingling facts and feelings, procedures, and judgements, all influencing each other in interesting ways.

Memory is what creates customer loyalty. It doesn’t matter what parts of your customer strategy you design. If customers don’t remember that you did it, it won’t matter later.

It’s for this reason that we love the subject of memory. So, we did a mini-series about it.

In this episode, the second part of a three-part mini-series on Memory, we build on the concepts we shared in the first episode. We talk about the memory network and how it works. We also discuss the different types of memories. Plus, we get into one of my favorite concepts from the “father of the behavioral sciences,” Nobel-Prize-winning economist Professor Daniel Kahneman, the Peak-End Rule.

It's sure to be an episode you will never forget.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

There are a lot of things that memories are. They are facts, procedures, feelings, and evaluations. One thing they are not is a sole existence. We kick off this episode with an explanation of the network of memories that makes it clear what we mean.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

02:53 Ryan explains his metaphor of a fishing net to describe how memories connect to each other in our minds.
11:06 We discuss the different types of memories and how they form.
15:39 Colin explains how sometimes organizations can design experiences that train customers to use them, like the site where he buys his sheet music for the guitar.
19:04 We get into how habits are a type of memory, albeit and automatic and subconscious one.
22:13 Colin tells a story that is sure to mean that his daughter will never let him babysit his grandchild again.
23:55 Ryan explains Episodic memory, which is the one that is most like what experienced champions should do for their customer strategy.

You can listen to part 1 of our mini-series on memory here.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 35,000 subscribers.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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Memory is crucial to customer strategy. Understanding customer behavior requires a fundamental understanding of how we access and use memories in our daily life and how it drives decision making in our actions and even who we decide to trust.

In other words, understanding people requires understanding their memories. Further, it requires knowing what they remember and why, and also, what they don’t remember at all.

This week, the Intuitive Customer is going Netflix. We present the first of our three-part series on Memory. It’s the Memory Mini-Series, Part 1. In it, we explore how our behavior is motivated by our memories. We also take a closer look at how memories form, and where it lives in your mind, or whether it ends up in the memory wastebasket instead.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

Memory is a giant subject as it relates to Customer Experience. It affects what customers remember about your brand, what they order or buy from you, and whether they ever come back. In essence, managing customer behavior requires managing their memories.

6:43 Ryan explains why memories are not all, but almost all of human psychology.
9:36 Colin asks Ryan to explain whether memory has anything to do with the decision-making shortcuts people use to make decisions, and Ryan explains that some do, and some don’t.
17:37 Ryan explains how brands are a memory-based structure in the minds of your customers, their thoughts, and feelings that they associated with your offering and why that is.
21:21 We explore how memories form, and how the different types of memory formations differ from each other, starting with how memories exist in our minds.
26:46 We explain why Ryan can still order a pizza from Pizza Hut in Cleveland, even though he hasn’t lived there in decades, and what to expect in the next installment of our three-part series on memory.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 35,000 subscribers.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

View Details

Memory is crucial to customer strategy. Understanding customer behavior requires a fundamental understanding of how we access and use memories in our daily life and how it drives decision making in our actions and even who we decide to trust.

In other words, understanding people requires understanding their memories. Further, it requires knowing what they remember and why, and also, what they don’t remember at all.

This week, the Intuitive Customer is going Netflix. We present the first of our three-part series on Memory. It’s the Memory Mini-Series, Part 1. In it, we explore how our behavior is motivated by our memories. We also take a closer look at how memories form, and where it lives in your mind, or whether it ends up in the memory wastebasket instead.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

Memory is a giant subject as it relates to Customer Experience. It affects what customers remember about your brand, what they order or buy from you, and whether they ever come back. In essence, managing customer behavior requires managing their memories.

6:43 Ryan explains why memories are not all, but almost all of human psychology.
9:36 Colin asks Ryan to explain whether memory has anything to do with the decision-making shortcuts people use to make decisions, and Ryan explains that some do, and some don’t.
17:37 Ryan explains how brands are a memory-based structure in the minds of your customers, their thoughts, and feelings that they associated with your offering and why that is.
21:21 We explore how memories form, and how the different types of memory formations differ from each other, starting with how memories exist in our minds.
26:46 We explain why Ryan can still order a pizza from Pizza Hut in Cleveland, even though he hasn’t lived there in decades, and what to expect in the next installment of our three-part series on memory.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 35,000 subscribers.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

View Details

What did you do during the lockdown? Did you take up a hobby or a new exercise program? Did you watch hours of news coverage hoping for some good news? Were you in the kitchen working with your sourdough starter? Or were you on the couch watching the entirety of Netflix?

All were excellent pursuits, by the way, especially the bread making. However, one of my team was spending the lock down a different way: taking a deeper dive on the data we have collected on our Emotional Signature® research. What he found there became a book.

Our Emotional Signature research measures the level of emotional engagement you have with customers right now and determines what the really want from you. We undertake this exercise by asking a lot of questions. As a result, we have loads of responses, nearly a million in fact.

We had looked at it for each project, gleaning the insight for our client and then filing it away for posterity. However, we had never undertaken a perusal of the whole batch together, even though I thought we should and often told my team we were sitting on a gold mine. It only took a global pandemic to get us to start digging.

In this episode, we talk with Zhecho Dobrev, Senior Consultant at Beyond Philosophy for 13 years, Customer Experience and Behavior Science Consultant and Trainer, and, now, Author of The Big Miss: How Organizations Overlook the Value of Emotions, about what he found and whether any of it was worth its weight in gold. You can follow Zhecho on Twitter here.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

In many ways, this research is significant in scope and fairly international. Dobrev's book uses the responses from nearly 20,000 customers from 24 organizations within nine industry sectors, including healthcare, finance, telecoms, utilities, and others. While there were plenty of business-to-consumer models, almost half were business-to-business companies, too. Respondents were from the US, UK, Canada, and Europe. With all the resources and data gathered over the past two decades, what Dobrev discovered about customer behavior might surprise you.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

03:53 Zhecho explains what he was looking at and what he was looking for during his lockdown with a decade’s worth of Beyond Philosophy Emotional Signature data.
08:15 Zhecho shares some interesting research that demonstrates that despite knowing that how customers feel affects decision-making, most organizations ignore it.
15:36 We get into the opportunity costs associated with ignoring this essential part of the customer experience to organizations, including the development of a Wicked Learning environment, which we discussed a few weeks back.
20:19 We hear a story of how a closer look at what people really want helped move the ball for the YMCA gyms.
23:56 Zhecho shares another example from a luxury store in California that measured the brain activity of an employee while managing the emotional experience and how it resulted in more sales for the store.
27:51 Ryan shares his experience with managing emotions and shares his advice for how to apply this in a real world experience.
28:56 Zhecho shares his advice for how to apply these ideas in practical ways for your organization.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 35,000 subscribers.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

View Details

What did you do during the lockdown? Did you take up a hobby or a new exercise program? Did you watch hours of news coverage hoping for some good news? Were you in the kitchen working with your sourdough starter? Or were you on the couch watching the entirety of Netflix?

All were excellent pursuits, by the way, especially the bread making. However, one of my team was spending the lock down a different way: taking a deeper dive on the data we have collected on our Emotional Signature® research. What he found there became a book.

Our Emotional Signature research measures the level of emotional engagement you have with customers right now and determines what the really want from you. We undertake this exercise by asking a lot of questions. As a result, we have loads of responses, nearly a million in fact.

We had looked at it for each project, gleaning the insight for our client and then filing it away for posterity. However, we had never undertaken a perusal of the whole batch together, even though I thought we should and often told my team we were sitting on a gold mine. It only took a global pandemic to get us to start digging.

In this episode, we talk with Zhecho Dobrev, Senior Consultant at Beyond Philosophy for 13 years, Customer Experience and Behavior Science Consultant and Trainer, and, now, Author of The Big Miss: How Organizations Overlook the Value of Emotions, about what he found and whether any of it was worth its weight in gold. You can follow Zhecho on Twitter here.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

In many ways, this research is significant in scope and fairly international. Dobrev's book uses the responses from nearly 20,000 customers from 24 organizations within nine industry sectors, including healthcare, finance, telecoms, utilities, and others. While there were plenty of business-to-consumer models, almost half were business-to-business companies, too. Respondents were from the US, UK, Canada, and Europe. With all the resources and data gathered over the past two decades, what Dobrev discovered about customer behavior might surprise you.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

03:53 Zhecho explains what he was looking at and what he was looking for during his lockdown with a decade’s worth of Beyond Philosophy Emotional Signature data.
08:15 Zhecho shares some interesting research that demonstrates that despite knowing that how customers feel affects decision-making, most organizations ignore it.
15:36 We get into the opportunity costs associated with ignoring this essential part of the customer experience to organizations, including the development of a Wicked Learning environment, which we discussed a few weeks back.
20:19 We hear a story of how a closer look at what people really want helped move the ball for the YMCA gyms.
23:56 Zhecho shares another example from a luxury store in California that measured the brain activity of an employee while managing the emotional experience and how it resulted in more sales for the store.
27:51 Ryan shares his experience with managing emotions and shares his advice for how to apply this in a real world experience.
28:56 Zhecho shares his advice for how to apply these ideas in practical ways for your organization.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 35,000 subscribers.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

View Details

A lot of the behavioral sciences can feel intimidating. However, it doesn’t have to be. The Five Rules Podcast Series is our attempt at giving you an easy entry point into the complex and messy world of Behavioral Science.

In my 20 years as a consultant for Customer Experience, I have been involved in several successful implementations. The Maersk Line project that I worked on with Michél Patterson, a continuous improvement expert in Lean Six Sigma was one of the most, with an improvement of 40 points for their Net Promoter Score® (NPS) over 30 months. What’s more is they also experienced a 10 percent increase in shipping volumes.

Implementation was a big part of that success. To that end, in this episode we share the five rules of a successful customer experience implementation. Patterson takes the lead on this one, as a career-long believer in continuous improvement providing the following five rules she used in her first, and very successful, project with customer experience improvement:

Define: What are you trying to accomplish?
Measure: How will you know if what you do is working?
Analyze: What changes are possible that might improve experiences?
Improve: How can you roll these changes out on a larger basis?
Control: How can you keep things moving in the right direction?

In this episode, we cover these five rules and how they played out in our highly successful Customer Experience implementation for the world’s largest shipping container company.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

If you know anything about Lean Six Sigma, you probably recognize the five rules. These phases of the implementation serve as excellent guideposts in a customer experience project like this one. Patterson says that for her first project in the implementation area, these five areas were the natural inclination for organizing their efforts with Maersk.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

06:44 Patterson explains how she didn’t have a lot of experience with handling customer experience improvement projects, so she relied on her Lean Six Sigma background and project management structure, starting with Define.
14:43 Patterson explains the concept about putting Measure second in the list and why it is essential it is there.
22:04 We discuss the third in the list, Analyze and how the changes you make are going to improve the experience and move the metric identified in the second step, Measure.
25:00 Colin brings up the Ambassadors, how they were chosen, and the role they played in the implementation.
26:52 After you improve your experience in a bigger way based on the first three steps, you land at Control, which is where you keep things going and improving continuously.
30:58 Colin adds in some details he remembers from the implementation and how they played into the success of the overall project.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 35,000 subscribers.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

View Details

Intuition is a concept that plays a major role in decision-making for all humans. Intuition is the way we can “know” things without using our reasoning. It is based on our instincts and experiences, and our need to find patterns for things in our lives.

Unfortunately, intuition isn’t always right. Knowing when intuition could be correct and when it might not be is a critical skill for any of us, particularly in business.

Robin Hogarth’s book, The Myth of Experience, can help. In it, Hogarth has theories about intuition and how it forms, and in what conditions it might be more reliable than others.

In this episode, we explore the idea of intuition, how cognition affects it, and what environmental factors affect its reliability. We also share some practical advice on how you can overcome your propensity to use instinct and combine it with rational processes to get the best possible outcome for yourself and your organization.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

We talk about intuition as a “gut feeling” or “something we know in our hearts.” However, intuition lives squarely in our brains. It is part of the two systems of cognition that we all share. One system is fast and automatic, while the other is slow and methodical. Intuition comes from the fast and automatic part, so understanding how that works will also help you understand when your intuition is serving you—or failing you.

03:48 Ryan discusses what he learned from Hogarth’s book regarding where intuition comes from and how it forms.
06:31 We discuss how intuition plays a role in my Apple product obsession.
10:45 Hogarth’s research indicates that there are two environments under which intuitions form, kind and wicked, which has a video that explains it well.
15:51 We discuss how you might not always know which kind of environment you are in, kind or wicked, and are often fooled; this video also explains how people get fooled and why.
23:48 Moneyball, either the book or the movie, gives us a good example on how to build upon the instinctive decisions we favor and coupling that with rational processes to ensure it isn’t wrong.
25:42 We share the practical advice we can glean from this concept and apply them to your decision making and what resources you trust.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 35,000 subscribers.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

View Details

My iPhone is getting bossy. It suggested widgets based on the time of day I was using it. This proactive experience is the future of experiences. Unfortunately, few organizations know how to build them.

While the definition of proactive experience is somewhat fluid at the moment, perhaps the best way to describe it is to solve a problem before the customer knows they have one. This proactive experience is powered by the emerging field of Customer Science, a convergence of data, artificial intelligence (AI), and the behavioral sciences. Intaking a variety of consumer inputs, the machine will output a response intended to resolve these customers’ predicted needs creating a positive engagement tool for customer service.

There are benefits to customers with proactive experiences. Many customers want a proactive experience because it feels more personal, improving consumer satisfaction. It makes a person feel more important and appreciated when a system tries to recognize what they want.

Organizations benefit, too. To the company, proactive experiences provide a different advantage: customer retention. If customers feel more satisfied with their experience, they are more likely to return to your site in the future.

In this episode, we invited Vasili Triant, Chief Operating Officer of Ujet, to tell us more about what is possible with proactive experiences. He shares many go-to-market activities that can help organizations gain the first-mover advantage rather than we-are-getting-left-behind hustle.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

A company can do a few things to create this positive engagement tool for customer service. It all starts with understanding your customers, which involves customer segmentation, dividing them into similar groups, and appealing to what they have in common and value collectively. From there, you must hire people to transform this information into algorithms that can predict what the customer wants to do based upon indicators provided by said customer.

Here are a few critical moments in the discussion:

06:17 Vasili introduces the concept of proactive customer service, its definition, and its benefits.
10:33 We discuss the process of formulating a proactive customer experience and how to ensure its success.
15:45 We discuss how proactivity contributes to the future of customer experience.
25:22 Vasili explains how proactive customer experiences help to predict customer behavior.
27:50 Vasili details his frequently asked questions and the answers he uses to help organizations take advantage of this engagement tool to boost the customer service experiences.

This podcast was produced in partnership with Ujet.cx. You can find more on them on their Twitter page here.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as a 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' He has 290,000 followers. Shaw is the Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 35,000 subscribers.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

View Details

Is your idea of an ideal evening a nice meal at home and a book or a Netflix queue?

Or would you rather be at a cocktail party with people from all walks of life exchanging stories or jumping up and down to a throbbing beat in the middle of a crowded dance floor?

How you answer this question is one of many ways that you can explore your personality type. The personality you have will help you determine how to leverage your strengths (and confront your “opportunities”) on your path to success.

Psychology research determined that there are common areas of personality that all people share with many characteristics that fall under them. They are the Big Five Personality Dimensions and they might be useful to you on a journey of self-discovery.

In this episode, we explore the Big Five Personality Dimensions and how they might affect your preferences. We also look at the characteristics that fall under those dimensions to determine how these facets can affect our choices.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

The Big Five Personality Dimensions are the areas of our personality that drive our decisions. They include Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism, and Openness. For each dimension, there are personality traits that are associated with the area. For example, Extroversion, which determines how you generate your energy around (or away from) people, has facets like warmth, assertiveness, and excitement seeking, as a few of them. We think taking an online quiz is a great start in a journey of exploration for better self-awareness, as well as understanding the people around you.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

05:00 Ryan shares his insight on the differences between the two personality camps for psychological research and how it relates to the Big Five Personality Dimensions.
11:32 We discuss some of the psychology tests that human resources departments often use and how we think they should be applied to a journey of self-awareness and discovery.
17:05 We cover the Five Dimensions of Personality and explain what they are, as well as the characteristics associated with each area.
24:26 Colin shares a story about how a leadership conference revealed to him several years ago how his personality traits were interpreted by his team through communication, and how they didn’t necessarily match his self-view.
27:50 We share the practical applications we see for personality exploration in customer experience, customer strategy, and personal self-discovery.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 35,000 subscribers.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

View Details

We hope you enjoy today's show. If you do, could vote for us in the People's Choice Podcast Award? It doesn't take long to cast your vote and it would really mean a lot to both Ryan and I. Thanks very much. Cheers!

To vote, please click here.

I am grumpy about customer experience these days. Recently, I vented a bit of my frustration on LinkedIn and asking has the world gone mad? This realization came with a bunch of different things in my life as a customer went wrong, from gate delays on the tarmac for transcontinental flights on both sides of the pond to a house in shambles because of materials delays and poor project management.

Interestingly, it is not simply a case of a single company or industry experiencing failures; the problem is everywhere. From theme parks to airlines, the responses to my rant revealed issues that seem to encompass a wide range of businesses.

The reader's replies voiced many opinions about the possible causes and solutions for these declining experiences. One reader suggested that the lack of good service is due to a lack of motivated workers wanting to be paid more for less work. Another commenter theorized that the culprits might be high expectations, insufficient staffing, and a lack of empathy.

In this episode, we talk about many of the problems with experiences we are seeing today and what we can do about them—and how we can adapt to the new normal.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

While many may be quick to blame the entire situation on COVID, many of the problems we are seeing today are also influenced by other factors. For example, many labor pool shortages in the UK are affected by population migration resulting from Brexit, which makes organizations hard-pressed to find warm bodies, let alone the right warm bodies, to fill their open positions. Also, some of the problems are cultural. For example, one reader shared her perspective as a Dutch person living in Britain. Then, of course, there is the computer to deal with, and sometimes it says no (Warning: Fruity language at the end of this video). Regardless of the causes for this shift in customer service quality, we must begin to repair some of the damage.

Here are a few more key moments in the discussion:

1:38 Colin talks about his frustrations with flights to and from JFK Airport and the subsequent LinkedIn post about the world going crazy.
04:30: We discuss the declining customer satisfaction index and some of our listeners’ responses.
08:05: We evaluate a commenters assessment that customer service quality has declined due to a shrinking labor pool.
12:40: We look at COVID-19 and how it may have affected quality of Customer Experience by raising consumer expectations.
17:12: We examine a listener’s poor experience with Disney and how it is representative of a larger labor shortage problem around many larger corporations.
22:52: We explain how COVID did not cause all customer service issues but rather worsened previously existing ones. Specifically, we look at Brexit and economic downturn in Europe.
32:40: Ryan discusses a listeners review of good customer service and then we look at solutions for these customer and employee experience issues.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 35,000 subscribers.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

View Details

We hope you enjoy today's show. If you do, could vote for us in the People's Choice Podcast Award? It doesn't take long to cast your vote and it would really mean a lot to both Ryan and I. Thanks very much. Cheers!

To vote, please click here.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an incredible technology with potential to shape the future of humanity. However, it is fundamentally flawed. Who messes it up? That’s right, human programmers.

The common misconception is that AI is a pure technological brain built from scratch without the risk of human influence. The truth is the program is incapable of performing tasks beyond the boundaries of the specific situations for which the algorithms were designed.

Take the basic linear regression formula: y = mx + b. This simple equation is a program to figure out the output or “Y” by means of the input “B” through the algorithm “mx.” All that an AI is doing can be summarized at a basic level in this equation. It is finding an output from an input using a fundamental algorithm. Since the AI is simply doing the math, the algorithm is the most important part of any AI.

Understanding these principles, it is apparent what really matters in AI construction is the importance put upon the inputs in the coding process. Currently, AI is not capable of making these decisions; only human coders have that power.

In this episode, we talk about today’s AI and its flaws with our guest Broderick Turner, Ph.D.,Assistant Professor of Marketing at Virginia Tech., and founder of TRAP LAB (Technology Race and Prejudice LAB). We explore the inherent biases built into programmers’ decisions when making AI’s—and the ridiculousness of a robot uprising with the technology we have today.

So, What’s AI Good for Then?

Many of us perceive AI as mysterious as a magic trick. However, in reality, AI is a series of algorithms. In other words, AI is merely the means of producing an output from an input based upon the algorithm put in place by the programmer. Therefore, AI tends to work best when the inputs are limited.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

03:46 Dr. Turner introduces “Weapons of Math Destruction”, the concept that AIs are merely opinions written in code, and what that means for AI.
05:30 We discuss the absurdity of the idea of an AI takeover and why this would be impossible with our current technology.
09:32 Ryan asks Dr. Turner to explain what scenarios AI is good for and we discuss some of the most successful AI products in the modern world.
13:09 Dr. Turner discusses his own private research including how AI is used in conjunction with YouTube thumbnails to determine optimization for view counts for advertisers.
17:12 We discuss how AI is used to determine which thumbnails will be the default based upon data collected through user trials and how AI is effective in this field. We then discuss how AI audits are conducted in these scenarios.
26:28 We discuss the results of the audits conducted by Dr. Turner and what this means about the user groups of the sites tested.
32:40 Dr. Turner discusses the racial and gender biases found in websites like Twitter and how the algorithms the sites use affect them.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 35,000 subscribers.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

View Details

We hope you enjoy today's show. If you do, could you vote for us in the People's Choice Podcast Award? It doesn't take long to cast your vote and it would really mean a lot to both Ryan and I. Thanks very much. Cheers!

To vote, please click here.

There is a compelling and interesting Sci-Fi show on Netflix called “The OA.” But I don’t recommend watching it.

I wouldn’t watch it because this show was victim of outdated broadcast content strategy in a streaming-dominated world of television. However, I mention it because it represents what can happen if you neglect to update your customer strategy to invest in your Long Tail business model.

The Long Tail refers to a different inventory approach made possible by the Internet. It represents the ability to have any number of options available in virtual form for the consumption of consumer groups of any number and still be profitable. It allows you to offer more options without regard for the shelf space needed in a physical space. The Long Tail strategy is particularly applicable to content, like books or television shows, but it likely has applications in many other business verticals as well.

In this episode, we explore the implications of the Long Tail strategy for customer experiences and how we can learn a lot from Netflix’s mistakes in this area. We also give you practical ways to apply these business lessons to your own Long Tail customer strategy.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

“The OA” is a show with two seasons, referred to as parts, that ends the second season with a significant cliff hanger. However, since the other three parts of the original five-part story arc were never made, it hangs there in the Netflix Original inventory unresolved, forever. It is an unsatisfying end to an otherwise compelling show. That’s why even though you can watch the “The OA” right now, I don’t recommend it. You will never get the answers you seek about what happened. We take a look at why this happens and what we can learn from it for your Long Tail customer strategy.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

01:36 Ryan introduces the premise of what happened with the Netflix show “The OA” and why their content strategy creates problems with their catalog.
04:32 Colin explains the concept of Long Tail and how it applied to Amazon’s business model in the early days and later became an essential part of other businesses’ offerings.
12:16 We discuss how Netflix might be a victim of using an old broadcast strategy to their approach to creating and renewing content, and how it can poison their Long Tail offering.
17:04 Colin asks Ryan to explain why humans need completion from a psychological standpoint, which Ryan ascribes to cognitive dissonance and our discomfort with feeling unresolved.
22:26 Ryan tells the story of France’s Maginot Line and how fighting an old war did nothing to help defend the country from the Germans in World War II.
24:52 We explain how you can apply what we see happening at Netflix to your own experience and its Long Tail possibilities and opportunities.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 35,000 subscribers.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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We hope you enjoy today's show. If you do, could vote for us in the People's Choice Podcast Award? It doesn't take long to cast your vote and it would really mean a lot to both Ryan and I. Thanks very much. Cheers!

To vote, please click here.

Usually, we have one pickle per podcast. However, today’s podcast has two pickles per podcast. Sure, it’s still The Intuitive Customer Podcast, just now with an extra pickle.

Our first pickle comes from Jane, who works at a large business-to-business company. They are implementing a Voice of Customer program to identify critical improvements necessary for the organizations. However, to get the insight they need to make sweeping changes, they need robust data collection. Jane asked us for advice on how to increase their survey response rates to get the data they need, and also how to get the local team to get on board with the data collection process.

Our second, extra pickle, comes from Elizabeth, who asks, how is inflation affecting people’s ability to buy? Since I am sure that we are all curious about this issue—both as businesses and consumers—we thought we would include this one as a bonus.

In this episode, we respond to both Jane and Elizabeth’s business pickles. First, we discuss how Jane can increase her response rates to her survey and get the team on board with the new initiative. Then, we dive into research from consumer research firm Attest that tells us a bit about how people feel about inflation and how that is going to affect their customer behavior.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

Previous podcasts might help take a bit of a deeper dive on each of our listener’s pickles. We had a podcast, that we produced in partnership with Attest, on the 5 Rules for Customer Research a few weeks ago, which addresses the areas of Jane’s pickle. Also, we did an episode recently called, Inflation is Going to Kill My CX, and that addresses some of the ways to respond to inflation in your experience.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

03:07 We hear the background on Jane’s pickle and what their company is trying to do.
06:37 Ryan shares perspective on how you can motivate people to respond to the survey in different ways, and Colin adds that considering who you are asking will also influence how you motivate them.
14:23 Colin explains how communication about how you will use the data you collect and being selective about how often you ask will both boost response rates.
20:44 We learn about Elizabeth’s question regarding inflation, and Colin shares interesting statistics that he gleaned from Attest's US inflation sentiment tracker.
24:06 Ryan explains how the way we buy gas might make the feelings about gas prices more painful.
26:08 Both Ryan and Colin share their insights on how organizations can respond to customers that are bombarded with price hikes and personal cutbacks that build relationships instead of destroying them.

We produced this podcast in partnership with Attest.

Do you have a business pickle? Tell us about it here.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 35,000 subscribers.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

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When I was still a lad, around 10, I brought home a school report that read, “Colin is the class clown.” I am still proud of that report card to this day. Humor is an essential part of life and, surprisingly enough, business. There are numerous ways to use humor to your advantage in your customer strategy.

You might have heard the phrase, “Laughter is the best medicine.” That’s because it is. There are many health benefits of laughter. Laughter reduces tension and increases trust in relationships. It can make an uncomfortable situation more bearable, which is good for everyone’s mental health, too.

Laughter is an excellent strategic tool in business, as well as in life. When we laugh, it feels disarming, and we are more willing to listen to people who make us laugh—because we hope they will do it again! When people are listening to you, there are many more opportunities to be persuasive.

I always want my team to use humor, appropriate humor, of course. I also encourage them to read the room, or, to put it another way, ensure that their joke is coming at the right time.

In this episode, we explore the many ways that humor can encourage your customer strategy in a positive direction. We also talk about the four theories behind what makes something funny, and have many clips that demonstrate what we mean.

(Also, it is important to note that the comedy clips have a bit of fruity (aka, bad) language, so be careful if you play them at work or around your mum.)

Key Ideas to Improve Your Customer Experience

We discuss the four theories of humor, which, to be honest, don’t sound funny at all. As we go through them, some of you naturally funny people will understand these concepts intuitively. However, for those that want to be more amusing and use comedy more effectively in their customer strategy, it is helpful to be familiar with what makes something funny to people. So, consider how you can apply these concepts to business, whether through the contact center and account management interactions, or marketing messaging, or even in the conference room.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

09:05 We begin with the first of four theories of humor, Superiority Theory, which is much better than the other three for sure.
14:51 Ryan talks about the second theory of humor, Relief Theory, and we all felt a lot better afterward.
19:50 Incongruity Theory is the third theory we discuss, but it didn’t go at all like we expected.
25:05 The last theory, Benign Violation Theory, explains how breaking social norms or language meaning is what makes this type funny that Ryan probably made up because he needed a fourth one to finish out the list.
27:03 Colin asks Ryan to explain where sarcasm falls into all of this and then proceeds to use a bunch of British slang that really cleared things up for all of us.
35:51 Colin and Ryan break down how all of these theories can be useful in your customer strategy.

We hope you enjoy today's show. If you do, could vote for us in the People's Choice Podcast Award? It doesn't take long to cast your vote and it would really mean a lot to both Ryan and I. Thanks very much. Cheers!

To vote, please click here.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 35,000 subscribers.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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I was recently out and about and thought how happy I was that the pandemic was behind us. Many people must feel the same way because retail is bouncing back after two terrible years. However, it’s not bouncing back to the way it was before. Customers have changed how they want things and organizations should take advantage of how a physical and virtual experience work together in their customer strategy.

Bjorn contacted us with this very question. He has a business pickle that he wants help with, specifically, how to leverage the technology like Customer Science and online tools developed during the pandemic to enhance the brick-and-mortar Customer Experience.

In this episode, we explore this subject. We give examples of some excellent versions of this integration as well as areas of opportunity for them. We refer to two other podcasts, Nissan and the Metaverse, that discuss these types of integrations that might also help surrounding this topic. We also give Bjorn and the rest of you the practical advice that can make this process work for your customers and your bottom line.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

Different people want distinctive experiences at various times. This idea is the foundation of Customer Segmentation and targeted marketing. When discussing an integration between online and physical Customer Strategies, it is essential to consider why people want one over the other or why they were motivated to be in the type of interaction they are at any given time. This understanding will help you create an integration strategy that enhances things for your customers rather than detracts.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

02:40 We hear about Bjorn’s pickle from Bjorn himself and reflect on how the pandemic changed both online and brick-and-mortar interactions likely forever.
06:01 Colin shares a story about a recent shopping experience that was an excellent example of what is possible with the physical/virtual experience integration until they blew it at the end.
11:35 We talk about how the most important question to ask when comparing shoppers between online and in-person is their motivation for being there.
14:30 Colin shares some interesting statistics from McKinsey’s “What's Next for Digital Consumers? May 23rd, 2021,” which leads to a discussion about the advantages and disadvantages of human interactions in Customer Experiences and how organizations should adapt experiences regarding that.
22:53 Colin talks about how Customer Science and the AI involved will enable more customer segmentation that was possible in an analog world.
29:24 We summarize our discussion and what it means for practical steps organizations can take to successfully integrate digital and physical experiences moving forward.

Do you have a business pickle? Tell us about it here.

We hope you enjoy today's show. If you do, could vote for us in the People's Choice Podcast Award? It doesn't take long to cast your vote and it would really mean a lot to both Ryan and I. Thanks very much. Cheers!

To vote, please click here.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 35,000 subscribers.

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Breakthrough thinking: Why do we believe things that are not true?

There was a car brand several decades ago in the UK called ŠKODA. It was a terrible car, much like Yugo was in the US. However, they have changed their image and today, my son wants to buy one. I told him the jokes we all used to have about ŠKODA and their low-quality construction (What do a ŠKODA and a baby have in common? They never go anywhere without a rattle.)

My son doesn’t care. His perception is that they are a great car company. Mine hasn’t changed.

Now, I know my son better than anyone, except maybe his wife and mother. I know he is sensible and good with his money. He’s no Wally. If he decides to do something, he bloody well knows why (he gets that from me). Nevertheless, his opinion that the company is better now has done nothing to change my mind.

In this episode we are exploring why we believe things that are not true, even when faced with facts. Psychologically, there are a lot of reasons we do this. We also talk about how you can overcome a bad reputation and change customers perceptions of you with your customer strategy. Spoiler alert: It doesn’t happen fast.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

There are a few reasons why we won’t change our minds even when the facts tell us we should. Some are psychological; some are social. However, they are all at work in this critical customer strategy concept.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

04:31 Colin shares how the different spread of information about the war in Ukraine in the West vs. Russia can ensure that the Russian people don’t change their minds or stop supporting it.
09:19 Ryan answers Colin’s questions about why people don’t change their minds even when they are presented with information that they are wrong about something with several influences.
12:32 We discuss how the self-image can get in the way of changing one’s mind, also; we push away negativity from our self-image.
16:12 We talk about the length of time it takes to change minds and what it takes during that time to ensure it happens.
19:11 Ryan tells a story about how social agendas can also get in the way of changing one’s minds, and it will probably not surprise you to know that politics is a culprit.
26:54 Colin reviews what he thinks the key learning is for organizations and how we would combat these inclinations with customer strategy.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 35,000 subscribers.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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Podcast Summary

A lot of the behavioral sciences can feel intimidating. However, it doesn’t have to be. The Five Rules Podcast Series is our attempt at giving you an easy entry point into the complex and messy world of Behavioral Science.

5 Rules for Effective Customer Research That Make A Difference

Customer research is an essential part of any organization’s customer strategy. However, it requires more than emailing a customer survey out over seven years or so. Customer research requires a few things to be effective in driving the metrics that matter for your experiences.

This episode, with guest Sam Killip, Director of Customer Research from consumer research platform, Attest, which helps organizations understand their customers. Attest’s global online consumer platform taps into hundreds of thousands of consumers around the globe.

Killip says their clients survey consumers to understand consumers' views and what they're doing, thinking, and feeling to feed into their customer strategy. With her help, we devised a list of five rules for making these efforts effective.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

The 5 Rules for Effective Customer Research That Make a Difference include:

Define the right method.
Get under the skin of the customer.
Cast your net wide.
Respect the respondents.
Do them little and often rather than large-scale.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

03:09 Killip explain a little background about Attest and how she came to her position there after a long career in law before joining the team.
05:04 We share the first rule, Define the right method, and discuss why survey answers are not always the best way to understand why customers do what they do.
08:55 We introduce the second rule, Get under the skin of the customer, and why mom and pop shop owners knew this one from day one, and how larger companies can gain that same understanding.
14:36 When talking about rule number three, Cast your net wide, Tillip explains how you can get into trouble when you make too many assumptions about your who your customers are.
20:18 As we move into the second to last rule, Respect the respondents, we focus on appreciation for the people who provide the customer voice and the essential nature of keeping them engaged with the project.
23:49 We cover the last rule, Do them little and often rather than large-scale, and why this one is essential to keeping your finger on the pulse of the customer sentiment.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on Linkedin and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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We have another business pickle to address. This time it’s with Christine Jones who is having problem with her organization not taking customer complaints or the Voice of Customer program seriously.

We have been there. Ryan once worked at a grocery store that had a suggestion box that he never once in all the years he worked there saw opened. He suspects that no one even had the key anymore.

Colin’s corporate employer engaged in a pricey customer survey every year, listened to the results, including the complaints, and then carried on with business-as-usual. When Colin complained, one person suggested maybe they stop doing the customer survey.

In this episode, we explore why this happens with Voice of Customer feedback and complaints. We also share practical and actionable steps to change this for your organizations—and none of them are to stop getting customer feedback.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

Organizations that are monopolies don’t need to bother with customer feedback. However, monopolies are few and far between. For the rest of the organizations, which is almost all of them, competition necessitates taking customer complaints seriously—before your customers become the competition’s customers.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

01:58 We read Christine’s pickle and share our stories that commiserate her problem, because it’s not an uncommon one, especially in business today.
06:00 Colin shares his last point first with Christine, which is exactly what he did in the same situation: realize that it could be that this organization might not be the best fit for her long term.
13:57 Ryan explains that empathy for fellow employees will help customer strategy champions to help them prioritize the experience agenda, which might mean making allies higher up in the organization.
19:26 We discuss Confirmation Bias and Reference Points and how they play a role in how organizations view the Voice of Customer and customer complaints (hint: they are not small ones).
24:24 We share the practical things that Christine can do in this environment to affect change and get the organization to take customer complaints seriously.
29:24 We talk about what might be the greatest customer complaint ever set to music, United Breaks Guitars.

Do you have a business pickle? Tell us about it here.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 35,000 subscribers.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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Discover how customers really make decisions and what to do about it

Your Customers Want Self-Service, And The Reasons Why Might Surprise You

Many organizations bust their backs trying to deliver excellent Customer Service. However, it might surprise you to learn your Customers want self-service—and the reasons why might surprise you even more.

Attest is a company that does consumer research, and they've got several great reports that I've been reading. In particular, two stats from their US Food and Beverage Report from July 2021 emphasized to me how essential a topic this was. We discussed them on a recent podcast:

72% of Gen-Z prefer self-checkout options over cashiers in grocery stores
68% of shoppers want virtual try on tools for clothes and makeup

Self-service has been one of the most significant trends in all business in the last two decades. So, why? What's the human thing behind it? When do people want more or less human interaction?

Self-Service Versus Full Service

The first stat above suggests a generational shift from a traditional way of doing things. It could be that younger people want to do things a new way.

Reference Points also play a role here. People who have been shopping for a while (e.g., older generation X, Boomers, and Silent Generation) form Reference Points about what that interaction should be like. For example, if you're used to full-service checkout, anything different from that might bother you. You might feel self-checkout is extra work. However, the full-service checkout isn't as ingrained into your expectations as a younger shopper (e.g., younger Gen X, Millennials and Gen Z). So, you might have a more positive reaction to self-service than older people.

For me, I would use self-service sometimes and not others. It's a tradeoff between speed and efficiency. For example, if I have a full cart of groceries at Publix, self-service would be a no-go because it would be a hassle. However, at McDonald's, I would probably use the self-ordering screens to speed up the delivery of my heart-stopping meal. In both cases, my choice to use or not use self-service has to do with how easy it is for me.

Do you have a business pickle? Tell us about it here.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 35,000 subscribers.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

View Details

How do you know if someone trusts you? Is it how they talk to you? How much time do they spend with you? What do they say about you when you aren’t around?

We might argue the answer is D, all of the above. Plus, there are many other behaviors people have that indicate they trust you. Moreover, these things are true whether we are talking about people in your personal life or customers on your sales reports.

All this talk about trust is because of Bob. As you may remember, some of our listeners write into our “I’m in a Pickle” feature of the podcast. This week we consult Bob about how to find out if the account he manages as part of his new position trusts his company. Bob’s wants to know if we have any tests that will help him determine if they do.

In this episode, we talk about the many ways you can find out if your customers trust you. They range from the direct to the obscure but should give you a clear picture of how customers feel about your company regarding trust and many other emotions you want to know about.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

Bob’s question inspired not just one answer, but several. We have four suggestions for Bob that can help determine if his account trusts his company. Each of them is effective in their own way, and also works together with the others to create a complete picture of the trust in this significant business relationship.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

02:29 Our listener Bob shares his pickle as a new employee at a company handling a big account that wants to test whether the account trusts his company, and asks for our help.
04:13 We share our first suggestion for Bob, which is to ask customers if they trust you, preferably on surveys, which is the easy part; the hard part is what we tell you about the answers.
08:13 The second secret we share builds upon the first one by suggesting you pose scenarios and ask questions whose answers will indicate what they think about you.
15:39 We talk about how to use what you know about customer behavior data to discern how much customers trust you, including what they want to hide from you.
22:02 Ryan explains how trust experiments and games can also indicate how customers feel about you, including an example from the British TV hit show, “Golden Balls.”

Do you have a business pickle? Tell us about it here.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 35,000 subscribers.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

View Details

The contact center at many organizations doesn’t get the strategic consideration it deserves. My former contact center team at British Telecom seemed to be viewed primarily as a cost center, a necessary expense. As a result, their team was always pressured to streamline staffing, coached to be as efficient as possible with multiple priorities, and designed to generate the least amount of cost.

These measures weren’t bad business principles, but they also didn’t send the best signal to the team. Contact center employees felt like second-class citizens in the organization, not nearly as valuable or venerated as sales and marketing.

However, the contact center should have been valued. The contact center is an essential component to your experience, and also contains a wealth of information about your customers. With all that rich data pouring in, the contact center can be a front-line help to the company and the company’s brand.

The tide is turning regarding how organizations view the contact center. We have the pandemic to thank for part of this realization about the contact center’s value. One of the few good things that came out of the pandemic was the acceleration of technology adoption and comfort. Plus, the need for contact center workers to work from home meant that organizations had to embrace the cloud, which is an essential element for the contact center technology of the future.

In this episode, we host Thomas Goodmanson, President and CEO of Calabrio, a global Customer Experience intelligence company that builds software to enrich customer interactions. Goodmanson explains the future of contact centers and why now is an excellent time to be in the contact center game.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

Goodmanson points out that high turnover rates are a source of frustration for many contact center organizations. Turnover makes it difficult to train your people in the skills necessary to deliver that experience you want for your brand. If you don’t have that front-line team there for the context, the data you collect is full of all your customer behavior insights, but inaccessible to put to work for your customer strategy.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

05:41 Goodmanson explains which parts of the employee experience of the contact center employee are broken and why.
08:30 Colin asks Goodmanson to take a deeper dive into how the software available for contact centers enriches human interactions and where that ties into Calabrio’s customer experience intelligence field.
14:21 We discuss the area of self-service and how some generational differences might drive the channels for future contact centers.
18:48 Goodmanson describes how software innovation will alleviate some of the stresses and pain points associated with a call center employee’s daily work.
22:00 Colin shares his view about how the experiences of the future that will be most successful are those that are proactive, and asks what Goodmanson thinks about that, too.
24:37 All three of the hosts share their advice and key takeaways for the future of contact centers.

This episode is sponsored by Calabrio.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 35,000 subscribers.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

View Details

Verint is an expert in the Voice of Customer and have been for over 25 years. Their Verint on the Engagement Capacity Gap report is essential reading for experience professionals today. Fleischaker emphasizes the critical nature of ensuring that you don’t overlook Voice of Customer data, which is crucial part, so you can optimize the relevance of the insights you get from it.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

03:59
08:07
12:51
20:04
21:57
25:02

Verint sponsors this episode. Click here to register for Verint's annual engagement conference in Orlando from June 13 to June 16.

Verint helps the world's most iconic brands build enduring customer relationships by connecting work data and experiences across the enterprise. The Verint Customer Engagement Cloud Platform draws on the latest advancements in AI and analytics, an open cloud architecture, and the science of customer engagement to meet shifting customer interactions and their ever-increasing demands.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 35,000 subscribers.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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How many streaming services do you subscribe to? How many products are on Amazon Subscription in your Prime Account? Do you subscribe to satellite radio? How about music streaming?

I think you get the point. We subscribe to everything. Subscriptions are as normal today as texting or drinking $6 versions of coffee that we can make for ourselves at home.

Subscriptions have a lot of appealing features to customers. In the U.S. Food and Beverage report by Attest, a consumer research platform, we learned that Of course, they also have a lot of benefits to the companies that offer them, not the least of which is a steady stream of income from its customer base.

In this episode, we explore the reasons why customer like subscriptions and how psychology influences these feelings. We also explain how behavioral sciences play a role there, too.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

Many years ago, I subscribed to Amazon Prime to get faster shipping. As a result, I also get Amazon Prime streaming as part of the package, but it wasn’t the driving force behind my decision. Now, the irony is that I choose Amazon Day delivery to reduce how many shipping packages I receive. So, apparently, I no longer need the fast shipping, but I won’t cancel Amazon Prime because I don’t want to lose the streaming service. This example is not uncommon among subscribers. Loss Aversion is a significant influence on our behavior when we continue to subscribe.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

03:19 Before we get into the theories about why subscriptions work the way we do, we share some interesting examples of programs that are working, from phones to cars to…heated seats?
06:27 Colin shares some fascinating statistics revealed by Attest, a consumer research platform, in their latest Food and Beverage report.
11:14 Ryan explains the two perspectives regarding subscription services and what each of them likes best about it.
16:54 We discuss how Mental Accounting benefits from the lower installment pricing inherent in subscription programs.
20:33 We discuss the role of Loss Aversion in subscription service and how it can benefit organizations that offer them to customers.
29:17 We share our practical advice and what we think organizations should be wary of, or tragedy may ensue.

This podcast was done in partnership with Attest.

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Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 35,000 subscribers.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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Customer Science is a vital part of any organization’s future success with their customer experience. The combination of AI, behavioral sciences, and data is a powerful way to gain insight into your customers behavior so you can provide a proactive and perfect experience for them.

But how good is the data you are feeding it? And are you feeding ALL your data into the mix? If our experience tells us anything, it’s that you probably aren’t, which can degrade the quality of the insights available to you.

In this episode, we talk with Chief Marketing Officer of Verint, Celia Fleischaker about the third part of the Customer Science fusion formula, data, and how to ensure that you are using all of yours.

Verint is an expert in the Voice of Customer and have been for over 25 years. Their Verint on the Engagement Capacity Gap report is essential reading for experience professionals today. Fleischaker emphasizes the critical nature of ensuring that you don’t overlook Voice of Customer data, which is crucial part, so you can optimize the relevance of the insights you get from it.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

One significant issue with many organizations’ customer data is it isn’t collected in one place, nor is it in one format. This situation makes it difficult to leverage all the data you have. Often, organizations use what is easiest to use, e.g., sales numbers, geo locations, delivery records, rather than all that is available. However, it is in the layering of details that you have about customer behavior that you get the richest rewards from Customer Science.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

03:59 Fleischaker explain how the shift to digital channels has resulted in more data available for you to feed into your AI, including that from the Voice of Customer, which requires companies to consolidate it.
08:07 We hear about an insurer in Europe who is using Customer Science to improve first all resolution and Customer Experience in the contact center.
12:51 Colin asks Fleischaker how this influx of data used with Customer Science has changed marketing.
20:04 Fleischaker explains how the new approach to customer strategy will affect customer segmentation and targeting efforts.
21:57 We talk about the ways that leveraging your data can result in a proactive experience that anticipates customers’ needs.
25:02 All three of us share practical steps that organizations should take today to make their data work better for them in the science-driven future.

Verint sponsors this episode. Click here to register for Verint's annual engagement conference in Orlando from June 13 to June 16.

Verint helps the world's most iconic brands build enduring customer relationships by connecting work data and experiences across the enterprise. The Verint Customer Engagement Cloud Platform draws on the latest advancements in AI and analytics, an open cloud architecture, and the science of customer engagement to meet shifting customer interactions and their ever-increasing demands.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

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LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 35,000 subscribers.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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A lot of the behavioral sciences can feel intimidating. However, it doesn’t have to be. The Five Rules Podcast Series is our attempt at giving you an easy entry point into the complex and messy world of Behavioral Science.

Experiments serve as the gold standard for determining causality. If we create them correctly, we know that an action we take makes something else happen and there isn’t any other explanation.

That is, if we create them correctly.

Even in my corporate career I realized that determining causality is tricky. After presenting to organizations the revenue gains they can expect by taking my advice, they ask, “How do we know that your changes caused the increase instead of something else?” My answer was always the same, unsatisfying one: You won’t.

That’s because we can never know the causality of behavior at 100 percent certainty (even if we follow all the rules).

However, when we have more data we also have more confidence that there is no other explanation. Sound experiment creation strategies will help us build a solid case for our causality.

In this episode, we share the five rules for creating behavioral experiments. We talk about how academics design behavioral experiments and how that could work regarding your experimentation regarding changing experiences to inspire new customer behavior.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

So, what are the 5 rules? The 5 Rules for Running Behavioral Business Experiments include:

Define your metrics and what you're going to measure.
Establish comparison conditions.
Randomize or get as close to randomization as you possibly can.
Define the theory…or not.
Foster a culture of experimentation.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

03:46 Ryan begins his list of rules by first explaining why you should care about following them, which is because proper experimentation determines causality.
07:43 We get into a discussion about the three things that you need to establish causality in your experiment and why they are important to your results.
10:12 Ryan begins the list of the rules, starting with the most foundational, which is to determine what you want to measure before you design your experiment.
12:48 We discuss why it is essential to establish different conditions in your experiment (Hint: it comes down to one word: comparison).
20:25 Ryan explains why having a theory going into an experiment than not having one.
25:42 We talk about why it is essential to allow failure with regards to experiments, and why you will be glad you did (most likely).

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 35,000 subscribers.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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Prices will never be low enough for customers. After all, have you ever got a customer survey back that said you should charge more for your product or service? Have you ever written that yourself as a customer? Of course you haven’t! Who would?

As you may remember, some of our listeners write in to our “I’m in a Pickle” feature of the podcast. This week we consult Peter about his business-to-business (B2B) customers that push back on price. Peter’s company is not the cheapest, nor do they have plans to be, so he wants to know what he should do about this customer behavior.

Too many organizations don't have a pricing strategy, even though having one is essential to your overall customer strategy. The foundational element is that you should communicate value. Without value that the customer sees, your price will never, ever be low enough.

Chances are, some of you have faced Peter’s problem, too. So, this episode is about customer pricing and the psychology surrounding it. Perhaps more importantly, it’s about how to keep your prices high and your customers feeling like they are getting a deal.

Key Ideas to Improve Your Customer Experience

In another podcast, we discussed Fernando’s problem regarding distinguishing a commodity from the others in the field. If you haven’t heard that one, a simple summary is determining how you are different from the other suppliers is first, and communicating this difference is second. These are the same principles vital for pricing strategy. After all, nothing is valuable until a customer is willing to pay for it.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

03:21 Ryan, who researches pricing in his academic career, talks about the different approaches one can take to address pricing issues with customers, starting with communication.
05:12 Colin talks about the concept of perceived value and how no one will buy anything without it.
10:05 Ryan begins his advice for Peter by talking about how a pushback on price is often a feeling that the value provided does not justify the price, which is usually a communication problem.
13:14 Colin talks about buying an uninterruptible power supply using a metric he understood, but maybe not the most important one; Ryan explains that this happens a lot, so manufacturers should know what that easier metric is that customers use to decide.
18:00 We talk about the Curse of Knowledge, and how it can affect how we communicate about a products’ features and specs instead of the benefits that customers would understand and want to know.
24:35 We also suggest that the problem might be that Peter has price conscious customers and he needs to attract a different type instead based on a podcast a few weeks ago about firing your customers.

Do you have a business pickle? Tell us about it here.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 35,000 subscribers.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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A lot of companies get customer segmentation wrong. Or they got it right, but they did it seven years ago. The fact is that if you have customer segments that were constructed before February 2020, you probably need to do it again. Things have changed dramatically over the past couple of years, and the customer behavior shared by your customer segments is one of them.

One of the biggest problems that I see in customer segmentation, besides timeliness, is that the categories do not get into why customers buy. Often organizations choose broad categories to the segments, like how much business they represent to the organization or what type of widget they buy, to group like customers together.

Segmenting your customers for targeting purposes is essential. This podcast subject was inspired by some interesting stats I read about in the consumer research team Attest’s 2022 US Consumer Trends report about what different groups of customers want. Many of these stats reveal that different people want the brands they choose to communicate to them in various ways, and often these things are in stark opposition to each other. It makes clear that one message for all your customers delivered one way will be less than effective for your customer strategy.

In this episode, we discuss our 5 rules to effectively target your customers. Starting with a rule that demands you accept change as a constant, we set you on the right course for grouping your customers into meaningful segments that allow you to target them with the right message that encourages them to do what you want in the way that speaks to them best.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

Many times, when I discuss customer segmentation with clients, I learn that they have already done it. Excited to see what they have, I take a look, learning that many of the segments include really relevant information like fax numbers or Myspace handles. Usually, after I ask, I learn that these segments were done years ago. However, if your customer segmentation is older than 24 months, it might as well be from 24 years ago. The world has changed, and your customer segments have, too.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

03:08 I share some interesting stats from the Attest's 2022 US Consumer Trends report that create a problem for many marketers and inspired this topic for the podcast.
05:26 We share the first rule about accepting that things change, including your customer segments, so be prepared for it.
08:31 We discuss how multiple inputs help create more meaningful grouping than the vague and broad ones we often encounter that do not assist effective targeting.
11:21 Colin explains that it is essential to know what you want the target to do before you segment, which is why he considered making it rule number one.
14:06. We explain how customer behavior is the most important and the most neglected of the characteristics used to segment customers.
19:39 We reveal the final rule and Ryan explains that effective segmentation should have four to eight groupings.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 35,000 subscribers.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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Organizations only pay lip service to CX, and now, we have the numbers to prove it.

From Zendesk’s The Trends Report 2022, you can see a clear dichotomy between what people say they will do and what they will actually do regarding CX.

You should read the whole report, but for starters, here are some stats I was surprised to learn (or maybe not surprised as much as interested to see it in print):

73% of business leaders reported a direct link between customer service and business performance
56% of organizations say they will focus on driving better customer experiences over the next 12 months.

However, later in the report we learn:

23% of organizations said that they were looking to increase customer satisfaction.
23% said they are looking to drive stronger relationships

Framing that one in reverse means 67% are not looking to increase customer satisfaction or drive stronger relationships. So, what is going on here?

In this episode, Chief Technology Officer of Zendesk Adrian McDermott (@amcdermo) joins us to give his take on these numbers. For the past 15 years, Zendesk has provided tools and technologies for digital CX and worked with companies to enable agent efficiency in customer service. McDermott has been with them for the past 10 years and scaled his product development from ten people to around 1,500. He also shares what he thinks organizations should do with their experiences.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

My regular readers will remember that customers satisfaction scores across the board are falling or stagnating for most organizations. The American Customer Satisfaction Index published a report that suggested customer satisfaction was approaching a 17-year low. What’s more, customers care about this dissatisfaction. Zendesk reported that 61% of customers say that they would switch to a competitor off the back of one bad service experience—and that’s just one dissatisfying experience!

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

05:04 Colin goes through the stats from the Zendesk report that show the dichotomy between what organizations say they will do regarding CX versus what they plan to actually do.
08:12 McDermott shares his take on how these numbers demonstrate two problems, one on the supply side and the other on the demand side, and how organizations should respond.
19:59 We shift the conversation to discuss Customer Science, and to get McDermott’s take on how these tools will help move CX forward.
23:13 McDermott explains that he thinks these tools can aid in personalization, ideally down to a segment of one individual.
26:35 We talk about the strengths of Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning in improving Customer Service efficiencies and where that is an appropriate application in customer facing interactions.
34:18 We all share our tips for taking this report’s information and today’s technology and doing something practical with it, proving once again that taking theory beyond the philosophy is the most significant way to make it useful in CX.

This episode of the podcast was made in partnership with Zendesk.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 35,000 subscribers.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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A common mistake organizations make with their experience is failing to understand customer expectations. This mistake will lead to customers feeling unhappy and disappointed—two emotions I guarantee won’t contribute to your customer-driven growth.

Expectations are a form of Reference Point, which people use to compare and evaluate experiences. The expectations are rational, emotional, and sensory, and are an essential companion for customers as they walk your customer journey, making them essential for your Journey Map.

What’s worse, we aren’t meeting customer expectations, at least not according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index. On a recent podcast, we explored how the ACSI is showing poor outcomes for customer satisfaction over the last ten years, a time span that make it impossible just to blame the virus.

In this episode, we talk about customer expectations and why so many companies get them wrong. We will also take a look at why we have expectations and where they originate, as well as the reasons we think this way. Perhaps most importantly, we will talk about how to avoid disappointing customers’ expectations when you present them your experience.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

Let me start by asking if you have ever been to the Congo? Most people haven’t. However, if I asked you what it might be like, what would you say? Some people might say they picture it to be a jungle country. They might use words like green, humid, or lush. Some might say dangerous or sweaty.

However, in most cases, they don’t know any of this stuff is true. So, how did these images and adjectives get there? My guess is these descriptions come from books or movies people might have read or seen, or stories they heard over the years in school. This exercise demonstrates how customers’ expectations develop.

Here are a few other key moments in the discussion:

09:33 Ryan explains the theory behind why we need to draw upon our past experiences or construct ideas about new experiences as we go about our daily lives for comparison’s sake.
11:32 Colin builds upon Ryan’s example about drawing upon experiences by pointing out that the past experience does not have to be in the same industry vertical to be the comparison.
15:13 Colin gets into the importance of understanding customers’ emotional expectations as well as their rational ones to deliver an experience that satisfies and delights them.
22:57 We talk about how customers’ expectations can change over time and can be reasonable, so it’s important not to blame your problems on unrealistic customer expectations.
26:59 Colin and Ryan both share their practical advice on what to do about understanding customer expectations and how to apply it to the experience you deliver.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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The gas pump is probably where it hurts the most right now. Standing there, watching the total spin by, climbing higher than you ever have seen it before brings home the acute pain of today’s inflation rate. Never mind that housing and health care have much higher cost increases over the past decades…that gas price per gallon is hard to take.

Inflation has been rising steadily across the board for the past few months. So much so, that experts, who were not concerned in the beginning are starting to worry. While there is reason to believe it will peak soon, no one knows if pricing will go back down.

Stephanie wrote to us about her Business Pickle that inflation is going to kill her CX. Chances are, you are facing some difficult pricing and cost concerns yourself and wondering what it is going to mean to your experience, too.

This episode focuses on how you can manage the current economic environment without destroying your Customer Experience. Will our new, post-pandemic normal have a high price tag associated with it? And what does that mean for your customer experience?

Key Ideas to Improve Your Customer Experience

Believe it or not, from an economic perspective, all inflation is not bad. To the contrary, inflation serves the broader economy. It might surprise you to learn that the Federal Reserve Bank (the Fed), the U.S. governmental institution that manages the economy, wants inflation. However, the Fed wants a steady rate of around two percent. That slow but steady rate encourages consumer spending and investing rather than hoarding of resources (I’m looking at you, Bitcoin.). However, the inflationary rate is climbing faster than that, which is where some financial experts have concerns. So, to summarize the governmental policy on inflation: a little bit is okay, too much is concerning.

Here are a few other key moments in the discussion:

03:56 We share Stephanie’s pickle about how to respond to rising costs but maintain a customer-centric experience.
05:32 Ryan explains how a little inflation plays in maintaining a strong economy, and how too much of it can destroy it.
09:21 Colin shares a personal experience with inflation regarding a garage roof project he got a quote for nine months ago, which now is significantly more.
12:56 Ryan explains how inflation can affect the customer relationship and erode trust if it’s not handled properly.
16:34 We share some of the things you shouldn’t do in this situation, because they contribute to the erosion of trust and the degradation of your experience outcome.
21:33 We both have suggestions for how Stephanie can handle this with her customers to the best possible outcome.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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Social media has brought us a lot of things, but key among them is the “Influencer.” It means a person that can affect how people think and behave about things related to their area of interest or expertise. We have influencers that can teach us about makeup, sports books, stock picks, customer strategy (ahem) and, of course, wood working. (It’s a thing, I promise).

There are many reasons that the idea of an influencer is critical to marketers today. First of all, it is an excellent way to reach a targeted audience whose areas of interest intersect with your offering. Second, it works really well in the certain circumstances. However, you have to be deliberate about how you use Influencers, and the behavioral sciences can be an excellent guide for you.

In this episode, we explore the idea of Influencers and how you can use them to promote your brand. We also talk about how to optimize your chance for success as well as critical considerations that you should apply to this essential customer strategy.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

One of the most important things to remember about influence is that it is both conscious and unconscious. In other words, there is influence that we choose and participate in on purpose and influence that we never really knew happened to us. Both kinds of influence are essential when you are designing a message for customer strategy, and should have deliberate effects they are evoking from people.

Here are a few other key moments in the discussion:

04:14 Ryan explains the difference between influences that are conscious and subconscious, including the difference between subliminal and subconscious, and how that difference changes our response to them.
10:37 We talk about some famous experiments that explore this concept, including one that was fake and never happened, and one that is terrifying.
17:16 Ryan shares some examples of ways that your experience sends subconscious signals, many times in ways you didn’t expect.
22:02 We discuss the essential considerations you should think about as a marketer when deciding which Influencers you should approach and how to message through them.
26:08 We share the practical ways you can use the science behind influence to leverage the power of influence in your experience and customer strategy.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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Who do you feel loyal to in your life? My money is on your answer being your friends and family. The reason you feel loyal to them is because you have an emotional relationship with them. They might do things you don’t like sometimes, usually at the holidays, that drive you crazy. However, you don’t sever ties over it.

The same emotional connection happens in business relationships. Also, like your personal relationships, they can weather a little bad news without ending them. However, for this to be the case, there are some things you need to do ensure that this relationship forms—and it probably isn’t as complicated as you might think.

This episode focuses on how to create these emotional bonds with your customers and foster customer loyalty. We explain why emotional bonds protect you in business relationships and how to lay the foundation for customer loyalty.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

To begin with, we borrow from a concept in Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People called the Emotional Bank Account. An Emotional Bank Account is a lot like a regular bank account where you make deposits and withdrawals. The difference is the deposits are good things that you do for your customers and the withdrawals are the things that happen that they don’t like. We think that everyone should invest a lot of time making deposits into the Emotional Bank Account for that rainy day when something doesn’t go the customers’ way.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

01:39 Colin introduces the listener’s business pickle and why loyalty is such an essential part of your experience.
05:18 We explain the concept of the Emotional Bank Account and how it applies to your personal and business relationships.
08:22 Colin shares an example of working with a construction equipment company that you would think wouldn’t want to get into the touchy-feely stuff—until they learned that’s what their customers wanted.
09:57 We discuss the simple way you can build up your customers’ trust in you, which facilitates an emotional relationship forming with your business customers.
13:35 Colin explains how having the entire team consistent in their dealings with customers, and presenting a unified front is essential to forming an emotional bond with customers.
15:01 We explain how you should be yourself when you deal with customers because the relationship will hopefully last, and no one can keep up pretense for that long.
16:41 Ryan explains how addressing the individual’s personal career goals and job responsibilities are also essential to emotional relationships in business, as well as understanding the company politics your business contact must navigate.
21:06 We explain how creating win-wins is essential, and there are times when you have to let a customer go.

Do you have a business problem you would like our help with? Please contact us to tell us about it. We may solve it with you and our listening audience on the podcast!

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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Ever been channel surfing and see a movie playing on broadcast that you own in your digital personal library and been unexpectedly delighted? Have you ever then watched that movie, commercials and editing and all, even though with very minimal effort you could watch that movie from streaming without any of that stuff?

This episode explains why you were so happy to find the movie and why it was better to watch it that way rather than stream it yourself. It’s related to the idea of serendipity, and the explanation is the result of a decade of research by Kristina Durante, (@KristinaDurante) Ph.D., Professor of Marketing at Rutgers Business School. We invited Durante to come talk with us, and much to our surprise, she accepted.

However, our surprise in this instance was not serendipity. Durante says serendipity boosts our enjoyment of something because it feels like a “gift from the gods.” The idea that fate has dealt you a good hand is one that makes people feel happier with Customer Experiences, even when they can’t attribute that good luck to the organization providing it. She says that customers like how it feels like magic.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

Durante says that there are three main components to define serendipity. First, it must be something positive that happens. Second, it should be unexpected and unplanned. Finally, it should have no obvious source, meaning it can’t be attributed directly to anything or anybody.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

02:28 Ryan introduces our guest and explains why she is on the show.
04:26 Durante explains how she became interested in serendipity after the song “Material Girl” thrilled her when she heard it on the radio, but hearing it later on her playlist wasn’t the same.
07:42 Durante explains what their research defines as serendipity and how it differs from surprise or luck.
11:24 We discuss how Netflix employs a bit of serendipity in it’s “Play something” feature and why it was necessary for the Netflix viewer experience.
16:28 Durante discusses how serendipity is different than surprise and how this difference is essential to boosting enjoyment for customers.
25:42 Durante talks about ways marketers can set this up for customers in their experiences, as well as some retailers that understand and employ this concept well.
32:22 All three of us share our insights into how marketers can increase the feeling of serendipity in their own experiences as well as what to avoid while doing it.

Join us in celebrating our 20th anniversary over the next month.

We will be giving away books and other things this month.

Check out our LinkedIn and Twitter feeds for more information.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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Do you know when in your experience customers decide to buy from you or not? You should. Otherwise, how can you design an appropriate environment to get customers to decide to do what you want?

It reminds me of the phrase, "Crossing the Rubicon." The Rubicon river was a northern boundary outside Rome in the ancient Roman Empire. The Senate determined if a general crossed the Rubicon with their army, that was grounds for treason.

There is a famous story that as Julius Caesar crossed it with his army, he said,"Alea iacta est”, which means “Now the die is cast” for those of us a little rusty on the Latin. The quote signifies passing the point of no return.

This story is more than a Roman history lesson. I mention it because customers also "cross the Rubicon" when they decide things. Psychology refers to this as the Rubicon Model of action phases in decision-making, and it describes our varying mindsets before and after choosing. The deliberative mindset before choosing takes in information; the implementing mindset commits to and maybe defends the decision after choosing.

In this episode, we take a look at how deciding changes our perspective on things in an experience and how we assign importance to information. We also discuss how your experience design should support and complement these mindset shifts.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

A buying decision is not the only one a customer makes. All of the little decisions that customers make are part of this mindset shift also, in varying degrees. That means plotting them and understanding when they happen is crucial. Knowing when they occur will help you determine where to design features into the experience that get them to decide what you want them to, which is the how, or critical skill of experience design and customer strategy.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

02:15 Colin shares a marital problem he is having with his wife Lorraine about, well, picking wallpaper for their home redecoration project.
05:44 Ryan explains the psychology behind decision making called the Rubicon Model of Decision Making, and a bit of Roman history lesson about the origin of its name.
07:59 We explain how your customers essentially “Cross the Rubicon” in your experience, too.
11:49 We discuss the two mindsets of customers in decision making, deliberative and implementing.
17:16 We discuss how all the decisions along the way are also subject to the Rubicon Model.
21:07 The discussion turns into how to strategize in your experience to take advantage of the timing for customer decision-making.
27:59 We share the practicalities of applying this information in your experience design.

Join us in celebrating our 20th anniversary over the next month.

We will be giving away books and other things this month.

Check out our LinkedIn and Twitter feeds for more information.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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A lot of the behavioral sciences can feel intimidating. However, it doesn’t have to be. The Five Rules Podcast Series is our attempt at giving you an easy entry point into the complex and messy world of Behavioral Science.

Senior executives have risen to their position for many reasons, but one of them is a love for numbers. Executives live by numbers.

So, you can’t just have a “really great idea.” It would be best if you had a “really great idea” and an idea of how it will drive numbers for the organization.

I have learned a lot about how to win over senior executives. In this episode, we explore the five rules for successfully engaging with senior executives to enhance your career. I share these based on my decades-long career and constant immersion in these skills. Moreover, I share them because I have learned that if you don’t engage properly with senior executives, it can have precisely the opposite effect on your career.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

One of the overarching principles that guide your behavior when engaging with senior executives is to remember what matters to them most. So, if you're having a conversation about customer strategy, think at their level, which is a high-level customer strategy, not an on-the-ground customer tactic. We often mention getting inside the head of your customer and looking at the experience from their perspective. Now, apply that principle your upline by taking their perspective and speaking to them in the language of their decision making.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion.

03:25 Colin shares the first rule, which is that everyone should have an opinion; that’s what you are paid for and how you add value to the team.
08:51 We discuss how to handle an explanation with senior executives, and walking the tight rope between respect and intimidation.
13:25 We talk about how at a senior level the questions get simpler, even if the responsibility gets more intense.
18:38 Ryan explains how the fourth rule is essential, be concise, because he has seen people that cannot adapt to a changing environment, and they lose their opportunity to communicate it as a result.
21:38 Colin shares the last rule, Back up your argument with numbers and explains why these matters—maybe the most—when talking to senior executives.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on Linkedin and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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The future of customer strategy is providing proactive experiences based on the predicted needs of your customers. The key to unlocking this future is your customer data, particularly the data you have collected about customer behavior. You have most of what you need to predict your customers' next move in your customers' past behavior.

This concept is predicated on the idea of Customer Science. As you might recall, Customer Science is the blending of customer data with artificial intelligence and the theories of the behavioral sciences. Customer Science is the next big thing in Customer Experiences, and it is what you need to predict accurately how your customers are going to behave.

I am fascinated by how Customer Science is already changing experiences for the better in the real world. For example, at a recent CX Live Event, I heard Michelle Huenink, Director, Customer Experience & Success at Microsoft, speak about how the company was using their data to provide predictive—and in some cases—prescriptive experiences to their customers. In this episode, Huenink explains what she did, why she did it, and how you can get started doing the same for your organization.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

A significant part of Huenink’s motivation is transforming Microsoft’s Customer Experience to a connected experience using customer data as the basis for its change. She wants to leverage the vast amounts of Microsoft’s customer data to identify moments that are sending an individual’s experience down the wrong path, as well as find parts of the process that necessitate too much customer effort. Then, she wants to empower the front-line teams to correct course and fix things for customers, sometimes even before the customer knows there is a problem.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

05:39 Huenink walks us through a recent implementation from the past year that identifies and intervenes when a customer enters an “at-risk” zone in the experience.
07:37 Colin asks Huenink what she is looking for in data that helps her focus on the area that will benefit the experience.
11:14 We discuss some of the challenges an organization faces when they try to change the experience based on data discoveries.
16:14 We discuss the differences between customers regarding the channels they use to interact with a company and how data can help you provide solutions to present a consistent experience regardless of the contact made.
20:03 Huenink identifies the most significant opportunity for Microsoft with their experience transformation efforts—and it will probably sound familiar.
22:09 Colin asks about segmentation and how they use it to personalize experiences.
27:17 Huenink shares her advice for what organizations can do to use their data to identify focus areas in their experience transformations.

Don’t miss CXN Live: Customer Self Service 2022 for more great ideas on leveraging self-service to increase customer experience, reduce contact volumes and improve efficiency.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' He has 289,000 followers. Shaw is the Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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We celebrated a significant milestone this year. It’s Beyond Philosophy’s 20th anniversary. Not only that, but Financial Times also recognized our company as one of the top management consultancies for the fourth year in a row.

It is always gratifying to reach these milestones and enjoy these accolades. However, they didn’t happen by chance. It was lots of trial and error, hard work, passion, and (a little) luck that went into this business. I once heard on the British version of Shark Tank that the secret to business success is making more good decisions than bad. I am proof positive that this is true.

Small businesses are somewhat easy to start but not easy to keep. The US Bureau of Labor and Statistics estimates that 20 percent of new small businesses don’t survive the year. That number jumps to 50 percent that fail in five years. So, as you can see, making it to 20 is no joke.

Over the past 20 years, I have learned a lot of things about business. In this episode, I share them with you, my listeners. My hope is that I can share them with others and help them survive and be one of the 50 percent of small businesses that is still around in five years.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

There are many things I have learned over the past two decades. Now, as we find ourselves in the Great Resignation, a period where people are re-thinking their careers post-pandemic and starting their own businesses, I have distilled the ten most important to this list.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

02:31 We discuss the survival statistics of small business per the US Bureau of Labor and Statistics, and, spoiler alert, they aren’t that great.
06:36 We share the first of the ten lessons I learned over the last 20 years in business, which is be brave.
11:48 We discuss the second of the lessons, which is to zig when others zag, which we also discussed on a recent podcast with Alex Mead.
13:08 We share the importance of focus, which can be scary for entrepreneurs because it might mean turning away business.
15:40 Number four is the lesson about what to expect when you start your new company (hint: hard work and lots of it).
17:15 Colin shares his fifth lesson, which is about learning who is wasting your time and who has something to offer you.
19:46 We begin the second half of the list, starting with the fact that cash is king, especially to you the new business, and ending with the last lesson, which is…
29:10 Colin talks about the final lesson, which is to provide value, and without it, it won’t matter if you know the other nine.

Join us in celebrating our 20th anniversary over the next month.

We will be giving away books and other things this month.

Check out our LinkedIn and Twitter feeds for more information.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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Big Data creates big problems. One of the biggest problems is what to do with it now that you have it.

Don’t feel too bad if this is true for your company. Most organizations have no idea to use the customer insights they have collected. Moreover, it’s surprising how many organizations can’t tell you how improving metrics identified by the employed measures translates to providing value to the organization. In many ways, measurement is killing your Customer Experience. But there are things you can do to fix that.

We invited Founder and CEO Ryan Stuart, @rstuart85, of Kapiche, a customer insights platform to discuss this problem. Kapiche specializes in helping organizations interpret customer data without manually coding it reading thousands of comments. Stuart understands the problem with collecting customer data but not knowing what to do with it next. Stuart explains to us the lessons he has learned in this area and how to use customer data to improve your customer strategy for your Customer Experience moving forward.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

One of the big problems with data is how much of it there is. With such enormous amounts of it, many organizations are overwhelmed by what to do with it. Stuart provides specific things that organizations can do for determining how to use the customer feedback usefully in their customer strategy. Then, they can go to work interpreting the data to move the needle on what measures are helpful to their experiences.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

03:43 Stuart shares his thoughts on why so few organizations have improved their Customer Satisfaction scores over the last ten years pre-COVID.
10:15 Colin shares the importance of using the right lens to interpret data, and why that lens shouldn’t be the same one you used 20 years ago.
12:06 Ryan shares his thoughts on why having a specific strategy for your data helps make your hopes for analyzing customer insights and the outcomes it will have for your experience become the reality of your data analysis.
15:04 Stuart explains how the data pyramid works for transforming data into wisdom, from the bottom (data) to the top (wisdom).
20:10 Colin explains that he encounters similar problems when rolling out Emotional Signature data to organizations; they still look at the new data with old eyes.
22:47 Stuart explains his two-part answer to the question of how to help organizations rise to the data challenge and use it effectively.
32:11 All three hosts share their practical insights on what you can do with your customer data to create a winning customer strategy that improves the experience in ways that matter to your bottom line.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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One of our listeners in Finland is in a pickle. Anna wants to operationalize journey mapping to make their Customer Experience more customer centric. Perhaps more importantly, she wants these improvements to prove practical and effective rather than viewed as a “soft and fluffy” exercise that is not practical for the organization to continue to support.

Anna is not alone in this problem. Similar situations are everywhere in business today. After all, owners and stakeholders in an organization do not invest money in anything because they are hoping it doesn’t provide a return on investment. The things you spend resources on in business should provide a return on investment—or they are not practical enough for the organization to continue to support.

In this episode, we discuss Anna’s business pickle and how she can leverage what she learns in journey mapping to improve her organization’s customer strategy. In addition, we will share practical steps and advice that any organization should take when implementing what they learn from the exercise to become more customer-centric in the experience they provide.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

When it comes to journey mapping, we often encounter a problem. People think that the exercise is the answer to everything that’s wrong (or right) with Customer Experiences. But it isn’t. Journey Mapping is a way to uncover the answers to everything, and should be combined with other customer-centricity experience improvement efforts and measurements to ensure success. We talk about these areas in the podcast.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

2:55 Anna shares her pickle in a recording about how to use the findings in their journey mapping exercise to change the organization to be more customer-centric.

6:10 We share our advice on how to operationalize journey mapping starting with the four parts of a customer experience, including the rational, conscious, subconscious, and psychological.

07:15 Ryan shares his view on what journey mapping can do for an organization, and how it can benefit organizations in their experience improvement efforts.

12:50 Colin addresses the nine areas of customer centricity that affect customer experiences, and the four levels of customer centricity that range from Naïve to Natural.

16:40 Colin shares a personal example of how an experience can expose how customer-centric an organization is.

20:46 We talk about the John Cotter’s 8-step Process for Leading Change and how Anna (and other organizations) can use it to manage the process.

32:08 We both share the practical steps for leveraging what you know from your journey mapping exercise into improving your experience to drive value for the organization, from Emotional Signture research to measurement strategy and more.

Do you have a business problem you would like our help with? Please contact us to tell us about it. We may solve it with you and our listening audience on the podcast!

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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I started Beyond Philosophy 20 years ago when Customer Experience was the next big thing; the new concept that was going to change everything in business. The last big thing, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), was old news. After all, everyone had one at that point.

Now, in 2022, I see the next big thing: Customer Science. Customer Science combines the power of artificial intelligence (AI), customer data, and the concepts of behavioral science to help organizations create a winning customer strategy. Leveraging the power of Customer Science, organizations can understand why their customers are doing what they are now and, perhaps more importantly, what they are likely to do next.

In this episode, we talk about Customer Science and how it can turn things around for your organization in 2022. Will you be on this new wave of change’s crest or left in its trough making the same mistakes you did last year?

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

The mistakes of last year are best summarized by lagging or plateauing Customer Satisfaction Scores. The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) says only 30 percent of companies tracked by ACSI improved their score over the last 10 years. Another way to look at it is ASCI says 70 percent of companies either had flat results or saw a decline in customer satisfaction. All this to say, it’s time for a next level for customer strategy. As Customer Experience moves aside for Customer Science, we have found it.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

03:21 Colin describes how what he is seeing in business today regarding customer experience feels familiar to what was happening over two decades ago with CRM.
08:34 We get into what Customer Science is and what it is capable of doing for businesses today.
13:27 Colin reads some articles for 2002 regarding CRM, when experiences were becoming a new focus and compares it to what is happening with Customer Experience today.
20:10 Colin explains what this might mean for Customer Experience professionals moving forward with the new wave of change.
22:51 We share how to respond to these changes in the best possible way for your organization and your career as we move into 2022.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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The metaverse. It is supposed to be a digital world. Some say it will combine social media and virtual reality (VR), like a more complex VR chat. Some say it will be the next level of online interaction where anything can happen. Others are confused by what it is and what it means. Some call it Mark Zuckerberg’s pipe dream. We think it is the future of Customer Experiences.

Immersive experiences are part of the metaverse, leveraging the power of augmented reality (AR) and VR. While they have to this point largely been dominated by games and entertainment, these immersive technologies are poised to change how people interact with brands’ products and services in more everyday ways.

In this episode, we invited Dobrian Dobrev (@DobrianDobrev), a User Experience Designer and a speaker at UX conferences and author on UX Design and Information Architecture to tell us how the metaverse will change things in brand marketing. Dobrev takes us through the ways Coca-Cola has been using these technologies in their customer strategy to great success.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

The metaverse is in its infancy. Few organizations really know what it is or how to use it in their customer strategy, perhaps thinking of it as a “gamer thing.” However, Dobrev sees enormous potential for brands to use these technologies beyond entertainment, which he has written about in the past. Coca-Cola has been one of the first brands that gets it and Dobrev gives us a front-row seat to their strategy and success.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

05:29 Dobrev to defines the immersive technologies that Coca-Cola uses, and the differences between AR and VR.
07:41 Colin gives a layman’s example of what a metaverse is using a science fiction example and Dobrev explains how AR, VR, and the metaverse will leverage immersive technology to real-world applications and change customer interactions.
13:04 We learn about an entertainment VR project Coca-Cola used to promote their Fanta brand and how that evolved into a campaign, called Hydr8 AR prototype that ventured outside entertainment and what it was designed to do for customers.
17:02 Dobrev shares the concepts behind an early VR project where Coca-Cola made their packaging convert to a VR headset.
18:48 Dobrev explains how Coca-Cola used AR to help small businesses reinvigorate their business after the first global shut down with “Open Like Never Before.”
20:50 We ask Dobrev what he sees as the future and what brands can do to get started creating immersive experiences for their products and services.

Want more stuff like this? Don’t miss CXN Live: Voice of the Customer 2022 for more great ideas on leveraging customer feedback to enhance customer understanding, optimize key touchpoints, identify friction points, and drive culture change.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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Customer satisfaction is low. What’s worse, we can’t just blame COVID for the problem. Sure, COVID is part of it, but, surprisingly, this problem has other causes.

Not only that, but a recent report from the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) suggests that only 30 percent of companies tracked by ACSI improved their score—since 2011. That means that 70 percent of companies either had flat results or saw a decline in customer satisfaction.

It’s time to stop making excuses and turn things around.

In this episode, we talk with the Managing Director of the ACSI, David VanAmburg about what has been going on over the past ten years in Customer Experience. Like usual, the problem, has a few different influences. We discuss them and what we can do to fix them in 2022.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

I have experienced many waves of change in my career. When I was starting out it was all about Total Quality Management and Business Process Reengineering. Then, following that was Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Starting in the 90s and over the last 20 years, it has been Customer Experience. It surprised me to see that in a time when more organizations were addressing Customer Experience that the ACSI scores were mostly flat or declining. We discussed a few things that might be part of the problem.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

04:22 VanAmburg gives us his take on the things that are affecting the low scores we see of late on the ACSI.
08:18. Colin asks why VanAmburg thinks that only 30 percent of companies improved their customer satisfaction scores in the last ten years covered by the report.
10:20 VanAmburg explains the problems of too much focus on the smaller picture and not enough of the bigger picture when analyzing data from a CRM.
12:58 Colin talks about how some companies jump into things without understanding them or committing to them, including CRM.
17:04 VanAmburg explains how retail banking faired through the pandemic, and what other companies could learn from it.
18:31 Ryan summarizes the discussion and teaches us all about medium maximization and how that can affect results.
24:07 Colin and VanAmburg discuss the influence of customer expectations and how those changed during the pandemic and affected scores during the pandemic.
27:31 Colin asks what VanAmburg thinks will happen in 2022, and his answer probably won’t satisfy you.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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What would it be like if your printer sent you an email to let you know it needed ink? Or if your car could tell you that you need to take it in for transmission service? Or if your refrigerator could tell the repair professional what was wrong with it before you ever said a word?

Sound like a futuristic take on product technology? It is, and it’s called the Internet of Things (IoT). However, you might be surprised to know that the ability to have all these things is already available and some companies have been using it to excellent effect.

In this episode, we hosted Tobias Goebel (@tpgoebel) Product Marketing Principal at Twilio IoT. Goebel’s article, “It’s Time for the VoC to Get a Little Brother: The Voice of the Product,” introduced the idea of the Voice of Product (VoP) to us. We discuss how the VoP can change how experiences occur in the future and why it should be a significant part of your customer strategy today.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

Goebel is clear that he thinks the VoP will not replace the VoC. Instead, Goebel sees it as enhancing the interactions customers have with organizations. The VoP can help firms be proactive in anticipating customers’ needs by communicating issues before they become problems, be active in resolving customer issues by providing unbiased feedback regarding its usage and be reactive to the trends the product team sees and areas of opportunity the VoP uncovers from the data it reveals.

Here are a few more of the key moments in the discussion:

05:04 Goebel describes how he views IoT and what that means for product technology and the VoP.
10:35 We discuss how the VoP could be used with different consumer products, like vacuum robots and table saws.
12:19 Goebel shares the three benefits he sees for connecting a product into an organization.
16:07 We hear a story about iRobot, which inspired Goebel’s article and fueled his fascination for what was possible with the VoP from a customer service perspective.
20:23 Ryan and Goebel discuss how the Voice of Customer and the VoP can work together to provide lots of valuable insight and facilitate faster response times.
26:47 Goebel explains how Amazon has a leg up on this insight as it is an outlet for millions of products and has access to the data about them.
28:52 We talk about why now is the time to tap into VoP and what you should consider when you do so.

This episode was sponsored by Twilio

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LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work.: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular LinkedIn column called, Why Customers Buy . Click here to read and subscribe.

Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last three years. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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We all know that feeling when you see which client is calling and you inwardly groan, What is wrong now? Some customer relationships are more difficult than others, for sure. That is to be expected in any organization.

However, there are other customer relationships that have moved beyond difficult. The costs of the resources it takes to manage the many aspects of doing business with them has outgrown the revenue the generate. Or they are so heinous to deal with that the money you do make doesn’t feel worth it for the toll it takes on your people and organization.

With customers like these, it might be time to fire them.

In this episode, we talk about our listener Robert’s problem with difficult customer relationships and when it is time to call it quits. Moreover, we discuss the best possible way to handle this tricky process that can keep you from burning that bridge entirely, even when there are days when you would be all too happy to light that match.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

Every customer relationship has two general areas to consider. First, there is the financial aspect. Are they making your organization money? Sometimes, when you determine the costs of the resources it takes to maintain the account, you discover that they aren’t, which makes your decision less difficult. Second, there is the interpersonal aspect. Are they making you and your people miserable? If servicing the account means that you have high turnover in the account management positions that deal with the customer, as well as throughout the organization, it might be worth it to reassess the relationship. We discuss these areas, as well as other considerations in the decision process.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

04:53 We learn about Robert and his business problem with difficult customers and when to know it’s time to move on.
07:13 We start by agreeing that there are customers who should be fired and how you can identify those situations from a rational perspective.
11:48 Colin shares an example of who shouldn’t be in on the decision to fire a customer and who would be better suited with the task, and why.
16:11 We discuss the key traps to avoid in this decision process, so you can make a decision that will not cost you more in the long run.
21:38 Colin shares a seven-step process for letting a customer go as gracefully as possible.
27:29. Ryan shares some tips for managing your reputation during the transition.
30:46 Colin shares one last tip for what you should do to avoid this situation in the future.

Do you have a business problem you would like our help with? Please contact us to tell us about it. We may solve it with you and our listening audience on the podcast!

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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Our listeners have problems and they let us know about it. For our I’m in a Pickle feature on the podcast, Tina in New Zealand wrote to us because the engineering firm she works with thinks customer relationships are a waste of time. She wants to know how to convince the engineers that customer relationships are what get the customer strategy gears turning toward long-term success.

I found this pickle particularly interesting because I have faced this myself in our global Customer Experience consultancy. In fact, it was the impetus for the research we did with the London School of Business that led to my third book, The DNA of Customer Experience: How Emotions Drive Value.

In this episode, we share our experiences working with firms that are less than convinced that customer relationships are essential to business success. From storytelling to Emotional Signature® research to adopting the same strategies as one would for personal relationships, we share plenty of practical tips to help Tina get out of her pickle and on her way to convincing the team to see things her way.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

People didn’t always have interpersonal relationships. Now, we do, and not just in our personal lives. We have personal relationships in business, too. As customers, we use the same cognitive machinery to manage both types of relationships, and, not surprisingly, there are parallels in the management of them, too. We take a close look at Tina’s business pickle and present real-world, practical solutions to convince the engineers it’s worth it to develop a business relationships with customers.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

03:02 We read Tina’s pickle to set up the discussion on what business problem our listener is facing.
05:17 We start by looking at some of the reasons this might be happening to Tina at work and Colin shares an example of his experience in a similar situation.
09:21 Ryan chimes in with how convincing people to do anything requires a mixture of what they are interested in and what you are trying to tell them.
12:16 Colin shares how a skeptic at a German insurance company asked him to prove what Colin was saying was true, and how that led to the research behind Colin’s third book, The DNA of Customer Experience.
15:48 Colin share his insight on what makes successful customer-facing people and what Tina can do to optimize the experience for the engineering customers.
18:08 Ryan discusses how part of the convincing might require pointing out that relationships have staying power, but competitive differentiation in the marketplace.
20:48 Colin shares how his work with Maersk Line revealed to leadership the pitfalls of a transactional relationship with customers, and how their changes led to a giant turnaround for the company.
23:19 We share 5 tips (well, really only four; one of the tips will get you in trouble) for building relationships from HelpGuide.org, and our other advice for Tina and her company.

Do you have a business problem you would like our help with? Please contact us to tell us about it. We may solve it with you and our listening audience on the podcast!

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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Did you know that customer satisfaction scores are the lowest they have been in the past 15 years? It’s true, and you can’t blame it all on COVID, although there is some blame to be cast there. Per the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), only 30 percent of companies tracked by ASCI improved their score; that means 70 percent didn’t, and that’s alarming. It’s also one of seven significant lessons that 2021 taught us.

This new year also coincides with the 20th anniversary of me founding my global Customer Experience Consultancy, Beyond Philosophy and publishing my first book on the subject, Building Great Customer Experiences (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). Things have changed since then, but one thing that hasn’t is that people want exceptional experiences that meet (or exceed) their expectations—and organizations need to deliver them.

In this episode, we explore the seven things we learned professionally and personally in 2021 and what they mean for your customer strategy in 2022. Spoiler alert: it means that everything is changing. Again.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

Twenty years ago, all the signs around me pointed to the next big thing in business: Customer Experience. However, the influence of Customer Experience is waning now, making way for something new: Customer Science. Customer Science is the blend of Artificial Intelligence, customer data, and the behavioral sciences, and just like its predecessor Customer Experience, it has outstanding implications for your customer strategy.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

04:52 Ryan kicks off the professional lessons learned this year with the realization that changing challenges is the reality of the business environment today and how to respond to it.
06:43 Colin explains how uncertainty is something human beings do not process well, and it leads to customer behavior that reflects the behavioral science theory of Loss Aversion.
10:26 Colin explains that Customer Experience is getting absorbed into a larger, more influential concept poised to change the business world, Customer Science.
12:45 Colin shares shocking statistics from the American Customer Satisfaction Institute Index.
15:06 Ryan and Colin discuss what is happening to Customer Experience and how it is the cycle of things in business.
17:05 Colin explains how some companies succeeded in improving their customer satisfactions scores.
19:03 Ryan shares that his personal learning in 2021 was about work/life balance and that he thinks little improvements in areas of his life lead to more improvements down the road.
22:10 Colin talks about his weight loss journey and how a jolt to his bad habits in his personal life demonstrates what often needs to happen in the business world.

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Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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When I was 25, my mum was proud of the fact that we had never discussed the verity of Father Christmas, which, of course, is not in question. She wanted that story to be a part of my life, so she made sure it was, well into adulthood.

I have continued the tradition with my kids. Father Christmas, the story of a toymaker that brings love and joy to children all around the world has been in effect at the Shaw house for over 30 years. Now, we are indoctrinating the grandkids as well.

Storytelling as a form of persuasion and communication is unparalleled, whether it is about Father Christmas (aka Santa Claus) or an example about whether Disney Theme Park Guests want to eat a salad while visiting the park (spoiler alert: they don’t).

In this episode, we discuss the power of storytelling in business, from the theory behind why it works to how you can apply it practically in your experiences to enhance your customer strategy.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

Human beings seem to be hard wired for stories. We seek out stories because they entertain us. We remember stories better than we do if the same information is conveyed in a nonstory format. We tend to be more persuaded by stories and are more likely to relay stories to other people than if the same information was communicated in another way.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

04:49 Ryan presents the generalized summary of what theoretical work on storytelling has taught us.
07:27 Colin gives an example of an often-told story he uses to make his point about an abstract concept, to make concrete his point about an abstract concept.
10:16 Colin discusses the role of social proofing in storytelling around organized religion, simultaneously trying to explain his point while not getting cancelled.
15:08 Colin admits that Apple tells a story he likes to hear, and how that affects his affinity for the brand.
16:31 Ryan shares how many tech companies have origin myths, that are not that different from superhero stories in a way.
20:01 WARNING: Colin says something that is not safe for the six-year-old (or six-years-old at heart) listeners of the podcast.
21:53 We share practical advice about how to use story telling in experiences and customer strategy.

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Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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Imagine that you own a well-known car brand during a global pandemic. No one is coming to the show room to see your dealer’s cars, nor are they bringing them in for service. No one is really driving them around, either. What do you do?

For Nissan’s Hussein Dajani, General Manager, Digital and CX Transformation, this wasn’t hard to imagine since he lived it for the past 18 months. He and his Customer Experience Steering Committee came up with a virtual version of the traditional car-buying and service experience and implemented it in record time. The results? Double-digit growth.

I learned about this story on a CX Network Live event. Fascinated with the story and the success, we invited Dajani to this episode of the podcast to share what he learned with you.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

Digital experiences are much more prevalent today than they were even a couple of years ago. The virus accelerated the emphasis on digital transformation of formerly analog experiences for all industries, even one like buying a car. The COVID-19 Pandemic also forced organizations to take more risks than they would have otherwise.

Nissan’s Shop@Home program is widely successful, producing double-digit growth at a time when many people weren’t even driving their cars much. Dajani shares what he learned during the project and the practical tips he has for other organizations that have a similar journey ahead.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

03:56 Dajani shares his story about how he ended up at Nissan and what he wanted to change even before the pandemic disrupted business-as-usual.
08:22 Dajani talks about how the day he thought he was getting fired was the day the organization called upon him to deliver.
11:53 We learn about Shop@Home and what it was designed to do for customers.
15:29 Colin asks Dajani if COVID helped get the internal team on board; Dajani’s answer might surprise you.
17:59 Nissan’s plan is to transform the business, not just get through the pandemic, and Dajani explains why.
22:47 We learn about some of the ways that Nissan changed the service experience to a virtual one and why it fixed some friction points for the business.
29:51 We ask Dajani the practical advice he has for organizations on a similar journey, and he leads with empathy, empathy, empathy.

Artificial intelligence and predictive customer experience can transform customer experience initiatives by identifying and shaping customer intent. As a result, it has the potential for businesses to increase engagement, retention, and long-term customer value. Want to know more? Attend CX Network's Online Live Event on January 25th and 26th, 2022.

Click here to register today.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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Fernando has a problem that he wants our help solving. In his industry of branding and packaging fast-moving consumer goods, his clients often tell him to do whatever the competition is doing. However, Fernando knows that while imitation is the highest form of flattery, it’s a less than ideal customer strategy when you want to win customers from the competition.

In this episode, we explore Fernando’s business problem, aka Pickle, for our, “I’m in a Pickle” segment of the podcast. We discuss the challenges surrounding competitive differentiation as well as the psychological theories from the behavioral sciences that can help guide the customer strategy. Not surprisingly, it takes standing out from everybody else to fit in with customers.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

Human beings are social. From an evolutionary point of view, our social natures is tied into survival. Those that were part of the pack had a better chance of living out the day than individuals going it alone.

Without the same threats today that we might have faced in the past, our social nature persists. Sometimes, this natural inclination is a good thing. However, when the need to fit in influences our decisions in the marketplace, it becomes a problem. Moreover, things like “best practices” can get in the way of creative approaches to deliver experiences. A critical part of any organization’s customer strategy and competitive differentiation is to find a way that you are different from the pack and communicate it. The behavioral sciences explain why this is challenging—and also why it works.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

03:54 Ryan kicks off the discussion of three influential concepts, Risk Aversion, Loss Aversion and Social Proof, that describe why differentiation can be challenging for Fernando’s customers.
07:06 We explain why adopting best practices and following the leaders in the marketplace is not a great long-term strategy.
08:29 Colin shares a story demonstrating a concept called optimal distinctiveness about buying a popular car, but ensuring that his was “just a bit” different, so his car stood out from the others.
15:56 We bring it back to Fernando’s problem to talk about how to balance the need for conformity with the desire to achieve optimal distinctiveness.
18:49 Ryan explains where we got the term for Top-Shelf liquor and how that relates to Fernando’s problem.
21:48 We explain that appealing to customers requires a practical understanding what those target customers want, and using those values in the experience design.
24:35 Colin shares his advice on what Fernando, and anyone else having a problem with competitive differentiation, can do to overcome their risk aversion and employ a winning customer strategy.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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Fred Reichheld, inventor of the Net Promoter Score® (NPS), sees customers recommendations as an act of love. Recommendations are a chance to provide an experience to someone they care about.

Reichheld’s new book, Winning on Purpose: The Unbeatable Strategy of Loving Customers, shows tracking the actual referrals is the next level, what Reichheld describes as the “gold” in the business—and the future of your customer strategy.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

Andy Taylor, Executive Chairman of Enterprise Holdings, once told Reichheld there is only one way to grow. Taylor told Reichheld, “You've got to make sure your customers are treated so well, they come back for more and bring their friends.” Reichheld says that's the basic flywheel that drives all great business.

Reichheld thinks that the right way to determine growth is to measure that flywheel. He would like accounting teams to know how much of their revenue came from customers they have had for a year and all the business of that customer’s referrals, called Earned Growth Rate. Earned Growth Rate separates referral growth from the other growth strategies organizations implement, that can include acquisitions, sales and marketing, or new store locations, among others.

Reichheld sees the Earned Growth Rate concept today as where Net Promoter was 20 years ago. In the next 10 to 20 years, he thinks there won't be a serious business person that doesn't know about Earned Growth Rates. He says his new book shows people how to do that.

Here are some key moments in the discussion:

03:05 Reichheld explains why his frustration with NPS inspired his book and what he is trying to accomplish with it.
09:09 Reichheld makes the argument that there is only one class of purposes that work in business, and explains why.
13:18 Reichheld shares the one way to grow a great profitable business, and how it drives his decisions to invest in companies.
20:18 Colin asks Reichheld what advice he would give an organization that doesn’t know how to use NPS properly, the way Reichheld intended when he invented it.
21:31 Ryan asserts that culture dictates how NPS plays a role in an organization, and asks Reichheld to give advice on how to focus organizations on culture.
24:44 We learn the difference between good profits and bad profits, per Reichheld, and how to use NPS better moving forward.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

Winning on Purpose: The Unbeatable Strategy of Loving Customers

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I love when listeners write in with their business problems. I don’t love that they have problems, but I love that they share them with us so we can all work through them together. In our latest submission for our “I’m in a Pickle” feature of the podcast, Janet explains that even though their customer comments are overwhelmingly positive, their Net Promoter Score® (NPS) is not where they need it to be. Without any complaints to speak of, Janet and the organization don’t know what the problem is, and they asked for our help.

In this episode, we explore the practicalities and pitfalls of using NPS as a metric for your customer strategy success. We also look at the tactical and practical things that Janet and her organization can do to get the score where they need it to be.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

Our first advice to Janet was to remember that NPS is a lot of things, but it isn’t a diagnostic tool. It is a score for how well you already did. If the score is low, it won’t tell you why. Likewise, it can’t tell you why you scored well. It is a way to measure the success of the efforts you have made and, of course, how likely it is that your Customer Experience efforts will lead a customer to recommend you to their family and friends. Here are a few key moments in the discussion.

02:42 We read Janet’s email and explain what her business pickle is.
05:42 Ryan kicks off our discussion by explaining that NPS is not the entire picture of what you need to know about your company’s performance.
10:21 Colin shares a tactical mistake Janet’s company is making with how they ask the Net Promoter Question, “How likely are you to recommend our product or service?”
13:39 Colin gives Janet’s organization questions to consider as they address the need for improvement to hit their goals.
16:38 Ryan agrees strategy to get detailed about why customers aren’t happy enough to recommend them, so they can find their opportunities to improve.
18:09 We kick off a discussion about customer behavior and the differences between what people say and what they do, as well as how to overcome that.
26:49 We summarize all our recommendations for Janet’s company to improve their NPS, from the tactical to the practical.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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I am happy to announce that I am getting my first electric guitar. Many of you know that also means I am buying my first amplifier, too. The one I have my eye on is Fender’s, not because I know anything about amplifiers and their performance, but because I like how it looks like it came straight out of the 1960s.

Nostalgia is an important part of my amplifier purchase. When I see the old-fashioned looking knobs on the amplifier, it reminds me of my childhood and the rock stars of my school days. Getting an amp that looks like that feels like an homage to my childhood dreams of being a rock star.

Of course, the amp is a great amp, too. But I couldn’t tell you why. I can tell you I like how it looks and how it makes me feel.

In this episode, we explore how nostalgia can help your customers feel happy about your offerings, too. If you use nostalgia to appeal to customers’ happy memories and feelings by looking at their past, they just might move forward into the future buying from you.

Key Ideas to Improve Your Customer Experience

The podcast begins with a description of what nostalgia is and why we feel it as human beings. Then we get into examples of how things trigger these nostalgic memories and evoke positive emotions, even if the experience in the past wasn’t a pleasant one. Then, we talk about how you can employ nostalgia to evoke the memories during customer interactions that will spill the happy and pleased over onto your experience.

04:39 Ryan explains what nostalgia is from a psychological perspective.
06:35 We then describe why a negative experience can also make someone feel nostalgic.
08:06 We talk about the Monty Python “The Four Yorkshiremen” sketch that shows how even when people complain about the past, they still seem to feel fond of it.
13:21 Ryan explains some of the psychological benefits of feeling nostalgic that we enjoy as human beings.
15:12 We begin to apply nostalgia to a practical insight for Customer Experience, by using happy memories to cast a Halo-effect on your experience.
23:08 We explain how if you understand what makes people feel nostalgic, you can replicate that in your Customer Experience for them.
25:49 Ryan and Colin explain how you can use the psychology behind nostalgia to improve your experience for people.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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One of our listeners, Jeanne-Claude, has a problem. He sells a complex product and despite the fact that they have the best one in the industry, the competition is outselling them.

I can relate. I sold a complicated product when I was in corporate life, and it was always a highly competitive field. It can be challenging to communicate why you are the best when you have a complex offering and you want to tell customers all about it. However, one thing I know to be true is that it doesn’t matter who is the best; it matters who customers perceive to be the best.

In this episode, we explore what behavioral science concepts might help Jeanne-Claude, and all the rest of you that suffer through something similar, to get the best of his competition.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

There are a number of factors that influence how customers perceive and offer. In the case of a complicated offering, they might be using something that is easier to compare to get them to a decision. However, it could also be the way the information is presented that drives them to the competition. It might even be that the way the choices are presented is making it difficult for them to choose Jeanne-Claude’s company. We talk about all of these concepts in this episode and how they might be influencing his results as well as how he can leverage them to change the outcome.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion.

01:54 We read Jeanne-Claude’s frustrating problem that despite being the best, they are losing to the competition.
03:39 Ryan explains the Evaluability Hypothesis and how it might influence the decision-making process for customers.
07:50 Colin shares a story about choosing travel insurance and how a magazine provided an easier metric to choose one from the many available options.
14:44 Colin explains that it is essential to understand what motivates a decision for specific customers so you can appeal to that in your communication.
21:22 We introduce the concept of framing and how it might influence people’s decisions.
25:42 Ryan brings Choice Architecture into the conversation and how presenting the choices in a different way might lead Jeanne-Claude’s customers in a new direction.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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Scarcity is something are more used to these days, particularly in light of the supply chain problems we see. Scarcity is something we feel when we are doing thing we have enough of what we need. If we don’t fix the problems at the ports, and the related problem of driver shortages to bring things in from the ports, we might see quite a few empty shelves this holiday season.

Not that empty store shelves were anything new to most of us. After the great toilet paper shortage of early 2020, we all know that the line between chaos and order is thinner than we ever suspected. That’s because when we feel something is scarce, we assign more value to it—and sometimes react in crazy ways.

In this episode, we brought back Dr. Professor Kelly Goldsmith of Vanderbilt University to talk more about Scarcity and how it affects our behavior. She explains how Scarcity has different types and we have various ways we respond to it. She also shares how understanding Scarcity and how it drives customer responses can make it an important tool in your marketing toolkit—but only if you know how to use it well.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

The empty store shelves this past year have all taught us a little bit about Scarcity. It changes how we respond to situations in many ways. Dr. Goldsmith explains them to us and how we can use it in our marketing efforts.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

04:54 Dr. Goldsmith describes what scarcity is and the difference between Objective and Subjective Scarcity.
07:43 Dr. Goldsmith explains that Scarcity is always relative, and you can’t have it without also having a Reference Point.
12:09 Ryan has Dr. Goldsmith explain why the toilet paper hoarding of 2020 is different than a marketing tactic, but inspired by the same psychology.
15:09 We talk about the difference between a perceived need and an actual need, and how that affects our response to Scarcity.
26:19 Dr. Goldsmith shares her research on Scarcity and the positives and negative potential effects of how we try to resolve it for ourselves.
32:51 We all share our insight into how people can use what they know about Scarcity to improve their customer strategy.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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The 5 Rules to Dramatically Improve The Way you Deal with Customer Complaints

A lot of the behavioral sciences can feel intimidating. However, it doesn’t have to be. The Five Rules Podcast Series is our attempt at giving you an easy entry point into the complex and messy world of Behavioral Science.

Does your organization like to pretend that complaints never happen? When they do happen, does the company sweep them under the rug and hide them from everyone involved?

If so, you are not alone. Many organizations have the wrong approach to customer complaints. They see them as a problem that should never have happened. However, complaints can be a great way to get real-time feedback on moments in your Customer Experience.

In this episode we explore the five rules to help organizations deal with customer complaints. These rules help you come to better outcomes with your dissatisfied customers and how to see complaints for what they are: opportunities to improve what’s broken in your Customer Experience.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

When it comes to handling customer complaints, there is no substitute for understanding how customers feel and showing them empathy. However, there are few other things to remember, too. Our five rules clarify the process and make it more likely that your customer complaint process will make things better instead of worse, both for customers and your bottom line.

03:21 We share the first rule about reading between the lines; understanding the real issue is key to good resolution, which is not what happened with Colin and his insurance company.
11:10 Colin reveals rule #2, which is about giving your employee the leeway and authority to resolve issues on their own, without having to get permission from someone else.
19:06 Ryan and Colin discuss the merits of resolving issues quickly with Rule #3.
24:42 Moving into the last two areas, the fourth rule is to change how your organization perceives complaints; seeing them as the free advice on your Customer Experience that you pay thousands to consultants to discover.
27:09 We discuss how to use empathy to resolve issues for the customer and make them feel like you care; resolving without empathy does not have the same effect.
30:13 Colin gives a quick summary of the five rules and encourages listeners to write in with their business problems to get some free advice.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on Linkedin and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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Rachel has a problem. Her boss can’t see the need to change. She is frustrated and doesn’t know what to do. Lucky for her, she listens to our podcast and took advantage of our “Help! I’m in a Pickle!” segment for our advice on what to do.

In this episode, we explore what Rachel, or anyone who champions Customer Experience but doesn’t have the support they need from above, can do to convince her boss that there is a need for change. We share strategies and tactics anyone can use to motivate the person they report to without getting written up on their boss’s weekly report.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

Much of the advice we share isn’t all that different from what we share about Customer Experience. After all, in both cases, you are trying to get people to do something that you want, and that requires motivation.

Like customers, your boss has values and metrics they think are important. They have priorities and time constraints like everyone else does, too. Persuading people requires making the change as important to them as it is to you to move Customer Experience up the priorities and give it the time and resources it needs to facilitate the customer-driven growth you want.

Here are some key moments from the discussion:

02:54 We read Rachel’s email about how her boss does not use the organization’s mission and values in his decision making and she wants him to.
06:29 Colin shares two essential points about getting any person to do anything, customer, co-worker, or otherwise.
09:11 Ryan explains how using measurement to motivate change, like a monthly update on achievement of these goals, keeps the mission and values top of mind for everyone.
16:07 Colin also suggest researching the competition and seeing how they use their mission and values, then report that to the boss.
18:13 Ryan suggests using the principles behind “nudging” to help the boss understand the importance of using the mission and values more in their leadership.
20:45 Ryan suggests using social pressure by getting other employees excited about the mission and values, too, so it’s harder for your leadership to ignore.
22:13 Colin shares a real-world example of using Social Proof to influence the leadership to come around to the organization’s new way of thinking through intra-company program where future invites were recommended by previous attendees.
25:02 We encourage everyone to remember that leadership can come from anywhere, so don’t be afraid lead others, no matter where you rank in the organization.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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Back in 1994, Steve Jobs introduced a concept at an Apple conference: that the design of their products should begin at the desired Customer Experience and work backward from there.

Not long after that, Joe Pine co-authored a book called The Experience Economy, that changed the way at looked at the future of business.

In 2002, I began my global Customer Experience consultancy, Beyond Philosophy, a term a bandied about long before anyone even knew what it was. By 2005, I had undertaken research to determine the 20 emotions that drive or destroy value, to prove that incorporating customer emotions into experiences provides an ROI.

Meanwhile, Lewis Carbone was championing Customer Experience and founding his consultancy and philosophy in ExpereinceEngineering™.

Now, 2021, Customer Experience as we know it is dying.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that the concepts behind it live on and are developing into a new variant: Customer Science.

In this episode, Pine, Carbone, and I discuss whether Customer Experience is dying and the future of experiences from our point of view.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

It is essential to explain that none of us think that putting the customer at the center of your experience at an organization is an idea that will never die. However, we all think that the original concept of Customer Experience from over 25 years ago has changed and morphed into new areas. What differentiated you at the turn of the 21st century and what does it today are two very different things. Perhaps, more importantly, we discuss what Customer Experience needs to be in the future and what Customer Experience champions can do to ensure that it happens.

Here are a few key moments in our LinkedIn live discussion:

05:34 Colin explains why he thinks CX is dying as we know it and Pine weighs in, too.
13:56 Carbone explains why he thinks it is impossible for CX to die.
25:05 Colin explains what he thinks the future of CX will be, Customer Science.
40:47. Pine shares what he thinks the future of CX will be, which is focusing on providing value to customers.
42:42 Carbone explains what happened with Capital One as they moved from fixing what was broken to transformative experience that changed the way they do business.
46:29. Pine explains how he thinks experiences can contribute to happiness, and how it isn’t about having more things to buy.
49:18 Carbone explains how CX of the future can augment the voice of the customer with the mind of the customer.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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Total agreement is overrated. Disagreements are good for us. They challenge the status quo and push the standards for improvement. After all, if you only talk to people who agree with you, how would you know when you are wrong?

In this episode, I debate with Customer Experience critic Alex Mead, Chief Customer Service Experience Officer, about how we Customer Experience influencers are doing everything wrong. Mead says that our training is outdated, impractical, and worthless and needs an overhaul for practicality.

I disagree. Mostly. Surprisingly, I feel like he makes good points. However, I do not think such an extreme measure is necessary or even a good idea.

Tune in to hear what Mead has to say about training, accreditation, Customer Experience Influencers, and even the term “Customer Experience” itself.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

We set this episode up as a debate and attempted to follow that format. Then, with Ryan as the presiding judge, Mead and I present our arguments, counterarguments, and suggestions for improvement.

Here are some critical moments in the discussion.

02:12 Mead shares his work experience and how he ended up as a self-described Customer Service Experience advocate.
04:56 Mead says that while a mass statement, he believes that Customer Experience is not appropriately defined by all that teach it and how we would explain it instead.
10:03 Colin explains his approach and that while he thinks Mead’s arguments have validity, Colin does not agree with his sweeping statement.
14:43 Mead explains that accreditation earned in two days does not prepare anyone to work in Customer Experience alone; practical experience is necessary.
17:54 Mead explains that a second problem is that today’s Customer Experience experts want to implement technology that is not what customers want.
23:44 We discuss why rebranded marketing people are not the best for heading up a customer-centered contact center experience.
26:05 We both present what we would do to improve Customer Experience training and accreditation moving forward.

To contact Mead directly, follow him on LinkedIn, Alex Mead, or email him at alexMead@sky.com.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is the Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for two years. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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Great business insights with a touch of humor, all put over in a clear, easy-to-understand way.

Each week we discuss how you can gain and retain more customers and solve business problems. We look at the theory of how and why Customers make decisions and then break this down into practical actions you can take.

Here is one review which we think sums up the show.

“The dynamics between the hosts of this show absolutely makes this podcast. Each brings a unique take on a topic, their own perspective, and play off each other’s sense of humor. I come away after each episode with a feeling joy and feeling a bit smarter. Win-win”.

You are in great hands as the hosts have vast experience and are respected across business. Colin Shaw, who LinkedIn calls one of the top 150 business influencers and has 390,000 followers; and Professor Ryan Hamilton, teaches marketing and psychology at Emory University; he also used to be a stand-up comedian.

If you want to learn and laugh, give us a try!

Check us out at BeyondPhilosophy.com.

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Do you remember Blockbuster, Circuit City, or Kodak? I ask because these brands are not around anymore. They were once the leaders in their field, the only game in town in some cases, but now they are gone. They disappeared because they didn’t respond to changes in the marketplace with new ideas.

It isn’t unusual for an organization to be set in its ways. Human beings are also reluctant to change their ways or even opinions. Psychologically, we tend to cling to what we believe and look for resources that support our views. It is only with effort that we see a different perspective.

In this episode, we explore why it is that we tend to stick to our opinions rather than seeing the other side of an issue. We also talk about how diversity in opinions can help create a culture at an organization that is collaborative without being combative. Finally, we discuss ways that an organization can use diversity in opinion and viewpoints as the basis for creating new ideas that ensure their brand won’t disappear like a national brick-and-mortar video store in the 2000s.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

The inspiration for this episode was book by Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Harari does an excellent job showing different viewpoints for long held and widespread beliefs that cause the reader to stop and reconsider their views on the topic. This open and balanced view of opposing opinions is what we advocate when trying to come up with new ideas that foster customer-driven growth in your organization.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

03:15 We talk about Sapiens and how the author asserts that becoming farmers probably didn’t make humans any happier than they would have been by remaining hunter gatherers.
06:06 Ryan explains the psychological reasons that people have a hard time seeing multiple viewpoints on an issue or alternative solutions to the one they favor.
09:49 We share one of the reasons we don’t want to accept other viewpoints, which involves conserving cognitive resources and other emotional reasons.
13:22 Ryan shares how scientific progress leads to shifting paradigms, and these changes are good for everyone in the community.
16:35 We explain how a complex world needs complex solutions to resolve it, and anything less will not serve you to make the changes you need.
19:37 We take turns sharing the four actionable ways you can incorporate this style of problem-solving and creative thinking in your organization, starting with gathering a diverse group of people together to collaborate.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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A lot of the behavioral sciences can feel intimidating. However, it doesn’t have to be. The Five Rules Podcast Series is our attempt at giving you an easy entry point into the complex and messy world of Behavioral Science.

If I had a more efficient family and less expensive friends than you have now, would you like to trade? I can guarantee they will save you time and money.

My guess is probably not. We don’t measure the worth of our families and friends with metrics like time and money savings. We have an emotional bond with them that we cannot replace with a better model or an updated version.

Loyal customers are the same way. They have an emotional bond with the companies they do business with and those feelings are why they come back over and over again. Not surprisingly, loyal customers are the most profitable and have a direct effect on your bottom line.

In this episode we explore the five rules that absolutely build customer loyalty. These rules help you design an experience that creates those emotional bonds and the loyal customers that come with them.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

When it comes to building experiences that produce the emotional relationships that promote customer loyalty, there are no shortcuts. It requires thinking long-term and in detail about how you interact with your customers. Our five rules help organize that process into actionable steps.

Here are some highlights of our discussion:

03:37 We talk about how many organizations think too much about the short-term goals and not enough about long-term goals.
07:59 We talk about how loyalty requires both parties to give and take, compromise, and understand each other, so organizations should remember that it goes both ways.
14:48 Ryan explains the difference between inertia and real loyalty, and why mistaking one for the other can be a real problem for organizations.
20:47 Colin talks about one of his favorite topics, customer memories and their relationship to forming emotional and loyal connections with organizations.
23:12 We bring it back to the emotional part of an experience that many times organizations overlook in their pursuit of business.
25:42 Colin explains the importance of having an Emotional Bank Account with people and to keep up with putting deposits in it.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on Linkedin and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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We all love to keep what is ours. As soon as we have possession of something, it becomes part of our “endowment,” a fancy word for “our stuff.” Psychologists call this the Endowment Effect, and it explains how we value things that we have, even if we got them for free.

However, we also hate losing our stuff, even more that we enjoy getting new stuff. Psychologists call this Loss Aversion, and it is the overall concept that explains why your free trial might help increase your sales. Some people would rather pay for something they used to get for free than lose access to it.

In this episode, we answer a question from one of our listeners, Mohammed, who wanted to know how to convince his team to implement a free trial to increase sales. We shared our theories about why it might work and what we recommend.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

There are practical considerations that accompany implementation of a free trial to optimize your success. We discuss a few of them in the podcast:

02:41 We share the problem, which is part of our “In a Pickle” feature of the podcast where we address listeners problems with practical applications of the behavioral sciences.
04:48 We explain the Endowment Effect and how it relates to Loss Aversion.
08:10 Colin shares an example of how a return policy can make or break a “free-trial” experience.
14:01. We talk about how you can use the successes with a free trial to outweigh some of the costs of having one.
15:10 We talk about the concept of follow-on sales where bringing on new customers presents an opportunity to sell them additional goods and services.
18:41 Ryan talks about Reference Points and how it can be difficult to get some people to pay for something they used to get for free unless you make it clear that is the arrangement from the start.
22:01 We summarize our suggestions for Mohammed to convince his team to implement a free trial in his company to increase sales.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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Sometimes customers don’t come back. The two biggest reasons that customers do not come back are apathy and rudeness. With either behavior on your side of the experience, you will lose customers' business. So how do you get them to say, “I’ll be back?”

Our guest Shep Hyken, author, speaker, and thought leader for the Customer Experience movement joins us to answer that question with material from his new book, I'll Be Back: How to Get Customers to Come Back Again and Again. In this episode, we discuss some of the concepts he shares in the book, including a six-step process you can use to create an I’ll-Be-Back experience for your customers.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

Hyken's goal with the book is to give practical tips to create better than satisfactory relationships. One of Hyken's main messages in all his work is that organizations should be better than average consistently and predictably. When you are better, customers come back.

The core message here is you have to look at those things through the customers' eyes. But, also, every individual in the company should ask, "Is this right for the customer?" before they do anything.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

02:44 Hyken shares the main idea behind his book, including its origin and how it became his latest passion project.
06:55 Hyken explains why “Fine” the f-bomb of Customer Experience is.
09:45 We learn an abbreviated version of the six-step process to creating an I’ll-Be-Back experience.
13:49 Ryan talks about how best practices can be reductive if too many firms use the same strategy.
17:59 We discuss the importance of meeting the needs of the customers and not confusing that wisdom with the tactics used to meet them.
21:54 Hyken shares a story about when an early delivery cause a big problem for one of his clients and how it could have been avoided.
26:33 Colin introduces the idea that you should be sure that your customers are returning because they feel loyalty, and not just because they haven’t bothered to make a change.

If you want to learn more about the book, please visit Hyken.com.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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You probably didn’t mean to do it. You were just trying to market the latest brand effort to your new and existing customer base. You were doing your job; getting the message out. Unfortunately, your marketing inadvertently damaged your customer focus.

However, marketing isn’t the only area to blame for the problem. How you segment customers also contributes to this damage, as well as how well you understand your customers’ expectations of you. It turns out that all of these areas contribute to the customer orientation of your organization. Having a handle on where you are for each of them is an excellent way to improve your customer focus.

In this episode, we explore the ways that we assess an organization’s customer centricity from the most unfocused on customers, or Naïve, to the most, which are Natural. We take a deeper dive into what we look at in three contributing areas, including Customer Strategy, Marketing, and Customer Expectations. Our hope is that you will be able to do it for organizations, too, starting with your own.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

These three areas are significant influences on how we assess an organizations customer centricity in various ways. For Customer Strategy, we see more nuance in the customer segmentation for the Natural companies. In Marketing, we consider how much communication there is throughout an organization so everyone that is in contact with customers is “in the know.” We also look at how often a company takes on customer research to detect changes in Customer Expectations. All of these assessments help us determine where a company is on their journey to putting the customer at the center of everything they do.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

05:07 Colin explains how Customer Segmentation demonstrates the customer focus of a company.
10:24 We introduce the idea that the Customer Experience strategy should permeate and be the dominant throughout each department’s functional strategies.
15:31 Colin introduces the Marketing area and how that shows where customers rank in the company’s focus.
20:07 We explain why and how market research is another indicator of customer-centricity.
22:24 Colin explains why managing Customer Expectations are indicative of customer-centricity.
29:04 We share why it is important to keep up customer research to stay on top of changes with Customer Expectations.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on Linkedin and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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If you are like most companies, you probably think that you put the customer at the center of everything you do. But do you?

There are some critical things that the most customer centric companies do differently than the average company. It requires a mindset that understands the essential nature of it and then a consistent approach to applying it in all the areas of the company, from how you recruit talent and empower employees to how you prioritize customers in your team meetings.

In this episode, we discuss how we categorize the customer centricity of organizations and use the areas of People and Culture and Leadership to determine it.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

There are four distinct types of organizations regarding customer-centricity, which we call our Naïve to Natural Model. There are Naïve organizations that do not or will not put customers first, Transactional ones that know they should do more but aren’t, Enlightened companies get the importance of it but are still working on putting them there, and Natural companies, well, they just do it.

We use nine areas to determine where an organization is on this model. Two of the most significant are People and Culture and Leadership. How you handle these areas and how they relate to customers indicate where you are on your Naïve to Natural journey.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

03:19 Colin defines what customer-centricity is for an organization.
05:07 We share the four types of organizations that we use to codify organizations for customer-centricity.
07:04 Colin explains how there are nine areas that affect an organization’s customer centricity, starting with people.
11:36 Colin shares a story about how he knew an organization was Transactional based on how much time they devoted to customer training in employee orientation.
23:27 We introduce another area of customer centricity, Culture and Leadership.
25:44 Colin explains how they once used a speed dating format to get senior managers back in touch with customers.
27:58 We share how the position of customer issues on the company’s team meeting agenda indicates how important they think it is.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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No one ever sends out an email that they hope no one will read. Well, not on purpose, anyway. No one would go through the trouble of writing, editing, circulating, and then editing an email some more only to have readers skip it and click on another, more compelling email in the inbox. We write and send emails to get people to do something, starting with reading it.

In this episode we explore the ways that email marketers can increase response rates to their campaigns using the concepts from psychology and behavioral economics. By using the way humans respond to information as a guide, you can change the reaction your email creates in people, and get them to respond more.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

There are two main concepts that we focus on in this episode, Framing and Loss Aversion. Framing explains how the presentation of information is never neutral and how that affects people’s reaction to it. Loss Aversion explains that we react more intensely to losses than we do to gains. Using the combination of these two concepts, you might be surprised at how different the response rate to the same information in an email can be.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

04:16 Ryan presents an explanation for Framing and Loss Aversion, and how you can use them to persuade people to do something.
08:51 Ryan explains how there is also a Negativity Bias at play which suggests we prefer negative information over positive information.
10:08 We make an important distinction between presenting losses and being negative, and how one does not necessarily lead to the other every time.
12:07 We describe how FOMO, or Fear Of Missing Out, is a form of Loss Aversion that can be useful when writing email copy.
15:07 Colin shares a tool that he finds helpful for writing headlines that are compelling for content, which could be useful for email subject lines.
21:54 We explain why understanding your customers goals and motivations will help you create a message that gets their attention.
24:59 We share all the specific things you can do to make your emails more compelling and increase your response rates.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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A lot of the behavioral sciences can feel intimidating. However, it doesn’t have to be. The Five Rules Podcast Series is our attempt at giving you an easy entry point into the complex and messy world of Behavioral Science.

A couple of years ago, research from some well-respected firms came back with the conclusion that investing in Customer Experience is not paying off the way that organizations had hoped. One of the reasons that might be the case is because many people are investing in Customer Experience just because everyone else is and, as a result, are focused on the wrong things. So, to change that focus and prove that your efforts are paying off, we wanted to give you a formula for success.

In this episode, we explore the 5 Rules to Guarantee a Return on Investment. From making sure you understand how your experience drives value for people to thinking outside the box to measuring everything you do; we have the way for you to prove that your programs work. But, perhaps most importantly, we show that you, as the champion of them, are the person that can get your organization the results they want and the customer-driven growth they need.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

We designed our five rules to help change your focus to what matters to customers to drive results for your bottom line. This process starts with Emotional Signature® research, which enables you to see what drives value for your organization and the hidden wants and needs that your customers really want but probably didn’t tell you.

The 5 Rules to Guarantee a Return on Investment are as follows:

Do your homework.
Think outside the square.
Remember, costs are part of the formula.
Have a Fail-Fast Mentality
Measure everything.

Here are some critical moments in the discussion:

03:37 Colin explains how doing your homework means digging deeper on what customers really want so you know what drives value for your customers in your experience.
08:30 We discuss how important it is to differentiate yourself from the competition by going beyond adopting industry best practices and looking ahead when planning your strategy in the marketplace rather than responding to change afterward.
14:16 Colin shares his no-miss strategy for ensuring that what you request in the budget will get approved (Hint: It involves getting the finance team on board).
18:31 We talk about how you have to try things and fail so you can learn what works and adjust the rest; it’s a “Ready, Fire, Aim!” approach to change.
21:46 Colin shares how when you can show your results, you also show that you are a person that makes decisions based on strategy and gets results on them.
24:05 We review and summarize all five rules as well as what you should do with them.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on Linkedin and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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We were excited to reach our 200th Episode of the podcast! In this episode, we look back on six of our favorite podcasts from these first 200 episodes and what the key learning was from each of them.

We want to thank our listeners for tuning in each week to hear our ramblings. We are proud of what we do, but it would be meaningless if it didn’t prove to be a useful resource for people. We hope that it is and that you will continue to join us on this journey as we explore the many facets of customer behavior and the tools that facilitate customer-driven growth.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

We identified the following episodes as our favorites from the past 200. Each of us chose three, and if you want to hear them in their entirety, simply click on the title:

Colin's Picks

How Apple Uses Psychology To Construct An Outstanding ExperienceThe Massive Importance of Memory in a Customer's Experience

What is Customer Science?

Ryan's Picks:

5 Rules for Ensuring Behavioral Science Works for Your Business

Are You Using This Valuable Marketing Tool for Growth?

Is Facial Recognition Creepy, Or Is It Just the Future?

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

04:24. We explain a new segment of the show we are adding moving forward that will help people even more than in the past.
07:41 Ryan shares his take on the 5 Rules for Ensuring Behavioral Science Works for Your Business episode.
10:54. Colin explains how Apple does a great job with the behavioral sciences in their experience when he shares his first pick.
13:57. Ryan talks about another favorite, Are You Using This Valuable Marketing Tool for Growth?, and its relationship to the Availability Heuristic.
17:15. Colin talks about memories, one of his favorite topics, with his second pick, The Massive Importance of Memory in a Customer Experience.
20:36 Ryan explains why his next pick, Is Facial Recognition Creepy, or Just The Future?, is one of his most memorable podcasts.
25:25. Colin discusses the three parts of Customer Science and why the What is Customer Science? podcast is perhaps the most significant episode of the first 200.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on Linkedin and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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It all started with Apple's Air Tags. As soon as I heard about them, I knew that they would be exceptional, and I had to have them.

But why? I had a drawerful of other manufacturer's products that did the same thing. What was so special about these?

My answer is because these were from Apple, and the reason Apple is the answer is because of Halo Effects. Halo Effects affect people's impression of you and your experiences, and, in some cases, you don't have as much control over these halos as you might like.

This episode explains what Halo Effects are, how they influence customers, and what you should do about it moving forward.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

Halo Effects are a widespread psychological phenomenon that forms about people and things, and even whole industries. Halo Effects describe how when you create a general impression about an entity. Then, you use that impression to fill in missing information with data that aligns with that impression moving forward. As you can probably guess, these Halo Effects can be positive or negative, and they have a lot of influence on what your customers think of you.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

03:13 Ryan explains what a Halo Effect is and how it affects customers' perceptions.
07:17 We explain how attractiveness is an excellent example of how Halo Effects can work quickly and automatically.
09:53 Colin shares an example about buying a car, and we get into how impressions and Halo Effects work together and change over time.
11:48 Ryan talks about how the Halo Effect can fill in details that we don't have.
16:02 Colin explains why all parts of the experience influence the Halo Effect, even if they aren't part of the core service you provide.
18:08 Ryan explains the multiplier effects that can happen of reputations for brands and organizations, both good and bad.
25:37 We talk about how you can use your familiarity with the concept of Halo Effects to manage customers' impressions of your brand experience to a better outcome.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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When it comes to your bottom line, pricing your products and services is essential. Price it too low and you can’t keep the lights on. Price it to high and nobody will buy it—and you still can’t keep the lights on. So how do you increase your margin (and keep the lights on)? Make sure your pricing is correct!

However, pricing correctly is more challenging than it may seem at first. Most companies assume that increasing your margin is a matter of marking up your costs enough that you can make a profit. But there is more to it than that. In some cases, companies don’t mark it up enough, and then they still don’t make a profit.

In this episode, we explore the psychology of pricing, the difference between pricing products vs. services, and what you can do to help your customers compare your pricing to your competition, and pick your offer over theirs.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

If you get the price wrong, you go out of business. So, there is a lot at stake with pricing. However, there is a lot at stake for in these decisions for customers, too, and they usually have even less information than you do. In other words, pricing is tricky, especially for services, which are not easy for people to compare.

Here are a few key moments in the pricing discussion:

02:24 We begin the discussion about the difference between products and services, and the different challenges with pricing and comparing them.
09:15 Colin shares a story about how a low price can send the wrong signals, too.
12:05 Ryan explains how Reference Points can help customer evaluate intangible items.
14:46 Colin shares and example of what Anchoring can do for your pricing, and how to pay too much for things in some cases.
16:56 Ryan explains that in some cases people will use environmental cues to make decisions when pricing is difficult to assess.
22:12 We talk about the signals that the dollar amounts in your pricing send and how prepayment can affect customers’ perception of price.
27:24 We share our advice on how you can use what you have learned about the psychology of pricing to increase your margins and get your pricing correct.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on Linkedin and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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A lot of the behavioral sciences can feel intimidating. However, it doesn’t have to be. The Five Rules Podcast Series is our attempt at giving you an easy entry point into the complex and messy world of Behavioral Science.

For three years running, Beyond Philosophy has been recognized by Financial Times as a leading management consultancy organization. While I would love to take credit for it myself, I realize that we could never have won without the excellent team we have here.

Our team-building strategy is deliberate and repeatable. I have used it to help organizations that hire us to improve their Customer Experiences to build their teams. In other words, we have a strategy for creating successful Customer Experience teams that we know works.

In this episode, we share the five rules for building successful Customer Experience teams. We hope that they will help you make the team you need to deliver the experience that fosters the customer-driven growth you need.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

When it comes to building Customer Experience teams, there is no considerable difference between them and any other team. So, in many ways, you can consider these rules as applicable for any team-building project.

Here are some highlights of the discussion:

04:28 We share Rule #1, which is to hire strategic thinkers and practical doers, so once you know what to do, you can then carry it out.
10:01 With Rule #2, we suggest hiring a team with a high EQ or emotional intelligence so they can understand and manage the emotions of themselves and others.
12:53 We talk about how understanding all the departments of an organization is essential for the CX Team with Rule #3, which is to respect cross-silo knowledge.
17:24 When we talk about Rule #4, which is to find people who can deal with conflict but with integrity, we discuss the importance of handling conflict when you are on the CX team because everyone is happy about the project until you ask them to do something.
23:14 We share Rule #5 and employ people with natural communication skills, which is vital when explaining the concepts behind why you are making changes to people from all walks of life.
29:38 We summarize the rules and why we think they are essential.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is the Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on Linkedin and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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In a discussion that echoes the age-old chicken vs. egg conversation sentiment, we engaged in a debate. After meeting a fellow Customer Experience proponent on a new social media platform called Clubhouse, we invited author and speaker Stacy Sherman to debate. The topic: Is Customer Experience the new marketing, or is it an entity on its own?

Sherman and I have a difference of opinion. Sherman, a director of Customer Experience and employee engagement at a global organization by day and the founder of DoingCXRight.com by night, says that Customer Experience is the new marketing, replacing and usurping it. I don't see it this way, and I see it as an entity/team separate from but working closely with marketing.

In this episode, we each make our case for our view. We also define what Customer Experience and Marketing are and the relationships that we see between them. In the end, we settle on an answer that should help organizations make the most of both teams.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

We have set up this episode as a court with Professor Hamilton presiding as the judge and jury to offer his unbiased decision. For our part, Sherman and I know that both the marketing and Customer Experience teams contribute a lot to the bottom line. We also understand that the two departments have many shared goals and metrics that measure their success. However, is one of them swallowing the other or do they both present value to the overall goal in equal parts? You'll have to listen to know for sure.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

03:44 I define the topic of the debate based on a sentiment I have been hearing that CX is replacing marketing.
08:41 Sherman and I offer our Customer Experience and Marketing definitions, which set the foundation for further discussion of our positions.
15:48 I explain why marketing has a different and equally important role as Customer Experience in defining what the experience should be.
18:25 Sherman explains that the blend of skills and real-world application of experiences that makes Customer Experience the new marketing.
22:15 Ryan asks us why this discussion matters to organizations trying to deliver an experience that promotes customer-driven growth.
26:38 Ryan gives his decision and summarizes the issue for us all.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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Some of you might know that I am learning to play guitar. However, almost none of you will ever hear my covers of Pink Floyd. In fact, that audience is quite exclusive, and includes only me and my wife Lorraine. That is because my guitar playing is something that I do in private, not public.

In this episode, we talk about privacy, or rather, the lack of it in today’s online environment. Your customers probably also have some things they would rather keep private, and finding out that you are invading their privacy with undisclosed data collection is not going to do good things for your Customer Experience.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

There is a bit of a duplicity in this topic for me. On the one hand, I applaud organizations that use the data they have about customer behavior to anticipate customer needs and provide an elevated, personalized experience for them. However, if customers don’t know that you are collecting data about them and then learn that you have without their explicit permission, it can feel creepy—and creepy is not a good emotion to evoke with your Customer Experience.

We discuss this conflict of interest and some ways that you can address it. Here are some key moments in the discussion:

04:22 Ryan explains the psychology of privacy and the differing needs of it amongst individuals.
06:56 We talk about a TED Talk by journalist Glenn Greenwald who explained that we wouldn’t give our ATM PIN to a company if they asked for it, but we give them plenty of other data about ourselves.
10:50 Colin discusses Apple’s new App Tracking Transparency function and what it revealed to me about some of his apps.
14:35 Ryan talks about how discovering that apps are tracking your data might lead customers to wonder about the safety of it.
19:29 We discuss whether some organizations are collecting data they don’t intend to use.
21:36 Colin shares a shocking story about the vacuum robots, which leads into a discussion about what could happen with data collection at a legislative level.
28:47 We share our insights on how you can manage this situation moving forward to a positive outcome for your Customer Experience.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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Maybe it’s a towing service. Perhaps you use an interior designer. It could be that you needed to outsource your call center. Whatever the reason may be, you have outsourced part of your Customer Experience.

There is an inherent risk involved, of course, if there are problems. After all, customers do not distinguish between the part of the experience you provide and the part your third-party does. To customers, it’s all one experience and any problems that happen along the way, whether they were under your control or not, reflect upon your brand. However, by bringing in these additional resources the third-party company provides, you also have created an end-to-end experience that makes it easy for your customers to do business with you.

The question is, was outsourcing that part of your experience really a good idea or a big mistake? In this episode we answer that question and give you some actionable steps to manage your third-party partners.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

This episode has some examples of what we mean by third party partners and how they fit into an experience. We also explore the pros and cons of outsourcing part of your Customer Experience. Finally, we discuss different ways you can mitigate your risk and manage customer expectations to the best possible outcome for your experience.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

03:20 Ryan shares a story about his friend and her troubles with a trampoline installation.
06:21 For the first time EVER in the podcast, Colin complains a bit about an experience he had with Apple.
07:40 We explain that how you position the third-party’s role in your experience might create some separation for the two parts in your customers’ mind.
09:58 We explain how companies can’t contract out part of the experience and then walk away from their responsibility for it.
12:22 Colin shares a story where a hotel saw their airport shuttle service like it was a favor and he saw it as a failed part of their experience, and why that happens.
15:56 Colin shares a term he learned from BMW when writing his first book, “Only-ers” and why you shouldn’t have them in your company.
19:58 Ryan explains how big companies can sometimes make customers feel like they are dealing with a third-party company if they don’t improve the customer journey between departments.
26:42 We share our advice and actionable items to help you manage the parts of your experience you might have outsourced.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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It’s summertime. Do you know what that means? That’s right. It’s time for your summer reading list. I bet you thought you were too old for such things.

In this episode, we share 7 essential books for any Customer Experience professional to read, ideally in a tropical locale with a fruity drink in hand.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

From books on Customer Experience to books about psychology to 1990s bestselling business books, we have a wide variety of reading material for Customer Experience professionals. These books will help you understand why customer behavior is the way it is and how you can help move that behavior to a place that delivers customer-driven growth. Best of all, we save the best for last.

Here are the 7 books we think you should read this summer:

The Experience Economy: Competing for Customer Time, Attention, and Money by B. Joseph Pine and James H. Gilmore
The End of Average How We Succeed in a World That Values Sameness by Todd Rose
Who Moved My Cheese? By Dr. Spencer Johnson
Uncontrolled: The Surprising Payoff of Trial and Error for Business, Politics, and Society by Jim Manzi
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Peopleby Stephen R. Covey
The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success by Megan McArdle
The Intuitive Customer: 7 Imperatives for Moving Your Customer Experience to the Next Level by Colin Shaw and Ryan Hamilton

See what we did there?

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

02:56 Colin introduces his first book, The Experience Economy cowritten by Joe Pine, a recent guest on the podcast from a few weeks back.
05:05 Ryan introduces his first book, The End of Average, and explained the basic idea of the book and the implications for Customer Experience.
06:53 Colin recommends Who Moved My Cheese?, a 90s bestseller that changed his life by urging him to start his own global Customer Experience Consultancy.
12:54 Ryan shares a book called Uncontrolled, a book that emphasizes the importance of experimentation.
17:15 Colin gives a brief summary of the seven habits shared in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
22:19. Ryan suggests The Up Side of Down, which shares the idea that failure is critical to growth and lessons learned from failure can lead to future successes.
24:40. We save the best for last with The Intuitive Customer, our book that explores the 7 imperatives for taking your experience to a new level of greatness.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on Linkedin and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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A lot of the behavioral sciences can feel intimidating. However, it doesn’t have to be. The Five Rules Podcast Series is our attempt at giving you an easy entry point into the complex and messy world of Behavioral Science.

The concepts behind behavioral science are powerful stuff. The psychology that drives how people make decisions has far-reaching and critical influences on how people act as customers.

We often hear about small changes that make a big difference on the outcome when you read about the experiments that prove the theories the science produces. However, the theories that play out in an experiment do not always have the same outcome in the real world. Sometimes, the behavioral science works fine, but isn’t as dramatic as the study you read about it. In the worst examples, behavioral science concepts don’t work at all.

In this episode, we explore the 5 rules that will help you set up your business for success in the implementation of the concepts theorized in behavioral science. We love the effects possible using behavioral science in Customer Experience, especially when they, well, work.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

Learning about behavioral science is engaging, fun even. However, implementing experience improvements using the theories you enjoyed learning about can be less fun and even a little frustrating if you aren’t getting the results you wanted. The following five rules will help you set up your behavioral-science-inspired Customer Experience design implementation for success:

Focus on the goals or problems to be solved rather than applying the theory. You must know what you are fixing to pick the appropriate tool to do the job, which was the subject of another podcast a few weeks ago, “Is This One of the Most Important Jobs in Business Today?”
Get granular. Behavioral science doesn’t work in general; it works in specifics.
Identify your levers. Determine what parts of the experience are under your control and concentrate your efforts there.
Identify your customers' mindset. Recreating the situation where your customer decides what to buy (and what not to) is essential to effectively applying the behavioral sciences.
Iterate. Behavioral science’s influence on customers works best when fine-tuned over time and measured for success.

Here are some highlights of the discussion:

03:46 Ryan presents how the way we learn behavioral science affects how we want to implement it.
07:26 We discuss the essential nature of getting specific with your actions using behavioral science concepts to drive behavior.
10:40 Colin discusses how people like things in threes, sevens, and so on, and Ryan explains how research has shown that people converge on specific numbers of items.
13:59 Ryan reminds businesses to focus on what they can control when implementing behavioral sciences; Colin explains that the way you manage it should be deliberate.
18:35 We discuss how essential it is to understand your customers’ mindsets when designing your experience and why.
25:05 We explain the importance of fine-tuning your efforts, even after implementation, and why you should measure your results.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is the Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on Linkedin and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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You might not realize it but the failure of the European Super League in soccer, the pros and cons of vaccine passports, and a brand that took a political stand and paid the price for it all have something in common. These things are part of three news stories that can provide insight into improving your Customer Experience.

So how do they provide insight? Like you can learn from other people's experiences, you can learn from other people's mistakes. Either way, it offers an opportunity for vicarious learning. Vicarious learning is beneficial for avoiding the pain of errors but still getting the benefit of the gained wisdom from it.

We see news headlines all the time about different types of vicarious learning opportunities, both good and bad. However, in this episode, we explore the lessons we can gain from the pain of three organization's Customer Experience mistakes and avoid making the same ones.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

There are three news stories that we talk about in this episode that, at first glance, do not seem to be about Customer Experience. However, after taking a deeper dive into the cause of the problem, we discover that Customer Experience is a contributing factor in all three cases. In this episode, we discuss why and how the experience affects the story's outcome and what insight you can glean from the situation.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

03:12 The discussion begins with a recap of the failure of the European Super League for soccer and how it shows the importance of recognizing the value you provide customers.
13:47 We talk about the movement for and against vaccine passports in the reopening of different venues and experiences after the pandemic and how that will affect CX.
16:15 The discussion turns to what happens when supply shortages disrupt business as usual after the pandemic, and the best way to handle that for your customers.
22:29 We review what happened to Delta in the past couple of months when Georgia, the state where the company is based, passed voting laws that were hotly contested and they decided to come out on the issue.
27:21 We offer advice on how to choose sides when staying neutral on a contentious topic seems impossible.
28:26 We talk about how framing can change how customers perceive your communication, and the benefits of being deliberate about your strategy regarding these issues.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on Linkedin and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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Pricing strategy on its face doesn’t seem complicated. The goal is to get as high a price as you can to ensure you have enough margin to make a profit, while also moving inventory at a sufficient rate. So, the strategy is often to move the price around until you find the sweet spot that hits all these metrics.

However, like most things that have to do with customer behavior, it isn’t as simple as that. There are other variables that can affect your pricing strategy success, and understanding them will help you find that sweet spot faster.

In this episode, we investigate pricing strategy and tactics that organizations use to inspire the customer behavior they want. We also talk about the two levels of pricing strategy to consider as well as some practical advice on how you can apply it to your pricing tactics.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

Pricing is great in that it produces excellent quantitative data. You can see you sold X amount of product or service at a specific price. Lower the price by ten percent and you can see that you sold Y. Modeling with data can show you a lot more about customer behavior related to price. Unfortunately, what quantitative data can’t always show you about pricing is the psychological effects pricing has on customer behavior. That’s where we come in.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

03:58 Ryan talks about the two ways to try to understand pricing and the concept of price elasticity.
10:34 Ryan explains the two levels of pricing strategy for different brands: individual pricing and general pricing image.
13:04 Colin shares a story about what he learned about making mistakes in general image pricing with a grocery store chain in the Southeastern US.
16:25 Ryan explains how the common tactics we associate with pricing (aka, sales) work on the individual level impressions.
17:55 Ryan shares the two general principles for pricing that affect customer behavior around price.
26:05 We share practical advice about what you should do with this information.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on Linkedin and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

View Details

When I was unsubscribing to a service online, I encountered some resistance. My unsubscribing experience included a detailed accounting of all the features to which I would no long have access—in bold, red typeface. It also featured a checklist where I had to acknowledge one-by-one all the benefits I was forfeiting. It was a wonderful example of a company that takes advantage of the effects of Loss Aversion.

Loss Aversion is part of the bigger concept of Prospect Theory, first introduced nearly 50 years ago by Nobel-prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Loss Aversion describes how we hate losing things much more than we enjoy gaining things.

We discussed the effects of Loss Aversion on customer behavior in this episode, part of our new series The Ten Most Effective Ways to Influence Your Customers’ Behavior. Loss Aversion is the 2nd of the ten effective ways. We also explain how you can use these effects to your benefit when presenting your marketing message and in your Customer Experience. Perhaps most importantly, we give you actionable items you can take to implement these ideas into your organization today.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

People hate losing things the most and will often change their behavior to avoid doing so. That means if customers are behaving a way that you don’t like, like unsubscribing, you can steer their behavior to a better outcome by emphasizing what they might lose if they continue in that direction.

Here are some of the key moments in our discussion:

03:49 Ryan explains what Loss Aversion is and how it affects behavior.
05:14 We talk about how this could affect your marketing messaging, with a little strategy.
06:54 Ryan explains the concept of Framing and shares a study about banking consumers in Israel that demonstrates how this works in marketing.
12:26 We talk about how it is essential to understand the effects of losses for your customers.
15:35 Ryan touches on the idea of Prospect Theory and how it relates to Loss Aversion and decision-making.
17:35 We discuss how FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) affects Loss Aversion also.
22:38 We share practicalities of how to apply this to your Customer Experience.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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In the early days of my career, I thought the customer was always right. The idea that one should fire a customer sometimes would have sounded like madness to me. However, as I have matured over the following four decades, I learned that sometimes the customer is not right. Sometimes they are really, really wrong, from how they abuse your systems to how they tax your resources to how they talk to employees. You should fire customers in these cases.

This episode explores the situations where it is critical to fire employees and why. Inspired by the article “Firing a Bad Customer in 2021” by Fred Reichheld, prolific author on customer loyalty and inventor of the Net Promoter Score (NPS), we discuss why you should fire some customers, how you should attempt to manage the situation, and how to go about it once you decide that a customer needs to go.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

It seems counterintuitive to tell a customer to beat it when you are in business. It seems like you should want every customer you can find, good, bad, or somewhere in between.

However, some customer relationships are not worth saving. Some cannot be fixed with credits and additional services. Moreover, these relationships often cost you the most in time and headache, and that use up valuable resources that could be spent in other areas. Here are some other key moments in the discussion.

04:46 Ryan explains the 80/20 rule and how it applies to customers.
06:25 Colin shares a personal experience about how loud customers are sometimes considered best customers, even when they are not.
12:25 Colin explains why he likes the rating systems on Uber.
15:13 The discussion turns to how difficult customer relationships can sometimes drain the life out of employees.
18:51 Colin explains a significant danger of paying too much attention to customers that don’t deserve it.
24:19 We share specific advice on how you should manage these customer situations to better outcomes and also the termination of the relationship, if it comes to that.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

View Details

A lot of the behavioral sciences can feel intimidating. However, it doesn’t have to be. The Five Rules Podcast Series is our attempt at giving you an easy entry point into the complex and messy world of Behavioral Science.

There is a common misconception in organizations that their business customers buy rationally. However, these same organizations also think that their business is built on relationships. This dichotomy comes from a misunderstanding about business customers: they have emotional needs in their business-to-business relationships just like they do in their business-to-consumer ones.

Business customers want many of the same things retail customers do. Business customers share the same emotional needs to feel cared for by the companies they do business with for their business. They need to know they are appreciated and that they can trust the suppliers they use to help them reach their goals.

In other words, they need to feel happy and pleased with their business-to-business Customer Experience. In this episode, we share the 5 rules for managing your Customer Experience in business-to-business relationships, including:

B2B is complicated, so you need to simplify it.
Recognize that customer emotions apply.
Manage different customers differently.
Define the experience to align the organization.
Focus on the art of the possible.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

Here is a quick summary of why these are the five rules:

B2B is complicated, so you need to simplify it. Due to the complex nature of businesses, particularly large corporate entities, it is essential to break down the Customer Experience into smaller, manageable parts.
Recognize that customer emotions apply. Emotions drive value in business relationships the same way they do in personal ones; how business customers feel in your experience is essential to manage.
Manage different customers differently. In your business relationships, you might have multiple contacts with various jobs within an account with different perceptions of your organization; understanding how these individual perceptions define the value your company provides is vital and might require adapting your approach depending upon the contact with whom you interact.
Define the experience to align the organization. It is critical to know what emotions are the most valuable to your organization’s customers and how you want to evoke these emotions with your experience. However, we recommend setting the goal of the emotion and allowing the organization’s departments determine how they will evoke that emotion in their part of the customer process.
Focus on the art of the possible. Not everyone will be on board with your plan, and that’s okay. Some departments will and these early-adopters will score the first wins for the program. Once the other, less enthusiastic departments see the early-adopter’s results, they will come around and join in the effort.

Here are some highlights of the discussion:

03:27 Colin shares some context about the complexity of managing Customer Experiences for large global corporate entities.
07:09 Ryan reviews the concept behind the Dunbar Number, which dictates how many relationships people can manage.
10:57 Colin explains a common dichotomy in thinking he encounters at his meetings with business-to-business clients.
13:40 Colin shares a story about working with a healthcare company and what it taught him about segmenting customers within a single account.
17:35 Colin explains how the Customer Experience manager should empower organizational departments to determine how to evoke the desired emotional outcome from customers in that department’s part of the process.
22:25 Colin shares his advice for managing the departments that buy-in to the process—and how to handle the ones that don’t.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

This podcast is sponsored byVerint.

Verint helps the world’s most iconic brands build enduring customer relationships by connecting work, data, and experiences across the enterprise. The Verint Customer Engagement Cloud Platform draws on the latest advancements in AI and analytics, an open cloud architecture, and The Science of Customer Engagement to meet ever-increasing, ever-shifting consumer interactions and demands.

Download the new Verint research report on the Engagement Capacity Gap, by visitingwww.Verint.com/boundless

Customer engagement is critical to your success. Join this three-day, virtual conference to discover tools and techniques that can help you build enduring customer relationships. Register atwww.Verint.com/engage

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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People lie. I have done it. You have done it. Even your customers have done it. From little white lies that don’t cause any real damage to great big deceptions with serious repercussions for all involved, lies are a fact of life.

While the scope of the lying is different, the aim is the same: avoiding the truth. You are avoiding the truth about your plans for the evening when you tell your friends you can’t meet them in the pub because you are busy and you are really going home to watch Netflix. You are avoiding the disappointment your mother would feel to know you already have the sweater she bought you for a holiday gift. You are avoiding getting sacked when you tell your boss that you are almost finished with a project you haven’t started yet.

In this episode, we tell you the truth about lying. We get into why people lie, how they justify it to themselves, and when they can’t. We also explain what happens to your relationships with customers when you lie to them. (Spoiler alert: it’s nothing good.)

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

One surprising insight that I learned was that people not only lie to other people, but also to themselves. Author, consultant, and investor Nir Eyal, breaks down lying into a 2 x 2 framework. One axis shows two groupings: other people or yourself. The other axis shows the subject of the lies: facts or values. From this, Eyal divides liars into four groups, which include: deceitful, delusional, duplicitous, and demoralized. By dividing into these groups, you get a glimpse into some of the reasons people lie.

Here are a few more key moments in our discussion:

04:20 Ryan shares research that suggests we think of lies as an economic trade off, what we gain vs. what we lose with lying.
08:58. Colin explains that most people lie in Customer Experiences to get the sale or to avoid upsetting the customer.
10:58 We compare the fine line between framing information and deceiving the customer through how we present the facts.
16:03 We share the justifications people have for lying; and, surprisingly, there is a good reason there.
17:55 Ryan shares past research of his that explains why people with rapport tend to lie more during negotiations than when they don’t.
26:21 We share our advice on how to manage honesty in your Customer Experience and why it is imperative.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

This podcast is sponsored byVerint.

Verint helps the world’s most iconic brands build enduring customer relationships by connecting work, data, and experiences across the enterprise. The Verint Customer Engagement Cloud Platform draws on the latest advancements in AI and analytics, an open cloud architecture, and The Science of Customer Engagement to meet ever-increasing, ever-shifting consumer interactions and demands.

Download the new Verint research report on the Engagement Capacity Gap, by visitingwww.Verint.com/boundless

Customer engagement is critical to your success. Join this three-day, virtual conference to discover tools and techniques that can help you build enduring customer relationships. Register atwww.Verint.com/engage

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on Linkedin and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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A massive gap exists. It widens every second between what customers expect and what many organizations can provide as we come out of the COVID-19 pandemic. If companies don't figure out what the future of their experience looks like pretty quickly, they face the grim reality that they will be watching from across a chasm as their profits and customer-driven growth fall into it in 2021.

Verint, the voice of customer experts for over 25 years, has recent research from respondents worldwide and across industries that indicates most companies are confused about what to do. Their respondents indicated that 82% believe the challenges of managing customer engagement and experience will get more difficult this year. The majority of them, 74 percent, didn't hire their planned new hires last year because of COVID and the related economic uncertainty. Moreover, only half say they are prepared for the rest of this year.

Verint's Nancy Porte, VP Global Customer Experience, CCXP, joins us in this episode to discuss the research. She explains what is happening, why this perfect storm of factors has backed organizations into a corner, and what they can do about it to join the few companies that have it figured out. (Hint: Customer Science is important here.)

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

Porte says Verint undertook this research because of several factors, not just the end of the pandemic. Before we ever heard of SARS-CoV-2, we were experiencing a digital disruption to business as usual. This disruption accelerated during the pandemic out of necessity, but not every company has succeeded. Also, many organizations saw a change in customer behavior to which they were not prepared to respond. Moreover, companies were experiencing changes in the workforce that were generational and compounded by a sudden work-from-home environment. All of these factors contributed to the environment organizations face today.

Here are a few critical moments in the discussion with Porte:

04:53 Porte shares some surprising statistics that emerged from the research about the state of companies today.
12:14 Porte explains why she thinks companies feel unprepared to meet customer expectations in the coming months.
14:48 We discuss the role technology can and should play in the future of Customer Experiences that meet customers’ expectations.
24:04 Colin talks about a critical and often over-looked aspect of choosing a technology partner for your CX design.
26:44 We talk about the pitfalls of data silos for the future of predictive analytics for customer behavior.
32:03 We share what you should do with this information to avoid letting all your success fall into the gap in 2021.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

This podcast is sponsored byVerint.

Verint helps the world’s most iconic brands build enduring customer relationships by connecting work, data, and experiences across the enterprise. The Verint Customer Engagement Cloud Platform draws on the latest advancements in AI and analytics, an open cloud architecture, and The Science of Customer Engagement to meet ever-increasing, ever-shifting consumer interactions and demands.

Download the new Verint research report on the Engagement Capacity Gap, by visitingwww.Verint.com/boundless

Customer engagement is critical to your success. Join this three-day, virtual conference to discover tools and techniques that can help you build enduring customer relationships. Register atwww.Verint.com/engage

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on Linkedin and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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Guess what? We got a suggestion from a listener—and we took it. He asked us if we had any advice for businesses with a small budget on how to use concepts from the behavioral sciences to improve moments in their Customer Experience. We created a fictional restaurant called Hamilton’s Fine Dining, which, you can imagine, had no budget at all for Customer Experience Design. Then, we talked about what we would do if our fake restaurant was really in need of improvement.

This episode explores the ways a business with little to no budget can use concepts from the behavioral sciences to create WOW! Moments in their experiences for their customers. We use examples from past concepts we have discussed with practical actions any business can take, regardless of company size or the existence of a Customer Experience improvement budget.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

Many times, we think that a new Customer Experience will cost a ton of money. But that isn’t always the case. Many times there are opportunities in your experience that cost you nothing more than time or attention to fix. All told, we came up with 11 practical tips that cost practically nothing that could improve an experience. Here are a few of the key moments in the discussion.

04:03 Ryan explains a common problem that occurs when people learn a new behavioral science concept, and what they should do to avoid it.
07:29 We identify how opportunities to improve often exist that correspond to regular business expenses that cost you nothing extra to fix.
10:35 Ryan takes a closer look at a common pitfall businesses fall into, too many choices and how it can backfire on your experience.
15:04 Colin explains how remembering faces requires a deliberate effort, but is an effective way to appreciate customers.
17:06 Colin shares some things that really bug him at a restaurant and what you can do about it.
21:24 We discuss Kahneman’s Peak-End Rule and how you can use it to optimize your experience for free.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

This podcast is sponsored byVerint.

Verint helps the world’s most iconic brands build enduring customer relationships by connecting work, data, and experiences across the enterprise. The Verint Customer Engagement Cloud Platform draws on the latest advancements in AI and analytics, an open cloud architecture, and The Science of Customer Engagement to meet ever-increasing, ever-shifting consumer interactions and demands.

Download the new Verint research report on the Engagement Capacity Gap, by visitingwww.Verint.com/boundless

Customer engagement is critical to your success. Join this three-day, virtual conference to discover tools and techniques that can help you build enduring customer relationships. Register atwww.Verint.com/engage

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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Brands have a problem sometimes. They get stuck and lose momentum and the ability to respond to changes in the market. Over time that can result in a loss of relevancy to their customers and an inability to keep their customers. Moreover, they lose out on forming solid relationships with customers that allow brands to enjoy the benefits of customer-driven growth.

In this episode, we speak with Jason Ten-Pow, President of ONR CX and author of the new book UNBREAKABLE: A proven process for building relationships with customers, about how to build deeper and profitable relationships with customers.

Ten-Pow has been consulting in Customer Experience for over two decades. From the customers' perspective, the relationship between customers and brands sits along a continuum, with extremes as a ruptured relationship or an indestructible bond. Ten-Pow sees that the challenge facing brands is to move that relationship to the end of the continuum where the customer sees their organization as the one to which they are exclusively connected. Moreover, he would encourage brands to realize that deep, permanent relationships with customers are not a one-and-done process. It's an ongoing effort.

The benefits of this type of unbreakable relationship between customers and a brand are apparent as we come out of the pandemic. Brands with this type of emotional engagement with their customers can weather the storms of global pandemics, economic downturn, and upstart (disruptive) competitors. As Ten-Pow says, organizations gain the ability to take risks, remain relevant in a changing marketplace, and change how they do things when forming these strong and resilient relationships with their customers.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

Ten-Pow says that there is a common misconception around Customer Experience that it is a "feel-good" exercise with no tangible benefits for the brand. However, excellent and optimal experiences that create emotional engagement with customers deliver much more than that. ONR's research revealed that only six percent of brands had achieved this type of connection to customers. His book addresses the other 94 percent and the necessary steps they should take for their CX Transformation. Here are few critical moments in the discussion:

05:56 We learn the secret to not getting stuck in a CX Transformation process and losing momentum.
07:12 Ten-Pow shares the five levels of the CX Audit, the first step in the Unbreakable CX Transformation.
12:18 We learn about the problem with Brands' data collection and use and what they should be doing with it.
14:50 Ten-Pow explains how technology solves problems, but the human relationship should be the priority and why that is the case.
22:12 We hear about how Adam at JPMorgan Chase crossed the divide between theory and real-world implementation at their organization.
27:35 Ten-Pow reveals the key to implementing successful CX Transformation processes: Pace.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on Linkedin and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

UNBREAKABLE: A proven process for building unbreakable relationships with customers

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New Podcast Series:

The 10 Most Effective Ways to Influence Your Customer Behavior

All of us have two systems of thinking that drive our decision making. One is rational and logical, and the other is fast and emotional. There have been many labels for these two systems over the years, but the ones we use are the Rational System and the Intuitive System. These two ways of thinking help us make decisions. However, these two systems do not always agree on the decision we should make.

For example, I bought a car 16 years ago that is falling apart now that I need to replace. I learned there was a subscription service where you can switch cars every six months for a monthly fee—a hefty one. My Rational System tells me that this fee doesn’t make sense because I am not always living there. I split my time between the UK and the US, so there would be months where I couldn’t drive the car. However, my Intuitive System saw the shiny cars and was ready to subscribe.

This episode, sponsored by Verint, explains how these two systems work together (or against each other, in my car example) for customer decision-making. Understanding how people make decisions helps you learn how to persuade them to do something else instead.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

We chose this topic for our new podcast series, The 10 Most Effective Ways to Influence Your Customer because it is foundational to Customer Experience management. Here are a few key moments in the discussion.

02:29 We announce the name and purpose of our new series, the Ten Most Effective Ways to Influence Your Customer.
07:40 Ryan explains the history of the two-system thinking and the foundational elements behind the theory.
11:34 We explain why you need to understand and encourage both types of thinking with the moments in your Customer Experience.
15:19 Colin explains how we train our customers’ Intuitive System with our experiences, good or bad.
22:20 Ryan shares how to anticipate which system is more important to appeal to for any moment and design for it appropriately.
24:29 We talk about how you have a choice to meet people where they are or to move them where you need them to be in their thinking.
25:56 We share our practical advice about what you should do with this information.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

This podcast is sponsored by Verint.

Verint helps the world’s most iconic brands build enduring customer relationships by connecting work, data, and experiences across the enterprise. The Verint Customer Engagement Cloud Platform draws on the latest advancements in AI and analytics, an open cloud architecture, and The Science of Customer Engagement to meet ever-increasing, ever-shifting consumer interactions and demands.

Download the new Verint research report on the Engagement Capacity Gap, by visiting www.Verint.com/boundless

Customer engagement is critical to your success. Join this three-day, virtual conference to discover tools and techniques that can help you build enduring customer relationships. Register at www.Verint.com/engage

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on Linkedin and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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A lot of the behavioral sciences can feel intimidating. However, it doesn’t have to be. The Five Rules Podcast Series is our attempt at giving you an easy entry point into the complex and messy world of Behavioral Science.

Before I founded Beyond Philosophy, I worked in corporate life. I was neck deep in company politics there, too. I learned that navigating through them was tricky and that there was a surprising lack of literature on how to do it better. Back then, there were fewer books on such things, and podcasts and TED talks didn’t exist, at least not to the degree they do today. It seemed there was a void regarding managing company politics. However, doing so is an essential area to master if you want your Customer Experience program to get the support it needs to survive and thrive in your organization.

In this episode, we share our 5 Rules for successfully managing your company politics that should work no matter where you are and whatever organizational climate you face. We pull from decades of work experience and supporting clients through their company’s politics to share tried and true advice for understanding and play the game of company politics successfully for your career.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

I have dealt with company politics my entire working life. These rules I share are designed to help you learn vicariously through me—because nobody pulls you aside at the company orientation to tell you how to deal with them. While this list is not exhaustive on the topic, it can certainly lay the foundation for a successful management of the politics you encounter at your organization.

Don’t be naïve. Company politics are everywhere and they affect your ability to do your job.
Understand how to play chess. The game teaches strategy, which is essential to playing the company politics game.
Realize that sometimes you need to lose a battle to win the war. It does no good to win the argument if you lose support from your allies; drop it and revisit the issue later, if necessary.
Focus on the customer. Company politics should not get in the way of your doing what is right for the customer.
Do a good job. If you do your job well consistently, everyone will want you on the team no matter who has the most power in company politics.

Here are some highlights of the discussion:

03:53 We define what company politics are and what we are managing.
06:40 Colin shares examples where company politics derailed customer experience programs.
08:53 We discuss how playing chess and managing company politics are fairly similar endeavors.
12:15 Ryan shares how understanding what your customer wants helps you manage your colleagues to get what you want.
15:26 Colin explains how people usually go along with your ideas until you ask them to do something—and what you can do about it.
18:54 Colin shares a story about how he learned that sometimes it’s better to blame the consultant for unpopular moments in your implementation strategy.
21:29 Colin shares the secret to career success his dad taught him that will trump any political games at any organization no matter who is in power.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on Linkedin and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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Throughout human history, it seems that around 150 is the number of meaningful relationships any human can maintain. Oxford University's anthropology professor Robin Dunbar discovered this number by studying monkey groups and extrapolating that number to match the human brain's capacity. Understanding why this is can help you optimize your ability to manage your team, your business, and even your social media feed.

In this episode, we discuss Dunbar's number and its implications for our personal and business relationships. Our social brain maxes out around 150 for loved ones, close friends, friends, and so on, but we can maintain relationships with acquaintances and familiar faces for up to 1,500. For those of you with thousands of social media relationships, this might sound crazy. However, if you take a deeper dive, you will likely find a similar number within that range amongst these online connections when it comes to meaningful relationships.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

From our ancestral hunter-gatherers to military troops to the number of people on your Christmas-Card list, the number of relationships hovers around 150. However, this number breaks down further into smaller groups, like five loved ones, 15 good friends, 50 friends, and 150 meaningful contacts. The concept goes beyond 150 as well. Many people have up to 500 acquaintances and 1,500 people that they at least recognize. However, the idea behind Dunbar's number is that those relationships outside of the 150-range need additional effort to move into the inner circle.

When it comes to your relationships from a personal or business perspective, understanding the relationship circles and your human limitations can identify opportunities for you and the teams you manage. We discuss these as well as how you can use this information moving forward:

Here are some of the key points in our discussion:

03:32 Ryan explains Dunbar’s number and how Professor Dunbar discovered it.
06:24 We discuss what it implies when it comes to management relationships.
10:11 Colin explains how you see what relationships people value by looking at how they spend their time.
16:19 We discuss what Dunbar’s number means for social media.
19:52 Ryan shares how the pandemic might have changed how our social interactions occur, but the vital nature of rekindling them as much as possible.
22:28 Colin shares how you can use Dunbar’s number in management at an employee and account level.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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What do the song “Fine Line” by Hootie and the Blowfish and the scent of air conditioning have in common? They are two things my family associates with taking holidays in the US. Once they hear the song or walk into an air-conditioned building, they are transported to our family trips in the US when they were young. However, these examples also represent critical areas for your Customer Experience design. Sound and Smell are an area often overlooked by organizations when it comes to the details and how it supports your brand image.

In this episode, we speak with sound and smell design expert Simon Faure-Field, CEO of Equal Strategy. He shares his expertise and examples of how organizations can use both sound and smell to deliver the experience that evokes the proper emotions that can lead to customer-driven growth.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

Many organizations have their focus on other areas of the experience, so when it comes down to choosing hold music for their call center, they are likely to say, “just play whatever comes with the system.” While this decision is simple, it reflects poorly on your brand unless you want to be a whatever-comes-with-the-system-type company.

Likewise, smells can be distracting from your experience. For example, many casinos allow smoking at their tables. It’s great for the casino because smoking tables often result in a higher take than non-smoking tables. However, it’s terrible for the guests who don’t fancy the odor cigarettes tend to leave behind. Faure-Field and his team at Equal Strategy addressed this problem in a Singapore Casino by developing a fragrance that cut through the smell of tobacco, and everyone won—just not as much as the house.

Addressing moments like these in your experience are examples of how you can use the areas of sound and smell to elevate and improve your experience.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

03:39 Faure-Field shares how your hold music at the call center can affect the Customer Experience more than you think.
05:11 Faure-Field shares how music reflects the brand personality that you want to show your customers.
10:24 We hear how Faure-Field’s team attacks sound design for a brand and examples of what worked for some of his company’s clients.
24:19 Faure-Field describes the types of scents they use to manage customer behavior and how they work together to create atmospheres.
26:09 We hear how a casinos in Singapore let their customers enjoy a cigarette while gambling without letting the environment go up in smoke.
31:47 Faure-Field explains how you can combine scents with opposing effects on customer behavior to provide an elevated experience.
34:10 We share our advice on how you can apply these concepts to your own Customer Experiences with any type of budget.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on Linkedin and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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You might be surprised to learn that when golf courses make less revenue, Disney World's attendance goes up. You might also find it weird that Mississippi's marriage rate correlates 99.3% with the US per capita consumption of whole milk. Perhaps most shocking is the fact that more people die of fire, smoke, and flames in years when Nick Cage is in fewer movies.

All of these are 100 percent true. Why do you think that is? If you just tried to think of the answer, congratulations! You are human. Also, don't worry about it. While each of these things is true, they are called a Spurious Correlation, which describes two parallel and completely unrelated statistics.

This episode discusses how your brain encounters something like a Spurious Correlation, and it tries to make sense of them, even when there is no sense to make. We see this kind of behavior in many different areas, including big data, pictures from Mars, and even your customer behavior analysis. Could you see something in the numbers that isn't there?

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

Spurious Correlations are statistics that are closely parallel, but there is no relation between them. We often see correlations in customer behavior statistics. Usually, you can explain why you know what you see, so you fix it. However, what happens if you are wrong about what you saw? We discuss what you can do about this problem before it ends up causing you more significant issues in your Customer Experience.

Here are some key moments in the discussion:

04:11 Ryan explains what a spurious correlation is and how it relates to Customer Experience.
07:28 Ryan tells us what our brains do when we see a correlated statistic, even when there is not an obvious connection
09:17 We share what Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman says about this phenomenon.
14:17 Colin shares why we evolved to seek patterns in data we receive about the world around us.
17:16 We talk about Professor Gary Smith’s article on Spurious Correlations in Big Data and what dangers that portends for Customer Experience analysis.
19:51 Ryan explains how the peer review process keeps scientists from making their opinions their conclusions.
28:40 We share three actionable things you can do to avoid making this mistake with your analysis of customer behavior.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on Linkedin and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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Ep 178 5 Rules for Making Customers Feel ‘Cared For’ and ‘Valued’

A lot of the behavioral sciences can feel intimidating. However, it doesn’t have to be. The Five Rules Podcast Series is our attempt at giving you an easy entry point into the complex and messy world of Behavioral Science.

We know that the most significant influence on a Customer Experience outcome is how a customer feels about it, for good or ill. Therefore, it is essential that you are deliberate about which specific emotion you evoke (for example, we want more good than ill). In my experience the best emotion for facilitating customer-driven growth is making customers feel “Cared For” and “Valued.”

In this episode we share the five rules for Making Customers Feel Cared For and Valued. These five rules will help you deliver a Customer Experience that delivers the customer-driven growth you want and need for your bottom line.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

Here are the 5 Rules for Making Customers Feel Cared For and Valued:

Define which emotions drive value. My experience dictates that many organizations need customers to feel Cared For and Valued, but that might be different for you. Customer research will tell you for sure.
Define the action that you need to take. Once you know what emotion you want customers to feel, you should determine what little things you can do all along the Customer Experience to evoke that specific emotion. We usually do that by reflection on our personal experiences when someone made us feel that way.
Design that into your Customer Experience. Now that you know what makes people feel the way you want them to, you design those moments into the experience where you can.
Train your people on how to evoke these emotions. It is critical that you teach people how to carry out these actions appropriately. Some people know naturally; many people don’t. However, with a little training, many people can learn how to do it well.
Measure your results. As in all things Customer Experience, it is paramount that you measure how your changes have yielded value to the bottom line.

Here are some highlights of the discussion:

01:53 Colin explains why Valued and Cared For are such important emotions regarding Customer Experiences.
05:42 Colin uses Ryan’s life experiences to demonstrate how you find the specific actions that evoke emotions for people by examining your own.
11:49 Colin shares how getting members of the team involved in the second rule activity helps solidify the concept throughout the organization.
15:52 Colin shares thoughts about why traditional Journey Mapping falls short for many organizations.
18:33 Colin reflects on his personal experience to demonstrate how you train teams to recognize customer emotions.
25:28 We summarize the five rules and share our final thoughts on customer emotions in an experience.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

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In the UK, there is a lot of talk about how to come out of the pandemic stay-at-home orders now that more people have been vaccinated. The idea of a vaccine passport has been circulating, which would allow those that are vaccinated to do things unvaccinated people cannot. However, some think that vaccine passports are discriminatory, particularly as it pertains to getting a job.

The idea of vaccine passports certainly gives you a lot to think about for your Customer Experience, and is also excellent fodder for a little friendly debate. In this episode, we discuss the idea behind the vaccine passport, what it could mean to these waning days of the pandemic, and whether we think it is a good idea, and why—or why not.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

Vaccine passports are not a thing, not yet anyway. However, the concept is a thorny one, to say the least. In some cases, requiring a vaccine of participants seems like a reasonable request. However, in others, it seems discriminatory. We untangle some of the finer points of the concept.

Here are some highlights of the discussion:

02:54 We share some of the organizations in the UK who have already adopted ideas similar to vaccine passports.
12:51 We discuss the two factors that influence perceptions of fairness associated with vaccine passports.
18:21 Ryan shares the less often discussed side of Prospect Theory that affects our assessment of risk.
20:10 We explain how social proofing could affect mask-wearing compliance.
21:44 Ryan explains a concept called reactance, which can happen when people feel their autonomy has been violated.
22:41 We discuss how framing the message is crucial to a rollout of any policy regarding vaccine passports.
24:31 We both share our take on whether or not vaccine passports are a good idea or not.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on Linkedin and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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We often hear requests for the best practices in Customer Experience. We understand why, too. Who wants to endure trial and error if there is a tried and true idea guaranteed to get results?

However, no tried and true idea always gets results. Instead, there are only expert opinions served as advice about what has worked in the past. These are often the “best practices.” We argue that best practices, no matter how solid a suggestion they are, could use a bit of challenge and a dose of skepticism.

Moreover, calling them best practices stifles creativity. They encourage people to follow the well-trodden path to an outcome without divergence. As a result, many people use them as an excuse to implement them blindly and wait for results. However, this strategy will not prevail, and success could remain elusive to those who follow this non-divergent, uncreative path.

In this episode, we explain why best practice stifles creativity and the best approach to accept best practice advice.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

When people ask me about Customer Experience's best practices, they know I have 20 years in the industry. They also surmise that I have seen a thing or two that worked for other organizations along the way. They probably want to avoid the mistakes the organizations I have worked with and I might have made along the way, too. To be clear, I don't take issue with this approach. People ask for my informed opinions, and as an expert in the field, I should offer those when asked.

My issue is with the meaning behind the term "best practice." It implies that you should do it without questions and expect results. Unfortunately, that type of thing doesn't exist. Instead, it would help if you learned what worked before, challenge that with what you know from your expertise in your field, and adapt the practice, so it is "the best" for you.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

02:57 We empathize with why people find best practices desirable and then why we think the concept is flawed.
04:36 Colin takes a counter argument that experts should know what best practices are, so their advice is valid.
09:07 We discuss why people don’t always take experts’ advice anymore, and the spectrum of reaction between gullibility and total skeptic.
11:27 Colin shares a useful tool he picked up at a client meeting that encourages debate in a healthy way.
17:33 We discuss the dangers of convergent thinking for your long term success.
20:51 We share the advice we have for people moving forward with “best practice” advice.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on Linkedin and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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Way back in 1998, I read a book by Joe Pine (@joepine), co-founder of Strategic Horizons, LLP, and Jim Gilmore called The Experience Economy. I was gobsmacked by it.

I dashed down the hall to my boss at British Telecom. He read it and had a similar reaction to mine. The next thing I knew, he put me in charge of improving the Customer Experience for our company, and the rest is history.

You could say that Joe Pine changed my life. His insight into how the experience would be vital to business today has shaped my career for 23 years. So, when I got to host him on this episode of The Intuitive Customer, you can imagine how excited I was.

We talk to Pine about how the pandemic changed in-person events, trade shows, and conferences for the better and what we can learn from going virtual. The future, it seems, will take the best of both worlds. The important thing is to avoid the worst of both worlds.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

Starting in March 2020, Pine watched as all the events he had booked canceled. At first, the organizers canceled them. But then, they began to migrate to an online format. It turns out, virtual events, for the interested attendee, could be excellent resources for information. Pine was fascinated at how effective virtual events were and the extent of their reach.

However, they weren't a replacement. The information was great, but Pine and the other event participants missed the interaction with other people in the field and the inherent networking involved.

Businesses responded to this need with hybrid events. The idea behind the hybrid event is a live event with attendees, and then a simultaneous online event complements the in-person one. Pine's book, Infinite Possibility Creating Customer Value on the Digital Frontier, discusses how technology can enhance the event's value in business post-pandemic. Whether it's a conference or symposium or a sporting event or concert, the hybrid event could be the format's future.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

06:50 Pine explains what the new trend of hybrid events.

08:50 Pine says online experiences like Twitch predict what people will want from events moving forward.

12:31 Colin shares the value of comments given by the audience during a presentation.

15:08 Colin talks about the emotional value people feel connecting to a presenter even when you are not in person.

22:17 Pine advises that hybrid events should have a producer handle the management of the virtual event.

20:15 We break down the four different possible levels of value for a hybrid event.

25:24 We share the top recommendations and tips we have for using the hybrid event in your experience.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on Linkedin and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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A lot of the behavioral sciences can feel intimidating. However, it doesn’t have to be. The Five Rules Podcast Series is our attempt at giving you an easy entry point into the complex and messy world of Behavioral Science.

Customers buy habitually, and that’s great when their habit is to buy from you. The problem is sometimes they aren’t buying habitually from you, but instead from your competition. Changing customer habits is essential in this case, and requires a deep understanding of why customers have the habits they do.

Years ago, I read the Charles Duhigg’s book, The Power of Habit, and have been obsessed with habits ever since. In it we learn the habitual cycle of customer behavior and also how to change habits using the different parts of it. In this episode, we explore this cycle and the 5 rules for changing customer habits, which include:

Understand your customer habits.
Understanding customer triggers.
Distract your customer from their existing habit.
Reinforce new habits with rewards.
Measure the difference.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

Here are the critical points we make regarding each of the 5 rules:

Understand your customer habits. Duhigg defines the habitual cycle as Cue, Response, then Reward.
Understanding customer triggers. The Cue is the trigger for the response. When you know what makes your customers initiate habitual behavior, you have an opportunity to change it if necessary.
Distract your customer from their existing habit. Changing customer habits requires disrupting the trigger so customers don’t start in on their automatic response.
Reinforce new habits with rewards. Once you have disrupted the habit cycle, supply an immediate reward so customers adapt to the new desired response quickly.
Measure the difference. Like all things with Customer Experiences and customer habits, you should measure the difference your efforts make in terms of what drives value for your organizations (i.e., $$$).

Here are some highlights of the discussion:

03:37 Ryan explains what a habit is and what part of our brain governs them and why.
07:50 We discuss the steps of the Habit Cycle as outlines by Duhigg’s The Power of Habit.
09:37 We share a story about how Delta understood my trigger at the airport, and got me to change my habits using that information, and why it worked.
20:16 We describe the different ways you can disrupt the trigger for habitual behavior so you can re-train customers to do what you want them to do.
25:15 We explain why the third stage of habitual behavior, Reward, is essential to forming habits (hint: It’s the reason we have the habit in the first place).
28:52 We cover the vital nature of measuring the effects of your efforts and how it can help you with your Customer Experience.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on Linkedin and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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In job descriptions and resumes, there are new required skills for candidate’s resumes in Behavioral Science. These jobs might be the most important new jobs in business today. But why? Behavioral science and the scientists that use it will tell you that understanding the “why” of what customers do has become table stakes in some industries today.

In this episode of The Intuitive Customer, we discuss with two behavioral scientists their job descriptions, what they actually do, and what they wish people knew about what they do.

Anne Wilson, Ph.D., earned her doctorate at Harvard Business School, and now works in behavioral finance for a national investment firm. Lauren Cheatham, Ph.D., got her doctorate at Stanford University, and after a stint at the University of Hawaii and then Apple, she now works in Silicon Valley at a social media giant. Both scientists have been charged with applying what they know about the behavioral sciences to guide both internal decision making, and external customer decision making.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

As passionate promoters of the behavioral sciences in Customer Experience design, we are thrilled to hear that large, national brands are embracing these essential principles. We asked our guests why those firms hired behavioral scientists, what they wished everyone understood about the behavioral sciences, and if they had examples of how they were able to solve a problem using their behavioral sciences background.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

04:09 Wilson shares what she does for the financial company with her skills.
05:36 Cheatham share why she thinks behavioral science works for organizations of all kinds, including hers.
12:17 Cheatham explains what drives her crazy about the perspective gap that exists with behavioral sciences in business.
13:20 Wilson explains why a basic knowledge of behavioral sciences is a good start, but not enough to handle the heavy lifting in the science.
21:03 Cheatham shares how her behavioral sciences tool kit resolved an issue in their Customer Experience measurement.
24:24 Wilson shares what her team looks for to resolve poor financial decision-making in their customers.
30:16 Colin asks the guests what advice they have for organizations that are considering hiring a behavioral scientist.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on Linkedin and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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You have only half a second to make an excellent first impression with your customers with your digital experience. Per the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department at Harvard, most people form a first impression of a website in 500 milliseconds. So, the question is whether you are proud or concerned about your digital experience after hearing this stat?

This episode explores the science behind how people form first impressions of digital experience and some of the ways you can use psychology and the behavioral sciences to improve your chances of making a good one.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

First impressions are lasting impressions. First impressions also become the anchor for experience evaluation, meaning that customers adjust either up or down from their first impression point. So, the better your first impression, the higher your first impression, the higher your customers' final evaluation of the digital experience will be.

How we evaluate websites has many other influences also. First, we tend to compare websites to the best websites we have ever used. For example, when I track a package on any website, I expect it to have the same level of clarity and information as Amazon. However, most of them do not. Also, we have experience with a wide variety of websites that set expectations or that we use as a comparison against our digital experiences.

Digital experiences give you new challenges and new opportunities in the area of customer experience also. One challenge is that you cannot see how your digital experience affects customers because you aren’t there. However, as we covered in a different podcast about measuring customer emotions, there are ways to gather this data. One of the new opportunities a digital experience presents is that it is easy to test what works and what doesn’t because you can measure everything. Moreover, as we have said in other podcasts about Digital Transformation, changing a digital experience is easier than changing a different channel, like a retail store or a call center.

The bottom line is whether it's face-to-face, on the phone, digitally, or through social media, people take in information and form an impression based on it. Understanding that, the key idea to remember is that all the things that improve an offline experience also apply in the digital experience. Here are few highlights of the conversation:

01:47 Colin shares the story of how we met his father-in-law and made a less-than-ideal first impression.
05:43 Ryan summarizes the findings from the research published about website first impressions.
07:52 We explain how first impressions can affect the overall impression of your digital experience.
14:43 Ryan explains how you can use ideas from customer segmentation to improve the first impression of the website.
17:36 We discuss the importance of measuring customers emotions in digital experience and how you can do that.
21:22 Ryan explains the website may not be your digital experience’s entry point for customers, so mind the other ways customers come to you online as well.
23:14 We share our key takeaways for what you should do to optimize the possibilities of making an excellent digital first impression.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on Linkedin and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

View Details

We recently spoke to Customer Experience experts who shared an interesting insight. They all say they wish people understood that there was no one thing to do, no silver-bullet-solution for Customer Experience. We couldn’t agree more. We believe that the best way to improve Customer Experiences is to do a lot of little things that add up to significant improvements. In other words, there is no one thing, but many things that you should do to improve your Customer Experience in 2021.

One of the contributing factors to this mindset is the number of stories we hear in business books, blog posts, white papers, and TED talks that describe how organizations change this one small thing and revenue increases by 50 percent. While that makes an interesting story, it isn’t the typical result of making a small change. Perhaps why they are so engaging; because results like that are so hard to come by. Unfortunately, they often create unrealistic expectations. Upon encountering that mindset with my clients, I find myself quoting Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who, upon election, said to his cabinet, “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.”

Part of the reason this situation is reality is that Behavioral Science is complicated. Many factors affect how it works and what it does to customer behavior. Moreover, outside factors change how the concepts work with decision-making, and these factors are often out of your control.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

In this episode, we discuss the problem with seeking a silver-bullet solution for your Customer Experience problems, where this problem originates, and how you can avoid making that mistake in 2021.

Here are some highlights of the discussion:

03:12 Ryan shares how people’s misconceptions about what science is contribute to the problem.
07:35 Colin shares a story about another contributing factor to the mindset.
12:08 Ryan introduces the ideas about boundaries to science using Newtonian Gravity as an example.
17:31 Colin compares the idea of boundaries to how you segment customer groups.
23:06 Colin shares his recommended actions with two essential things to do in 2021.
24:44 Ryan explains the difficulty with avoiding CX Management theories and how you can manage it to a successful outcome.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is the Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on Linkedin and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

View Details

No matter what business you are in, the best way to connect with your customers is through the experience you provide them. However, connecting requires knowing what customers want, and today, that isn’t the same as it was 20 years ago. The Experience Economy dictates that people value experiences over material things these days.

In addition to knowing what customers want, wouldn’t it also be great to know what works in Customer Experience Management? Wouldn’t it be even better to know what doesn’t work before you waste your time and energy (and budget) trying it yourself?

These ideas are the concept behind Customer Experience expert James Wallman, founder of the World Experience Organization (WXO). The WXO is a Customer Experience organization that encourages worldwide collaboration and debate on what is—and what isn’t—critical to Customer Experiences.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

Among other things, Wallman says the bid idea behind the WXO is to separate the useful CX concepts from the ones that are merely hot air. He hopes that the WXO will further legitimize the Experience Economic and CX movement, allow all the members to learn from each other, and see new ways to achieve customer engagement.

Here are some highlights from our discussion.

03:28 Wallman explains the idea behind founding the WXO and why he did it.
05:08 Wallman describes the Experience Economy and how the WXO will help move it forward.
11:55 Wallman talks about how not having an organized and defined effort can delegitimize the CX movement.
18:06 Wallman discusses the reasons behind choosing CX pioneers to establish the WXO.
21:03 Colin explains how the human being is always at the center of the experience, no matter what type of experience it is.
23:49 Wallman shares his idea that we are all on a “Hero’s Journey” and how those should look in a journey map.
30:50 We give the information on how what to do if you are interested in joining the WXO.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on Linkedin and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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Vital for 2021 - Digital Nudging Will Revolutionize Your CX

Whether you realize it or not—and even if you don’t know what they are—you use Digital Nudges in your online experience today. Digital Nudges are the interactions you have with customers online in your experience that inspire their actions. Every online experience has them, but not all of them are deliberate.

In this episode of the podcast, we are going to take a closer look at what Digital Nudges are, how they work, and why, and share some examples of Digital Nudges that work and some that don’t. We argue that designing these moments intentionally to help people make decisions that drive value for them and your organization is key to revolutionizing your Customer Experience in the post-pandemic era.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

Digital Nudges build on Nobel-prize winning economist Professor Richard Thaler and Professor Cass Sunstein's concept of Nudging. Thaler and Sunstein's 2008 book Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness explained that a Nudge is a way you present your customers' choices that tips the scales towards a particular option. Digital Nudges are the same idea, but specifically to the online experience.

The reason Digital Nudges work is because they play into our biological psychology as human beings. People who study how consumers make buying decisions use concepts from the Behavioral Sciences to explain customer behavior. From concerns about availability to worrying about risking losing something to gain something else to finding ways to shortcut a challenging decision, the Behavioral Sciences can explain what concept (or concepts) are at work when people decide to buy from you. Perhaps most importantly, Behavioral Sciences can also show you why they don't.

02:50 We explain what we mean by the term Digital Nudging.
04:40 We give examples of what we mean by Digital Nudging and the concepts from Behavior Science behind them, starting with Scarcity.
09:05 We explain how Social Proofing can help with a Digital Nudge.
14:51 Colin shares a story about a website that did an excellent job of leveraging the ideas of Anchoring, Extremeness Aversion, and the Decoy Effect.
20:43 We explain how the Evaluability Heuristic comes into play in Digital Nudging and how to use it to buy things like an uninterruptible power supply.
23:30 We talk about how Framing Effects influence customer behavior and buying decisions.
25:46 We share the recommended actions, so you can use this information to Digitally Nudge your customers intentionally instead of leaving it to chance.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on Linkedin and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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There's light at the end of the tunnel! - Re-imagine your customer experience!

There was a time when we thought this moment would never come, but we are almost there. As vaccines roll out worldwide for the SARS-CoV-2 virus, we can see the light at the end of the pandemic tunnel. This unique situation provides an unprecedented opportunity to reimagine your Customer Experience to respond to how the pandemic has changed customer behavior.

Key Ideas to Improve Your Customer Experience

In this episode, we discuss this exercise's critical question to present a new experience for your customers. Do you go back to how you used to do things, scrap all that and carry on doing what you have been doing this past year, or come up with some combination of the two? We believe that taking what is working now with what was working before the pandemic and creating a new optimized experience is the best course of action to foster customer-driven growth.

However, it is essential to ensure that you know what your customers want, and, frankly, if you haven't researched it in the past month, you probably don't know. Understanding this crucial information is essential before you can move forward. People have changed and what they consider business as usual has too. You must know what they think is the value you provide, so you don't unwittingly eliminate it from your new experience.

Here are some highlights of the discussion:

04:35 Colin presents how he came to this discussion when working with a client.
09:32 Colin shares how the milkman ruined the relationship with the Shaw family by accident.
14:04 Colin gives examples of things that have become normal for people over the past few months, which have some advantages over the old way of doing things.
18:32 Colin and Ryan emphasize what the goal should be for this exercise over the next couple of months.
22:17 Ryan shares the drawbacks that digital transformation has had on the education space, particularly in graduate school level education.
25:02 Colin and Ryan share their recommended actions to tackle this project over the next couple of months.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on Linkedin and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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This is the Most Significant Thing We Learned in 2020!

Like many people, we are not sad to see the year 2020 slip into the past. We look to ringing in the new year with happy anticipation of better things to come. With a vaccine headed to us all and a new appreciation for what we share when things are “normal,” we are all practically giddy at the prospect of sending this year off to the annals of history.

However, even a year as challenging as this one presents new insights and opportunities for us all. Every year we usually take time to reflect on what has happened and what we have learned, and this one is no different, even if unprecedented. This episode, we share five significant insights that we gleaned from the notorious year 2020.

Key Ideas to Improve Your Customer Experience

From the impressive power of human resilience and ingenuity during crises to a renewed appreciation for the most important things in life, we share both personal and professional lessons we learned this year. In this episode, we also discuss what we see for the future in Customer Science and Customer Experience.

Here are some highlights of the discussion:

02:27 Ryan shares his first insight about how this terrible year taught him a lot about how humans can adapt to challenging times.
05:36 Colin shares how he remembered to appreciate what he has but also what is most important to appreciate.
07:15 Ryan talks about how he sees the beneficial impact of empathy both customer- and employee-facing.
10:47 Colin explains how the future of Customer Experiences is in the area of Customer Science, which is a fusion of data, technology, and the behavioral sciences.
16:02 Colin explains how the iPhone took existing technology and changed the world and how Customer Science at a similar inflection point.
17:59 Ryan explains why Customer Science is close to changing everything as we know it.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on Linkedin and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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Designing Country Culture into Your Global Experience

A dull and awkward presentation in Singapore many years ago taught me an important life lesson: One must know the local culture when presenting an experience to people to evoke the desired response. In this case, I didn't realize it was going to be different to presenting in the USA or UK. So, I kept asking for audience participation like I usually do and hearing crickets in response. It was a long morning.

Many organizations with a global presence have probably had a similar situation; what works in one country does not in another. You present your carefully planned and executed Customer Experience from Country A, where it is a wild success, roll it out in Country B, and you get nothing but crickets back.

The good news is that you don't have to keep having this problem. The most successful global organizations know that an overarching strategy is essential, but so are relevant and localized tactics to achieve success. Once I adapted my expectations in Singapore, the presentation went well (i.e., no crickets). You can do the same with your customer experience.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

In this episode, we discuss the realities of having the same emotional outcome when having Customer Experiences within different countries. The foundational elements of the process will remain the same. However, once you implement the experience you have defined for your organizations, you must adopt the tactics to reflect the country's culture where your customers live. Perhaps most importantly, you need to recognize that localized management and ownership will be the key to your success.

Here are some highlights of the discussion:

03:50 – We introduce the key idea behind a Customer Experience Statement and using it internationally.
09:40 – Colin explains the 20 emotions that drive and destroy value and how that applies to the tactics you use for different cultures.
15:31– We discuss these ideas' practical applications for organizations, starting with a general step-by-step plan for segmentation.
18:15 – We discuss the importance of diversity in the global team and management representation.
20:16- We suggest that many of these nuanced differences are noticed by and affect the subconscious.
21:51 – We explain our recommended actions and the critical nature of measuring your results in your efforts to adapt locally.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

Please provide us feedback on our podcast in a quick 4 minute survey. Click here for a chance to win a $ 100 Amazon voucher.

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC , which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on Linkedin and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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If the Stress Is Becoming Intolerable, This is What to Do

If there is one thing 2020 has given all of us, it's a lot of stress. Coping and managing stress is a skill leaders need to relieve the pressure in their lives and help employees manage their stress so they don't pass it on to customers.

I often say, Happy Employees Make Happy Customers, which is also the title of my latest book. However, happy employees are not stressed out, making managing stress a priority for today's leaders.

However, managing stress is easier said than done. To get some help in this effort, we share the advice of Carmen Mohan, MD, FACP, founder of Hello Health. Dr. Mohan started Hello Health, a comprehensive executive health and wellbeing program, to help leaders manage and cope with stress themselves and their teams.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

In this episode, we discuss Dr. Mohan's consultative approach to stress management. She says leaders often feel alone in their experience and, even when overwhelmed, push hard to keep going, so they meet other people's needs. She suggests leaders should realize they are not alone and that stress is common among leadership positions. Stress comes from making critical decisions quickly and professional and personal demands pulling leaders in many directions at once. Some people feel stressed because they know other people are struggling more than they are, and they feel guilty that they have it pretty good.

Managing this stress is essential. First, it is hard to lead a team to success in a stressed-out state. When leaders are stressed, they often can't get the perspective they need to solve problems in the best possible way. Finally, stressed managers cannot help their teams cope with their pressures, leading to a less than exemplary Customer Experience.

The COVID-19 pandemic isn't helping matters, either. None of us has ever been through a pandemic before, so we don't know what to do. We also do not know when it will end, and uncertainty does not do anything good for anyone's stress level. Add to it the acute pressures caused by the pandemic, like the fear of getting yourself or someone you care about sick or the financial insecurity caused by the shut-downs and stay-at-home orders, among others, and you have a perfect storm of high-stress times and truly anxious people.

To combat these effects, Dr. Mohan has a few actionable steps.

Make time for self-care and sleep. Dr. Mohan says that addressing your needs makes you better equipped to handle others' needs, even if it feels like there is no time for it.
Celebrate what you did accomplish so you can rest deeply. Dr. Mohan encourages leaders to write down at least one accomplishment each day to focus on, so the mind can relax and rest deeply at night, giving the best restorative sleep to the body.
Start the day by meeting your needs. Dr. Mohan encourages people to start the day doing something they like, not checking the phone and diving into the day. If your brain knows you will begin the day this way, it will relax more and sleep better.
Find that decompression time you have lost. Many people find that the loss of decompression time resulting from working from home or blurring the lines between work and home life difficult. Dr. Mohan encourages people to take a walk outside to clear their minds.
Find a way to keep your thoughts in the present. People who feel anxious or guilty that other people are having problems and are struggling would be well served to occupy their thoughts with the here and now. By keeping your mind occupied in the present with a task, you cannot worry about the past or the future.

Here are some highlights of the discussion:

04:28 Dr. Mohan addresses the problem of marginal thinking in stress management for leaders.
07:36 We have a few actionable steps for coping with stressors.
14:18 Dr. Mohan shares how to get your mind to relax enough to get into the deep restorative sleep necessary for stress management.
20:17 Find out the easy fix to "bookend" sleep and help the mind relax during stressful times.
25:04 We cover the importance of finding moments to decompress from work to home life.
26:49 Dr. Mohan addresses how to alieve guilty feelings when you are not struggling as much as other people you know with essential activities.
28:40 We get into the advice for leaders to pass this along to their teams.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on Linkedin and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services

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The Five Rules for Measuring and Managing Customer Emotions

A lot of the behavioral sciences can feel intimidating. However, it doesn’t have to be. The Five Rules Podcast Series is our attempt at giving you an easy entry point into the complex and messy world of Behavioral Science.

Ignoring emotion in your Customer Experience strategy is a big mistake and one you can’t afford to make. Emotions are a significant influence on customer behavior with implications for your customer retention, customer loyalty, and, perhaps most importantly, customer-driven growth. Incorporating ways to measure and manage customer emotions is critical for your business strategy today.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

Managing emotions can feel overwhelming. Many times we hear from clients that they don’t know where to start. However, we have a plan that can set you up for success, empower your thinking, and help you tackle this critical task.

In this episode, we discuss The 5 Rules for Measuring and Managing Customer Emotions, which are:

Be specific.
Define which emotions drive the most value for you.
Measure the specific emotions across the customer journey.
Design the emotions into your journey maps.
Train your people on how to evoke emotions.

Here are some highlights of the discussion:

02:58 We discuss why being specific about the emotions is critical and a significant improvement on breaking down emotions into “positive” and “negative.”
05:29 We break down rule number two into two parts: figuring out how customers feel coming into your experience and defining what you want them to feel when they leave.
07:59 Colin shares a story of when a German insurance actuary gave him the idea for research with the London School of business, and the subject of his third book.
15:06 We clarify why you should measure your success with evoking the desired emotion, not only at a top level, but throughout the experience so you can respond appropriately where you should.
19:17 We tell you why your journey maps need you to design emotions into them with specific actions and deliberate strategy.
22:24 Colin explains how his marriage of nearly 40 years has taught him that training people in emotional intelligence is a winning strategy for any business (or marriage, for that matter).

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services

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Retail is Broken: This is the Solution

Some might say that retail is dead, another victim of COVID-19. However, I would argue that it is merely changing but far from finished. The pandemic has hastened changes to physical and digital retail experiences and customer behavior. Still, organizations that recognize and anticipate the shift can adapt and benefit from the new business-as-usual.

Key Ideas to Improve Your Customer Experience

There are both theoretical reasons and practical reasons why customer behavior is changing. In this episode, we discuss the key ideas of both.

Psychological theory underlays much of our behavior in retail experiences. For example, customers like to touch things when making decisions to inform themselves that they are making a good one about a product. People also use body stimuli in thinking. So, what we buy when we feel warm is different from what we purchase when cold. In theory, we also sometimes make other buying decisions in public than we would in the privacy of our homes in the glow of a computer screen. That also goes for our unplanned purchases; we choose different impulse buys online than in person.

From a practical perspective, customer behavior follows some general patterns as well. First of all, we have a well-worn process for decision making for purchases. These adapt to both physical and online experiences. Also, we want different types of retail experiences depending upon our perceived importance of the purchase. In other words, we don’t need a physical experience for commodity items, but we might for a more significant investment item, like technology or appliance purchase. The physical experience is sometimes the reason customers shop with you, whether that’s because it is fun or because being there makes people feel like part of the club. Sometimes, it’s because you are buying something that you feel you need to see, like the fish you will serve to dinner guests (you know, back when having dinner guests was still a thing).

Here are some highlights of the discussion:

01:18 – Colin shares a recent experience of buying a large television for the living room vs. a smaller one for the kitchen.
05:02 – We introduce the four key theories that underly the changes in retail today.
07:28 – Colin shares a story about when he consulted the Prime Minister at 10 Downing Street. (No, really.)
15:13 – We share the practical observations of customer behavior in both types of experiences.
19:18 – We explain that physical experiences often help build confidence for a customer’s buying decision.
20:51 – We discuss how customer segmentation could help determine if customers want a physical retail experience for specific purchases.
27:40 – We talk about what you should consider and the recommended actions when designing your respective physical and online experiences.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on Linkedin and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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Digital Transformation Didn’t Work: This Is What You Should Do Now.

Experts estimate that companies wasted around $900 billion in 2018 on failed digital transformation projects. Nevertheless, organizations have spent upward of $2 trillion (with a t) on digital transformations in 2020. How do we know that this is not just a big waste of time and money this time around?

This episode of The Intuitive Customer hosts guest presenter Zhecho Dobrev, Principal Consultant for Beyond Philosophy, and our lead for digital transformation consultations. Dobrev shares what is working well, what isn’t, and what organizations should do to improve their experiences.

Key Ideas to Improve Your Customer Experience

One of the reasons digital transformations are so unsuccessful has to do with preconceived notions of what a company needs to do before they know for sure. Moreover, many organizations do not understand what drives value for customers, even though they think they do. Understanding the Value Drivers for customers in online or digital experiences is essential to success, much like it is with the rest of the Customer Experiences people have with you. Digital transformation success requires you to recognize the moments in your online experience that drive or destroy value for you.

Here are some highlights of the discussion:

03:58 – Zhecho explains how Customer Experience and digital transformation trends have stagnated over the past five years.
09:52 – Zhecho explains the main problem with digital transformation is preconceived ideas of what needs to be done without understanding what drives value.
13:58 – Zhecho explains what four-category value drivers are for digital transformation, which include Economic, Functional, Experiential, and Symbolic Value.
26:29 – We discuss the key takeaways from this research, including the importance of defining which of these categories drives the most value for your organization.
28: 33- Dobrev explains that the next most crucial thing is to determine what experiences can be digital and what should remain human-controlled.
30:24 – We explain the recommended actions that every organization should do with their digital transformation to set themselves up for success.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey. https://bit.ly/2UholUM

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on Linkedin and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.

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What happens when you get three Customer Experience Pioneers together to discuss the past, present, and future of Customer Experience? This episode of The Intuitive Customer, for starters. Recorded in celebration of the recent CX day, Colin joins fellow experience experts and champions Lewis Carbone and Joe Pine to talk all things Customer Experience.

Lewis Carbone is the author of Clued In: How to Keep Customers Coming Back Again and Again and the founder of ExperienceEngineering™.

Joe Pine is the author of the book that started it all, The Experience Economy. He and his partner, Jim Gilmore, are true pioneers of the Customer Experience movement and the founder of their consultancy, Strategic Horizons, LLP.

Key Takeaways

There are a few things from this discussion everyone should remember in today's business environment, which include:

Each of us has failed at some point during our career in one way or another.
- For my part, I often operated with the mindset that valuing the emotional connection that the Customer Experience evokes is an opinion everyone shared. However, I learned that tying your work to measurable results is the proper way to obtaining that shared mindset, and it is a value that I espouse to this day. If you don't tie your work to results, you will likely find that your mindset is your own.
- Pine made the mistake of underestimating how difficult it would be to get companies to be the first to undertake a Customer Experience improvement program. Failure is a possibility, and, for some organizations, too much of one. Pine learned that what you design and what you deliver might not produce the results you intended when you mix in real-live customers. As a result, he advises his clients to reserve around 20 percent of their budget to make real-world adjustments for those parts of the experience that aren't working as they had hoped.
- Carbone said his mistake was not being clear enough with people what the real meaning of Customer Experience is. There is not the depth of understanding that he assumed, and he believes that to fix it, we need a new way of talking about experiences that use distinctive language that better defines the concept for people.
The future of customer experience is infused with technology and data.
- I have a passion for a new concept called Customer Science, which combines technology with artificial intelligence and mountains of data to predict customer behavior. The data-based approach Customer Science provides is an excellent path to anticipating your customers' needs and increasing your emotional bond with them.
- Pine agrees, adding that the shift from physical to digital experiences occurring with the COVID-19 Pandemic has accelerated this fusion of technology and psychology. He sees the value that an organization can generate by amplifying in-person experiences with digital ones and capitalizing on their desire for meaningful experiences that they value more than stuff.
- Carbone sees the future of Customer Experience in the cultures of the organization. Champions of the concept should build a culture that echoes the sentiments of their desired experience within their organizations. Moreover, the idea that science and art combine to create a higher level of experience management has begun to transform how companies approach business-as-usual. Carbone says using technology and humanity combined can create what he describes as Experience Management 2.0.
There are things you can do right now to prepare for the future of Customer Experience at your organization.
- In addition to tying your efforts directly to return on investment (ROI), I advise champions of Customer Experience to determine the lifetime value of customers they serve. Often this amount helps justify expenses for an experience program that demands an organization's resources. Also, I encourage organizations to identify ways to improve the experience that take advantage of the most significant opportunity rather than only fixing the problems. The ROI on delivering a solution for a substantial opportunity is far more valuable than repairing a small problem that has costs associated with it.
- Carbone suggests deepening your understanding of how customers think vs. what they think. When you understand the role of unconscious thought and emotions and the influence they exert on our actions, you have an opportunity to surpass the benefits of customer centricity and reap the rewards of a customer-driven business model.
- Pine says preparing for the future means making a few adjustments to your thinking. First, he wants organizations to realize they are in an experience economy, not a service-providing one. Next, he encourages businesses to consider what they would change in their experience offering if they charged admission for it. That mindset is the correct one for innovation and the creation of a good experience that customers think is worth having. Finally, he wants a focus on the individual reactions that highly-customized experiences deliver.

To discuss this further contact us at www.BeyondPhilosophy.com

About Beyond Philosophy:

Beyond Philosophy help organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). We then capitalize on this by improving your customer experience to meet these needs thereby retaining and acquiring new customers across the market.

This podcast is produced by Resonate Recordings. Click here find out more.

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The 5 Rules for Designing Great Digital Experiences

A lot of Behavioral Economics can feel intimidating. However, it doesn’t have to be. The Five Rules Podcast Series is our attempt at giving you an easy entry point into the complex and messy world of Behavioral Science.

In 2020, we have all been doing many more online customer experiences than we thought we would. Some of these digital experiences have been excellent, and others were not.

Suppose these are the only experiences that your customers have with your organization this year. How important is it to you that the digital experience is as easy and convenient as possible? We would be surprised if you said anything less than "very important."

This episode of The Intuitive Customer shares our five rules for designing great digital experiences. Follow these directives, and you will deliver the kind of online experience that your customers appreciate, leading to the customer-driven growth you need.

What Are The Five Rules?

The Five Rules for Designing a Great Digital Experience

Design in a digital "nudge."
Analyze how customers really behave.
Design your experience to anticipate your customers' needs.
Plan to evoke emotions and measure them.
Humanize technology.

What Should You Do With Them?

Design in a digital "nudge." The term digital nudge refers to the book Nudge by Nobel-prize winning economist Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. They suggested that the way you present a choice can influence how people choose. The subtle clues you include can affect how people behave. For example, if you make it seem like the normal thing to do is to participate in the company's 401(k) plan by making people who don't want to opt-out, most people participate in the program. The same concept can apply to your digital experience. We recommend using any number of psychological concepts that are part of the behavioral sciences in your design that nudge people toward the online behavior you want them to have.
Analyze how customers really behave. A significant plus to working in the digital space is that you can measure everything. From how long people stay on the page to what they load (and unload) from their carts to what they look at the longest, you have a plethora of data, enabling you to understand how customers behave—in real life. Moreover, you can test what happens to customer behavior if you change things, and analyze that data, too.
Design your experience to anticipate your customers' needs. Knowing what you know from the first two rules, you can now design into your digital experience features that anticipate your customers' needs. It could be that you make it easy for them to find their past orders. Perhaps you ensure that you have a shipping calculator available to them or other information necessary to decide. Whatever you choose to do, you must make it easy for them and present an experience that doesn't take up too much of their attention that they would rather be giving to something else.
Plan to evoke emotions and measure them. Just as you should with your in-person experience, your digital experience should have specific actions that evoke a particular feeling that drives value for your organization. We would recommend that you participate in your digital experience as if you were a customer or have someone from the outside do it to provide a fresh perspective of the emotions your present experience evokes.
Humanize technology. People respond differently to technology than they do to people. Moreover, people sometimes don't like it when they feel like they can't interact with other people. Suppose you use technology to interact with your customers at any point in the digital experience. In that case, we recommend that you ask yourself if that interaction would have a more positive emotional outcome if handled by a human.

To discuss this further contact us at www.BeyondPhilosophy.com

About Beyond Philosophy:

Beyond Philosophy help organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). We then capitalize on this by improving your customer experience to meet these needs thereby retaining and acquiring new customers across the market.

This podcast is produced by Resonate Recordings. Click here find out more.

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When I am shopping on Amazon, and a product has 3.5 stars, I don’t buy it. Now, 3.5 stars isn’t a bad rating; in fact, it’s above average. However, for me to place that item in my Amazon cart, it needs to have a rating of at least four stars or more. My behavior on Amazon is part of a broader concept called Negativity Bias, and it’s a massive influence on customer behavior.

This episode of The Intuitive Customer discusses the concept of Negativity Bias and how it affects people’s behavior in your Customer Experience. We also share some positive ways you can make negativity work in your favor.

Key Takeaways

Negativity Bias describes how we emphasize negative information over positive and find it more compelling for decision-making. It’s the reason we remember negative reviews more than positive ones. It’s also why we think about what could go wrong in specific situations rather than what could go right.

Here are a few more things you should know about Negativity Bias:

We all have a negativity bias. This bias is not reserved for a particular type of person or demographic. A compulsion to remember and focus on the negative is a psychological concept that we all share, and it affects all of us in different ways regarding how we behave.

Negativity Bias is related to Loss Aversion. Loss Aversion describes how we feel more pain from losing things than gaining things makes us feel good. Negativity Bias is a focus on the negative, which is a focus on the potential loss. It can lead to less rational decision-making. However, it can also motivate us to improve the situation too.

Negativity Bias leads to specific actions to protect oneself. As customers dealing with uncertainty, as we often are when trying a product or service for the first time, we tend to take a what-could-go-wrong perspective. To prevent the potential bad outcome, we take specific actions to avoid it. These actions could include scrolling through customer reviews (focusing on the bad ones), buying only from brand names we know and trust, or looking for referrals from friends and family.

While a little Negativity Bias can do good, too much only leads to bad. A focus on the negative can lead to good things, like process improvements or problem-solving exercises. However, too much stress there can lead to a skewed world view. It can lead to making poor decisions or missing the good things that are happening in an experience.

Recommended Actions

There are a few ways that you can use the Negativity Bias to get a good outcome. These include:

Perform periodic checks of negative assessments to ensure that you have a realistic view of the situation. It is essential to determine if the negative feelings you have about your customer experience or business performance are based on objective measures or not. It’s great to use Negativity Bias to motivate improvements, but it shouldn’t squeeze the life out of your organization either. Remember to highlight success and reward good outcomes whenever possible.
Remember that everyone tends to focus on the negative, including customers. When you understand how it works for people’s perception, you can counteract its effects with specific tactics. Look for ways to mitigate the Negative Bias’ poor outcomes for your bottom line by addressing it in your Customer Experience.
Provide people with solutions in today’s negative environment. Without a doubt, a global pandemic inspires quite a bit of Negativity Bias. Your customers feel it, and if you can find ways to be helpful in light of the present challenges, it will pay off later when customers remember this time. In other words, you can build customer loyalty by taking extra care of customers right now when they need you.
Communicate positively. Understand how customers can glean the negative much more quickly than the positive and take special care to positively frame your messaging. Whether in direct customer communication channels or advertising, keeping the message positive is essential to inspiring customer-driven growth. An outside perspective can help you maintain positivity in your experience. Our Experience Health Check, where we pretend we are customers and then give you specific recommendations to improve your experience, can give you a fresh set of eyes on your communication efforts throughout the customer journey.
Remember that fixing problems is good, but not always the best opportunity in your experience. Organizations often want to focus on what is going wrong in experience and fix it. That is a good instinct. However, many times in our Emotional Signature Research®, we discover that customers have other wants and needs that present a much more significant opportunity than fixing the various problems in the experience. While we aren’t saying that you should ignore problems, we are saying to keep an open mind about addressing other opportunities in your experience that might yield a better return on investment in the long term.

To discuss this further contact us at www.BeyondPhilosophy.com

About Beyond Philosophy:

Beyond Philosophy help organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). We then capitalize on this by improving your customer experience to meet these needs thereby retaining and acquiring new customers across the market.

This podcast is produced by Resonate Recordings. Click here find out more.

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5 New Rules Guaranteed to Build Trust

A lot of Behavioral Economics can feel intimidating. However, it doesn’t have to be. The Five Rules Podcast Series is our attempt at giving you an easy entry point into the complex and messy world of Behavioral Science.

A great idea is a beautiful place to start when it comes to improving your Customer Experience to benefit your bottom line. When combined with a deliberate strategy and cunning tactics, a great idea is almost enough to make you successful, but only "almost enough."

While these elements are fundamental to your success, affecting a real culture change at your organization is vital to achieving the customer-driven growth you hope to inspire. This episode of The Intuitive Customer shares our five rules for affecting real culture change. With these rules guiding your actions, you are well on your way to fostering the proper environment for your idea, strategy, and tactics to deliver the results you want.

What Are The Five Rules?

The five rules for affecting real culture change build upon each other. They include:

The 5 Rule for Affecting Real Culture Change

Create or define a burning platform.
Recognize this is a long-term goal.
Be clear on your vision for the future.
Remember that "you don't make an omelet without breaking eggs."
Lead from the top.

What Should You Do With Them?

Create or define a burning platform. Change is difficult and a bit painful for people. Therefore, unless the pain of change is less than the pain of staying the same, most people will resist making a change. Consequently, it would be best if you defined the problem and the pain it will cause the organization. Without the burning platform that only change will extinguish, you will have difficulty making meaningful changes in your organization. Just ask Circuit City, Blockbuster, or Kodak.

Recognize this is a long-term goal. If you think you will implement and complete a culture change in six months, I wouldn't recommend taking it on. While you can get an excellent start and even make progress, six months is not long enough to affect the fundamental changes needed to foster customer-driven growth in many organizations. A more reasonable term is three to five years.

Be clear on your vision for the future. It is imperative that you know what you want the culture to change to, and also what things you need to do to change the culture from where it is presently. You need to know what you want to start doing and what you need to stop doing. Moreover, communication (and re-communication) will be vital to get the team on board with your plan.

Remember that "you don't make an omelet without breaking eggs." Despite your best efforts, not everyone is going to approve of your plan or your changes. Some may go so far as to obstruct progress. It would be best to resolve yourself to the idea that you might need to remove someone from their position because they are getting in the way of progress. You can't make a Customer Experience omelet without breaking a few eggs.

Lead from the top. It takes more than words to effect change. People take notice of what you do to support your ideas. Specifically, you should examine how you prioritize your time. For example, if putting the customer at the center of what you do is essential to your plan, you should have time set aside in your schedule to do that for customers, too. When you show your team that you are not asking them to do anything you are not willing to do yourself, you increase employee engagement and improve the Employee Experience.

To discuss this further contact us at www.BeyondPhilosophy.com

About Beyond Philosophy:

Beyond Philosophy help organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). We then capitalize on this by improving your customer experience to meet these needs thereby retaining and acquiring new customers across the market.

This podcast is produced by Resonate Recordings. Click here find out more.

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When you bring attention to something, it influences people’s behavior. For example, The food and household goods supplier in the UK, Tesco, was recently accused of profiteering by raising the prices of a yeast extract spread called Marmite. There was quite an uproar about it in the UK. You would think that this would mean sales of Marmite would go down.

You would be wrong. After the kerfuffle about the love-it-or-hate-it spread, Marmite sales increased by 61 percent. The reason Marmite sales went up has a lot to do with Priming.

This episode of The Intuitive Customer cover what Priming is, how it works, and how you can employ it in your Customer Experience to foster customer-driven growth.

Key Takeaways

Priming is a term derived from the early water pumps, as in “priming the pump.” That phrase refers to the fact that you would need to pour a little water into old water pumps so that more water would come out of it. The psychological concept is similar. Priming describes how doing a little bit of something can activate cognitive systems in peoples’ minds and influence their behavior.

Here are a few more things you should know about Priming:

Priming affects what customers remember at the moment. Customer Loyalty requires memory; after all, you can’t return to an experience if you don’t remember it (at least not on purpose). However, because memories exist in a network or a connected group of recollections associated in some way, Priming the memory pump affects what memories a customer remembers before they make a decision, and it can affect how they decide.
Little things are often the Primers, and they appeal to the subconscious. Priming works best in a subtle way, triggering the subconscious. For example, researchers observed that when a wine store played French music over the sound system, French wine sales increased by a ratio of five to one. However, the customers were unaware of why they bought French wine that day.
The two systems of thinking are part of the reason Priming is so effective. The automatic and fast thinking Intuitive System is always looking for ways to present information useful in decision making. When you send a Prime through your experience, the Intuitive System pushes the memories associated with the prime to the customers’ consciousness if the customer needs it.
Priming Customer Experience happens whether you are deliberate about it or not. Many little things in your experience are priming the customers’ subconscious right now. However, few organizations engage in a deliberate strategy there. How the store looks, smells, or sounds, is a significant influence on how customers behave. However, even your advertising primes customers; unfortunately, it is often by setting customers’ unrealistic expectations that fall short in reality.

Recommended Actions

There are a few things we recommend that you do with Priming in your Customer Experience.

Recognize that Priming exists now in your Customer Experience. Whether or not you intended them to, little details of your experience are priming customers right now. There is no neutral priming. We recommend taking an outside approach to determine what these Priming elements are, so you are not surprised.
Consider whether these existing Priming elements are working. Once you recognize the primes that already exist, can you trace them to your desired customer behavior?
Adjust the Priming elements that are not working. To adjust your primers, you should have a clear idea of what experience you want to deliver. This experience should inspire the customer-driven growth you want. If you are not getting the results you want currently, trace the customer behavior back to the moment they encountered the prime, and consider how changing it could inspire new action. In one of our client consultations with an insurance company in the UK, we changed one word that their customer service agents used in the new policy-holder interaction and reduced their new customer call back volumes by 70 percent in three weeks.

To discuss this further contact us at www.BeyondPhilosophy.com

About Beyond Philosophy:

Beyond Philosophy help organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). We then capitalize on this by improving your customer experience to meet these needs thereby retaining and acquiring new customers across the market.

This podcast is produced by Resonate Recordings. Click here find out more.

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Like the rest of the world, the Customer Experience world is changing. Customers have new expectations and are doing business in new ways. While we adapt to the world that COVID-19 presents, we change what we want as customers and how we think about our relationships with the entities we buy. As Customer Experience managers, we must rise to meet this challenge by getting inside our customers' minds.

This episode of The Intuitive Customer hosts Lewis Carbone, Customer Experience expert and speaker, and founder of ExpereinceEngineering™. His book, Clued In: How to Keep Customers Coming Back Again and Again, discusses his methodology for designing into your experience clues that signal to your customers that you have what they are looking for, so they keep coming back for more.

Key Takeaways

Carbone shared several essential insights from his decades in the field of Customer Experience. Here is a quick summary of what he had to say:

The unconscious mind makes decisions long before the conscious mind rationalizes it. Many decisions we make happen at a primitive, emotional level, per Carbone. Therefore, it is essential to build your Customer Experiences on this foundational principle to increase your emotional engagement with customers.
Few companies are using this principle as their foundation, even still today. Many companies know that customer emotion is vital to experiences, but they still don't emphasize them in their day-to-day. Carbone says this is because they don't know what to do, so they stick to methods with which they are comfortable.
Knowing how customers think is more valuable than what they think. Carbone believes that once you have the code for customer decision-making, you can unlock how to give customers what they want and evoke the emotion you want them to feel.
The clues you leave in an experience help you achieve this outcome. Carbone shares the example of how the toilet paper triangle signals a freshly-cleaned hotel bathroom. If he ever uses his bathroom for the first time and the paper doesn't have a triangle, Carbone wonders who was there before him or if the staff forgot to clean the room. In other words, if the clues you leave send the wrong signal, you evoke the wrong emotions.

Recommended Actions

Carbone says that when it comes to the next evolution of Customer Experience, it is essential that organizations and individuals who seek to manage them should increase their self-awareness of how well they understand the field. The behavioral sciences are crucial to help you design experience that leaves the appropriate clues.

Carbone also shared his Five Absolutes for Customer Experience Management, which include:

Moving from the idea of "making and selling" to the concept of "sensing and responding is the best approach.
Considering the emotional and rational bonds you have with customers is essential.
Ensuring that you understand and leverage the role the unconscious mind plays in customer decision-making is foundational to your design.
Becoming "Clue Conscious" of signals your experience sends in the language you use, physical space characteristics, and gestures by employees, among others, is critical to your success.
Developing a robust system for clue management, along with a Clue-Conscious culture, is vital for your organization.

Also, an outside perspective can help. As global Customer Experience consultants, we find that we can see experiences with new eyes. We often engage in what we call Customer Experience Health Checks, which involves us walking the experience as if we are customers, and conducting internal interviews to get an idea of the company culture. Then, we present our recommendations based on what we discover.

Finally, remember to design not only for fixing problems but also for customer motivations. Whether it's feeling safe or feeling cared for, knowing what motivates customers to do business with you helps you design the right experience to give it to them. Solving problems often have too narrow a scope; widening your perspective will yield better results in the long-term.

To discuss this further contact us at www.BeyondPhilosophy.com

About Beyond Philosophy:

Beyond Philosophy help organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). We then capitalize on this by improving your customer experience to meet these needs thereby retaining and acquiring new customers across the market.

This podcast is produced by Resonate Recordings. Click here find out more.

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The 5 Rules for Driving Down Costs Without Affecting Customers

A lot of Behavioral Science can feel intimidating. However, it doesn’t have to be. The Five Rules Podcast Series is our attempt at giving you an easy entry point into the complex and messy world of Behavioral Science.

If you are like most businesses in 2020, you are facing a very different year for your bottom-line performance, and in many cases, it’s not a good kind of different. Naturally, many organizations have responded to a tumultuous and tentative market for growth by balancing the business scales with cost-cutting measures. However, if you cut the wrong things in the wrong areas, you can end up making the situation worse.

Don’t get me wrong; cutting costs is essential in business, even when there isn’t a global pandemic. The critical thing to remember is what to cut, when, and how so that you don’t wonder later why everything went sideways.

This episode of The Intuitive Customer covers my 5 Rules for Driving down costs without affecting customers. They might help you navigate the remaining weeks of 2020 with less turmoil than cutting costs without them.

What Are The Five Rules?

The 5 Rules for Driving Down Costs Without Affecting Customers

Do not think there is one "silver bullet."
Do not over-emphasize the easily-measured costs.
Strive for balance.
Look at the lifetime value of the customer.
Select the areas that drive the least value for you.

What Should You Do With Them?

Do not think there is one "silver bullet." The first step is to avoid thinking that one big cut will make the business all balance out. A proper approach to cost-cutting is to cut a little in many areas, which, when added together, get you the cost savings you need. Perhaps even more importantly, small five percent cuts across several areas will be less traumatic for the organization than one massive one.
Do not over-emphasize the easily-measured costs. Some cuts are easy to measure because the direct costs are in black and white. However, there are indirect costs associated with these items too. I would advise companies to consider all the costs for any item on the ledger before making any cuts. It could mean that you get to your goal faster with fewer cuts when you integrate all the costs associated with any item you eliminate.
Strive for balance. First off, let me tell you that I have never been involved in a customer experience improvement program that has not resulted in cost savings. That's because poor experiences cost you money, too, in actual amounts and opportunities missed. Moreover, unintended consequences can result from any action, and especially when cutting expenses. Instead, I would ask that you look for ways to reduce costs that don't involve stopping something. It could be that adding budget to specific areas can prevent expenses from piling up in another place and improve the process simultaneously.
Look at the lifetime value of the customers. Often, organizations only consider the annual value of a customer. However, depending on your customer lifecycle, that could only be a small percentage of their overall worth. When you consider the customer's real lifetime value, the expenses associated with providing a solution that costs more is less significant. Sure, you are out the expense in the short-term, but the long-term gains far outweigh them.
Select the areas that drive the least value for you. Some parts of the experience might be more valuable than you think at first glance. It is essential to consider what customers use and appreciate most when making cuts. What you don't want to do is unwittingly cut the most important part of your experience in the interest of cost savings, and end up taking away what your most valuable customers loved the most.

To discuss this further contact us at www.BeyondPhilosophy.com

About Beyond Philosophy:

Beyond Philosophy help organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). We then capitalize on this by improving your customer experience to meet these needs thereby retaining and acquiring new customers across the market.

This podcast is produced by Resonate Recordings. Click here find out more.

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How Well Do You Know What You Really Want?

Have you ever bought a book you thought you should read and then didn't read it? Did you ever buy a variety of yogurt flavors and then throw out some of them after they expired because you never wanted that flavor when it was time to eat yogurt?

We do these things because we often overestimate how much variety we want in the future. In psychology, it's called Naïve Diversification Bias, and it means that we are notoriously bad at predicting our future selves' wants. This episode of The Intuitive Customer explores this concept and what you can do about it for your customer experience.

Key Takeaways

As always, with the behavioral sciences, Naïve Diversification bias isn't the only thing that is happening when we make these forecasting errors. However, it is a significant driver of these decisions to overestimate our desire for variety in the future. Here are a few things to remember about this psychological concept that influences customer behavior:

Research shows we choose the same thing in the moment, and more variety for the future. Itamar Simonson, Ph.D., The Sebastian S. Kresge Professor of Marketing at Stanford University, showed in the 1990s that we do this. When his students chose snacks for the next three weeks ahead of time, he saw that they picked more variety than when they decided the snack for the day each week.

We all overestimate our need for variety in the future. Naïve Diversification bias is one we all share. Part of the reason we choose more variety in the future is that we think we want more variety than we do. When the future becomes the now, we are content with the same choice, usually our favorite one.

Naïve Diversification Bias does not mean people do not want a variety of choices. People like having options, just not too many of them. However, most people don't know that they don't like having too many choices until they face them, and they feel overwhelmed.

Mapping out customer behavior can help you identify Naïve Diversification Bias when it occurs. Many organizations participate in journey mapping, which is an excellent way to identify these moments in the customers' process. However, it does not show customer behavior. Behavioral Journey Mapping takes traditional journey mapping to a new level that helps you see what customers do and how their choices could be creating dissatisfaction for themselves.

Recommended Actions

There are a few ways to mitigate the consequences of this natural bias we all share. Here are our suggestions for combatting its effects in your customer experience:

Be able to recognize Naïve Diversification Bias. It is essential to know what is when you see it. Identify where in your experience it occurs and the circumstances that surround that decision-making moment.
Understand that customers change their minds. Knowing that regret is not an emotion that drives value for your bottom line, find ways to mitigate the effects of Naïve Diversification Bias in your experience whenever possible. We recommend discovering these moments by mapping customer behavior rather than process.
Develop strategies to manage the potential negatives of the bias. To improve the experience for them, offer customers opportunities to remedy their wrong choices. Have a clear return policy or give them regular opportunities to re-evaluate their options in subscription services.
Compress the time between choice and consumption. People make choices that create more satisfaction when the timeline between the decision and the time they use or consume the product is short. Whenever possible, it would be best to shorten this interval to facilitate customer satisfaction with their choices.
Build filtered-diversification into your offer. When customers make decisions for future consumption, they want options. However, if you present too many choices, you can overwhelm customers. Therefore, we recommend offering a wide variety of products or services and a way to narrow down the field from which the customer can choose. This way, you offer enough choice to satisfy customers and prevent them from getting weighed down from too many options.

To discuss this further contact us at www.BeyondPhilosophy.com

About Beyond Philosophy:

Beyond Philosophy help organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). We then capitalize on this by improving your customer experience to meet these needs thereby retaining and acquiring new customers across the market.

This podcast is produced by Resonate Recordings. Click here find out more.

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I heard a new term that I think has the capability of being the next wave of change in business today. Customer Science. ‘Customer Science’ is the fusion between technology, behavioral science and data. This new concept is forming now, making this an exciting time for all us interested in customer-driven growth.

This episode of The Intuitive Customer explores this nascent concept of Customer Science and what it could mean to organizations seeking customer-driven success.

Key Takeaways

Customer Science to me in the integration between a number of existing disciplines; Behavioral Science, Technology (AI) and Big data. It is about using science to understand Customers in a much deeper, meaningful way. We often say there is a big difference between what Customers say and what they do. Customer science gets under the skin of what the real motivators of human behavior are using data and technology to inform us. Here are a few more things you should know about Customer Science:

Science is how we know things. Science can be defined as a rigorous identification and measurement of phenomena, leading to a systemic understanding which can then be explained by a causal link or theory. In other words, we know more after we use science than when we started.
The definition of science helps us define Customer Science. Using the definition of science as a basis, you could define Customer Science as the rigorous identification of systems in customer experiences that help you create theories for customer behavior in future experiences.
Companies don't use science on the customer side of the business. Few organizations employ a scientific approach to customer behavior, choosing instead to focus on a company's finance or operations. However, applying those same skills to the customer side could yield excellent results that mirror those achieved in the usual "scientific areas" for business.
Customer Science is an idea whose time has come, much like the iPhone was. If you will recall, the technology for taking digital pictures, texting and calling, listening to music, and online shopping were all available to us before the iPhone. What Apple did was integrate all of these existing functions into one device and changed our fundamental understanding of what was possible with a handheld device. Customer Science could do the same with the customer experience and the psychological influences that exist as separate entities, combining them into a robust science that drives customer growth.
Data will be the next competitive battleground for organizations. A key ingredient for scientific discovery is data. Collecting data about your customers' behavior is essential for organizations that want to analyze it for ways to identify strategies that encourage customer-driven growth.

Recommended Actions

You can do a few things to prepare for the use of Customer Science for your organization, including:

Recognize that there is external pressure to change. The pandemic accelerated changes for all businesses over the past few months, including increased cloud computing use, digital transformations, and the impending rollout of 5G. All organizations have been changing the way they do things, leading to either good or bad outcomes.
Use Customer Science to document how your efforts work or don't. Without science, you can't be sure what causes the needle to move in either direction. The rigor and measurement inherent to science can, and it will enable you to track how things changed. Also, A/B testing can help you see what works and, perhaps more importantly, what doesn't.
Research to gather essential data for this effort. If you do not have the data you need to undertake science, research can help you get it. Our Emotional Signature Research® is an example of data gathering that can help you understand why your customers behave the way they do now and what you can do to change their future behavior.

To discuss this further contact us at www.BeyondPhilosophy.com

About Beyond Philosophy:

Beyond Philosophy help organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). We then capitalize on this by improving your customer experience to meet these needs thereby retaining and acquiring new customers across the market.

This podcast is produced by Resonate Recordings. Click here find out more.

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I have the box my iPhone came in. So do many of you, I would guess. Many people keep their iPhone boxes. We keep them for various reasons, and most of them boil down to because we like how they look. It turns out, customers care a lot about how things look, and it influences their buying (and box-keeping) behavior.

This episode of The Intuitive Customer explores the research of Claudia Townsend, associate professor of marketing at the University of Miami at the Miami Herbert Business School. She discovered that how things look and how you display items affects how people think about them and, often, whether they will buy them.

Key Takeaways

There are a few things to remember about esthetics, per Professor Townsend.

A deliberate focus on esthetics was once reserved for luxury items but not anymore. In the beginning, luxury brands were the most interested in creating outstanding esthetic design. It was for products that had met every other function and needed a differentiation from the competition. Today, however, the focus on elevated esthetics is universal.
Esthetic preferences affect even hyper-rational buying decisions. We are aware that looks drive purchases like cars and clothes, but they also influence which companies stock we buy. In one of Professor Townsend's early papers, she analyzed stockholders' buying behavior after receiving an annual report. The research team learned that how many colors and images the firm used in the annual report affected investor behavior—and this behavior was the same even among experienced investors.
1. The appreciation of esthetics is universal. We all have preferences, even if we don't know fashion or trends.
2. Our appreciation is innate an unconscious. We don't do it consciously. We like what we like.
3. The space between items in a display also affects our buying decisions. In another paper, Professor Townsend did with Julio Sevilla, their research suggested that the amount of space in a display affects the value we assign to objects. When items have a lot of space between them, we think they are more expensive than when they are close together. Professor Townsend says this innate judgment is hard to change.
There are two things organizations should learn from this:

Recommended Actions

There are a few ways you can use this concept to manage your Customer Experience:

Recognize that esthetics matter. Customers make buying decisions based on how things look, so your esthetic is a significant part of your Customer Experience.
Design a deliberate appeal to your offerings. Consider all the details of your visual effects to appeal to a customer's preferences. Any investment you make here will be worth the money.
Don't ignore this effect just because you offer an intangible. Esthetics still matter even when you present a service and maybe even matter more when there is no actual product to use for comparison. Customers will equate things like a clean, organized office with things like professionalism and skill. If a website is hard to use, they might think it isn't up-to-date with its technology.
If you don't know what is vital to the esthetics of your design, find out. Researching to find out what matters to people can help you in your design efforts. Our Emotional Signature® research can help you discover your customers' underlying wants and needs to point you in the right direction with your visual appeal.

To discuss this further contact us at www.BeyondPhilosophy.com

About Beyond Philosophy:

Beyond Philosophy help organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). We then capitalize on this by improving your customer experience to meet these needs thereby retaining and acquiring new customers across the market.

This podcast is produced by Resonate Recordings. Click here find out more.

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Why What We Believe Is Sometimes Just Wrong!

Many sports fans will tell you their team is the best. However, only one of the sports teams wins the championship and is definitively the best. Moreover, many organizations that never get close to the championship have fans who would say these teams are the best. For this last lot, the claim that their team is "the best" creates some serious conflict compared to reality.

The sports fan situation I described is an example of Cognitive Dissonance. Cognitive Dissonance is a universal concept for the behavioral sciences that describes how we can hold a belief contrary to reality. Moreover, the idea explains why we feel uncomfortable when confronted with the facts and will often seek irrational ways to resolve them.

This episode of The Intuitive Customer takes a deeper dive into the broad idea of Cognitive Dissonance and the many ways we try to resolve the discomfort it causes.

Key Takeaways

Cognitive Dissonance is everywhere. It is best to think of it as a behavioral science concept that is like a giant umbrella with many more specific forms of it that fall underneath. Here are a few things to remember about this essential concept:

We all have contradictory beliefs that we hold to be true at the same time. Continuing with my sports fan example, I think the Luton Town Football Club is the best team in the English Football League. But, the truth is I know they are not. They are only in the second or Championship level of the four tiers of the league and probably should be playing in the third. Since the best teams play at the Premier level, which is a level up from Luton Town, they can't be "the best."
Contradictory beliefs cause us discomfort. Having conflicting feelings bothers us. They create tension that we want to resolve by dropping one of them, but we can't. So, the pressure remains.
We resolve the discomfort in different ways. Eventually, we will either change our beliefs to match our behavior or change our behavior to match our ideas. However, when we cannot do this, we resort to irrational methods of resolving the conflict, like finding ways to change our perception of the conflict (i.e., rationalizing our actions). Sometimes we minimize the conflict by making excuses for the behavior. Other times we change our recollection of the story to line up better in our heads with what we believe.
Cognitive Dissonance happens at an organizational level, too. Sometimes the brand promise and the actual Customer Experience create the Cognitive Dissonance for customers, creating problems for your customer-facing team. They are left trying to reconcile reality with what the customer feels the marketing promised them.

Recommended Actions

Wanting to reduce the feelings of Cognitive Dissonance is universal. From a Customer Experience perspective, you want to help ease your customers' uncomfortable feelings about it. Here are a few suggestions on how to manage it in your experiences:

Understand Cognitive Dissonance and how it makes people uncomfortable. Customers are often dealing with trying to resolve what they believe with reality, even as customers. When customers have these conflicting feelings, it can affect their behavior. Customer-facing employees should recognize when it is happening and be prepared to help manage them.
Employ Cognitive Dissonance reduction strategies. It would be best to find ways to help customers feel less discomfort during their buying decisions. Giving your Customer-Facing team the tools they need to help manage customer emotions to a positive outcome is critical. For example, use humor to recognize the situation and ease the customer's tension. Another way could be to point out ways features or benefits that appeal to the customer's strongly-held belief that appears to them to conflict with the reality of your offer.
Recognize that sometimes customers don't understand what they want. People can't always tell you what they want. It's up to you to dig deeper and discover what motivates their behavior. We have Emotional Signature® Research that takes into account the difference between what people say is important to them and what actually is.

To discuss this further contact us at www.BeyondPhilosophy.com

About Beyond Philosophy:

Beyond Philosophy help organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). We then capitalize on this by improving your customer experience to meet these needs thereby retaining and acquiring new customers across the market.

This podcast is produced by Resonate Recordings. Click here find out more.

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5 New Rules Guaranteed to Build Trust

A lot of Behavioral Economics can feel intimidating. However, it doesn’t have to be. The Five Rules Podcast Series is our attempt at giving you an easy entry point into the complex and messy world of Behavioral Science.

When you choose to do business with a company, which do you prefer, Company A, that you trust, or Company B, that you don’t? If you chose A, then you chose wisely—and you decided to like your customers would.

People like to do business with people, brands, or organizations they trust. This episode of The Intuitive Customer shares our five new rules guaranteed to build trust. With trust, you can have the kind of relationship that yields the customer behavior you want to get the customer-driven growth you need.

What Are The Five Rules?

The five rules guaranteed to build trust are not complicated. Instead, the rules are simple, or at least simple to say. Doing them is a bit more complicated—but still not that hard. Here are the five rules:

The 5 New Rules Guaranteed to Build Trust

Remember that trust is earned, not given.
Be authentic.
Be transparent.
Do what you say are going to do.
Be consistent.

What Should You Do With Them?

Remember that trust is earned and not given. If you think about it, none of us start off trusting people (in general), which is especially true with businesses. However, if you approach customers with a deliberate strategy with specific actions designed to build your credibility, you can earn people’s trust and deepen your relationship with them.

Be authentic. You can build trust when you are genuine with people. However, people still won’t necessarily believe you are sincere. So, one way to show your authenticity is to offer a contract. Contracts can provide peace of mind that you mean what you say, and if you don’t deliver, the customer has recourse. Contracts also help customers relax and let you do what you do without feeling the need to watch you or micromanage the project, which gives everyone a little more room to work.

Be transparent. Along with authenticity, letting the customers know everything is another way to prove you are genuine. This policy includes lousy news. There is no point in hiding bad news; the customer will find out anyway, and it will be that much worse that they didn’t find out from you. The same goes for mistakes; admitting them and trying to correct them goes a long way to prove that you are a trustworthy company or individual that customers can rely on. Furthermore, suppose you have a good standing with your customers, what Stephen Covey’s book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People calls an emotional bank account, customers will usually forgive your mistake without losing trust.

Do what you say you are going to do. Actions speak louder than words. So saying you are going to do something isn’t enough; you have to do it. If you always do what you say you are going to do, people will learn to trust your words.

Provide consistency. The continual delivery of customers’ expectations leads to trust. Moreover, it makes a brand promise that can follow you all over the world. For example, people know when they go to a Hilton anywhere in the world, they will get roughly the same level of experience. Another example is being consistent about many of the little things in a Customer Experience. For example, when we choose a specialist for medical care, we don’t always know if they are “good” at their job. However, we do know that the office appears organized, that they always listen when we talk and look us in the eye when they speak to us. While these little things do not tell us explicitly that they are good at what they do, they do indicate a level of trustworthiness that helps us move forward without as much stress about it. Don’t forget all the little things when you are interacting with customers, because what seems like an irrelevant detail might have more impact on your relationship with customers than you might think.

To discuss this further contact us at www.BeyondPhilosophy.com

About Beyond Philosophy:

Beyond Philosophy help organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). We then capitalize on this by improving your customer experience to meet these needs thereby retaining and acquiring new customers across the market.

This podcast is produced by Resonate Recordings. Click here find out more.

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THIS is the Big Reason You Make Mistakes

We make a lot of subjective decisions. Without the guide of "right" and "wrong" to direct us, we weigh the pros and cons and do the best we can. However, our brains can thwart our best efforts for an optimal outcome by focusing on the wrong things.

Focalism is a concept that describes how our minds can overemphasize specific points of information over others, and often the wrong ones. Focalism is a reason we often make mistakes. This episode of The Intuitive Customer explores Focalism, why it happens, and what you can do to overcome this natural bias we all share.

Key Takeaways

There are a few things you should know about Focalism:

Objects of Focalism in a Customer Experience tend to be notable, easy-to-remember moments that make for good stories. For instance, if you're evaluating your customer experience and someone was rude to you in a way that makes for a good story, you might overemphasize this moment in your whole evaluation of the experience.

When it comes to overemphasizing the wrong things, the person making the decision is who puts the weights on those decisions. However, people are influenced by what's going on around them. For example, if your sales team emphasizes miles per gallon fuel efficiency for a car, then the customer might also. However, the customer could also react by exaggerating the importance of another feature in response.

People are not as happy with decisions made using Focalism long-term. A study in the 1970s showed that student participants who justified why they chose a poster for their dorm room didn't keep it hanging as long as those students who chose the one they liked best without justification.

We make the best decisions by integrating the information. One way of doing that is by allowing the Intuitive System (fast, automatic thinking) more time while the Rational System (slow, deliberate thinking) is distracted to process information.

Recommended Actions

We have a few recommended actions that you can use to manage Focalism in yourself and your customers:

If you want to make the best decision as a customer, we recommend that you do something else before making it. Focus on something else for a while, and then come back to the decision and see if you have a different perspective.
If you manage the experience for your organization, it would be best to look for these attributes that will become the overemphasized focuses of a customer's evaluation later and improve those aspects of the experience. These will be the easy-to-remember moments of an experience.
We recommend that you have an A/B test regarding how changes to the experience affect your customer behavior. Have a control group carry on doing what you have always done and another group where you change something, whether it's a suggested or mandatory "waiting period" before they sign up with you or a distracting activity before you push for the close, or something in-between. Then, analyze the results to see which process or experience drove the most value for your customers and your bottom-line.
Remember also that Customer Experience has many influences that affect the outcome. Focalism is one of many forces at work at any given moment, so solving it will not necessarily fix all your problems or drive all your success. This part is one of a much more complex system, and it is better to integrate all of that information than solve for the one piece. We recommend additional training on Customer Decision Making to help you identify and manage all the moving parts involved.

To discuss this further contact us at www.BeyondPhilosophy.com

About Beyond Philosophy:

Beyond Philosophy help organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). We then capitalize on this by improving your customer experience to meet these needs thereby retaining and acquiring new customers across the market.

This podcast is produced by Resonate Recordings. Click here find out more.

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Did you know that if you were to write a Customer Experience review on your mobile phone, it would be more emotional than if you did it on your computer? Did you also know you are more likely to tell me your email and or home address and your substance abuse history if I ask you on your mobile?

You might be thinking that this can’t be true. However, recent findings by Shiri Melumad, Assistant Professor of Marketing for the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania suggest that you would. It turns out that the technology we use to share information affects what we include in the content.

Key Takeaways

A few different reasons exist for this phenomenon, but what they have in common is they are related to how we feel and where we are when we feel it. Assistant Professor Melumad has a few different critical takeaways from her research for two published papers.

We are more emotional in reviews on our phones than on our computers. There are a few reasons for this, which include:
1. One of the critical drivers of more emotional reviews on the phone is the phone’s size. The smaller screen and keyboard are more challenging to use, so people want to get to the point and write shorter reviews. The brevity enforced by the phone’s size means that what content makes it in is often emotional.
2. People who have experiences in the extreme are more likely to give a review. However, those who had an okay or satisfactory experience are less likely to provide a review.
3. Another influence on the content of the review is temporal proximity. In other words, the closer you are to the experience, the more emotional it is. After you get home, your emotions settle a bit, and your content output reflects that.
4. People are more likely to write a positive review than a negative one on their smartphone-generated content. This slant is the result of our self-presentational concerns. In other words, we don’t want to come across as a negative person.
5. The emotional reviews written on mobile phones are more compelling to readers than those written on a computer.
Boundary conditions exist for this emotionality. A review of a refrigerator may not be as emotional as your written response to a current events story. There is always a context to your emotional evaluation that might make some information more pertinent in some instances than others. Professor Melumad says there are two important points about these boundary conditions, which include:
People are more likely to disclose personal information on their phones than their computers. Everything from their current home address to bankruptcy history found its way into inboxes from mobile phones, per Assistant Professor Melumad.
1. Have the phones with us all the time because they are small when compared to a computer
2. Rely on the phone to help us stay in touch wherever, whenever
3. Use the phone to maintain our closest relationships
We really love our phones. Our intense psychological relationship with our phones as a comfort device because we:
Using your phone in public leads to Attentional Blindness, which describes how we are so absorbed in our activity, we are unaware of what is going on around us. Assistant Professor Melumad says Attentional Blindness occurs because our cognitive resources are concentrating on using the smartphone, leaving little room for other activity.

Recommended Actions

There are a few ways to apply this information on behalf of your organization, which include:

Realize that mobile phones can help with critical health-related disclosures. Assistant Professor Melumad says this phenomenon would be helpful in contact tracing for COVID-19. People would be more likely to use the app on their mobile. The same concept applies to gather medical information at a doctor’s appointment. People might be more forthcoming with personal medical information via the smartphone than they are with other methods.
Focus on smartphone-generated content for persuasive reviews. Study participants found the emotional content more compelling than other reviews. Also, it would be best to data-mine the survey to get more candid feedback on your experience since people tend to be more accurate about their wants and needs through their mobile devices.
Remember that little things have big effects on customer behavior. Professor Melumad’s research reinforces our long-held belief that little things mean a lot in your experience. Figure out what you want to get out of your customer reviews, and use it to target customers appropriately for their smartphone-generated content.

To discuss this further contact us at www.BeyondPhilosophy.com

About Beyond Philosophy:

Beyond Philosophy help organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). We then capitalize on this by improving your customer experience to meet these needs thereby retaining and acquiring new customers across the market.

This podcast is produced by Resonate Recordings. Click here find out more.

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How to Make Your Experience Easy and Gain Growth

I hear things like this when I go into an organization: "We want to delight customers at every moment of contact." I nod my head and smile, but secretly I think it sounds exhausting. Moreover, it is unnecessary in many parts of the experience. People many times do not want to be delighted; they want to be done already. Keeping it as easy as possible for customers to get it done is a direct path to gain growth.

Key Takeaways

Whenever you make customers think about something in your experience, you create what we call Customer Effort. A Customer Effort Score measures how difficult a customer thinks it is to work with you as an organization. Like other Customer Experience measures, deriving your Customer Effort Score involves asking your customers how difficult they thought their experience was and then having them rate it on a scale.

There are a few significant takeaways behind reducing Customer Effort and keeping it as easy as possible.

Rational thinking, which is the type that takes a lot of energy to do, is something customers are not super excited to do most of the time. We prefer to use easy, automatic thinking and save our energy for other activities. Humans established this preference over the cour thousands of years, because, for many of these years, securing food was a challenge. We needed to preserve our energy for other things, like avoiding predators.
We also use habits to simplify our thinking. Many times, we learn to do something using the rational side of our thinking. Repetition makes the behavior habitual, which is governed by our automatic and intuitive thinking system.
As a general rule, customers want things easy. However, some specific instances exist where the experience should be a little complicated. These rare occasions usually involve status items, like the American Express Centurion Card, a card so hard to get you can't ask for it; American Express asks you if you want it. Since it isn't for everyone, and it is hard to get, customers like that the experience is challenging. Examples like this, however, are not the norm.
You must make your experience as easy as possible for customers, so you get a low Customer Effort Score and get your customers to come back for more.

Recommended Actions

Authors Matthew Dixon, Karen Freeman, and Nicholas Tobin wrote in the Harvard Business Review the article "Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers." There were five principles they shared help organizations reduce the Customer Effort in your experience, which includes:

Don't just resolve the current issue; head off the next one. I like how this principle is proactive and removes obstacles that would keep customers from doing more business with you.
Arm reps to address the emotional side of customer interactions. When your team is minding the customer's emotions, it eliminates moments in your experience that can cause uncertainty or stress for customers. For example, changing the language reps use with customers can communicate better and put customers' minds at ease.
Minimize channel switching by increasing self-service channel stickiness. You train your customers on navigating your experience, whether you are deliberate about it or not. People have ways that they get what they want based on the experience you design for them. Therefore, creating it without friction is essential. Moreover, we would encourage you to ensure that you weigh the benefits of any changes you want to make to your experience against the hassle and disruption it will cause your most valuable customers.
Use Feedback from disgruntled or struggling customers to reduce Customer Effort. I hope this one doesn't need any additional explanation; it's a no-brainer.
Empower the front line to deliver a low-effort experience. If your company policies are getting in the way of customers having a smooth experience, especially when resolving problems, change them. If your people have the freedom and ability to solve customers' issues right away, it reduces a lot of Customer Effort.

I would add the following two principles to the previous five from the HBR article:

Think about the interactions with the customers that drive the most value for you. This area is excellent for fulfilling the current unmet needs in your industry. Look for ways to simplify your experience to meet these unsatisfied wants and create competitive differentiation with your competitors.
Remember, it doesn't pay to be logical if everyone else is being logical. Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman of Ogilvy UK, and author of Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sensesays doing things your way differentiates you from the competition and allows for you to satisfy these unmet needs, too.

To discuss this further, contact us at www.BeyondPhilosophy.com.

About Beyond Philosophy:

Beyond Philosophy helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden unmet needs that drive value ($). We then capitalize on this by improving your customer experience to meet these needs, thereby retaining and acquiring new customers across the market.

Resonate Recordings produce this podcast. Click here to find out more.

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The 5 Rules for Behavioral Journey Mapping

A lot of Behavioral Economics can feel intimidating. However, it doesn’t have to be. The Five Rules Podcast Series is our attempt at giving you an easy entry point into the complex and messy world of Behavioral Science.

What Are The Five Rules?

We were training customers with journey mapping recently when it became apparent that people didn't understand what journey mapping could do for them. Moreover, they thought they did. To respond, I came up with five precepts for advanced journey mapping skills, which can serve as a guide to your desired outcome.

Before we get into the rules, I should clarify for those of you that aren't familiar with Journey Maps what they are. They are essentially what a customer does in your experience. This exercise is excellent, and I support their use in designing your Customer Experience.

My criticism for journey mapping is that most people only do a superficial version that does not dip much outside their interaction with customers. Moreover, they usually don't indicate why customers do what they do. In many cases, it feels more like a customer process than a journey map, mostly because it isn't going to take you where you want to go.

Our version of journey mapping is called Behavioral Journey Mapping. It is different because it expands past the actual customer interaction where the experience starts and stops. It also identifies how customers feel entering the experience. Also, Behavioral Journey Mapping digs deeper into how each of the moments of the experience influences customer behavior, which is essential if you want to get customers to behave the way you want.

Now, for the rules:

The 5 Rules for Advanced Journey Mapping

Embrace that the journey is rational, emotional, subconscious, and psychological.
Look for the hidden aspects of a customer journey.
Define strategically what specific emotions drive most value across the market.
Build deliberate memory points.
Identify how to nudge customer decision-making.

What Should You Do With Them?

Embrace that the journey is rational, emotional, subconscious, and psychological. The first step is to understand that it is essential to know what customers do and why they do it. It is also necessary to know how they feel entering the experience. When you have this understanding of all the aspects of a customer journey, from practical to emotional and all the psychological stops in between, the rest of the rules will make more sense and yield more useful actions to get to where you want to go.

2. Look for the hidden aspects of the customer journey. Here is where you begin to plot out what is happening in your Customer Experience. You should include where the experience starts, recognizing it often happens way before the customer ever interacts with your organization. Furthermore, it would be best if you carried the journey map out to the end of the experience, which may conclude long after your organization's last interaction. Furthermore, third-party providers that take over parts of your experience (e.g., shuttle drivers, installers, tow truck operators) are also part of the experience and should make the map.

3. Define strategically what specific emotions drive most value across the market. Now that you have detailed what is happening in the customer journey comprehensively, you can plan how you want to enhance it. A crucial part of this strategy is the emotion your customer feels at the end of the experience. Whatever feeling you choose, from satisfied to safe to appreciated, the sentiment should drive value for your organization, which could mean anything from Net Promoter Score® to customer-driven growth. Then, your job is to design an experience that evokes these emotions. If you don't know what these emotions are, you should do research, like our Emotional Signature® Research, which uncovers the customers' unmet, hidden needs that can drive value for your Customer Experience if you were to meet them.

4. Build deliberate memory points. Memory is vital to your experience. Your customers don't choose you based on the experience you provide; they choose you because of the experience they remember you provide. Therefore, building a positive memory of your experience is essential to your customer-driven growth. Memories form based on the peak experience of the experience and how customers felt at the end, called the Peak-End Rule, first introduced by Nobel-Prize-winning economist Professor Daniel Kahneman. If the peak emotion that occurs in your experience and the one at the end, as identified in your customer journey map from Rule 2 do not drive value for your organization, you need to change them.

5. Identify how to nudge customer decision-making. There will be moments in your experience that present an opportunity to nudge customer behavior to something that you prefer to what is occurring now. Understanding how people make decisions, and the psychological concepts that explain them will help you design your situations to make it easy for customers to make the decision that you want. After all, isn't that what spending all this time and money on customer journey mapping was meant to do?

To discuss this further contact us at www.BeyondPhilosophy.com

About Beyond Philosophy:

Beyond Philosophy help organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). We then capitalize on this by improving your customer experience to meet these needs thereby retaining and acquiring new customers across the market.

This podcast is produced by Resonate Recordings. Click here find out more.

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Mastering the Illusion of Control

Humans often feel like we have more control over things than we do. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary—and even regular common sense—we think that if we do things in a certain way, we can influence what happens around us, particularly during sporting events. This concept is called the Illusion of Control.

Key Takeaways

In this episode of The Intuitive Customer, we delve into the idea of the Illusion of Control and why it is essential to how you design your Customer Experience. The concept has a few key takeaways, including:

The Illusion of Control is pervasive in our daily lives. You can see humans under the influence of the Illusion of Control when they participate in superstitions or pre-game rituals before sporting events. You can also see it in business situations, like when a sales manager criticizes a sales representative for missing quota, which may or may not be within the sales representatives’ control.
The Illusion of Control manifests in several different ways for a Customer Experience. Customers think they decide for themselves, and they do, but they don’t control everything that leads to that decision. The design of your experience has an enormous influence on how people decide to take action. It starts with advertising messages and package design, but other things along the way affect the purchase also. Furthermore, in brick and mortar situations, even the location in the aisle can affect how a customer chooses.
The Two-Systems model reinforces the concept. The concept that the Intuitive and Rational Systems in our brains work together to make decisions supports this concept as well. We often say that customers buy emotionally and then justify the purchase rationally. The rational justification that occurs could be our minds trying to take control of our impulses.
The Illusion of Control does not mean it is okay to manipulate people. We believe that deception is wrong. Instead, we encourage you to design your experience to get a particular outcome but leave control in the hands of the customers. After all, that’s usually what customers want anyway.
The Locus of Control is also an essential concept. This concept describes how some people perceive the power as internal, meaning they control how things go by what they do, and others think of the force as external, that someone or something is doing things to them. We all have different ideas on the Locus of Control and they change situationally. For example, many of us feel the pandemic is an external power that is controlling our lives.

Recommended Actions

We have a couple of suggestions for how you can use these concepts to your benefit.

Recognize the changing nature of the feelings of control. Control is something we feel we have, even when we don’t. With control as a feeling, it makes it subject to change. It is essential to recognize this changing nature and the bias it creates and correct for it in your actions.
Consider the Locus of Control in your experience design. It is crucial to determine whether your customers have an internal or external bias for Locus of Control and accommodate those feelings with a customized reaction. Developing a way to manage the side-effects of those biases can help improve the experience for people and encourage customer-driven growth.
Determine your customers’ expectations for the Illusion and Locus of Control.Many times, customers want to feel in control. However, there are times when they want to surrender that control to your organization, particularly in safety situations. Your experience design should meet those expectations, or you could end up with an “area of conflict” with customers.
If you are unfamiliar with customer expectations, do research. With so many things changing in recent months, you might not know what your customers expect. We recommend researching to find out, like our Emotional Signature Edge®. Uncovering these hidden, unmet expectations and needs is essential to designing an experience that facilitates customer-driven growth.

To discuss this further contact us at www.BeyondPhilosophy.com

About Beyond Philosophy:

Beyond Philosophy help organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). We then capitalize on this by improving your customer experience to meet these needs thereby retaining and acquiring new customers across the market.

This podcast is produced by Resonate Recordings. Click here find out more.

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The Big Mistake People Make with AI

Business leaders of today have to understand the technology of tomorrow. Specifically, one would be wise to understand what AI is, how it works, and what problems it can solve for your business.

This episode of The Intuitive Customer is a conversation with Bikram Ghosh, associate professor of marketing at the Eller College of Management at the University of Arizona, Tucson about AI in business today and what is possible for your business processes.

Key Takeaways

Ghosh studies AI and its overlap with behavioral economics. He believes that the future of Customer Experience management and the way to foster customer-driven growth is AI, and here’s why:

AI is machine intelligence driven by algorithms. The goal is to mimic the human mind. By taking stimuli from an external environment, called inputs, machines try to predict the outcome.

There are many types of AI.

Machine Learning is a type of AI where machines attempt to learn from their mistakes. We learn from our mistakes; machines seek to do the same thing by making mistakes, recognizing them, sourcing them, and then fixing them moving forward.

Attitudinal Data refers to how customers talk about products on blogs and social media. From attitudinal data, the algorithm can extrapolate behavioral nuances.

Natural Language Processing makes it possible to detect behavioral nuances, and is a significant area of work in Machine Learning.

Computer Vision is when the machine analyzes micro-expressions or picture data to determine how people react to a product of brand. This AI helps companies learn how people react to their product or brand from studying customers’ micro-expressions or from picture data analysis.

AI is great at determining how a large group feels in general, but not individually. Machines are improving in these areas, however. Amazon is working on capturing the data about the nuances of customer emotions.

AI is excellent at categorizing groups. This news is excellent as many organizations do not have sufficient segmentation in their customer groups. The potential for segmenting by customer behavior is a possibility in the near future, which would allow for tracking the dynamic nature of customer actions and emotions.

Recommended Actions

Ghosh realizes that it can be daunting for people not familiar with AI to dive into the process. However, he offers some practical tips in this area:

Begin with a form of sentiment analysis. Getting the customer’s emotions allows you group your customers based on how they feel.
Decide what the appropriate response would be to each group.
Map the outcome variables for the groups and their responses to design the process.
Have your AI begin collecting data at every level down to deployment.
Track your desired data, whether that is pertaining to customer loyalty, behavioral measures, or whatever else you want. Here, I would discover what drives value for each group.

Some additional takeaways are:

Use AI to help with your categorizing. Solving many problems starts with effective segmentation for improved targeting. Best of all, AI can do thing your human resources cannot—and faster, too.
Do not use AI at activities that require creativity, judgment, and decision making. That's where humans come in.
Think of AI as complementary to human work. Ghosh recommends that you find parts of your business process that are repetitive or physical that you can automate with AI.
Remember you only have to understand what it can do; you don’t have to program it. Most of us can’t anyway. You hire people to do the programming. Your job is to determine what part of the process you can have them program.
Educating the team about how customer behavior is affected by emotions is essential. Helping people in your organization understand the importance of the emotional experience and how AI can help improve it, is critical as we move forward to the Customer Experiences of the future.

To discuss this further contact us at www.BeyondPhilosophy.com

About Beyond Philosophy:

Beyond Philosophy help organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). We then capitalize on this by improving your customer experience to meet these needs thereby retaining and acquiring new customers across the market.

This podcast is produced by Resonate Recordings. Click here find out more.

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The 5 Rules for Making and Managing Customer Memories

A lot of Behavioral Economics can feel intimidating. However, it doesn’t have to be. The Five Rules Podcast Series is our attempt at giving you an easy entry point into the complex and messy world of Behavioral Science.

What Are The Five Rules?

I love the subject of customer memories. From how they form to how they change to how they drive your customer loyalty, customer memories are a crucial aspect of your Customer Experience. Knowing the role your Customer Experience design plays in the formation of customer memories is critical to enabling customer-driven growth. Here are the five rules to bear in mind when making and managing customer memories:

Five Rules for Making and Managing Customer Memories

Embrace that we don't choose between experiences, but between the memories we have of experiences.
Emotions create memories.
Map your customers' "fishing nets."
Define what you want a customer to remember.
Discover how your customers retrieve their memories.

What Should You Do With Them?

Embrace that we don't choose between experiences, but between the memories we have of experiences. Full disclosure, this rule is not mine. Professor Daniel Kahneman, Nobel-prize winning economist, came up with it. It is a foundational element of your entire Customer Experience strategy. If you think about it, memories are what make us who we are. Moreover, memory is how we learn and what we use to make future decisions. For all of these reasons, it is essential to have a plan for making customer memories that drive value for your organization.

Emotions create memories. How you feel affects memories in two main ways. The first way is that the strength of the emotion is the catalyst for memory formation. Those things you feel most strongly about are what you remember. The other stuff you didn’t have strong emotions about? Not so much. The second way feelings affect memories is that they are essential. Professor Kahneman gave us the Peak-End rule, which says that what forms a memory is the peak (or most intense) emotion you felt and how you felt at the end. Therefore, we encourage you to determine what peak emotion you want customers to feel and when, and how you want them to feel when the experience concludes. Then, we want you take deliberate actions to deliver these emotions to customers.

Map your customers' "fishing nets." There is also the idea that your memories are part of networks, which means that memories connect to one another. An analogy we use to describe this is a fishing net. If each memory is a knot in the fishing net, the connected memories are the knots that are attached to it. Now, if you imagine you have hold of a knot in a fishing net and you are drawing it up to the surface of a shallow pool, you can see that the connected knots will rise with the knot you are holding. Some knots will break the surface while the others hang out just below. We like to think of the knots above the surface of the water as conscious memories, and the ones below are subconscious memories. We want you to see if you can discover what memories customers will associate with the memory of your experience and use that to your advantage in your Customer Experience design.

Define what you want a customer to remember. There are practicalities to consider regarding managing customers’ memories. First, choose what you want the customer to remember. Second, have strategies in place to reinforce these memories. For example, if you manage a theme park and you know your experience has a strong emotion at a particular moment, like the top of the roller coaster as the cars start to plummet down, how can you help customers remember it? Many theme parks have identified that moment as a strong emotion and have cameras that take photos so their guests can see themselves in that thrilling moment right after they get off the ride. Even if the customer doesn’t purchase the pic, that photo reinforces the exhilarating moment in the guests’ memory right away.

Research can help you find these valuable moments in your experience to reinforce. Moreover, research can help you focus on the areas in your Customer Experience that give you the most impact first. Our Emotional Signature® Research defines what drives value for your customers emotionally. Then, you can look at the customer process to see when there are moments with potential to evoke that emotion.

Discover how your customers retrieve their memories. Helping your customers create fabulous memories of your experience does not do you any good if they do not remember them at the right time. Understanding how your customers recall experiences is essential. Remember the fishing net analogy we shared? We want them to pull the right knot at the right time and associate the memory to a moment when they make a buying decision in your area. Also, you should be aware that every time a customer accesses a memory, they re-remember it. This tendency can make the intensity of emotions increase. It's great when they get more positive. However, if you experience has the customer repeat what went wrong over and over to different members of your customer service team, you could be making a bad memory worse.

To discuss this further contact us at www.BeyondPhilosophy.com

About Beyond Philosophy:

Beyond Philosophy help organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). We then capitalize on this by improving your customer experience to meet these needs thereby retaining and acquiring new customers across the market.

This podcast is produced by Resonate Recordings. Click here find out more.

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What A Face Mask Can Do for Customer Segmentation

Everyone has an opinion about face masks. Some think they help stop the spread of COVID-19; some think they are unnecessary and a nuisance; others fall somewhere in between. However, what you probably didn't know about face masks is they can help you customize moments of your Customer Experience so that no matter what opinion your customer has, they feel like you understand them.

Key Takeaways

This episode of The Intuitive Customer discusses this essential and relevant chance to participate in customer segmentation. Customer segmentation, you might recall, is the opportunity to take your more substantial groups of customers and put them in groups based on a characteristic(s) they share. In this case, our segmentation example is regarding face masks by asking customers when they wear them to determine how they feel about the global pandemic.

Here are the key takeaways from this episode:

People have had different experiences during the pandemic this far, and it will affect customer behavior. Different countries and states had varying degrees of "lockdown," ranging from none at all to shelter in place. It is essential to understand what conditions your customers had to determine how they feel before they walk through your door.

People will emerge from the pandemic in different emotional states about their safety. Like the conditions they experienced, people have varying degrees of regard for their safety as the world returns to the new normal. Some are terrified and will avoid returning to brick and mortar locations; some flout requirements to wear face masks, calling the pandemic a "hoax." It would be best to know what type of emotional state your customers are in so you can provide the appropriate response in your Customer Experience. We know that in some countries face masks are being politicized. This doesn't matter for this segmentation as we are talking about how Customers Behave.

A Golden Questions helps determine the customers' emotional state regarding the pandemic. If you ask people how they feel about the threat of COVID-19, they probably won't tell you the whole truth, especially if they don't know you. To get to the heart of their feelings, you should ask a different way. A Golden Question is an example of a query that reveals how a customer feels about something without asking them about that something directly. In the case of face-mask segmentation, we think the Golden Question is, "When have you been wearing a face mask?"

We have identified five likely segments of face mask wearers. We have determined the five divisions of face mask wearers here:

Full Metal Jacket: Someone that has been locked in and is venerable or looking after someone venerable.

The nervous face mask: Forced to go out for food shopping or work but is nervous.

The social conscious face mask: They are concern but understand the science. They are not that worried about face mask but realize their social responsibility

The pocket face mask: They have a face mask in their pocket/purse and will see what others are doing or will wear it in certain conditions.

The freedom fighter: Never wear a face mask as I don't want government to tell me what to do. It's all overblown.

It is important not to judge any group. Empathy for each of the groups will make this exercise more successful.

Recommended Actions

Segment your customers into the face mask wearers. Once you have asked your customer the Golden Question about Facemasks, you should then segment them into one of the five groups we identified based on their answers.

Try to step outside your feelings. Like everyone else, you probably identify with one of these groups. You find their feelings easy to understand because you feel the same way. However, we recommend that you try to "step outside your feelings" and see the issue from the other group's perspective.

Use the face mask wearer segmentation to customize your experience (and messaging) for each group. Since each group shares an emotional state about the threat of COVID-19, you can design responses that appeal to each group's unique psychological needs. For example, you can communicate to Full Metal Jacket face mask wearers all the things you have changed to prevent the spread of SARS-CoV-2 in your experience and send a warm, "Welcome Back!" to your Freedom Fighters.

Recognize that what people need now is not what they needed three or four months ago. Customer's needs change based on the situation they experience. Before the pandemic, we would have said that having an easy experience was essential; after the pandemic, I would say safety is paramount. Adapting and responding is key to your ability to navigate the "new normal" successfully.

To discuss this further, contact us at www.BeyondPhilosophy.com.

About Beyond Philosophy:

Beyond Philosophy help organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). We then capitalize on this by improving your customer experience to meet these needs thereby retaining and acquiring new customers across the market.

This podcast is produced by Resonate Recordings. Click here find out more.

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Never Let a Good Crisis Go To Waste

I am fond of an old saying that goes like, "Never let a good crisis go to waste." Part of the reason I like it is it points out that even something as grim as the COVID-19 Pandemic has a silver lining. In this case, it presents an opportunity to reimagine what you do with customers and take advantage of the environment of change that the "new normal" in business will offer.

Key Takeaways

This episode of The Intuitive Customer explores how organizations respond to the crisis and which ones will be the most successful. There are similarities across industries in how business is handling the changes, some more successfully than others. Also, customers are in a different place than they were at the start of 2020 as well. Here are a few of the key takeaways from what we observe:

There are three ways organizations have responded to our current economic climate:
Reacting: They have changed but believe the changes are only temporary until we return to normal.
Responding: They have made changes they intend to continue in the short-term, meaning for at least a year or so.
Reimagining: They see the advantage of the disruption of business-as-usual and are using it to pull forward plans they were delaying.
Loss Aversion is at play, also. Businesses are in a loss mindset, which can drive unusually risky behavior. In other words, things are bad, so some companies are willing to try something they otherwise wouldn't be able or ready to try.
Different places have different experiences. Sweden didn't shut down; the UK did. The state of Georgia opened in April and California in June. People have had varying degrees of disruption to their former daily lives and will respond accordingly.
The Kubler-Ross stages of grief model is affecting customer behavior. Where your customers are in the five stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—influences how they feel today. Someone who has accepted the changes will behave differently than someone who denies that the pandemic is real.
There is likely going to be a second wave. Without a vaccine, people are likely in for another wave of "stay-at-home" orders in the fall. Will you be prepared?

Recommended Actions

Knowing that the crisis does present opportunity, we have been advising our clients to do the following as they re-open:

Interpret new customer behavior. Can you observe customer behavior and the emotions that influence them to act that way?
Identify the accelerants that are in your marketplace. What did the pandemic do to change the market in your industry, and can you capitalize on it? (If you don't know, you can find out with research.)
Determine if there is a further segmentation. Are there new market segments or customer segmentations you can make based on your customers' experiences geographically or emotionally?
Review your strategy. Do you have long-term plans that you can pull forward to the short-term? Do you have a plan if there is a second wave of infections?
Redesign your Journey Maps. Have you introduced new nudges in your customer process that address the emotional needs people have in the "new normal?"
Train employees in managing emotional experiences. What have you done to get your customer-facing team ready to handle customers' emotional experience?

To discuss this further, contact us at www.BeyondPhilosophy.com.

About Beyond Philosophy:

Beyond Philosophy helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). We then capitalize on this by improving your customer experience to meet these needs, thereby retaining and acquiring new customers across the market.

This podcast is produced by Resonate Recordings. Click here to find out more.

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General Show Notes:

Have you ever driven a long way to a vacation, perhaps with kids in the backseat, and heard the whining query, "are we there yet?" Have you ever wanted to ask that question yourself? It turns out there are good reasons for that. It's called the Return Trip Effect, and we discuss it on this episode of The Intuitive Customer.

Key Takeaways

Assistant professor Zoey Chen from the University of Miami Business School published a paper with her colleague on the concept of the Return Trip Effect titled, "Are We There Yet?" Here are a few key takeaways from our discussion with her.

The Return Trip Effect explains how the trip to an anticipated destination often feels like it takes longer than the trip back. Research narrowed it down to two reasons why it felt this way.
When you go the first time, you see different landmarks for the first time that create time markers. The more time markers you create, the longer the trip feels. On the way back, you do not see them for the first time, so they might not be as notable, creating fewer time markers. The fewer the time markers, the faster the trip feels.
Anticipatory feelings can contribute to how long the trip feels. When you want to be somewhere already, it seems like every second you are not there is an eternity. The return trip home usually does not carry the same anticipatory feelings.
The Return Trip Effect demonstrates how outside influences can affect memories. In this case, feelings are making you remember how long it took to get somewhere. Whether or not it did take longer does not bear the same influence on memory.
We know that most memories are subject to the Peak-End Rule, first introduced by Professor Daniel Kahneman. The Peak-End Rule says that what we remember about an experience is the most intense emotion we felt and how we felt at the end. However, memory sometimes begins before the event, in anticipation of it, which can be the peak emotion.
The Sleeper Effect is a concept that your brain might overwrite a memory over time, replacing the experience with the anticipatory experience. This effect occurs because research shows that positive memories tend to outlast negative memories.
People also remember the unique experience more. The first time makes a significant impression, but the second of third experience of the same thing does not.
People also remember experiences with brands they feel are personally relevant, meaning brands that are part of their identity. For example, Apple is a brand I love and identify with, so I remember my experiences with them more.
The information introduced after an experience, especially close to the conclusion of it while your feelings are still percolating and memories are forming, can change your perception of the experience. Additional information can improve your perception of an experience and also your memory of it.

Recommended Actions

There are seven actions you can take today to help you use what you know about how memories form to design into your Customer Experience a way to enhance customers' memories about yours.

Decide what type of memory you want people to have about your experience. Different strategies enhance different types, so knowing what memory you want customers to have will shape your enhancement strategy.
Strive to make experiences unique. Are you finding ways to create a novel experience for your customers so they remember them more?
Consider the post-experience. Have you provided additional information that will improve the experience in customers' minds and thereby improving their memory of it?
Remember that endings are essential. Have you designed a deliberate way to end the experience that evokes emotions like happiness and pleasure from customers?
Balance building excitement with maintaining proper expectations. Be sure that you can deliver on any promises you make customers. Falling short sabotages your success in creating excellent memories of your experience.
Design an experience that reinforces positive memories. People come back to you not for the experience they have with you but for the experience that they remember they had with you.
Be deliberate. Don't leave the memory formation up to chance; be specific and detailed about how you deliver your Customer Experience to create the type of memory that brings customers back for more.

To discuss this further contact us at www.BeyondPhilosophy.com

About Beyond Philosophy:

Beyond Philosophy help organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). We then capitalize on this by improving your customer experience to meet these needs thereby retaining and acquiring new customers across the market.

This podcast is produced by Resonate Recordings. Click here find out more.

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The 5 Rules to

Managing How Your Customers Make Decisions

A lot of Behavioral Economics can feel intimidating. However, it doesn’t have to be. The Five Rules Podcast Series is our attempt at giving you an easy entry point into the complex and messy world of Behavioral Science.

What Are The Five Rules?

How people make decisions is a complicated and fascinating subject. Understanding the process and the role your Customer Experience design plays in it is essential to providing the platform to encourage customer-driven growth. To that end, here are the five rules to bear in mind when managing customer decision-making:

Embrace the fact that customers don't always make rational choices.
Strive to make customers buy from you intuitively.
Discover your customers' decision-making strategy.
Map your customers' habits.
Design your experience understanding the different ways customers make decisions.

What Should You Do With Them?

Embrace the fact that customers don't always make rational choices. Before you can proceed in this management process, you should first accept that your customers do not make rational decisions all the time. Rationality plays a role, of course, but it not always the driving force behind the yes or no customers give you. This concept applies to the business-to-consumer as well as the business-to-business market. Many organizations have based their experiences on the idea that rational decision-making is the driving force. If you do the same, you run the risk of ruling out ways you can create a competitive advantage. By opening up your solution set to include the emotional in addition to the rational, you not only create a winning formula for winning customers and prospects over, but you also create a competitive differentiation that is hard to beat by your competition.
Strive to make customers buy from you intuitively. Intuitive purchases are automatic and occur without the customers giving it a second thought. This situation is ideal for obvious reasons. However, it requires creating an easy experience that appeals to customers' need for simplicity while also meeting their needs.
Discover your customers' decision making strategy. There is a multitude of ways that customers use their rationality and irrationality in tandem to make buying decisions. Some methods are based on how you position the offer, others on the customers' tolerance for risk; others are based on how much effort they are willing to put into the purchase process. We recommend determining how your customers make decisions and use that pattern to help you design an experience that leads them to the choice you want. When you can do this successfully, you create a competitive differentiation few organizations are willing to undertake.
Map your customers' habits. Habitual behavior is one of the ways customers make intuitive decisions to go with your product or service. A trigger in your experience signals the habitual response to start. However, your competitors have triggers, too. When you can spot the triggers, either yours or the competition, you understand how to meet your customers or move your customers to a different behavior where you want them to be.
Design your experience understanding the different ways customers make decisions. When you apply the previous four rules in an exercise we call Behavioral Journey Mapping, an advanced take on traditional journey mapping, you can see how the different touchpoints in an experience influence customers' decisions. You can then determine what experience you wish to deliver so that you can take deliberate actions in the appropriate moments to encourage or change customer behavior. The Behavioral Sciences do not work "in general," but instead work "in specific."

To discuss this further contact us at www.BeyondPhilosophy.com

About Beyond Philosophy:

Beyond Philosophy help organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). We then capitalize on this by improving your customer experience to meet these needs thereby retaining and acquiring new customers across the market.

This podcast is produced by Resonate Recordings. Click here find out more.

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Have you ever picked a line at the store only to realize that you chose the longest, most slowly moving line? Have you ever waited forever to receive a shipment and then felt like they owed you an explanation for what could possibly take that long? Have you ever had such a great time laughing and talking in line with other people that you didn’t even notice how long you waited?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, then you are a typical customer with common perceptions of waiting in a Customer Experience. Years ago, David Maister wrote a paper called "The Psychology of Waiting Lines." Maister suggests that sometimes waiting in lines can seem longer than it is. Gretchen Rubin, the author of The Happiness Project, wrote an article on Psych Central that details eight reasons that waits seem longer.

This episode of The Intuitive Customer explores the psychology of waiting and what you can do to mitigate it for customers. We address Rubin’s eight reasons and share what you can do about them to promote customer-driven growth.

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Business as usual is anything but usual today. How things will change in the “new normal” and what you can do to manage it is almost anyone’s guess. However, if you can open your mind to trying new things other than what you normally would do, you might discover the magic trick that makes it all work well for managing your customer behavior.

In this episode of The Intuitive Customer, we continued our discussion on these ideas with Rory Sutherland, an author, speaker, and the Vice-Chairman of Ogilvy in the UK. Here is what we discussed.

Key Takeaways

Dare to be trivial. We like this rule of Sutherland’s 11

rules of succeeding with nonsensical ideas, because it supports the idea that little things

matter a lot to the Customer Experience and can have a significant effect on customer

behavior. Sutherland adds that this rule is tied into the idea of “magic,”

which is what he calls getting significant results from little changes. He also thinks

these magic details can cause butterfly effects in the best possible ways.

If there is a logical answer, we would have already found it. Perhaps most importantly, Sutherlands last rule tells us that there likely isn’t a reasonable explanation for why this type of thinking works (or doesn’t, as the case may be). He points out that many, many people have well-established systems of analysis to come to precisely that answer and haven’t. Moreover, it’s hubris to believe you can do it better, so don’t hang your hat on your ability to do so. However, if you leave behind the well-established system and forge a new one, you open up possibilities to get the customer behavior you want in exciting ways. For example, before airlines, cruise ships crossed the Atlantic to the states, and there was a lot of competition to be the fastest crossing. However, once airplanes could manage the crossing in an afternoon, the cruise line competition was pointless. Instead, cruise lines went to extremes to make the journey more enjoyable than an airplane and created a whole new industry for holidays and travel.

We will do more of what we did during the crisis and less of what we didn’t do during it. Sutherland predicts that the pandemic will change customer behavior in many ways he cannot foresee, but in one way that he can. We will all have adapted to a new way of doing things during this time that we will continue doing after it ends. For example, Zoom calls might replace some meetings and business trips. Grocery deliveries will enjoy more widespread use. Some people might continue working from home.

Recommended Actions

Open yourself to magic. If you can leave behind the usual ways of doing business and open your mind to new ways of doing things, you broaden your potential solutions considerably and often economically.
Avoid following the crowd. Many organizations, especially those that use management consultants, are more comfortable doing what has always been done because it is easier to measure, quantify, and report results. Now, the ability to do those things is lovely, however, they are also well-known and well used. If you can break away from the pack, what you give up in certainty you gain in potential competitive differentiation.
Read Sutherland’s book. To get into these ideas in greater detail, we would encourage you to read Sutherland’s book, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don’t Make Sense. Another option is to look up his TED talks or engage with him on Twitter (@rorysutherland).

To discuss this further contact us at www.BeyondPhilosophy.com

About Beyond Philosophy:

Beyond Philosophy help organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). We then capitalize on this by improving your customer experience to meet these needs thereby retaining and acquiring new customers across the market.

This podcast is produced by Resonate Recordings. Click here find out more.

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The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don’t Make Sense Part 1

If you go into business, you probably have checked out what the competition is doing first. In many cases, you might be tempted to do the same thing. After all, it is working, at least to some extent.

However, we think that taking a different tack, choosing a different road, or embracing that idea that doesn’t make sense, will be a way to create competitive differentiation that you would otherwise not have. Without new ideas, you offer the same old same old.

In this first episode of a two-part series of The Intuitive Customer, we host speaker and author Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman of Ogilvy UK, who is known for his TED talks and being a general advertising legend. His book, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don’t Make Sense, discusses how you can create products driven by ideas that are irresistible to customers.

Key Takeaways

Part of Sutherland's book is 11 rules of succeeding with nonsensical ideas, which a few of these were the subject of our discussion. Let’s take a closer look at the few we asked him about and what he had to say.

It doesn’t pay to be logical when everybody else is being logical. Sutherland says that when you worry about the same things as the competition and run the same metrics for success, you are essentially becoming the same business. Moreover, you can commoditize your market. However, when you strike out on your path with your concerns and ways of measuring success, you diverge from the competition’s path. In other words, you abandon the comparison to find your comparative advantage. Most companies choose to be objective with their focus on concrete issues and problems that they can analyze and report. The risk here is that you spend a lot of time focusing on optimizing things that do not drive significant behavioral changes for customers. If you choose a subjective focus, you open up the possibilities for how you can change your business for the better.

The opposite of a good idea can be another good idea. There is often more than one path to success in a market. Your competition might have a great idea, but not the only plan. If you were to do the exact opposite of what your competition does, you could have another great idea that speaks to a different segment of the market share. Moreover, you might uncover some hidden unmet needs that people might not have realized they wanted, and area that we often discuss regarding our Emotional Signature research.

The problem with logic is it kills off magic. When your focus is on the rational, you miss out on all the irrational magic that can occur in your customer experience. Moreover, you don’t recognize it when it presents itself to you; instead, you think it’s a trick or cheating. However, using solutions that work with customers’ irrational nature will help change their behavior in ways you didn’t know possible. Moreover, you have more solution options to choose from to do so.

Solving problems with only one rationality is like playing golf with only one club. Businesspeople tend to approach issues and opportunities with a similar mindset. Sutherland describes it as a financial engineering, Newtonian-reductionist mindset. However, when you define a problem, you often also determine the solution. If you think about the issue in economic terms, you often limit yourself to financial solutions. However, when you open up your definition of the problem to include a lot of different areas, you have may options for the direction of your solutions. For example, solving problems using persuasion, Sutherland says, will allow you to marry economics and behavioral science, which is at least two clubs from your solutions bag.

To discuss this further contact us at www.BeyondPhilosophy.com

About Beyond Philosophy:

Beyond Philosophy help organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). We then capitalize on this by improving your customer experience to meet these needs thereby retaining and acquiring new customers across the market.

This podcast is produced by Resonate Recordings. Click here find out more.

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Post Pandemic Silver Lining: Are You Grasping This Incredible opportunity?

As everything starts to open, what is the silver lining of the pandemic? This is a unique opportunity to change customers’ habits and there has never been a better time to help customers form new habits. As states have reopened and people are emerging from their homes into the bright light of the post-pandemic world, we have a unique opportunity to make some changes in customer behavior
that can lead to customer-driven growth.

In this episode of The Intuitive Customer, we are going to talk about how habits form and why. We will also discuss why this is an unprecedented chance to get your customers to change habits that will benefit your bottom line.

Key Takeaways:

Here are a few key takeaways from this episode:

Habits are a cycle of Cue, Routine Reward. The cue is the stimulus; the routine is the reaction to the cue, and the reward is the benefit of the action. Consistent participation in the cycle results in a habit, for good or ill.
The Intuitive System governs the realm of habits. You might recall that we all have two systems of thinking: the fast and emotional Intuitive System, and the slow and logical Rational System. As habits are automatic reactions to the cycle, they are picked up by the Intuitive System.
Habits can be challenging to overcome once initiated. The automatic nature of the cycle makes habits challenging to manage. This fact is troublesome to managers of Customer Experiences, mainly when the habitual behavior is for the competition.
A common misconception about habits is that they cannot be overruled. While it is true that habits can be challenging to overcome once initiated, they are not an overwhelming desire that cannot be changed. If you decide you want to do something different, you can. It will just take a conscious effort to change the behavior when the cue initiates.
The reason now is a great time to change behavior is because business-as-usual is already disrupted. COVID-19 stay at home orders have already disrupted everything for customers, including their usual habitual cues.

Recommended Actions:

Since the world is not going back to the way it was, everything is going to be different. As a result, there are a few key takeaways we have for how to change customers’ habits, which include:

Figure out the cues that triggered the customers’ routines. What happened to the customer right before they exhibited habitual behavior?
Determine what habit you would prefer to see at that moment. What would you change about the habitual behavior you observe currently?
Research whether there are hidden, unmet needs. What is something that customers do not get right now that would create a lot of value for them? (For this one, we recommend doing a deeper dive into what customers really want, not what they say they want. Our Emotional Signature® can help.)
Choose a strategy to implement a change in the cue that will encourage the new desired habit. What can we do in our experience that addresses these unmet needs that will inspire a new pattern to form?
Do not wait until the new normal is established. Is there something we can do today to set up the new customer behavior we want?

To discuss this further contact us at www.BeyondPhilosophy.com

About Beyond Philosophy:
Beyond Philosophy help organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). We then capitalize on this by improving your customer experience to meet these needs thereby retaining and acquiring new customers across the market.
This podcast is produced by Resonate Recordings. Click here find out more.

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Practical Advice on How to Influence People: 6 Key Principles

Many years ago, Robert Cialdini introduced the principles of influence. Today they are crucial skills for salespeople worldwide. They are also foundational to your Customer Experience. If you enrich your experience with these principles, which include things like learning to genuinely like other people and encouraging a favorable environment for reciprocity by your sincere generosity, you can benefit your bottom line.

In this episode of The Intuitive Customer podcast, we speak to our guest Brian Ahearn, CMCT®, Chief Influence Officer at Influence People about Cialdini’s Six Principles of Influence. We discuss how you can use them to create the experience you want that will deliver the customer-driven growth you need.

Key Takeaways

There are six fundamental principles of influence, according to Cialdini. These are what Ahearn uses in his work to help people strengthen relationships, overcome uncertainty, and motivate other people to action. They include:

The Principle of Liking. Many people make the mistake of thinking this principle is about getting other people to like you, but it isn’t. What Cialdini is saying is that if you genuinely like other people and communicate this fact to others, it will set the stage for a relationship that can move forward.
The Principle of Reciprocity. When people do something for us, we often feel like we should return the favor. However, these feelings of reciprocity only occur when we feel like the other person is sincerely helping us, not just trying to get something out of us. Ahearn says that this principle is about helping other people get what they want, not getting what you want in return. Ahearn explains when you demonstrate sincere generosity these things you want will come back to you naturally as a result.
The Principle of Authority. When we feel like someone is an expert in something, we appreciate their advice more. It’s why we hire a CPA to file our taxes and go to the doctor when we have symptoms. We want sound guidance, and it saves us a lot of time to get it from an expert. Making yourself an authority in a relevant area to people makes you a credible resource with advice others want to hear.
The Principle of Social Proof. There is an evolutionary imperative in the idea of safety in numbers. Therefore, showing people how other people just like them have taken action and enjoyed a significant benefit as a result, is a compelling motivator for all of us humans.
The Principle of Consistency. We all want to believe that we are as good as our word. When we agree to something, most of us intend to deliver and feel great shame when we don’t. So, gaining agreement to move forward in some way is an excellent way to persuade people to change their behavior. They want to live up to your expectations—and their own.
The Principle of Scarcity. In the time of our COVID-19 pandemic, we all have seen plenty of customer behavior motivated by feelings of Scarcity. We all want to have what we need when we need it. Creating feelings that a person needs to act to have what they need before it’s gone is a strong motivator for action. However, Ahearn cautions that it is essential to keep people working together instead of in competition. If you don’t believe him, consider the empty shelves of toilet rolls in stores as of late.

Recommended Actions

We often talk about the psychological principles that are behind the customer behavior inspired by Cialdini’s 6 Principles of Influence. Your customer-facing teams must recognize this behavior and its motivations. We recommend training your employees in the soft-skills of emotional intelligence and the concepts of Behavioral Economics, in a program like our Memory Maker Training, so that they can manage it to a better place for your organization.

For his part, Ahearn advises us to stop telling people what to do and start asking. This minor adjustment in your approach can make a major difference in your ability to persuade other people to do what you want. Moreover, he tells you to have a fallback position if the person cannot agree with your original request. That way, you have a better chance of still moving forward with your desired action, even if you don’t get agreement for what you originally asked.

For my part, I believe talking to people on a human level, with empathy and an eye toward helping others, we can meet everybody’s needs—and that includes your need for customer-driven growth.

To discuss this further contact us at www.BeyondPhilosophy.com

About Beyond Philosophy:

Beyond Philosophy help organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). We then capitalize on this by improving your customer experience to meet these needs thereby retaining and acquiring new customers across the market.

This podcast is produced by Resonate Recordings. Click here find out more.

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I hate my cable providers. That’s right, providers is plural. I have two different providers, one in the UK and one in Florida, and they both provide poor experiences. In many ways, I see cable companies as the perfect example of what not to do with your Customer Experience.

This Episode of The Intuitive Customer takes a look at all the ways cable companies provide experiences that do not promote customer-driven growth. Moreover, we share the ways that these experiences promote customer behavior that demonstrate principles studied in Behavioral Economics. Perhaps most importantly, we explore how you can avoid making the same mistakes in your organization.

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Understanding Human Behavior During the Pandemic, and What to Do About it

Let us begin by wishing you all our best during these unprecedented times. We hope that you and your family are all safe and sound, and novel coronavirus-free. While no one knows what to expect, we are all in this together.

The pandemic has shown how uncertainty can affect human behavior. This episode of the Intuitive Customer explains why, how it makes us feel, and what we can do about it for ourselves and our customers once we make it to the “other side” of the COVID-19 crisis.

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There is a lovely mirror leaning against the wall in my garage in England. My wife thinks we should sell it. I think we should give it away, to which my wife tut-tuts. She argues it is a beautiful mirror and believes it will fetch a handsome sum on the Internet. I disagree. So, the mirror sits there, ignored for the time being, and not selling, and I hold the Endowment Effect fully responsible.

The Endowment Effect explains how we value our possessions more highly than others do because they are ours. It is one of the reasons some prices for products and services end up too high. It is also the subject of this episode of the Intuitive Customer.

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I don't know if it's age talking here, but it probably is. Life becomes a lot clearer as you go on. I am at the point where I feel comfortable telling you what I think. In this episode of The Intuitive Customer, I am going to tell you about seven mistakes organizations make while trying to gain growth in revenue or market share.

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Loss Aversion teaches us that people like to gain things, but that they like hanging on to what they have even more and feel losses much more profoundly than gains. So, you would think that effective policy to reduce disposable bag usage by charging a surcharge for a grocery bag would tap into these feelings.

Not so fast. New research reveals that Loss Aversion is not the reason for the grocery bag surcharge’s success.

In this episode of The Intuitive Customer, our guest host Alicea “Allie” Lieberman, a Ph.D. candidate from the University of California, San Diego, shares her findings with us regarding why incentives work. The Harvard Business Review also published an article about her results, “Why We’re Incentivized by Discounts and Surcharges” in February of this year. She and her research partner Kristen Duke also published their study in a peer-reviewed journal that shows how Social Norms help drive the effectiveness of incentives to change customer behavior.

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What You Should Learn from Apple’s Outstanding Experience

I am a huge fan of Apple products. If there were already a waiting list for the next iPhone, I would be on it. For me, buying Apple products is emotional, intuitive, and automatic—all the things a brands needs to foster customer-driven growth.

Apple is excellent at incorporating principles of behavioral economics and psychology that are hugely influential on customer behavior in all the right ways. This episode of The Intuitive Customer explores how Apple does it and what you should do, too.

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A global pandemic wasn’t in your plans this quarter. However, we see an opportunity to enhance your relationships with customers in this global crisis.

In this episode of The Intuitive Customer, we share ten strategies for managing the uncertainty surrounding COVID-19. Our practical tips help you manage the stress and anxiety at your front lines to the best possible outcome. Our approach will bring you closer to your customers at a time when world leaders are calling for social distancing as the norm.

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Shark attacks have overblown importance compared to how often they occur. But since TV and movies have made so much of these rare, and rarely fatal events, we are sure we will be the next victim. These unlikely worries are the result of a psychological phenomenon called the Availability Heuristic.

This episode of the Intuitive Customer explores the Availability Heuristic and how it can help your brand promote customer-driven growth. Turns out, being available is a more significant influence than you think.

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You all want growth, don’t know what to prioritize to get it, and aren’t nearly worried enough about the disruption AI will have on your industry. At least, that’s what our research late last year told us.

This episode of The Intuitive Customer reveals the trends we identified in our research late last year. While some of it was what we expected to hear, a few trends left us gobsmacked. Hear what we learned. We also share advice for understanding customer behavior to drive customer-driven growth from here.

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We all misjudge other people’s motivations at times. The academic term for it is a Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE). An FAE describes how we misinterpret our limitations and the motivations of others and how we mistakenly attribute successes and failures for ourselves and others.

This episode of The Intuitive Customer explores FAEs’ effects on customer-driven growth. Understanding customer behavior avoids FAEs so you can manage the Customer Experience to a profitable place.

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Research in Harvard Business Review last year suggested that some companies with poor customer service are terrible on purpose to wear out disgruntled customers so they don’t have to fix customer problems. Moreover, the HBR authors suggest that this method makes these organizations more profitable.

This episode of The Intuitive Customer explores this idea in more detail. We discuss businesses that might benefit from this strategy, and which ones would not. Find out which group you belong to and why.

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Where AI Meets CX: The Remarkable Future for Humanizing Brands

Artificial Intelligence (AI) will transform the customer experience in many ways in the coming years. One area that we see interesting applications of AI Technology is the brand personification and social media management. This new way of creating meaningful interactions with your customers will build emotional engagement with your company, even though the entity doing it is not a human being.

Brand personification is a fundamental principle of the concept of Conversational Commerce first introduced in 2016 by Chris Messina, tech expert, and inventor of the hashtag. Conversational Commerce is a way to describe how customers interact with brands on social media and other channels to move them through the sales cycle. These interactions will be handled more and more by AI, at least in the beginning stages. Brand personification represents how the values of your brand become a persona that interacts with customers in this way.

When you consider brand personification, you can see it follows the “cult of the entrepreneur” prevalent over the past 20 years. Brands like Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Tesla all have a persona, and it seems to resemble the founders that introduced them to us. These organizations are a manifestation of the entrepreneurs themselves, from how they do business to the culture that supports their work.

Messina says that you don’t have to have a super-famous founder to have a brand persona. Any organization can adopt one. By using a set of principles your team decides best represents the values you want to deliver in your Customer Experience, you can “humanize” your brand to be a persona that says and does things that communicate these values. Many of these communications will take place on social media platforms. In other words, you use your values to envision what that would look like in a real human. Then, you communicate as if that human were your brand in your social media presence.

As this technology progresses, chatbots will do the heavy lifting in these efforts. Moreover, they will populate with responses from AI-powered technology. AI will help technology mimic authentic human behavior. However, organizations will still need to determine what they want these personas to be.

In this episode of The Intuitive Customer, we discuss with Messina how an organization should undertake humanizing its brand for customers in the second of a two-part interview. Building on the concept of Conversational Commerce addressed in Part 1, we take a deeper dive into the practicalities of developing an AI-powered anthropomorphized brand that will interact on social media on your behalf to build a relationship and how that might affect customer behavior and, perhaps most importantly 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.

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Social media has changed many things about our lives. Not only can we have a blow by blow account of what our friends and family are up to, but we can also see what they had for dinner. We can even see what friends of our friends had for dinner.

One of the other ways social media changed our lives is in how we interact with brands. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter gave us direct access to brands in a way we hadn’t had before. However, it also gave them direct access to us.

Conversational Commerce was conceived in 2016 by the inventor of the hashtag, Chris Messina. It describes how we interact with brands over several different channels in various ways, including social media. Messina, who has a career in tech and tech platforms, recently co-founded and launched a conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) company called Molly. Molly will skim your social media presence to find answers to your customer questions on your behalf.

However, Messina sees applications like Molly as just the beginning of AI handling customer interactions on the social media platforms. He also sees a future where brands interact with people as if the brand was a person. Humanizing brands is the future of social media. Moreover, it will be handled by AI, not humans.

But how should organizations create this anthropomorphized brand for themselves? What should they use to create it and how should it respond to queries? After they establish a humanized brand that can respond, how should it affect the customer journey and contribute to the relationship. These are all questions that Messina and other experts ask about the future of brand interaction.

This is the first of a two-part interview with Messina about his concept of Conversational Commerce and how it will affect the future of Customer Experiences on social media and the relationships that develop there. We also discuss the essential considerations that every brand should make before launching their personalized interactions that aim to deepen the customer relationship and facilitate 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.

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This is The New Imperative for 2020

Our global Customer Experience consultancy engaged research at the end of 2019 to determine our direction for the next decade. We learned that, first and foremost, organizations want to gain growth. So, we have a new focus for 2020, helping organizations achieve the growth they want by assisting them in providing the Customer Experience they need to do so.

Growth is challenging today. Competition is intense due to many factors. One critical reason is that the time from innovation to imitation is down to weeks in many cases. Today’s businesses must face the challenges of new product and service launches in a commoditized market, fueled at least in part to massive growth in online commerce.

However, gaining growth is not impossible, in fact, far from it. Growth can come from many different strategies. Chief amongst the approach is by providing a Customer Experience that meets your customers’ needs, even the ones they are not entirely aware they have. Meeting these unmet needs is the foundation of what we call customer-driven growth, which is growth powered by exemplary Customer Experiences.

Since 2002, Beyond Philosophy has focused on growth driven by an improved Customer Experience. Our work with Maersk Line, the largest shipping container company in the world, improved Maersk’s Net Promoter Score® (NPS)by 40 points in 30 months, a statistic I often share. However, the next part is essential to realize; they also increased their shipping volumes by 10 percent. Moreover, our work with RICOH Canada, the printer company, improved their NPS by 34 points in 30 months and also increased printer sales by 10 percent—and this was in a declining market.

If organizations want growth, we are going to give it to them. So, how do we get growth? Where do we get new customers? This episode of the Intuitive Customer explores the types of growth that organizations can focus on, how to approach gaining it in today’s marketplace, and the four essential steps to take to be successful in this effort. Moreover, we show how improving Customer Experience leads to this growth and why.

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.

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Discover This Powerful Marketing Technique to Gain Growth

How you present information has a significant effect on how your customers perceive the message. It’s no secret; it’s why there are marketing departments. However, what is fascinating is that when we present information, we can take advantage of things that shouldn’t matter when you think about them rationally, but that do matter quite a bit when it comes to customer-driven growth.

For example, if I were to tell you Forrester, a global research company, predicted that 1 in 4 Customer Experience professionals would lose their jobs this year, does that sound like good news? It doesn’t seem to be to me—and probably not to you if you happen to have a job title with Customer Experience in the title.

Now, let’s pretend that I told you Forrester predicted that 3 out of 4 Customer Experience professionals would keep their jobs this year. Does that sound as dire as the first prediction? In my opinion, it doesn’t. I am not sure I would even mention it if it were positioned that way.

Both predictions tell you the same thing and have the same facts supporting them. However, one sounds like doom and gloom, and one does not. How we perceive the news about the future of Customer Experience employment is affected quite a bit by how we heard the prediction.

This phenomenon has a psychological term that describes it called Framing Effects. The scientific community defines Framing Effects as giving people information that does not change, but varying something about how you present it to position the data in a specific way.

Framing art is a useful way to understand how Framing Effects work for information. If you think about mounting a painting or photo, different frames change how you perceive the artwork. A different color frame might bring out a color in the picture, or a different material might present the art as more or less valuable than it is in reality. The way you present the art in the frame will affect how it affects the viewer.

This episode of The Intuitive Customer discusses how Framing Effects change how people perceive the same facts or situations and why. We also discuss how you can use the way Framing Effects change communication to foster customer-driven growth or improve the Customer Experience for your organization.