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.

• 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. Michel 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:

1. Define: What are you trying to accomplish?
2. Measure: How will you know if what you do is working?
3. Analyze: What changes are possible that might improve experiences?
4. Improve: How can you roll these changes out on a larger basis?
5. 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. Michel 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  Michel 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  Michel 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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. 

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.

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:

1. Define the right method.
2. Get under the skin of the customer.
3. Cast your net wide.
4. Respect the respondents.
5. 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.

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.

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.

Your Customers Want Self-Service, and Here’s What You Need to Know about Why

You bend over backwards to provide helpful customer service. You look for the best team members, with the right attitude and aptitude to take care of your customers in every way. 

What it means to “take care” of customers is changing. So, while a focus on customer service is a sound and proven strategy, it could be what your customers want most is for your employees to leave them alone. Customers would rather take care of themselves with self-service.

However, self-service isn’t the only service that customers want. There are times when self-service doesn’t work, and only having that option will create a bad experience. 

In this episode, we discuss why people want self-service and what any company should consider when providing customers that option. We also talk about when self-service doesn’t work and why—and those reasons might surprise you. 

Key Ideas to Improve Your Customer Experience

Two stats caught our attention from consumer research company Attest’s US Food and Beverage Report from July 2021.  The first was 72 percent of Gen-Z shoppers would rather use self-checkout at the grocery store, and the second was that 68 percent of all shoppers would rather try clothes and makeup online with the help of a virtual tool. Attest’s research indicates that younger people like self-service for everyday interactions. It also suggests that shoppers of any age are pretty happy with online shopping for things that were traditionally in-person purchases. 

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

• 04:33  We start off the conversation by discussing if this is about wanting more or less human interaction or a generational thing.
• 07:56  Ryan shares the most important question to ask regarding making the move to a self-service channel (Hint: it’s about customers).
• 12:24  Colin talks about how he uses self-service in his Freedom Boat Club membership and why he prefers booking flights online over talking to a company representative (Hint: It’s because he’s picky).   
• 17:18  Ryan explains how customers wanting to be in control is a significant driver in a self-service preference, and why not everybody feels that way.
• 18:27  Ryan explains some of the psychology that is underneath these preferences and needs, as well as suggesting a summer reading assignment for our listeners that want to know more.
• 22:33  We get into the advice we have for firms regarding self-service for their experiences as well as what to avoid in those situations.    

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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:

1. Define your metrics and what you're going to measure. 
2. Establish comparison conditions.
3. Randomize or get as close to randomization as you possibly can. 
4. Define the theory…or not.
5. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.