Explore every episode of the podcast The Intuitive Customer - Helping You Improve Your Customer Experience To Gain Growth
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| Good Friction, Bad Friction: Why a Little Effort Makes Customers Care | 22 Nov 2025 | 00:25:03 | |
Episode Overview When everything is one-click easy, do we lose something meaningful? Guest host Dr. Morgan Ward joins Dr. Ryan Hamilton to explore how the right amount of friction in the consumption experience can boost connection, meaning, and long-term use of the product—while the wrong kind just gets in the way. Quote of the Episode "Consumption, in some ways, has just gotten too easy." — Dr. Morgan Ward 🔑 Key Takeaways
📚 Resources Mentioned / Referenced · Research example on difficult vs. easy coupons and subsequent purchase · The classic Better Crocker Effect based on the pancake-mix story (adding an egg restored pride and perceived contribution) · Discovery mechanics (blind-box/surprise products) and guided choice in retail · When should there be friction in the consumption experience and when should there not be? About the Hosts Ryan Hamilton is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of 'The Intuitive Customer' book. An award-winning teacher and researcher in consumer psychology, he has been named one of Poets & Quants' "World's Best 40 B-School Profs Under 40." His research focuses on how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence shopper decision-making, and his findings have been published in top academic journals and covered by major media outlets like The New York Times and CNN. His work highlights how psychology can help firms better understand and serve their customers. Ryan has a new book called "The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things" Harvard Business Press 2025 Follow Ryan on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryan-hamilton-49b3321/) Morgan Ward is an adjunct marketing professor, weekly expert guest on The Take—11Alive's in-depth news program that explores timely stories through expert insight—With over 20 years of experience advising clients ranging from start-ups to Fortune 500s and publishing in top academic journals, she's passionate about decoding the symbolic and cultural forces that shape consumer behavior. Her work focuses on status, identity, and decision-making across sectors like luxury, retail, and tech. Beyond consulting, Morgan serves as an expert witness in branding and advertising litigation, bringing academic rigor to questions of perception, distinctiveness, and influence. Follow Morgan on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/morgankward-phd/)
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| I Signed a 'Gag Order'. Here's What It Taught Me About Organizations | 08 Nov 2025 | 00:27:52 | |
In this episode, Colin Shaw shares a recent personal experience with a major brand that imposed a 'gag order' (NDA) after a poor service experience — and how this reflects a deeper organizational issue: silos. Together with Professor Ryan Hamilton, Colin explores why siloed thinking leads to incoherent customer experiences, how internal motivations can conflict with CX goals, and what leaders must do to ensure learning, trust, and advocacy remain priorities. A must-listen for CX professionals and senior leaders alike. Best Quote: "Who decides? That is the question every leadership team should ask — and answer wisely." Key Takeaways:
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About the Hosts: Colin Shaw is a LinkedIn 'Top Voice' with a massive 284,000 followers and 87,000 subscribers to his 'Why Customers Buy' newsletter. Shaw is named one of the world's 'Top 150 Business Influencers' by LinkedIn. His company, Beyond Philosophy LLC, has been selected four times by the Financial Times as a top management consultancy. Shaw is co-host of the top 1.5% podcast 'The Intuitive Customer'—with over 600,000 downloads—and author of eight best-sellers on customer experience, Shaw is a sought-after keynote speaker. Follow Colin on LinkedIn. Ryan Hamilton is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of 'The Intuitive Customer' book. An award-winning teacher and researcher in consumer psychology, he has been named one of Poets & Quants' "World's Best 40 B-School Profs Under 40." His research focuses on how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence shopper decision-making, and his findings have been published in top academic journals and covered by major media outlets like The New York Times and CNN. His work highlights how psychology can help firms better understand and serve their customers. Ryan has a new book called "The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things" Harvard Business Press 2025 Subscribe & Follow | |||
| AI vs. Human: Are You Making The Right Choice or a BIG Mistake! | 05 Jul 2025 | 00:30:27 | |
AI is taking over—well, at least some parts of customer service. But how do you know when to automate and when to stick with the good old-fashioned human touch? In this episode, we dive into one of the most crucial decisions organizations are making today: When should you use AI, and when do customers actually need a human? Spoiler alert: If you let AI handle everything, you might save money—but you could also drive your customers straight to your competitors. Best Quote from the Episode:
Key Takeaways:
If you're thinking about rolling out AI across your customer experience, stop and listen to this episode first. We break down the risks, the rewards, and how to make sure you don't end up with a frustrated customer base ready to rage-tweet about you. Resources Mentioned Wall Street Journal Article: Turns Out AI Is More Empathetic Than Allstate's Insurance Reps About the Hosts: Colin Shaw is a LinkedIn 'Top Voice' with a massive 284,000 followers and 86,000 subscribers to his 'Why Customers Buy' newsletter. Shaw is named one of the world's 'Top 150 Business Influencers' by LinkedIn. His company, Beyond Philosophy LLC, has been selected four times by the Financial Times as a top management consultancy. Shaw is co-host of the top 1.5% podcast 'The Intuitive Customer'—with over 600,000 downloads—and author of eight best-sellers on customer experience, Shaw is a sought-after keynote speaker. Follow Colin on LinkedIn. Ryan Hamilton is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of 'The Intuitive Customer' book. An award-winning teacher and researcher in consumer psychology, he has been named one of Poets & Quants' "World's Best 40 B-School Profs Under 40." His research focuses on how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence shopper decision-making, and his findings have been published in top academic journals and covered by major media outlets like The New York Times and CNN. His work highlights how psychology can help firms better understand and serve their customers. Ryan has a new book launch in June 2025 called "The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things" Harvard Business Press Follow Ryan on LinkedIn. Subscribe & Follow
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| Learn how the time Customers wait reveals how internally focused you are | 19 Aug 2023 | 00:29:40 | |
Waiting around for a customer experience is rarely a good thing. When customers are waiting for you, that's usually a sign that not waiting would have been difficult or inconvenient (read: expensive) for your company. However, not valuing customers' time is probably the most expensive mistake you can make. Then, of course, there are the times when the waiting is part of the experience. For example, the Peter Pan ride at Disneyland has several rooms you pass through before you get to the ride that set the mood and build anticipation of the adventure to come. When you skip it, you get to the ride faster, but you miss out on the building of the anticipation. Part of what makes the Peter Pan wait more beneficial than your average waiting around situation for an experience is that it make the waiting more enjoyable. Many would also argue that the ride—and the park itself—provide value to customers who are waiting. So, waiting isn't always bad; like many things we discuss on the podcast, it depends. However, it does always reveal how internally focused you are and whether you place importance on the value of customers' time. In this episode, we explore what it means about your focus when customers wait and how you can manage or enhance the waiting experience to engage and enhance customers' time spent with you. Here are some other key moments in the discussion:
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| Critical Thinking: Where are you on this new customer time paradigm? | 12 Aug 2023 | 00:31:35 | |
I get mad when people waste my time. It's probably why I have such a beef with cable companies and organizations' call centers that have long hold times. Wasting someone's time is also a waste of an opportunity to deliver an excellent customer experience. The source of my ire is likely tied to time being our most precious resource by some estimations. Therefore, when you waste it, you are careless with something with a finite supply. Some of us have more than others available—or left as the case may be. So, when an organization wastes customers' time, it can be one of the worst things they could do to increase customer loyalty and customer-driven growth. Would you want to be anxious to return to an experience that wasted yours? Not bloody likely, I say. By contrast, saving time is among the most essential things you could do for a customer. People will pay a premium for it, too. Regarding time and customers, one of the most essential things you can do is to make it worthwhile. In other words, any time customers give you should return to them as a memory of time well spent. The ideas expressed thus far here are not ours. Time progression is a critical area that key opinion leaders in the experience economy are exploring these days. In this episode, we host Strategic Horizons' Joe Pine, author of The Experience Economy and co-founder of the concept of Time Progression, to discuss what that means and how it can influence how customers respond to your experience. Here are some other critical moments in the discussion:
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| How perception plays a critical role in building a great Customer Experience | 05 Aug 2023 | 00:31:00 | |
We have all been there. We think we did something great, and we look forward to getting the feedback that tells us so. Unfortunately, when we do get the feedback, we discover that we weren't quite so great as we thought we were. It's a matter of perception and understanding this concept can help avoid this mismatch in the future. One of our listeners, Damien, found himself in this pickle recently. His organization has delivery stats that paint a glorious picture of achievement. However, the customer surveys do not paint delivery with that brush at all. So, Damien asks, why the discrepancy? The problem could be a challenge with perception. The internal organization has one perception of performance, the customers have another. If perception is reality, which one matters? (Hint: say the customers. Okay, not a hint so much as a gimme, but we do our best here.) From a psychological perspective, perception isn't the correct term. In fact, psychologists would only have perception as one part of what is going on here. To summarize, psychologists would submit that perception applies only to receiving the information through our senses. How we interpret and compare the perceived experiences to our expectations is the reason for the discrepancy. In this episode, we take a deeper dive on what is happening here to Damien's organization, and what they—and you— can do about it. Here are some other key moments in the discussion:
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| Want to build a successful career? Follow these key insights | 29 Jul 2023 | 00:30:35 | |
18 months. That was the timeline Colin gave himself to move from a sales job to a general manager post. It was a long time ago now, the kind of thing one remembers when they look back over a decades-long career. However, it also worked. Colin did make that transition, moving throughout departments and learning new skills, and always with the goal of moving to general manager. Ryan, being from academia, teaches an introductory marketing course to his MBA students. It's a class they take first semester when their enthusiasm and exuberance are high. This abundance of energy also drives them to his office during office hours, hoping for some career advice. As an academic, Ryan has some for them, but recognizes that there is always room for more. In this episode, we explore the key insights we have gained over the spans of our careers and share them with you. From taking advice from Colin's father to learning how to navigate the political quagmires that many organizations foster, we give you some areas to focus on to get where you want to go. Here are some other key moments in the discussion:
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| What really is an authentic experience and does it really drive growth? | 22 Jul 2023 | 00:34:43 | |
At first glance, authenticity appears straightforward. To be authentic, one simply needs to be genuine in their thoughts and actions. However, as is often the case with our discussions in the podcast, the subject becomes complex under scrutiny. Our motivation to discuss authenticity stems from a podcast listener's request. They find themselves grappling with authenticity in their experience and want to know how to improve and leverage it to generate growth with their customers. Consider the Sherlock Holmes Museum in London. It has meticulously recreated Holmes's apartment. As part of the London School's team, Professor Kent Grayson, MA, PhD, a scholar fascinated by authenticity, would engage museum visitors by posing a seemingly absurd question: Is the apartment portrayed in the museum authentic? However, it's a silly question. It cannot be authentic since Sherlock Holmes himself lacks authenticity. Nevertheless, individuals earnestly responded to Professor Grayson's query. Some offered genuine critiques, pointing out anachronistic furniture pieces and other details. It was ironic that the attendees thought that the fictional place inhabited by an imaginary detective was inauthentic because the end table was from the wrong period…but there it is. In this podcast, we discuss authenticity and how it matters in Customer Experiences. What we discover is elementary, our dear Watsons. Here are some other key moments in the discussion:
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| How do we differentiate our experience in an ever competitive world? | 15 Jul 2023 | 00:31:38 | |
Have you ever noticed how many vitamin options there are at a drug store? If not, you should know there are hundreds. It is bloody overwhelming. All these vitamins got us thinking about differentiation. If your product isn't that different from another, like a B-12 vitamin, how do you differentiate yourself from the competition? Vitamin companies are not alone here. One of our listeners wrote in with a business pickle about differentiation on how to have it in an ever-competitive market. The answer lies in the experience. But how? What does differentiation even mean? And what does B-12 do for you anyway? (It does lots of stuff, by the way; you should probably take it if you don't get enough.) When you are too close to something, you might have a hard time seeing what your differentiation could be. Your usually helpful depth of offering knowledge can be a hinderance. The nuances of competitive improvement might be authentic but too deep in the minutiae to distinguish you. In other words, your competitive advantage might be real, but really boring to your customers. So, instead of coming up with something that is a competitive differentiator, you come up with this minor detail, emphasizing something the customer doesn't care about or doesn't recognize they should. Therefore, it takes an outside perspective sometimes to see what is possible regarding differentiation. And sometimes, this differentiation from the outside is disruptive and turns everything in your industry on its ear. In this episode, we explore the ways our listener and you can differentiate yourself from the competition. As a bonus, we package it into five rules that you can use to drive your actions. Here are some other key moments in the discussion:
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| How to avoid this preventable mistake too many are making with AI | 08 Jul 2023 | 00:34:14 | |
Many organizations are making a common mistake when it comes to AI. They fail to capitalize on the potential to enhance Customer Experiences through this powerful technology by building it incorrectly. By changing their strategic approach, they could gain a significant competitive advantage. Take, for instance, a telecom company that developed an AI system to detect customer churn. While it successfully identified customers likely to churn, it fell short in explaining why they were leaving. Here's the issue: AI models excel at predicting customer behavior but lack the ability to establish meaningful connections and provide context for the data. It's akin to Deep Thought from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy revealing that the answer to life, the universe, and everything is 42. It may be a correct answer, but we're left without understanding the underlying context. The mistake lies in how organizations set up their AI systems. The outcome resembles the ambiguous answer of 42. What we truly need is the context that explains the reasons behind it. In this episode, we explore the mistake many organizations are making with AI and what might happen if the Flat Earthers get a hold of it. Chances are their answer will be about as useful as 42. Here are some other key moments in the discussion:
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| Here's why the small things in your experience are the most significant | 01 Jul 2023 | 00:32:24 | |
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| The astounding reason customers buy that they keep a secret | 24 Jun 2023 | 00:32:46 | |
You wouldn't think to look at it that The Magic Castle hotel in Los Angeles has been ranked in the top ten hotels on TripAdvisor, but it has. A converted apartment building has turned its unassuming appearance into an excellent experience for its guests, and how they do it isn't that big of a thing, quite the opposite. It's the little things make a big difference in their customer satisfaction. In this case, it's things like a popsicle hotline that makes this small hotel a surprisingly successful one. People who use the hotline—aka a red phone with a sign over it that reads, "Popsicle Hotline"—poolside receive a popsicle from the staff. Now, people remember this small thing when they talk about their experience. However, there are countless little things that happen in an experience that they don't remember. These little things often create value to customers. However, since they don't always remember them later when asked, they keep them a secret. In other words, they can't tell you because they didn't remember that moment specifically. In this episode, we explore the little things in an experience that create value for customers and what you can do to leverage these types of moments in yours. Here are some other key moments in the discussion:
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| The power of saying 'no'! Use this new framework to help you control you life | 17 Jun 2023 | 00:37:55 | |
You probably don't say no to people enough, especially if it's to your boss. Like most of us, you are conditioned to cooperate with others, which means we usually say yes to most requests to avoid conflict. However, learning to say no in the right way, might also avoid conflict while simultaneously giving you back control over your life. We host author Vanessa Patrick, Associate Dean for Research, Professor of Marketing, and researcher in the Consumer Behavior Marketing field, to talk about this right way to say no based on her book, "The Power of Saying No: The New Science of How to Say No to take Charge of Your Life." Patrick addresses this critical skill in her book, as well as its relationship to saying no to ourselves through self-regulation or self-control. Patrick's past research often depicts self-control as an upbeat version of self-discipline. Self-control serves as a reflection of your values, rather than self-imposed constraints. Patrick believes defining and defending these boundaries to others enables you to make decisions that create more fun and happiness in your life, particularly regarding the things you already said yes to. In this episode, we explore the idea of personal policies, or the rules we set that should guide our decisions. Calling it compassionate self-control, Patrick says this approach facilitates having your needs driving your decisions. It also means that instead of looking out for cues from other about how to respond to these requests, we look within ourselves. Here are some other key moments in the discussion:
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| The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things | 21 Jun 2025 | 00:34:03 | |
How do you grow your revenues without upsetting your existing customers? In this episode, Colin Shaw and Professor Ryan Hamilton dive into the new book he has written with Anne Wilson, Senior Lecturer at Wharton. Published by Harvard Business Review Press, the book is called: The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things Available here: https://bit.ly/3ZCN2wD Professor Ryan Hamilton reveal how brand growth often gets derailed not by bad strategy, but by insufficient attention to how your customer segments relate to each other. You may think your audiences are living on separate islands, but spoiler alert: they're not. They're watching each other, seeing what the other does, and sometimes they don't like it and will move elsewhere. From Crocs to Prius to the Bud Light fiasco (and yes, even neo-Nazis in New Balance sneakers), this episode pulls no punches. It's a fast-paced, funny, and brutally honest look at why many brands fail to grow—and how you can avoid becoming the following cautionary tale. 💥 Best Quote from the Episode:"If your growth strategy relies on one customer segment not hearing what you're saying to another, it's already a bad strategy." — Prof. Ryan Hamilton 🧠 What You'll Learn:
Ryan's new book with Annie Wilson is out now! Published by Harvard Business Review Press, The Growth Dilemma explores how inter-segment conflict affects brand growth and what to do about it. It's innovative, practical, and unlike anything else out there. Buy it now: https://bit.ly/3ZCN2wD 📣 Get InvolvedIf you're leading a brand, managing customer segments, or thinking about how to grow, this episode is for you. Reach out to Ryan on LinkedIn if you're interested in:
📨 Connect with Ryan: https://bit.ly/3SvsqTh About the Hosts: Colin Shaw is a LinkedIn 'Top Voice' with a massive 284,000 followers and 86,000 subscribers to his 'Why Customers Buy' newsletter. Shaw is named one of the world's 'Top 150 Business Influencers' by LinkedIn. His company, Beyond Philosophy LLC, has been selected four times by the Financial Times as a top management consultancy. Shaw is co-host of the top 1.5% podcast 'The Intuitive Customer'—with over 600,000 downloads—and author of eight best-sellers on customer experience. Shaw is a sought-after keynote speaker. Follow Colin on LinkedIn. Ryan Hamilton is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of the book 'The Intuitive Customer'. An award-winning teacher and researcher in consumer psychology, he has been named one of Poets & Quants' "World's Best 40 B-School Profs Under 40." His research focuses on how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence shopper decision-making, and his findings have been published in top academic journals and featured in major media outlets, including The New York Times and CNN. His work highlights how psychology can help firms better understand and serve their customers. Ryan has a new book called "The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things." Harvard Business Press 2025.
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| 5 Rules for forming an strong relationship with your customers via your brand! | 10 Jun 2023 | 00:31:41 | |
Your customers are having a relationship with your brand right under your nose. Do you know if it's a strong, healthy one? Our connection with brands is much like any other relationship in our lives, with some being healthy while others are not. Unfortunately, it's not uncommon for people to form codependent or dysfunctional relationships with brands. Therefore, it's essential to build strong brand relationships with your customers. Despite being legalistic trademarks, brands have become an entity, almost human-like, with which people form a personal connection. The corporate structure with its trademarks, colors, taglines, and messaging guidelines are irrelevant to customers. What matters is the brand's presence in customers' minds, memories, thoughts, and emotions. Creating an attachment is crucial. Stephen Covey, the author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, introduced the concept of the Emotional Bank Account years ago, which can apply to these relationships customers have with your brand. Emotional Bank Accounts have positive and negative deposits in them all the time, only the assets held within are how we feel about the brand. Just like we have these accounts with people in our lives, brands also make deposits and withdrawals in these accounts. In this episode, we explore the ideas behind these five rules and how they help you form a strong emotional bond with your customers with a robust deposit history in their emotional bank accounts, ensuring their loyalty to your brand. Here are a few key moments in the discussion:
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| This is how to impress your boss and a Business case for change accepted | 03 Jun 2023 | 00:32:13 | |
Getting your new program initiatives accepted requires overcoming a lot. So, to help you get that done—and impress your boss doing it—you need to have a winning strategy. The corporate budget is a funny thing. Getting approval on a budget in the corporate world doesn't mean you get to spend it. Quite the contrary. You often have to get the budget approved for what you might spend and then when you want to spend it, you get approval again. When you read it written out like that, it sounds super inefficient and completely silly. However, my guess is that many of you that are responsible for a budget know exactly what we mean. Plus, change is hard for people. As a champion of a business program that would result in significant change, you are already going to have a challenging time getting that approved. This episode helps you get through this inefficient and silly process successfully, and impressing your boss while you do it. We share our tips and tricks for handling this process with clarity, influence, political awareness, realism, credibility, and professionalism. Here are some other key moments in the discussion:
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| Context is king! Why too many organizations fail to understand this | 27 May 2023 | 00:30:51 | |
Organizations often fail to consider the context in which customers enter the experience, assuming that every customer is the same. However, recognizing the context of a customer's experience is crucial to developing an effective customer strategy. Context is an omnipresent factor in customer experience. Depending on a customer's context, we must create a customized experience. For instance, while working on a project for one of the cellular phone companies in the United States, we discovered that they treated customers who had lost their phone or had it stolen in the same manner. This oversight neglected the importance of context. Consider how you would feel if you had lost your phone in the back of a taxi. Most likely, you would feel foolish, right? Now, consider how you would feel if your phone was stolen. You might feel outraged, or scared, or both, which are different emotional responses than how you might feel after leaving your phone in a cab. Despite this, the mobile company treated both types of customers in the same way. They immediately requested the account number from both. However, we convinced them to determine what happened first, followed by ensuring the customer's safety if their phone was stolen. This simple change had an enormous impact on their experience design and outcomes. Thus, segmentation is a vital aspect of anticipating context. People bring unique perspectives and expectations to their experience. While segmentation is only one factor that can determine context, it is an excellent starting point. In this episode, we explore why context is crucial to customer experience design and how you can improve your understanding of your customer's context. Here are some other key moments in the discussion:
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| How to integrate Customer behavior into your journey maps to gain ROI | 20 May 2023 | 00:39:21 | |
Journey Maps can be useless exercises. That's right…we said it. However, these often-used tools don't have to be as useless as they usually are. Journey Maps are only useless if you don't include the customer's emotional journey in them. Emotional journeys are the "squishy stuff" associated with why customers buy from you. Since customer's feelings are challenging to itemize, many organizations tend to leave them off. However, the result is a customer process, not a journey map. After all, without this information, how can you expect to predict and anticipate customer behavior? Moreover, how can you design an experience that is so well positioned for customers' needs that they come back for more (and more)? In this episode— and at the behest of a very complimentary listener who says we actually taught them something (!!)—we explore how you can integrate customer behavior, and the emotions that drive that behavior, into your journey maps. We show you how all the things we talk about on this podcast apply in a practical way and can produce practical results, like an ROI. Here are some other key moments in the discussion:
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| How will knowing yourself and managing your emotions make you a better leader | 13 May 2023 | 00:32:26 | |
Having a high IQ isn't the most important thing for leadership. It helps, but intelligence isn't enough to make a great leader. It turns out that IQ without EQ, or emotional intelligence, doesn't inspire teams to meet or exceed their goals. This EQ concept, popularized by Daniel Goleman, has been a crucial component of the leadership conversation for several years. Similarly, customer service representatives with high EQ are crucial for the emotional management of customers. The ability to understand and manage emotions is a crucial factor in ensuring customer satisfaction. EQ involves the ability to identify and manage our own emotions and the emotions of others, as well as understanding your reactions to situations and how they may affect others. In other words, leaders and customer service representatives who can remain calm and objective in stressful situations are more effective in their roles. In this episode, we will delve into the concept of EQ, what it entails, and its impact on leadership and customer service strategies. We will explore the five realms of EQ, starting with knowing your emotions. Here are some other key moments in the discussion:
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| Lets really understand what Customer Engagement is and how to improve it | 06 May 2023 | 00:28:36 | |
Vijay, one of our listeners, drew my attention to a deficit in my content regarding customer strategy. He asked if we had anything on customer engagement. After a search of both my hard drives (computer and memory), I realized that I didn't. To remedy this giant hole in our content, we recorded this podcast. Now, part of not having any content on the subject means I didn't have a definition ready for the term. However, like anyone would these days, I fixed that with an internet search. I found an excellent one at HubSpot, another great one at Salesforce, and third at Qualtrics. Each of these definitions was unique and oddly familiar. However, together they do a great job of defining the general outline of the concept. To summarize them, let's say that customer engagement is about interacting with customers in a connected way through a variety of channels to build an emotional connection with them. In a recent podcast with Customer Experience pioneer Joe Pine, we explored the idea of time well spent. One addition I might make to the combination definition from my previous three sources is to deliver an experience that a customer thinks of as "time well-spent." Often when customers feel this way about your product, service, or experience, they will recommend it to their friends and family—which is an excellent indication of engagement. In this episode, we explore the concept of customer engagement and how you can craft a winning strategy for it in your experiences. Plus, we fill a hole in our content to satisfy Vijay's request and feel better about the job we are doing engaging you with our content. Here are some other key moments in the discussion:
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| Considering a career change? Here are 10 rules for building a successful consultancy | 29 Apr 2023 | 00:32:34 | |
If you have been listening to us for a while now, you probably know about our "I'm in a Pickle" podcasts and the "5 Rules" series. If so, and you're a fan, today is your lucky day because this podcast is a mash-up of both series. Not only that, but we also added in 5 more bonus rules for 100% more rules. It seems that quite a few people in our audience have a pickle. They want to start a consultancy but don't know what to do. So, we are here to help. In this episode, we explore the 10 rules for building a successful consultancy and how they apply to your success. While we can't guarantee that you will be successful if you follow them, we know that you won't be if you don't. Here are some key moments in the discussion:
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| Why is my product not selling despite research that tells me Customers love it? | 22 Apr 2023 | 00:30:21 | |
One of our listeners has a pickle. They did research that told them a product was just what their customers wanted, so they developed and launched it. But now, there are no sales. They want to know what went wrong. We suspect we might know. Research is a double-edged sword. It has the power to give us answers we want but not always the answers we need. Many things we do, deliberately or otherwise, affect what we hear. In addition, sometimes our sources are unreliable. Customers have different mindsets when they answer a question on a survey and when they make a buying decision. So, what they tell you on a survey might be quite different than what they do as customers. In this episode, we take a deeper dive into these ideas of what went wrong for our listener's product launch. We also share some practical advice to avoid making these mistakes in the future. Here are some other key moments in the discussion:
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| Learn from this! The best and worst decision made in our years of experience | 15 Apr 2023 | 00:30:01 | |
We will admit it. We have made mistakes in our lives. It's only natural that some of the calls you make in your journey are going to be bad ones. Believe it or not, we are thankful for them. One learns a lot from one's mistakes or at least that is the hope. Some of the calls were good ones, though, and we are thankful for those, too. Perhaps, even we two, like the blind squirrel, can find a nut once in a while. One of the great things about having a podcast is that we can share information. In this episode, we share some stories about things that have gone wrong. Our hope is that you can learn vicariously through us without having to suffer through similar pains yourself. Similarly, we share some of our triumphs, too, with the hope that these success stories might help some of you as well. Here are some other key moments in the discussion:
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| FOMO is a powerful marketing tool, are you making the most of it? | 08 Apr 2023 | 00:28:51 | |
Did you know that FOMO, or Fear of Missing Out, is a powerful motivator for customer behavior? Organizations today should find ways to leverage the power of FOMO with their customers. I was surprised to learn how much of an addiction social media was for some people and how it linked up with feelings of FOMO. You might be as surprised by these statistics from 2021 as I was:
In this episode, we explore what FOMO is and how it affects what we do and why. We also talk about a couple of practical (and ethical) ways you can leverage its power to increase the profits for your bottom line. Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience Regret, even the anticipation of regret, is a huge part of FOMO. These feelings are associated with Loss Aversion, which describes how we hate losing things more than we enjoy gaining things. If we feel like we missed out, we are losing out on the chance to be a part of something—and we really don't like that feeling. Here are some other key moments in the discussion:
_________________________________________________________________ Did you know we have a YouTube Channel too? Check it out here.
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| What Customers Really Think About Your AI Experience: Academic Research Reveals the Truth. | 07 Jun 2025 | 01:09:29 | |
Have you ever said "thank you" to a chatbot or Chat GPT? Well, you're not alone—and you might just be weirder than you think. It turns out AI can be more empathic than people. But what do Customers think of AI experiences? Academic research reveals the answers we discuss in this show. In this special live-recorded episode from the SOCAP Conference, Colin Shaw and Professor Ryan Hamilton explore the psychology behind how customers actually feel about AI—and what that means for your customer experience. Ryan dives into the latest academic research on AI trust, customer behaviour, and why people treat AI like it's part of the cast of Friends. Meanwhile, Colin keeps things grounded with real-life examples with his usual "so what?" test. What You'll Learn in This Episode:
Best Quote from the Episode: "AI isn't human, but customers treat it like it is—and that means it's being judged by human standards. If it screws up once, they'll remember. And they'll blame all AI for it." – Professor Ryan Hamilton Resources Mentioned This podcast is sponsored by SOCAP International and IA Solutions, who are both as passionate about improving customer experience as we are. SOCAP: https://socap.org/ IA Solutions: https://iacallcenter.com/ Research References:
About the Hosts: Colin Shaw is a LinkedIn 'Top Voice' with a massive 284,000 followers and 86,000 subscribers to his 'Why Customers Buy' newsletter. Shaw is named one of the world's 'Top 150 Business Influencers' by LinkedIn. His company, Beyond Philosophy LLC, has been selected four times by the Financial Times as a top management consultancy. Shaw is co-host of the top 1.5% podcast 'The Intuitive Customer'—with over 600,000 downloads—and author of eight best-sellers on customer experience, Shaw is a sought-after keynote speaker. Follow Colin on LinkedIn. Ryan Hamilton is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of 'The Intuitive Customer' book. An award-winning teacher and researcher in consumer psychology, he has been named one of Poets & Quants' "World's Best 40 B-School Profs Under 40." His research focuses on how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence shopper decision-making, and his findings have been published in top academic journals and covered by major media outlets like The New York Times and CNN. His work highlights how psychology can help firms better understand and serve their customers. Ryan has a new book launch in June 2025 called "The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things" Harvard Business Press Follow Ryan on LinkedIn.
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| How to improve this most underestimated part of your experience! | 01 Apr 2023 | 00:34:31 | |
This Podcast produced in partnership with Zuper™. You are probably underestimating the importance of a vital part of your Customer experience. Most organizations do. However, neglecting to address it can have negative impact on your customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, and customer advocacy. Dying to know what it could be? Well, the area that is often underestimated in importance is the impact of your field service engineers. Often the face of your company, these team members deliver a critical part of your customer interaction. Underestimating the significance of this part of your experience is a critical mistake. Field service is a term not everyone is familiar with. However, you are familiar with them even if you don't know what they are called. Field service describes the people that install, repair, and upgrade your equipment. Their ubiquity is such that they are a part of everyday life. In fact, you probably saw a few at work in some capacity today; you just didn't know what they were called. In this episode, we host an expert in Field Service on our recent podcast, Michael Israel (MichaelIsrael@Zuper.co), Head of Field Service Evangelism at Zuper. Israel has worked in customer and field service for over 50 years. He has managed domestic and international field service operations, including 12 years at IBM. He's also been in management and executive roles with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) providers and field service software applications with Oracle and SAP. Here are some other key moments in the discussion:
_________________________________________________________________ Did you know we have a YouTube Channel too? Check it out here.
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| When brands make silly mistakes: 5 rules guaranteed to ensure your failure | 25 Mar 2023 | 00:27:44 | |
A lot of the behavioral sciences can feel intimidating. However, it doesn't have to be. The Five Rules Podcast Series is our attempt at giving you an easy entry point into the complex and messy world of Behavioral Science. This podcast is full of bad advice. If you do follow the five rules we present, we guarantee you will fail. We realize this might be different than our usual Five Rules episode content. However, we think that presenting the way to fail might be the way to help you succeed. (How's that for a different kettle of fish?) For example, if you want to fail, we have the rules that will help you do it. They include doing any or all of the following:
In this episode, we explore why our five rules, otherwise known as what not to do in business, lead to failure for many brands you know, and in some cases, remember from before they crashed and burned. We share what we have learned by watching brands make silly mistakes (and hope none of you will make the same ones.) Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience The critical thing to remember here is that we don't want you to do these things. Instead, we encourage you to learn from these mistakes. So, if anything, we are telling you to break these five rules instead of following them. Here are some other key moments in the discussion:
_________________________________________________________________ Did you know we have a YouTube Channel too? Check it out here.
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| Employee Experience is just a fad stupid! Or is it really the future? | 18 Mar 2023 | 00:32:01 | |
Fads come and go. From Tamagotchi's to fidget spinners, we have seen plenty come and go. However, one fad that will never go out of style is treating your employees as the valuable resource they are. So, to answer our own question, Employee Experience is not just a fad and is definitely the future of a successful organization. We are fired up about this today because one of you, Praveen Kumar is in a pickle and he asked for our help. He wanted to know how to build an excellent Employee Experience. Not surprisingly, we had plenty of advice about it. You see, so much of what we talk about on this podcast applies to customers. However, it also applies to employees. People are people, whether they are buying or selling. So, until your employees are robots, you should be managing both experiences. In this episode, we explore the question of how to build an excellent Employee Experience. We also share some advice on how to implement the advice practically and successfully, which is more than we can say for bringing back the Thighmaster. Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience One thing that might be a fad is what we call this area. For our part, we like Employee Experience because it goes with Customer Experience, and it uses alliteration. So, we don't think the idea behind it will fade, but the terminology might. And we are okay with that. Here are a few key moments in the discussion:
_________________________________________________________________ Did you know we have a YouTube Channel too? Check it out here.
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| 80% of the companies fail to increase their satisfaction since 2010, why? | 11 Mar 2023 | 00:37:46 | |
I have been watching the American Customer Satisfaction Index for over 20 years. Many years, there wasn't anything too surprising in the report. However, recently there has been, and it isn't good news for most organizations. After nearly two decades of investment in customer experience, only 20 percent of organizations have managed to improve their customer satisfaction scores—leaving the vast majority, 80 %, having failed to do so. One has to wonder, has it been worth it? We have been working on delivering experiences that surprise and delight customers for years. So, why aren't they surprised and delighted? Why, despite all our best efforts, are the numbers going the opposite direction? Before you blame COVID for all this, it is important to note that these trends began long before that, although the pandemic did nothing to help matters. Nor is it a problem of customers having unreasonable expectations. Research shows that as satisfaction declines, so do customer expectations. It turns out that there are a number of variables that could be contributing to this decline in customer satisfaction, which offers a lot for organizations to learn. We invited an expert, assistant professor Forrest Morgeson, from the marketing faculty at the Broad College of Business at Michigan State University and the director of research at the Customer Satisfaction Institute to share his insight. In this episode, we explore what this means to customer experience then, now and in the future. Where we are going with experiences, might surprise you. Here are some other key moments in the discussion:
_________________________________________________________________ Did you know we have a YouTube Channel too? Check it out here.
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| Discover True Value of an MBA: Just a Piece of Paper or a Must Have? | 04 Mar 2023 | 00:33:49 | |
One of our listeners, Clive Hearst has a bit of pickle he needs our help with today. He wants to know whether he should invest the time and money in getting his MBA. He wants to know what the true value is of an MBA, and whether it is a must-have for his career. The answer depends on a few things. It might surprise you to know I don't have an MBA. (Or maybe not). However, I have experience, and much of it leading teams and driving experiences for people, but I didn't pick that up in a classroom or an internship. I learned it on the streets, and in interactions with clients, bosses, and subordinates. I probably won't get an MBA. I am closer to getting a fishing boat and a new tackle box than a degree at this point. However, I still say probably because there is a part of me that says, "never say never." Part of me is interested in an MBA and I have to wonder why… So, does an MBA have any value or is it just a piece of paper? In this episode, we try to help Hearst answer these questions for himself and shed some light on the current state of the MBA in today's business environment. Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience There should always be deliberate goals for everything we do in business, and that includes post-graduate education. Post graduate education in this case is an MBA, but the same goes for a Ph.D., law school, or medical or dental school, any other programs too. Part of the decision should always be one's plans for what they will do with the education in which they invest. Here are a few key moments in the discussion:
_________________________________________________________________ Did you know we have a YouTube Channel too? Check it out here.
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| The Battle For Customer Attention: How To Come Out On Top | 25 Feb 2023 | 00:31:06 | |
Time is our most valuable resource. It's a resource that you aren't able to get any more of, no matter what you do, and you are losing more of it every second. When you look at it like that, asking people for their time a much bigger deal than you might have considered at first. Therefore, when you are spending it with them, you should make the most of it. Moreover, you are competing for customers' time. So, when they do give it to you, they are going to evaluate whether that was a good move afterward. If you are careful with it, you can end up on the bad side of an evaluation and a losing side of the battle for their attention in the future. Joe Pine, co-author of The Experience Economy, writes about this battle for customer attention and how they evaluate time given to you in a recent article about 'Competing for Customer Time'. Check it out here. We also hosted him on a recent podcast where he shared his three categories for customers' evaluations of time given to your organization. They include time well saved, time well spent, and time well invested. In this episode, we discuss these three categories and what they mean to organizational experiences. We also talk about how some organizations do it well, and some waste our time unapologetically.
Here are some other key moments in the discussion:
Did you know we have a YouTube Channel too? Check it out here.
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| Critical issue: How to increase your price without losing Customers | 18 Feb 2023 | 00:26:57 | |
Price increases are part of today's business environment. Unless you live on the moon, you are experiencing them from your suppliers, too, and will pass those on to your customers also. However, if you handle the price increase the wrong way, you will also likely be losing some of those customers, too. One of our listeners, Alan Flower, has a pickle regarding the need to increase his prices without losing his customers. Since our advice not to raise prices or to decrease prices instead will end up with him going out of business, we came up with a few other, more practical, ideas. The fact is no one wants a price increase. So, on its face, it seems like an impossible scenario. However, it might surprise you to learn that there are ways to increase a customer's price, maintain your company's margins, and keep most of your customers. In this episode, we explore the many ways you can soften the blow of a necessary price increase to retain as many customers as possible while doing what you need to do for your bottom line.
Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience Communication is the underlying theme of this exercise. Many of the suggestions we make during this podcast relate to the "how" of communicating. However, the why of it is just as essential, so be sure that you pay attention to both when you inform your customers of an impending price increase—or face their wrath instead.
Here are a few key moments in the discussion:
Did you know we have a YouTube Channel too? Check it out here. Connect with Colin on LinkedIn HERE. Follow Colin on Twitter HERE. Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University. Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey. To learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services Click here | |||
| Bad mistake! Is too much choice responsible for destroying my revenue? | 11 Feb 2023 | 00:30:34 | |
How long does it take to choose a craft beer at a big box liquor store? Four hours. That's what it felt like anyway. Why did it feel so long? Too many choices. In fact, when I was done, I needed a beer to recover from the exercise of choosing a beer. Of course, if there had only been a few, I would probably complain that there hadn't been enough options for craft beers. The fact is, we like having choices, until we don't. There is a point where not enough choices becomes way too many and the end result is the same, a negative experience and sometimes a lost sale. In this episode, we explore the negative effects of too many choices on your bottom line. From overwhelming customers to elevating their expectations, what you offer has a significant effect on what people buy—or don't. Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience There are two ways choice affects customers psychologically. First, too many choices can make people give up on deciding and wander off. Second, the plethora of options can increase the expectations for what a customer wants out of the transaction, and often keeps them on the hunt longer for the perfect choice. Neither is an outcome that is doing great things for an organizations bottom line. Here are some other key moments in the discussion:
Did you know we have a YouTube Channel too? Check it out here. Connect with Colin on LinkedIn HERE. Follow Colin on Twitter HERE. Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University. Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey. To learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services Click here | |||
| How ChatGPT will massively disrupt many industries and democratize AI | 04 Feb 2023 | 00:35:19 | |
I have written seven books, countless articles, and tons of keynote speeches, not to mention thousands of emails. As a writer, through and through, I know how difficult it can be to stare at a blank screen watching that blinking cursor wondering where to start.
But a new AI-powered chatbot might make my life a whole lot easier, and yours, too.
It's called ChatGPT, and it has the potential to change how we create things and make the power of AI accessible to everyone. It is a conversational chatbot that can process requests and, if you want, write things for you. It has written poetry, code for applications, the copy for a Ryan Reynold's MINT mobile company commercial, and more.
Unfortunately, it also means ChatGPT is accessible to high school students that need to write a five-paragraph essay about Romeo and Juliet. If there is one group where ChatGPT is unwelcome, it's the teacher's lounge at any high school or college.
In this episode, we discuss how ChatGPT might change the way organizations do things moving forward.
Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience
We also discussed what some of my readers on LinkedIn think of the AI technology in ChatGPT. Igor Rodrigues likes how it handles context. Sergei Liashenko thinks it could be useful for staff training. Graham Hill worries that if too many people leverage the technology, we will lose the distinctions between organizations that often provide a competitive edge.
We would love to also hear your insight. To subscribe to the newsletter and weigh in, please click here.
Here are some other key moments in the discussion:
Did you know we have a YouTube Channel too? Check it out here. | |||
| These are the critical questions to see if your segmentation is effective! | 28 Jan 2023 | 00:33:53 | |
If you have customer segments that read like the drink sizes on a fast-food menu, then this podcast is one you really need. The fact is many organizations get customer segmentation wrong. So, we came up with some critical questions that can get it back on track. One of our listeners is in a pickle and it has to do with their firm's segmentation. Vijay Patel's sales haven't been what he hoped, and he wondered if the problem might be targeting the wrong customers. We think they might be, too, but probably not for the reasons Patel thinks. Many organizations use databases to segment their customers based on easy-to-collect data, like demographics, industry vertical, or total annual sales. While this information is useful, it is incomplete. We discuss what needs to be included to make these numbers mean anything for targeting. In this episode, we explore what are critical questions an organization should be using to create customer segments that lead to effective targeting. And to be clear, they don't use the words "small," "medium," or "large." Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience I have had a terrible time with UPS recently. I sent a package 2-day priority international and ten days later, I still don't have it. Plus, I have had no luck getting answers about what happened to it. In part, I am to blame because I don't have a lot of experience with shipping things via UPS. However, part of the problem is UPS because they don't have a targeted experience for inexperienced shippers like me. Here are a few key moments in the discussion:
Subscribe to our YouTube channel HERE. 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 Brand Builds The Promise; Customer Experience DOES NOT Deliver! Why? | 24 May 2025 | 00:37:00 | |
How happy are you when you buy auto insurance? If your answer is anything other than thrilled, you're not alone. In fact, years ago, a UK insurance company tried to convince us otherwise with their tagline "Quote Me Happy." Spoiler alert: Nobody was happy. This raises a fascinating question: What role does advertising play in the customer experience, and why is there such a massive disconnect between the ads we see and what we actually get? In this episode, Colin Shaw and Professor Ryan Hamilton dive deep into the Great Expectation Gap—and they've brought in a special guest: Ben Shaw, Chief Strategy Officer at MullenLowe (and, fun fact, Colin's son). It turns out that years of heated Sunday lunch debates on advertising vs. CX have led to this moment! 🍽️ Together, they explore why marketing often sets unrealistic expectations, how brands can align advertising with reality, and why great advertising can only work if the customer experience delivers on the promise. 💡 Tune in to discover: The Brand makes the promise in the Market, the Customer Experience should deliver against that promise. — Colin Shaw Resources Mentioned Ben Shaw LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benshawuk/ 'Brand Ben' on Tik Tok: https://www.tiktok.com/@benshaw37?_t=ZN-8ujJORxL3SQ&_r=1 Mullen Lowe: https://www.mullenlowe.co.uk/ About the Hosts: Colin Shaw is a LinkedIn 'Top Voice' with a massive 284,000 followers and 86,000 subscribers to his 'Why Customers Buy' newsletter. Shaw is named one of the world's 'Top 150 Business Influencers' by LinkedIn. His company, Beyond Philosophy LLC, has been selected four times by the Financial Times as a top management consultancy. Shaw is co-host of the top 1.5% podcast 'The Intuitive Customer'—with over 600,000 downloads—and author of eight best-sellers on customer experience, Shaw is a sought-after keynote speaker. Follow Colin on LinkedIn. Ryan Hamilton is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of 'The Intuitive Customer' book. An award-winning teacher and researcher in consumer psychology, he has been named one of Poets & Quants' "World's Best 40 B-School Profs Under 40." His research focuses on how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence shopper decision-making, and his findings have been published in top academic journals and covered by major media outlets like The New York Times and CNN. His work highlights how psychology can help firms better understand and serve their customers. Ryan has a new book launch in June 2025 called "The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things" Harvard Business Press Follow Ryan on LinkedIn. Subscribe & Follow #CustomerExperience #Marketing #Advertising #Branding #CX | |||
| 7 key strategic questions essential for gaining growth in 2023 | 21 Jan 2023 | 00:33:10 | |
It's a new year so we decided we needed an update. A few years ago, we gave you some rules for gaining growth. But times have changed, and so the rules need to change, too. Therefore, we took another pass at the questions that can help your organization gain growth in 2023. In some ways, these are more like provocations than questions. However, we aren't picking a fight. We are, however, trying to be provocative. In fact, we usually ask them because we know that people can't answer them. We want them to realize that they don't know these answers and get them thinking about it so we can help them move forward. The first two questions you are probably familiar with already. They set the stage for what we are trying to uncover. Then, we move into specifics about what customers want from your experience. Next come the future questions that explore areas about where you should be trying to go and the tools you can use to get there. Finally, we get into a question about my absolute favorite part of experiences, memory. In this episode, we explore what we ask and why. We also talk about what they need to realize from their answers and how it can help them gain growth in the new year. Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience One company we helped move forward was Maersk Line, the world's largest shipping company. We hosted one of the successful leaders of this organization on another episode to share the five rules for a highly successful implementation. One of the things Maersk shared is that these questions made a difference in their improvement program—which is saying something since they improved their scores by 40 points over 30 months. Here are some other key moments in the discussion:
Did you know we have a YouTube Channel too? Check it out here. Customer Experience Information & Resources LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter. Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University. How can we help? | |||
| How do I discover if my customer has decided to buy? | 14 Jan 2023 | 00:30:53 | |
In sales, it can be tough to know when a customer is no longer deciding but already decided—unless, of course, they tell you that out loud. So, it is incumbent upon you to read the signs that a customer has decided to buy. For example, I like to make drawings with pen and paper during my sales presentations with a contact. Then, I position the pen toward them during the discussion as an invitation for them to pick up and draw a little bit, too. If they do, it's a good sign. Scribbling away on my pad of already scribbled paper, I know that the contact is engaged and interested in how my services will help them achieve their goals. However, there are several signals that a person sends when they are ready to buy. One of our listeners, Jason Bradley wrote in with a business pickle wanting to know what some of these signs are. In this episode we tell you and explain the psychology behind it. Here are a few key moments in the discussion: 03:19 We present Jason's business problem, how other listeners can send in their questions for us to answer on the podcast, and how Colin can tell a person has made a buying decision. 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.
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| An Authoritative view: Three Pioneers of CX Predict Big Changes in 2023 | 07 Jan 2023 | 00:44:20 | |
Every so often, I get a chance to chit-chat with colleagues of mine about the future of customer experience. This time, my colleagues were pioneers in customer experience, Lou Carbone (Experience Engineering.com) author of Clued In, and Joe Pine (StratgicHorizons.com), author of The Experience Economy. We discussed what we see changing in CX.
We all think we are at a turning point in the movement. There are a lot of things that the recent pandemic has broken. However, organizations haven't fixed all of them. Add in the inflation rates that are crippling the economy and affecting customer behavior, and you have a good idea of the state of things these days.
However, my colleagues and I agree there are also exciting things on the horizon. Customer experience enjoyed its first academic nod. We also see CEOs taking a new interest in creative thinking and open-mindedness. Customer science looms on the horizon.
In this episode, we explore the potential for the new year in the customer experience movement and combine the powers of decades of experience to guess what will happen in 2023. We see significant changes coming and share what we see and what you should do about it.
Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience
The state of affairs today in customer strategy is dire. The American Customer Satisfaction Index is at its lowest level in 17 years. From 2010 to 2019, two-thirds of organizations still needed to improve customer satisfaction. Forrester predicted that one out of every five people in Customer Experience would lose their job in the next twelve months.
Here are some other critical moments in the discussion:
Did you know we have a YouTube Channel too? Check it out here.
Customer Experience Information & Resources
LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.
Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 70,000 subscribers.
How can we help? Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.
Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey. | |||
| 5 rules guaranteed to make you an effective leader | 31 Dec 2022 | 00:33:24 | |
A lot of the behavioral sciences can feel intimidating. However, it doesn't have to be. The Five Rules Podcast Series is our attempt at giving you an easy entry point into the complex and messy world of Behavioral Science.
Bad leadership leads to bad Customer Experience. To have a great Customer Experience, you have to have great leadership.
It reminds me of rabbits.
When my kids were little, we kept rabbits in a hutch. One day, I let the rabbits out to enjoy a little freedom in the garden. But, when I put them down, they hopped right back in the hutch.
I had taken over a call center team at the time. The rabbits' behavior resembled my team's. The hutch represented all the constraints built up in the call center culture. The team were much more comfortable hanging out in these constraints than finding a way to do more for customers.
It fell to me to change the culture. Over time, my call center team were hopping throughout the garden of customer centricity, but it required focus and effort on both our parts.
In this episode, we explore the role of leadership in Customer Experience and the 5 Rules guaranteed to increase your effectiveness as a leader.
Here are a few key moments in the discussion:
Did you know we have a YouTube Channel too? Check it out here.
Customer Experience Information & Resources
LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.
Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 70,000 subscribers.
How can we help? Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.
Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey. | |||
| Wow! It's been an interesting year! This is what we have learned... | 24 Dec 2022 | 00:30:11 | |
The end of a year is always a nice reminder to reflect on time passed. It's a regular milestone where you can check in on your experiences and remember the lessons gained from another trip around our sun.
This year has been an interesting one. With a foot half-in, half-out of the pandemic, continuing supply chain issues, rising inflation rates all over the world, and a war in Ukraine, one might even say awful.
However, like any year, everything isn't awful. There have been moments, professionally and personally that have been exceedingly positive and have changed us for the better, even if it was just a little bit.
In this episode, we each share a professional and personal lesson learnt from this year. From a description of the world's ugliest knife (which you can see for yourself at minute 19:26 on our YouTube Channel of the podcast) to the significant realization I had that AI is just our bias written in code shared by our guest Broderick Turner, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Marketing at Virginia Tech., and founder of TRAP LAB, a few months ago, there is sure to be something for everyone—or at least some thing to entertain you.
Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience
Did you know we have a YouTube Channel too? Check it out here.
Customer Experience Information & Resources
LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.
Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 70,000 subscribers.
How can we help? Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.
Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey. | |||
| New Year's Resolutions: Why some people win, but most people lose | 17 Dec 2022 | 00:31:07 | |
Ah, yes! It's the most wonderful time of the year. When we reflect upon the passing year and make plans for the New Year: what we want to keep, where we want to be, and how we need to change. Then, we make them, our New Year's Resolutions.
However, in just a few days' time, we will have failed at keeping these resolutions (again) and forgotten all about it.
There are a number of psychological reasons why change is hard, and much of it has to do with habits. Habits are part of our Intuitive System, which is the fast automatic thinking we use to save energy instead of dragging out our Rational System, the slow, deliberate thinking we sometimes use. We get a cue, which triggers an automatic response, that gives us a reward.
However, habits can be broken once you understand where you need to intervene. With a few tricks and some real motivation, you can kick a bad habit or even start a good one.
In this episode, we explore why some people are successful with their New Year's Resolutions and win, and why some people fail and lose out on the benefits of meeting the challenge for change in the New Year. (If you want to be a part of the first group, we suggest you listen. Want to be in the second group? Keep on rolling with your present strategy.)
Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience
Habits are a giant part of New Year's Resolutions. Usually, we want to stop having bad ones, i.e., start losing weight and exercising, quit biting nails, or to stop smoking or drinking so much. However, sometimes we want to start good new habits, i.e., floss more, take up a new hobby or learn a musical instrument, or subscribe to a fantastic newsletter on LinkedIn (hint, hint). Below are some moments in the podcast that can help with either direction you are going with this in the new year:
Did you know we have a YouTube Channel too? Check it out here.
Customer Experience Information & Resources
LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.
Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 70,000 subscribers.
How can we help? Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.
Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey. | |||
| Want your post to go viral? Here is the secret formula... | 10 Dec 2022 | 00:31:23 | |
Going viral is the goal of any passionate social media poster. Posting your content and watching as the views and shares grow exponentially is the dream for marketers trying to build a brand online.
Unless, of course, the viral post is about how you broke a guitar during a customer's flight and then showed "indifference" to their complaint. (Looking at you, United Airlines.) That's a nightmare.
The trick is actually doing it—and for the right reasons, not a customer service failure. In an environment where there is infinite amounts of content to compete with, getting a post to go viral is a victory few marketers have the pleasure of experiencing.
In this episode, we explore how to get people to collaborate with you in your efforts to create viral content on social media and the essential elements of the content that encourage people to share it.
Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience
When you want a person to do something, you have probably heard that you should explain the benefits they will enjoy from doing so. It's no different with social media. Your content should have a benefit that appeals to the sharer and collaborator, and a benefit to whom the person shares it. Therefore, a hearty laugh, a heartfelt "awe," or an unrealized and epiphanic insight are never a bad way to go.
Here are some other key moments in the discussion:
Did you know we have a YouTube Channel too? Check it out here.
Customer Experience Information & Resources
LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.
Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 70,000 subscribers.
How can we help? Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.
Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey. | |||
| Embrace this amazing way Customers evaluate you to gain success | 03 Dec 2022 | 00:29:41 | |
Customers are fickle. Or at least they appear to be. What once may have exceeded your customer's expectations one day becomes ordinary the next. That's because People become less sensitive to change as things improve. It's called Diminishing Sensitivity, and it's the reason that sometimes you have to work harder to "Wow!" your customers.
If you gave $100 to a poor person and a millionaire, it would have completely different effects on their daily lives. While the millionaire would be polite and appreciative of the extra cash, the poor person would feel the difference made by the money far more.
In some ways, your customers are the millionaire in this scenario. Your excellent Customer Experience has made them less sensitive to your improvements. However, if your experience is next to terrible, improvements feel a lot more like $100 to a poor person.
Diminishing sensitivity can be seen across many different industries. For example, the difference in graphics between the video game Football for the Atari 2600 and Madden's NFL 10 was astounding. However, when you compare Madden 10 to Madden 12 and 14, the difference is noticeable, but not astounding. It ceases to be something that amazes and becomes something to be expected.
In this episode, we explore the concept of diminishing sensitivity and how it can affect your customer experience and your customers' perception of it. We also talk about what you can do to continue to improve.
How Can I Combat Diminishing Sensitivity?
While it would be easy to say you should constantly push the boundaries of your product or service, this is not necessarily realistic. As we have seen with the iPhone, constant improvement eventually bores consumers. Therefore, it's essential to occasionally disrupt the market with more significant improvements to keep your customers hooked.
Here are some other key moments:
Did you know we have a YouTube Channel too? Check it out here.
Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.
Customer Experience Information & Resources
LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.
Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 35,000 subscribers.
How can we help? Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services. | |||
| Don't panic! Here are the many advantages to a recession | 26 Nov 2022 | 00:27:49 | |
Recession is a natural step in the economic cycle, but it's easy to get overwhelmed by all of the bad news. When economic downturn occurs, we all feel it.
Corporations tend to cut back in a downturn, neglecting things like customer experience. To differentiate yourself from everyone else, you should double down on these services while others cut back.
Nobody looks forward to a recession, but being prepared and aggressive can help alleviate its effects. Don't let yourself get left by the wayside while there is such a great opportunity to grow.
In this episode, we do not minimize the downsides of economic recession, but rather show that not everything has to be terrible. We discuss what to do when things get bad, and how to focus on the upside of a recession.
Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience
The most crucial part of dealing with a recession is preparing ahead of time. If you're caught blindly by the oncoming decline, you and your business could wipe out. While we may not officially be in a recession yet, planning as though we were will leave you far more prepared for the times ahead.
Here are a few key moments in the discussion:
Did you know we have a YouTube Channel, too? Check it out here.
Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.
Customer Experience Information & Resources
LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.
Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 35,000 subscribers.
How can we help? Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services. | |||
| It's time to move your Customers to where you want them to be | 19 Nov 2022 | 00:30:02 | |
Claire Hillman, a loyal listener, a subscriber to our NL, Why Customers Buy, and viewer of our podcast on our new YouTube Channel is in a pickle and needs our help. She asks, Should I move to where my customers are or move them to where I want to be?
Now, our first reaction was to tell Claire that she should absolutely meet customers where they are. After all, isn't that the customer-centric thing to do?
However, it occurred to us that at one time, we waited in line at the airport to check in, wrote out our bills on paper checks to mail back through snail mail, and bought DVDs and CDs that we had to store on specially made racks in our homes.
We did these things because we hadn't moved to digital check-in, automatic bill payment, and streaming. If organizations hadn't moved us to these efficient and easy ways to simplify these tasks, we might still be making small talk with the airline employee or licking envelopes.
Since we see that many things that we do today are not the way we used to do things—and realize how much better the experiences are with the new way—it might not be the best things to meet customers where they are. Instead, it might be better to move them where you want them to be.
In this episode, we explore the finer points of moving customers to where they want to be and how to manage this process for your organization. You might be surprised to know that giving customers exactly what they want isn't always the best way to handle your customer strategy.
Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience
Another area where some customers might have not realized was a benefit to them is Self-Service, particularly at the supermarket. However, other customers are never going to want to serve themselves there. What is happening here is the idea of customer segmentation. Some customers love taking matters into their own hands; others feel like it's losing something from the experience to have to handle things themselves. How you move these groups to where you want them to be requires a careful look at the value you bring to the experience and framing the change in a way that appeals to each segment.
Here are a few other key moments in the discussion:
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. | |||
| AI Won't Save Your Customer Experience—But This Might... | 12 May 2025 | 00:32:19 | |
Episode Summary: Everyone's talking about AI like it's some kind of CX fairy godmother—"Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo! Your NPS just went up 50 points!" Spoiler alert: it doesn't work like that. In this episode, Colin and Ryan are joined by Frederic Durand, CEO of Diabolocom, and Collin D. Ehret, Senior Enterprise Sales Director (yes, another Collin… brace yourself), for a no-fluff, practical, and slightly irreverent discussion about what it really takes to implement AI in your customer experience. Diabolocom Website: https://www.diabolocom.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/diabolocom/ Frederic Durand LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fpdurand/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/collinehret/
This is a must-listen if you're wondering:
You'll hear real-world examples, hard-earned insights, and maybe even a laugh or two (two Colins on one podcast—what could go wrong?). 🔥 Best Quote from the Episode:"AI isn't a magic wand. If your process is a mess, AI will just make it a faster, more expensive mess."
About the Hosts: Colin Shaw is a LinkedIn 'Top Voice' with a massive 284,000 followers and 86,000 subscribers to his 'Why Customers Buy' newsletter. Shaw is named one of the world's 'Top 150 Business Influencers' by LinkedIn. His company, Beyond Philosophy LLC, has been selected four times by the Financial Times as a top management consultancy. Shaw is co-host of the top 1.5% podcast 'The Intuitive Customer'—with over 600,000 downloads—and author of eight best-sellers on customer experience, Shaw is a sought-after keynote speaker. Follow Colin on LinkedIn. Ryan Hamilton is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of 'The Intuitive Customer' book. An award-winning teacher and researcher in consumer psychology, he has been named one of Poets & Quants' "World's Best 40 B-School Profs Under 40." His research focuses on how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence shopper decision-making, and his findings have been published in top academic journals and covered by major media outlets like The New York Times and CNN. His work highlights how psychology can help firms better understand and serve their customers. Ryan has a new book launch in June 2025 called "The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things" Harvard Business Press Follow Ryan on LinkedIn. Subscribe & Follow
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| In an increasingly MAD world here are 5 rules for managing uncertainty | 12 Nov 2022 | 00:28:44 | |
A lot of the behavioral sciences can feel intimidating. However, it doesn't have to be. The Five Rules Podcast Series is our attempt at giving you an easy entry point into the complex and messy world of Behavioral Science.
As if the world isn't crazy enough—with the war in Ukraine, the cost-of-living crisis, the looming threat of recession, and the ostensible beginnings of catastrophic climate change— we learned a flesh-eating bacterium (Vibrio vulnificus) is running rampant in Florida, infecting people as it thrives in the brackish floodwaters left in the wake of Hurricane Ian.
It's bloody stressful these days.
With so many things we can't control, feeling uncertain about the future economy is normal. However, uncertainty is a difficult environment in which to move forward with business.
Colin thought maybe he was feeling so pessimistic about everything because he is getting old. So, he polled his followers on LinkedIn a few days ago to see what they thought. He asked them,"What are you expecting the business environment will be over the next year?" The results might surprise you.
However, no matter how we all feel about the future, into it we go anyway. So, in an effort to help us all cope with the road ahead, we present the 5 Rules for Managing Uncertainty in this episode, which you can also watch on our YouTube Channel.
Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience
Uncertainty is a difficult environment for decision making. Often, we look for ways to mitigate these feelings using short-cuts in decision making to move forward. It's also why we like to say a decision was a no-brainer. If the best way forward was so obvious that we didn't have to think about it much, we have much more certainty about it. Certainty is definitely our preferred state when we decide things.
Here are a few key moments in the discussion:
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. | |||
| Learn how to make influence your new super power today! | 05 Nov 2022 | 00:36:50 | |
What if we told you that we know how you could develop a superpower? You can. We know you can because the method for it it was developed by a Yale's assistant professor of marketing that was once a door-to-door salesperson and someone who has performed open-heart surgery on a pig.
The superpower you can develop is influence and it is essential if you want to make changes in your organization. As champions of Customer Experience, we don't need to tell you how crucial it is to get people to change. Influence and consensus building can help you get there, and our guest will tell you how.
In this episode, we talk with climate philanthropist Zoe Chance (zoechance.com) Ph.D., author of Influence is your Superpower: The Science of Winning Hearts, Sparking Change, and Making Good Things Happen. Chance shares with us why she wrote the book, some constructive criticism for the Customer Experience movement, suggestions for a winning strategy, and step-by-step instructions for how to gain support for your ideas.
Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience One of the reasons Chance wrote the book was because she felt like other tactics written by thought leaders for influence were too transactional. Her methods are softer and built upon a foundation of mutual benefit. In fact, she jokes that her agent wanted to call the book Influence for Nice People. While she rejected the title, she doesn't reject the premise and hopes that she can do some good with her strategies. Climate change is a topic so important to Chance that she is donating half of the profits from her book to go to 350.org, a global network of climate activists seeking change through the power of ordinary people.
Here are a few other key moments in the discussion:
Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey. Subscribe to our YouTube channel here.
Customer Experience Information & Resources LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter. Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University. Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 35,000 subscribers. How can we help? Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services. | |||
| FEAR! One of the greatest marketing motivators of human behavior | 29 Oct 2022 | 00:32:36 | |
Neither of us is much of a runner. In fact, to get us to run with any kind of speed would require some motivation—like a tiger chasing us. That's because fear is a powerful motivator. Fear is also a powerful tool for marketers to get customers or potential customers to care about something.
So, why does fear motivate us so much? Safety is an important value for all of us. When it is threatened, we notice. In other words, fear is a strong emotion, which makes it hard to ignore or control. In some cases, you might even have an involuntary response as the fear you feel taps into something primal. Michael McIntyre provides an engaging and comedic perspective on this topic here.
When you have something to sell, it can be challenging to cut through the clutter to get people to care about what you have. In fact, getting people to care about anything can be challenging, whether there is a potential sale involved or not. That's one of the reasons that marketers find themselves using it; fear can get people to care.
Political ads are big fans of this type of marketing. Campaigns use the opponent's platform and voting record to scare voters about what the opponent might do if elected. Of course, the candidate campaign ad creators want voters to choose would never do those things. So, fear motivates the voters to give their vote to the political campaign's candidate. It's genius, and very common.
In this episode, we discuss why fear motivates humans, how marketers can use it effectively and what marketers should avoid. Plus, we decide which mask Colin should wear for Halloween. Don't miss out on the exciting debate.
Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience
Among other ways, Loss Aversion, which is part of the larger behavioral science concept of Prospect Theory, is part of the equation in using fear as a marketing tool. You might remember that Loss Aversion describes that in our minds, losses loom larger than gains. To put it another way, we hate losing things more than we enjoy winning things. Loss Aversion is why we are sometimes motivated to respond to a marketing offer. We don't want to risk losing something.
Here are a few other key moments in the discussion:
Subscribe to our YouTube channel here for more content.
Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.
Customer Experience Information & Resources
LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.
Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 35,000 subscribers.
How can we help? Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services. | |||