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

Habits can be excellent or terrible for your Customer Experience. When it is the customer’s habit to buy from you, then there is not a problem. However, when it goes the other way, well, let’s just say some habits are meant to be broken.

Understanding what habits are and how they work is vital to your Customer Experience. When you understand customers’ habits, how they form and how they are governed by the mind, you have a much better chance of making those crucial changes in customer behavior to become their habitual brand.

So, what are habits? Habits are automatic behavior for a repetitive action that is triggered by a cue. Maybe the cue is a time of day or an activity. Perhaps it is the aisle at the grocery store where customers do most of their shopping. The important thing about triggers or cues is that you must disrupt them somehow to interrupt the automatic response that will follow.

When discussing habits, we talk a lot about the two systems of thinking that we all share. Originally conceived of by Nobel-Prize-winning economist Professor Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking Fast and Slow, there are two systems we use in our thinking. Kahneman called them System One and System Two. System One is fast and emotional thinking and it is always running in the background ready to jump in when needed for making decisions. System Two is slow and deliberate thinking that is used for logic and reasoning. It is not always running, however. Instead, System Two is resting a lot of the time.

We used the two systems of thinking in our own book The Intuitive Customer. We called System One the Intuitive System and System Two the Rational System. As it turns out, System One or the Intuitive System is the part of our thinking that handles habits. That means if you want to change behavior you need to appeal to the quick and automatic thinking of the Intuitive System.

This episode of The Intuitive Customer takes a deeper dive into habits and how they work in our brains. We also share a practical guide on how we can use the way habits work—and the system of thinking that governs them—to change them for the better.

The Intuitive Customer podcasts help you take your Customer Experience to the next level by unlocking the “hidden” aspects of your experience and determining what really drives value for your customers.

To find out more about how your organization’s marketing can improve customer loyalty and retention, contact us at www.beyondphilosophy.com.

To subscribe to The Intuitive Customer and never miss a podcast, please click here.

I have a few things that drive me crazy in the business world. In this episode of The Intuitive Customer, we are going to talk about how organizations often define loyalty, and why I think they have it all wrong.

It makes me upset when I think about it. Many, if not most, companies believe that when a customer gives you all their business, it means they are a loyal customer. After all, isn’t that what we all want, all the business our customers have to give? If they are giving it to us, then they must be loyal right?

Not so fast.. A customer giving you all their business doesn’t always mean they are loyal customers. It could be because they have a habit of buying from you, or it could mean they haven’t bothered to seek out an alternative. It might also be that they have no other choice, but as soon as they do, they will leave and take all that business with them. (I’m talking to you, Internet Service Providers.)

Customer Loyalty is more than an automatic, indifferent, or begrudging action. It is an emotional connection with a brand. Customer Loyalty is hard to earn but also hard to lose.

However, it can be lost, so don’t rest on your laurels.

When you think about who you are loyal to, you likely think of family and friends. That’s because you have a relationship with them. Over time, you have had a consistent and positive interaction with these people, and you share an emotional bond because of it.

Sometimes friends and families disappoint you though, don’t they? However, you don’t cut ties over it. With time and communication, most families work it out. Many friendships endure despite quarrels or disagreements, too. Again, that is because of the history and the emotional tie that you share with these people.

When you have loyal customers, you have a relationship with them, too. It is built through your consistent positive actions. Also, when you make a mistake or do something they don’t like, they don’t cut ties with you over it. Why? Customer Loyalty is an emotional bond with your company, and it persists over time and troubles.

One thing is certain about Customer Loyalty; it is the result of what you do in your Customer Experience. We examine what Customer Loyalty is, why it works that way, and, perhaps most importantly, how it benefits your relationship with them and all that business of theirs you would like to have.

Listen to the podcast in its entirety to learn more about The Secret of Creating Loyal Customers with your Customer Experience.

The Intuitive Customer podcasts are designed to explain the psychological concepts behind customer behavior.

If you would like to find out from one of our CX consultants how you can implement the concepts we discussed in your organization’s marketing to improve customer loyalty and retention, contact us at www.beyondphilosophy.com.

To subscribe to The Intuitive Customer and never miss a podcast, please click here.

Happy Employees Make Happy Customers

When your employees are happy, they are more likely to make your customers happy. Common sense dictates that this is logical. However, despite the rationality of this statement, too many organizations do not spend enough of their resources ensuring their employees are happy—and their Customer Experience suffers for it.

This episode of The Intuitive Customer dives into Colin’s new book on the subject ‘Happy People Make Happy Customers’ and we explain why the experience you provide your employees is just as critical as the one you want to deliver to customers. With special guest, Michael Lowenstein, author of Employee Ambassadorship and Beyond Philosophy’s employee engagement expert, we explore how your Employee Experience contributes to how customers feel about your company and why you should design one that is complementary with your Customer Experience strategy.

The question is, how do you get happy employees? The answer is harder to do than it is to answer: To get happy employees, you must design an experience that makes them feel emotion toward your organization that drives value for you. In other words, your Employee Experience strategy is to create one that makes it possible to deliver the Customer Experience you want.

Lowenstein, who instructs on this concept, explains that with the Employee Experience, you have to understand the emotional bits of it the same way you do a Customer Experience. Then, you can determine how they link with the emotional components of the Customer Experience you have designed. When you get these parts aligned, your employees feel an emotional bond with your company, a commitment to the value proposition of your organization, and a strong sense of duty to deliver on it for customers.

In our global Customer Experience Consultancy, we see the most opportunity in this alignment of the emotional components. Many companies do an excellent job of this. However, the majority do not, and many have a long, long way to go in this effort to provide an exceptional Employee Experience.

For most companies, the issues stem from the following problems:

1. Lack of commitment: It is difficult to put the customer first and improve the employee experience at the same time. It takes time, energy, and resources, which can be in short supply for most companies.
2. Management oblivion: Sometimes, the people in charge are too far removed from the day-to-day to recognize the issues with their teams’ experience.
3. Incentivizing the wrong things: That which gets incented gets done. When you reward other initiatives, you do not emphasize the proper actions that support improving the experiences for employees or customers.

It is all about human behavior. The same principles apply with employees as they do with customers. You must treat them with the same eye for detail and with a focus on evoking the proper emotions.

Listen to the podcast in its entirety to learn more about how you can create an Employee Experience that promotes the environment necessary to deliver the Customer Experience you want.

The Intuitive Customer podcasts are designed to explain the psychological concepts behind customer behavior.

If you would like to find out from one of our CX consultants how you can implement the concepts we discussed in your organization’s marketing to improve customer loyalty and retention, contact us at www.beyondphilosophy.com.

To subscribe to The Intuitive Customer and never miss a podcast, please click here.

Why Are We Scared of New Technology?

We have some exciting new technology for CX. Facial recognition technology and facial expression analysis yield some new and exciting data about how customers feel during a Customer Experience. The only problem is that many people find it creepy.

This episode of The Intuitive Customer asks the question Why Are We Scared of New Technology? It turns out, we have been here before with new technology. Of course, that time, it was something far more crazy than recording facial expressions and using software to determine how a person feels.

What was this crazy technology? It was trains.

According to mentalfloss.com, some people believed back when the first trains were running that if women traveled over 50 mph, their uteruses would fly out of their bodies. Other people thought humans would just melt.

Luckily, neither prediction came to pass. Now we travel at hundreds of miles an hour with no concern for melting or reproductive organs flying out of anyone.

In other words, we got used to the idea of riding trains and other transport at high rates of speed, and we don’t worry anymore.

I believe the same pattern of fearing technology and then getting used to it will be valid for facial recognition and facial expression analysis technology also. However, before we get into it any deeper, we should clarify the difference between the two technologies.

• Facial Recognition: Uses your facial features to identify who you are.
• Facial Expression Analysis: Uses your facial expression to identify how you feel.

In both technologies, the software records the spatial relationships of your features and compares them to a database. However, with facial recognition, it’s a database of people’s identities. With facial expression analysis, it’s a database of unconscious reactions our face makes in response to how we feel, e.g., dilation of the pupils or a widening of the eyes, tightness around the mouth, etc.

There are excellent applications for this technology for Customer Experience strategy and design. As global customer loyalty consultants, we believe knowing how your customers feel at the different moments of their interaction with your organization is invaluable when you are seeking to foster customer retention. Best of all, you don’t have to ask them about it, which can introduce some other influences that may or may not skew the data.

However, we have also learned that many don’t like the idea that cameras are recording their reactions and analyzing their unconscious reactions to how something makes them feel.

Facial recognition and facial expression analysis is the future of research for Customer Experience. I think we can get over this creepy factor and embrace the technology for our industry. Also, before too long, I believe we will wonder how we ever lived without it.

Listen to the podcast in its entirety to learn more about Why We Are Scared of New Technology for your Customer Experience.

The Intuitive Customer podcasts are designed to explain the psychological concepts behind customer behavior.

If you would like to find out from one of our CX consultants how you can implement the concepts we discussed in your organization’s marketing to improve customer loyalty and retention, contact us at www.beyondphilosophy.com.

To subscribe to The Intuitive Customer and never miss a podcast, please click here.

We can be grumpy about the restaurant experience. This self-awareness is key, especially when we realize that our behavior closely resembles the behavior of two grouchy Muppets heckling Kermit and Fozzie from the balcony.

However, it’s easy to see that every business can learn from restaurants that bungle these moments of the experience.

We are aware this episode is a grumpy rant. Moreover, not everyone will agree with the things that we think restaurants do wrong. What drives us mad could be the very thing you love most. However, the fact we differ on these points demonstrates a critical overarching theme of this podcast: segmentation matters, and accommodation is key to deliver an excellent experience.

Restaurants that choose to ignore these criticisms have a right to do so. Moreover, if they prefer to cater to a specific segment of customer that prefers the way they do things, that is their prerogative. Some restaurants have been extremely successful by doing this and we do not fault them for it. We don’t eat there either, but that’s beside the point.

In this episode, what we hope to achieve by airing our grievances is to point out how these moments in the restaurant experience demonstrate moments that every experience design could have. For your business vertical, whatever it may be, we hope that the common experiences of dining out—or ordering to go—help illustrate these concepts and help you improve your experience.

Plus, it sometimes feels good to complain.

Here are some other key moments in the discussion:

• 03:41 Colin kicks off the complaints by pointing out that some restaurants do not understand the business they are in, and therefore, do not send the right signals with their experience.
• 06:39 Ryan describes a restaurant experience that could use a little spruce up in the post-pandemic takeout vs. dine in experience.
• 11:32 We discuss the importance of managing the key interactions in an experience by properly training the team to put customers first so people remember that experiences can be time well-spent.
• 16:29 We remind our listeners that the little things add up and can burn you in the customer’s evaluation of how you did at the end of the experience.
• 19:17 Colin refers to an article out of Cornell that explains how what restaurants leave off the menu cause customers to spend more than they would have thought.
• 24:30 We summarize what we would change about these things that drive us mad at restaurants and that you can apply to your experience, too.

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