The Intuitive Customer - Helping You Improve Your Customer Experience To Gain Growth - 7 Books That Changed Our Lives, Will They Change Yours? - Essential Summer Reading

7 Books That Changed Our Lives, Will They Change Yours? - Essential Summer Reading

06/26/21 • 27 min

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

It’s summertime. Do you know what that means? That’s right. It’s time for your summer reading list. I bet you thought you were too old for such things.

In this episode, we share 7 essential books for any Customer Experience professional to read, ideally in a tropical locale with a fruity drink in hand.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

From books on Customer Experience to books about psychology to 1990s bestselling business books, we have a wide variety of reading material for Customer Experience professionals. These books will help you understand why customer behavior is the way it is and how you can help move that behavior to a place that delivers customer-driven growth. Best of all, we save the best for last.

Here are the 7 books we think you should read this summer:

The Experience Economy: Competing for Customer Time, Attention, and Money by B. Joseph Pine and James H. Gilmore
The End of Average How We Succeed in a World That Values Sameness by Todd Rose
Who Moved My Cheese? By Dr. Spencer Johnson
Uncontrolled: The Surprising Payoff of Trial and Error for Business, Politics, and Society by Jim Manzi
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey
The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success by Megan McArdle
The Intuitive Customer: 7 Imperatives for Moving Your Customer Experience to the Next Level by Colin Shaw and Ryan Hamilton

See what we did there?

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

02:56 Colin introduces his first book, The Experience Economy cowritten by Joe Pine, a recent guest on the podcast from a few weeks back.
05:05 Ryan introduces his first book, The End of Average, and explained the basic idea of the book and the implications for Customer Experience.
06:53 Colin recommends Who Moved My Cheese?, a 90s bestseller that changed his life by urging him to start his own global Customer Experience Consultancy.
12:54 Ryan shares a book called Uncontrolled, a book that emphasizes the importance of experimentation.
17:15 Colin gives a brief summary of the seven habits shared in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
22:19. Ryan suggests The Up Side of Down, which shares the idea that failure is critical to growth and lessons learned from failure can lead to future successes.
24:40. We save the best for last with The Intuitive Customer, our book that explores the 7 imperatives for taking your experience to a new level of greatness.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on Linkedin and Twitter.

It’s summertime. Do you know what that means? That’s right. It’s time for your summer reading list. I bet you thought you were too old for such things.

In this episode, we share 7 essential books for any Customer Experience professional to read, ideally in a tropical locale with a fruity drink in hand.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

Here are the 7 books we think you should read this summer:

The Experience Economy: Competing for Customer Time, Attention, and Money by B. Joseph Pine and James H. Gilmore
The End of Average How We Succeed in a World That Values Sameness by Todd Rose
Who Moved My Cheese? By Dr. Spencer Johnson
Uncontrolled: The Surprising Payoff of Trial and Error for Business, Politics, and Society by Jim Manzi
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey
The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success by Megan McArdle
The Intuitive Customer: 7 Imperatives for Moving Your Customer Experience to the Next Level by Colin Shaw and Ryan Hamilton

See what we did there?

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

02:56 Colin introduces his first book, The Experience Economy cowritten by Joe Pine, a recent guest on the podcast from a few weeks back.
05:05 Ryan introduces his first book, The End of Average, and explained the basic idea of the book and the implications for Customer Experience.
06:53 Colin recommends Who Moved My Cheese?, a 90s bestseller that changed his life by urging him to start his own global Customer Experience Consultancy.
12:54 Ryan shares a book called Uncontrolled, a book that emphasizes the importance of experimentation.
17:15 Colin gives a brief summary of the seven habits shared in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
22:19. Ryan suggests The Up Side of Down, which shares the idea that failure is critical to growth and lessons learned from failure can lead to future successes.
24:40. We save the best for last with The Intuitive Customer, our book that explores the 7 imperatives for taking your experience to a new level of greatness.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

Previous Episode

5 Rules For Ensuring Behavioral Science Works For Your Business

A lot of the behavioral sciences can feel intimidating. However, it doesn’t have to be. The Five Rules Podcast Series is our attempt at giving you an easy entry point into the complex and messy world of Behavioral Science.

The concepts behind behavioral science are powerful stuff. The psychology that drives how people make decisions has far-reaching and critical influences on how people act as customers.

We often hear about small changes that make a big difference on the outcome when you read about the experiments that prove the theories the science produces. However, the theories that play out in an experiment do not always have the same outcome in the real world. Sometimes, the behavioral science works fine, but isn’t as dramatic as the study you read about it. In the worst examples, behavioral science concepts don’t work at all.

In this episode, we explore the 5 rules that will help you set up your business for success in the implementation of the concepts theorized in behavioral science. We love the effects possible using behavioral science in Customer Experience, especially when they, well, work.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

Learning about behavioral science is engaging, fun even. However, implementing experience improvements using the theories you enjoyed learning about can be less fun and even a little frustrating if you aren’t getting the results you wanted. The following five rules will help you set up your behavioral-science-inspired Customer Experience design implementation for success:

Focus on the goals or problems to be solved rather than applying the theory. You must know what you are fixing to pick the appropriate tool to do the job, which was the subject of another podcast a few weeks ago, “Is This One of the Most Important Jobs in Business Today?”
Get granular. Behavioral science doesn’t work in general; it works in specifics.
Identify your levers. Determine what parts of the experience are under your control and concentrate your efforts there.
Identify your customers' mindset. Recreating the situation where your customer decides what to buy (and what not to) is essential to effectively applying the behavioral sciences.
Iterate. Behavioral science’s influence on customers works best when fine-tuned over time and measured for success.

Here are some highlights of the discussion:

03:46 Ryan presents how the way we learn behavioral science affects how we want to implement it.
07:26 We discuss the essential nature of getting specific with your actions using behavioral science concepts to drive behavior.
10:40 Colin discusses how people like things in threes, sevens, and so on, and Ryan explains how research has shown that people converge on specific numbers of items.
13:59 Ryan reminds businesses to focus on what they can control when implementing behavioral sciences; Colin explains that the way you manage it should be deliberate.
18:35 We discuss how essential it is to understand your customers’ mindsets when designing your experience and why.
25:05 We explain the importance of fine-tuning your efforts, even after implementation, and why you should measure your results.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is the Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on Linkedin and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving...

Next Episode

Is Outsourcing Your Customer Experience Really A Good Idea or Just Wrong?

Maybe it’s a towing service. Perhaps you use an interior designer. It could be that you needed to outsource your call center. Whatever the reason may be, you have outsourced part of your Customer Experience.

There is an inherent risk involved, of course, if there are problems. After all, customers do not distinguish between the part of the experience you provide and the part your third-party does. To customers, it’s all one experience and any problems that happen along the way, whether they were under your control or not, reflect upon your brand. However, by bringing in these additional resources the third-party company provides, you also have created an end-to-end experience that makes it easy for your customers to do business with you.

The question is, was outsourcing that part of your experience really a good idea or a big mistake? In this episode we answer that question and give you some actionable steps to manage your third-party partners.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

This episode has some examples of what we mean by third party partners and how they fit into an experience. We also explore the pros and cons of outsourcing part of your Customer Experience. Finally, we discuss different ways you can mitigate your risk and manage customer expectations to the best possible outcome for your experience.

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

03:20 Ryan shares a story about his friend and her troubles with a trampoline installation.
06:21 For the first time EVER in the podcast, Colin complains a bit about an experience he had with Apple.
07:40 We explain that how you position the third-party’s role in your experience might create some separation for the two parts in your customers’ mind.
09:58 We explain how companies can’t contract out part of the experience and then walk away from their responsibility for it.
12:22 Colin shares a story where a hotel saw their airport shuttle service like it was a favor and he saw it as a failed part of their experience, and why that happens.
15:56 Colin shares a term he learned from BMW when writing his first book, “Only-ers” and why you shouldn’t have them in your company.
19:58 Ryan explains how big companies can sometimes make customers feel like they are dealing with a third-party company if they don’t improve the customer journey between departments.
26:42 We share our advice and actionable items to help you manage the parts of your experience you might have outsourced.

Please tell us how we are doing! Complete this short survey.

Customer Experience Information & Resources

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers.

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.