Understanding Human Behavior During the Pandemic, and What to Do About it Let us begin by wishing you all our best during these unprecedented times. We hope that you and your family are all safe and sound, and novel coronavirus-free. While no one knows what to expect, we are all in this together. The pandemic has shown how uncertainty can affect human behavior. This episode of the Intuitive Customer explains why, how it makes us feel, and what we can do about it for ourselves and our customers o...
Apr 25, 2020•31 min
There is a lovely mirror leaning against the wall in my garage in England. My wife thinks we should sell it. I think we should give it away, to which my wife tut-tuts. She argues it is a beautiful mirror and believes it will fetch a handsome sum on the Internet. I disagree. So, the mirror sits there, ignored for the time being, and not selling, and I hold the Endowment Effect fully responsible. The Endowment Effect explains how we value our possessions more highly than others do because they are...
Apr 18, 2020•30 min
I don't know if it's age talking here, but it probably is. Life becomes a lot clearer as you go on. I am at the point where I feel comfortable telling you what I think. In this episode of The Intuitive Customer, I am going to tell you about seven mistakes organizations make while trying to gain growth in revenue or market share.
Apr 11, 2020•28 min
Loss Aversion teaches us that people like to gain things, but that they like hanging on to what they have even more and feel losses much more profoundly than gains. So, you would think that effective policy to reduce disposable bag usage by charging a surcharge for a grocery bag would tap into these feelings. Not so fast. New research reveals that Loss Aversion is not the reason for the grocery bag surcharge’s success. In this episode of The Intuitive Customer, our guest host Alicea “Allie” Lieb...
Apr 04, 2020•31 min
What You Should Learn from Apple’s Outstanding Experience I am a huge fan of Apple products. If there were already a waiting list for the next iPhone, I would be on it. For me, buying Apple products is emotional, intuitive, and automatic—all the things a brands needs to foster customer-driven growth. Apple is excellent at incorporating principles of behavioral economics and psychology that are hugely influential on customer behavior in all the right ways. This episode of The Intuitive Customer e...
Mar 28, 2020•34 min
A global pandemic wasn’t in your plans this quarter. However, we see an opportunity to enhance your relationships with customers in this global crisis. In this episode of The Intuitive Customer, we share ten strategies for managing the uncertainty surrounding COVID-19. Our practical tips help you manage the stress and anxiety at your front lines to the best possible outcome. Our approach will bring you closer to your customers at a time when world leaders are calling for social distancing as the...
Mar 21, 2020•24 min
Shark attacks have overblown importance compared to how often they occur. But since TV and movies have made so much of these rare, and rarely fatal events, we are sure we will be the next victim. These unlikely worries are the result of a psychological phenomenon called the Availability Heuristic. This episode of the Intuitive Customer explores the Availability Heuristic and how it can help your brand promote customer-driven growth. Turns out, being available is a more significant influence than...
Mar 18, 2020•23 min
You all want growth, don’t know what to prioritize to get it, and aren’t nearly worried enough about the disruption AI will have on your industry. At least, that’s what our research late last year told us. This episode of The Intuitive Customer reveals the trends we identified in our research late last year. While some of it was what we expected to hear, a few trends left us gobsmacked. Hear what we learned. We also share advice for understanding customer behavior to drive customer-driven growth...
Mar 16, 2020•28 min
We all misjudge other people’s motivations at times. The academic term for it is a Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE). An FAE describes how we misinterpret our limitations and the motivations of others and how we mistakenly attribute successes and failures for ourselves and others. This episode of The Intuitive Customer explores FAEs’ effects on customer-driven growth. Understanding customer behavior avoids FAEs so you can manage the Customer Experience to a profitable place....
Mar 07, 2020•29 min
Research in Harvard Business Review last year suggested that some companies with poor customer service are terrible on purpose to wear out disgruntled customers so they don’t have to fix customer problems. Moreover, the HBR authors suggest that this method makes these organizations more profitable. This episode of The Intuitive Customer explores this idea in more detail. We discuss businesses that might benefit from this strategy, and which ones would not. Find out which group you belong to and ...
Feb 29, 2020•27 min•Ep. 118
Where AI Meets CX: The Remarkable Future for Humanizing Brands Artificial Intelligence (AI) will transform the customer experience in many ways in the coming years. One area that we see interesting applications of AI Technology is the brand personification and social media management. This new way of creating meaningful interactions with your customers will build emotional engagement with your company, even though the entity doing it is not a human being. Brand personification is a fundamental p...
Feb 22, 2020•27 min
Social media has changed many things about our lives. Not only can we have a blow by blow account of what our friends and family are up to, but we can also see what they had for dinner. We can even see what friends of our friends had for dinner. One of the other ways social media changed our lives is in how we interact with brands. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter gave us direct access to brands in a way we hadn’t had before. However, it also gave them direct access to us. Convers...
Feb 15, 2020•24 min
This is The New Imperative for 2020 Our global Customer Experience consultancy engaged research at the end of 2019 to determine our direction for the next decade. We learned that, first and foremost, organizations want to gain growth. So, we have a new focus for 2020, helping organizations achieve the growth they want by assisting them in providing the Customer Experience they need to do so. Growth is challenging today. Competition is intense due to many factors. One critical reason is that the ...
Feb 08, 2020•29 min
Discover This Powerful Marketing Technique to Gain Growth How you present information has a significant effect on how your customers perceive the message. It’s no secret; it’s why there are marketing departments. However, what is fascinating is that when we present information, we can take advantage of things that shouldn’t matter when you think about them rationally, but that do matter quite a bit when it comes to customer-driven growth. For example, if I were to tell you Forrester, a global re...
Feb 03, 2020•25 min
The Secret of Pricing Academia has a problem with names. They are not always, well, intuitive. Hyperbolic Discounting is an excellent example of a pertinent business area disguised in a difficult-to-interpret label. Hyperbolic Discounting does not mean what you might think. If you take a look at the words in the name, you probably imagine it means embellished markdowns. However, Hyperbolic Discounting is a vital psychological concept that influences your customer’s behavior and could be getting ...
Jan 25, 2020•26 min
How AI will Change CX for the Future Customer loyalty is what most businesses want. The more your customers buy from you, the more you improve your bottom line, not only in increased sales but also in decreased customer acquisition costs. Improving your Customer Experience to foster customer loyalty is often an expense that senior management can get behind. However, there is a common misconception that customers are loyal to you based on the Customer Experience you deliver. The truth is that cus...
Jan 22, 2020•27 min
1 in 4 Will Lose Their Job in 2020 At the end of 2019, global research firm Forrester predicted that 1 in 4 Customer Experience jobs will be cut in 2020. While we find this prediction grim, we do not disagree. We believe that this reality has been on the horizon for some time now. There are many reasons why it has come to this point. One of the most significant is a misconception about what Customer Experience is and how it affects the bottom line. Customer Experience requires an investment in t...
Jan 18, 2020•29 min
If I asked you for $100, what would you say? My guess is no. You probably have a rule against giving people money just because they asked you. But what if I asked you for $1? Most of us would probably be okay with that. Sure, it’s still giving money, but it’s only $1, and that isn’t the same thing. However, by saying yes to giving me $1, you broke your rule about giving people money just because they asked you. It’s not a big deal, of course, but it does make it more likely that if I came back a...
Jan 11, 2020•27 min
How to Ensure You Make Good Decisions I am an Apple Superfan. As a loyal customer, I notice all the positive moments in my Customer Experience with them. They reinforce that my brand is the best and buying from them was a good decision. Moreover, if I ever see an article that is negative about Apple, or positive about a competitor of Apple, I don’t believe it or, worse, don’t read it. I don’t trust that it will be accurate, useful, or trustworthy to listen to that garbage. My customer behavior h...
Jan 04, 2020•26 min
The Biggest Thing We Learned in 2019 If there is one thing we have learned in 2019, it is that customers give us a lot to think about regarding their behavior. How they behave and why are fascinating topics and one that has much influence on our Customer Experience outcomes. As we embark on a new year and a new decade, it is an excellent time to reflect on what we have learned and what made the most significant impact on us regarding customer retention and loyalty. For example, one concept about...
Dec 28, 2019•22 min
What is Important in 2020? Yogi Berra, the New York Yankees Coach once said, “Predictions are hard, especially about the future.” Predictions can be difficult; it is true. However, they can also be helpful, especially if you are trying to plan for a new year. I have been in the Customer Experience industry since before there was such a thing. When I founded Beyond Philosophy back in 2002, no one was talking about Customer Experience. Then, things changed, and over the next decade, it changed fro...
Dec 21, 2019•23 min
Why the Strength of Customer’s Emotion is Critical Customers’ emotions are a critical part of Customer Experience. Our research shows that over 50 percent of a Customer Experience is about customer emotions. Furthermore, we know that emotion drives customer behavior. Having awareness of what emotions your experience evokes when and why is critical to your Customer Experience Outcome. However, did you know that in addition to being aware of the what, when, and why of customer emotions, you should...
Dec 14, 2019•28 min
Does Giving Gifts Mean More Business? It is the season of giving. No doubt, many of you sent out your gifts to your clients, suppliers, and other business associates already. But will your gifts result in more business? They might, and they might not. Like most things about interpersonal relationships, it depends on a lot of different variables. Researchers study gift giving and have for many years. In the beginning, it was considered a Sociology area, which suggested that gift-giving was primar...
Dec 11, 2019•30 min
Psychology has a lot of influence on customer behavior. When it comes to making decisions, we like to find ways to make them more manageable. Anchoring and Adjustment is a mental short cut or heuristic. We use to help evaluate numbers. Anchoring and Adjustment help us generate numbers. It works like this: First, there is a base number established either by the individual or an outside influence. Then, you adjust up or down from there. It helps simplify decision making. For example, if you needed...
Dec 07, 2019•31 min
The 7 Telltale Signs of a Company NOT Committed to Customers I discovered many years ago that I could determine whether a company was committed to customers pretty quickly. When I thought about how I recognized it, I found that organizations that did not commit to customers had some shared company culture cues that indicated where their focus was. The ideas behind this discovery later became my second book, Revolutionize Your Customer Experience . I developed for the book my Native to Natural™ m...
Nov 30, 2019•26 min
What is Really Happening on Black Friday? It’s that time of year again: Black Friday sales are next week. A US tradition, Black Friday was named for the idea that it is the day retailers finally move out of the red for the year and into the black of profits. It is also the official kickoff of the holiday shopping season. However, what is really going on here? Why do people trample through the doors of a retailer they likely frequent three times a week most months mere hours after polishing off f...
Nov 23, 2019•22 min
Marketing Yourself We usually talk about how you should use the principles of brand management to deliver excellent Customer Experience. However, brand management is an essential part of your job search, as well. In other words, marketing your Customer Experience has given you everything you need to know about selling yourself. Moreover, it has taught you all you need to know about improving your experience as a person. For example, one of the first things you do in a job search is to determine ...
Nov 20, 2019•28 min
Tribalism: Are You In with The In-Crowd? As humans, the need to belong is essential to us. Most of us have a deep need to feel we are part of a broader community that shares our values and interests. In other words, we need to find our tribe. Tribes are connections between people that form communities, which can be formal or informal. Sometimes tribes are associated with where you were born and from whom, which are the formal types of tribes. However, they can also be the result of where you sho...
Nov 16, 2019•27 min
People know an expensive brand when they see one. They also can spot a discount retailer at fifteen paces. So, why do they get it wrong so often? They get it wrong because of a concept called Price Image. Price Image is a concept that describes how people form impressions about whether your brand is high- or low-priced based on many non-price indicators. These ideas have a lot of influence on customer behavior. However, the Price Image is different from actual prices. Instead, Price Image is mor...
Nov 09, 2019•28 min
Are We Talking Ourselves Into a Recession You hear it all the time on financial media. “Consumer Confidence is low.” It describes how people think that something terrible is going to happen to the economy, and it affects their spending behavior. Confidence is a feeling, not a fact or a physical item. However, this emotional reaction has serious implications on the economy, as well as your bottom line. Not only is consumer confidence an emotional concept, but it is also contagious. Sometimes havi...
Nov 02, 2019•23 min
