You might not realize it but the failure of the European Super League in soccer, the pros and cons of vaccine passports, and a brand that took a political stand and paid the price for it all have something in common. These things are part of three news stories that can provide insight into improving your Customer Experience. So how do they provide insight? Like you can learn from other people's experiences, you can learn from other people's mistakes. Either way, it offers an opportunity for vica...
Jun 12, 2021•31 min
Pricing strategy on its face doesn’t seem complicated. The goal is to get as high a price as you can to ensure you have enough margin to make a profit, while also moving inventory at a sufficient rate. So, the strategy is often to move the price around until you find the sweet spot that hits all these metrics. However, like most things that have to do with customer behavior, it isn’t as simple as that. There are other variables that can affect your pricing strategy success, and understanding the...
Jun 05, 2021•29 min
When I was unsubscribing to a service online, I encountered some resistance. My unsubscribing experience included a detailed accounting of all the features to which I would no long have access—in bold, red typeface. It also featured a checklist where I had to acknowledge one-by-one all the benefits I was forfeiting. It was a wonderful example of a company that takes advantage of the effects of Loss Aversion. Loss Aversion is part of the bigger concept of Prospect Theory, first introduced nearly ...
May 29, 2021•26 min
In the early days of my career, I thought the customer was always right. The idea that one should fire a customer sometimes would have sounded like madness to me. However, as I have matured over the following four decades, I learned that sometimes the customer is not right. Sometimes they are really, really wrong, from how they abuse your systems to how they tax your resources to how they talk to employees. You should fire customers in these cases. This episode explores the situations where it i...
May 22, 2021•29 min
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. There is a common misconception in organizations that their business customers buy rationally. However, these same organizations also think that their business is built on relationships. This dichotomy comes from a misunderstanding about business customers: they have emotional...
May 15, 2021•31 min
People lie. I have done it. You have done it. Even your customers have done it. From little white lies that don’t cause any real damage to great big deceptions with serious repercussions for all involved, lies are a fact of life. While the scope of the lying is different, the aim is the same: avoiding the truth. You are avoiding the truth about your plans for the evening when you tell your friends you can’t meet them in the pub because you are busy and you are really going home to watch Netflix....
May 08, 2021•30 min
A massive gap exists. It widens every second between what customers expect and what many organizations can provide as we come out of the COVID-19 pandemic. If companies don't figure out what the future of their experience looks like pretty quickly, they face the grim reality that they will be watching from across a chasm as their profits and customer-driven growth fall into it in 2021. Verint, the voice of customer experts for over 25 years, has recent research from respondents worldwide and acr...
May 01, 2021•38 min
Guess what? We got a suggestion from a listener—and we took it. He asked us if we had any advice for businesses with a small budget on how to use concepts from the behavioral sciences to improve moments in their Customer Experience. We created a fictional restaurant called Hamilton’s Fine Dining, which, you can imagine, had no budget at all for Customer Experience Design. Then, we talked about what we would do if our fake restaurant was really in need of improvement. This episode explores the wa...
Apr 24, 2021•31 min
Brands have a problem sometimes. They get stuck and lose momentum and the ability to respond to changes in the market. Over time that can result in a loss of relevancy to their customers and an inability to keep their customers. Moreover, they lose out on forming solid relationships with customers that allow brands to enjoy the benefits of customer-driven growth. In this episode, we speak with Jason Ten-Pow , President of ONR CX and author of the new book UNBREAKABLE: A proven process for buildi...
Apr 21, 2021•30 min
New Podcast Series: The 10 Most Effective Ways to Influence Your Customer Behavior All of us have two systems of thinking that drive our decision making. One is rational and logical, and the other is fast and emotional. There have been many labels for these two systems over the years, but the ones we use are the Rational System and the Intuitive System. These two ways of thinking help us make decisions. However, these two systems do not always agree on the decision we should make. For example, I...
Apr 17, 2021•29 min
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. Before I founded Beyond Philosophy, I worked in corporate life. I was neck deep in company politics there, too. I learned that navigating through them was tricky and that there was a surprising lack of literature on how to do it better. Back then, there were fewer books on suc...
Apr 10, 2021•26 min
Throughout human history, it seems that around 150 is the number of meaningful relationships any human can maintain. Oxford University's anthropology professor Robin Dunbar discovered this number by studying monkey groups and extrapolating that number to match the human brain's capacity. Understanding why this is can help you optimize your ability to manage your team, your business, and even your social media feed. In this episode, we discuss Dunbar's number and its implications for our personal...
Apr 03, 2021•26 min
What do the song “Fine Line” by Hootie and the Blowfish and the scent of air conditioning have in common? They are two things my family associates with taking holidays in the US. Once they hear the song or walk into an air-conditioned building, they are transported to our family trips in the US when they were young. However, these examples also represent critical areas for your Customer Experience design. Sound and Smell are an area often overlooked by organizations when it comes to the details ...
Mar 27, 2021•40 min
You might be surprised to learn that when golf courses make less revenue, Disney World's attendance goes up. You might also find it weird that Mississippi's marriage rate correlates 99.3% with the US per capita consumption of whole milk. Perhaps most shocking is the fact that more people die of fire, smoke, and flames in years when Nick Cage is in fewer movies. All of these are 100 percent true. Why do you think that is? If you just tried to think of the answer, congratulations! You are human. A...
Mar 20, 2021•33 min
Ep 178 5 Rules for Making Customers Feel ‘Cared For’ and ‘Valued’ 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. We know that the most significant influence on a Customer Experience outcome is how a customer feels about it, for good or ill. Therefore, it is essential that you are deliberate about which specific emotion you...
Mar 13, 2021•28 min
In the UK, there is a lot of talk about how to come out of the pandemic stay-at-home orders now that more people have been vaccinated. The idea of a vaccine passport has been circulating, which would allow those that are vaccinated to do things unvaccinated people cannot. However, some think that vaccine passports are discriminatory, particularly as it pertains to getting a job. The idea of vaccine passports certainly gives you a lot to think about for your Customer Experience, and is also excel...
Mar 06, 2021•29 min
We often hear requests for the best practices in Customer Experience. We understand why, too. Who wants to endure trial and error if there is a tried and true idea guaranteed to get results? However, no tried and true idea always gets results. Instead, there are only expert opinions served as advice about what has worked in the past. These are often the “best practices.” We argue that best practices, no matter how solid a suggestion they are, could use a bit of challenge and a dose of skepticism...
Feb 27, 2021•26 min
Way back in 1998, I read a book by Joe Pine (@joepine), co-founder of Strategic Horizons, LLP, and Jim Gilmore called The Experience Economy. I was gobsmacked by it. I dashed down the hall to my boss at British Telecom. He read it and had a similar reaction to mine. The next thing I knew, he put me in charge of improving the Customer Experience for our company, and the rest is history. You could say that Joe Pine changed my life. His insight into how the experience would be vital to business tod...
Feb 20, 2021•32 min
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. Customers buy habitually, and that’s great when their habit is to buy from you. The problem is sometimes they aren’t buying habitually from you, but instead from your competition. Changing customer habits is essential in this case, and requires a deep understanding of why cust...
Feb 13, 2021•34 min
In job descriptions and resumes, there are new required skills for candidate’s resumes in Behavioral Science. These jobs might be the most important new jobs in business today. But why? Behavioral science and the scientists that use it will tell you that understanding the “why” of what customers do has become table stakes in some industries today. In this episode of The Intuitive Customer, we discuss with two behavioral scientists their job descriptions, what they actually do, and what they wish...
Feb 06, 2021•39 min
You have only half a second to make an excellent first impression with your customers with your digital experience. Per the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department at Harvard , most people form a first impression of a website in 500 milliseconds. So, the question is whether you are proud or concerned about your digital experience after hearing this stat? This episode explores the science behind how people form first impressions of digital experience and some of the ways you can us...
Jan 30, 2021•27 min
We recently spoke to Customer Experience experts who shared an interesting insight. They all say they wish people understood that there was no one thing to do, no silver-bullet-solution for Customer Experience. We couldn’t agree more. We believe that the best way to improve Customer Experiences is to do a lot of little things that add up to significant improvements. In other words, there is no one thing, but many things that you should do to improve your Customer Experience in 2021. One of the c...
Jan 23, 2021•28 min
No matter what business you are in, the best way to connect with your customers is through the experience you provide them. However, connecting requires knowing what customers want, and today, that isn’t the same as it was 20 years ago. The Experience Economy dictates that people value experiences over material things these days. In addition to knowing what customers want, wouldn’t it also be great to know what works in Customer Experience Management? Wouldn’t it be even better to know what does...
Jan 16, 2021•34 min
Vital for 2021 - Digital Nudging Will Revolutionize Your CX Whether you realize it or not—and even if you don’t know what they are—you use Digital Nudges in your online experience today. Digital Nudges are the interactions you have with customers online in your experience that inspire their actions. Every online experience has them, but not all of them are deliberate. In this episode of the podcast, we are going to take a closer look at what Digital Nudges are, how they work, and why, and share ...
Jan 09, 2021•31 min
There's light at the end of the tunnel! - Re-imagine your customer experience! There was a time when we thought this moment would never come, but we are almost there. As vaccines roll out worldwide for the SARS-CoV-2 virus, we can see the light at the end of the pandemic tunnel. This unique situation provides an unprecedented opportunity to reimagine your Customer Experience to respond to how the pandemic has changed customer behavior. Key Ideas to Improve Your Customer Experience In this episod...
Jan 02, 2021•27 min
This is the Most Significant Thing We Learned in 2020! Like many people, we are not sad to see the year 2020 slip into the past. We look to ringing in the new year with happy anticipation of better things to come. With a vaccine headed to us all and a new appreciation for what we share when things are “normal,” we are all practically giddy at the prospect of sending this year off to the annals of history. However, even a year as challenging as this one presents new insights and opportunities for...
Dec 26, 2020•25 min
Designing Country Culture into Your Global Experience A dull and awkward presentation in Singapore many years ago taught me an important life lesson: One must know the local culture when presenting an experience to people to evoke the desired response. In this case, I didn't realize it was going to be different to presenting in the USA or UK. So, I kept asking for audience participation like I usually do and hearing crickets in response. It was a long morning. Many organizations with a global pr...
Dec 19, 2020•24 min
If the Stress Is Becoming Intolerable, This is What to Do If there is one thing 2020 has given all of us, it's a lot of stress. Coping and managing stress is a skill leaders need to relieve the pressure in their lives and help employees manage their stress so they don't pass it on to customers. I often say, Happy Employees Make Happy Customers, which is also the title of my latest book. However, happy employees are not stressed out, making managing stress a priority for today's leaders. However,...
Dec 12, 2020•35 min
The Five Rules for Measuring and Managing Customer Emotions 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. Ignoring emotion in your Customer Experience strategy is a big mistake and one you can’t afford to make. Emotions are a significant influence on customer behavior with implications for your customer retention, custome...
Dec 05, 2020•30 min
Retail is Broken: This is the Solution Some might say that retail is dead, another victim of COVID-19. However, I would argue that it is merely changing but far from finished. The pandemic has hastened changes to physical and digital retail experiences and customer behavior. Still, organizations that recognize and anticipate the shift can adapt and benefit from the new business-as-usual. Key Ideas to Improve Your Customer Experience There are both theoretical reasons and practical reasons why cu...
Nov 28, 2020•32 min
