Podcast Summary 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. 5 Rules for Effective Customer Research That Make A Difference Customer research is an essential part of any organization’s customer strategy. However, it requires more than emailing a customer survey out over seven years or so. Customer research requires a few...
Jun 18, 2022•32 min
We have another business pickle to address. This time it’s with Christine Jones who is having problem with her organization not taking customer complaints or the Voice of Customer program seriously. We have been there. Ryan once worked at a grocery store that had a suggestion box that he never once in all the years he worked there saw opened. He suspects that no one even had the key anymore. Colin’s corporate employer engaged in a pricey customer survey every year, listened to the results, inclu...
Jun 11, 2022•33 min
Your Customers Want Self-Service, and Here’s What You Need to Know about Why You bend over backwards to provide helpful customer service. You look for the best team members, with the right attitude and aptitude to take care of your customers in every way. What it means to “take care” of customers is changing. So, while a focus on customer service is a sound and proven strategy, it could be what your customers want most is for your employees to leave them alone. Customers would rather take care o...
Jun 04, 2022•27 min
How do you know if someone trusts you? Is it how they talk to you? How much time do they spend with you? What do they say about you when you aren’t around? We might argue the answer is D, all of the above. Plus, there are many other behaviors people have that indicate they trust you. Moreover, these things are true whether we are talking about people in your personal life or customers on your sales reports. All this talk about trust is because of Bob. As you may remember, some of our listeners w...
May 28, 2022•29 min
The contact center at many organizations doesn’t get the strategic consideration it deserves. My former contact center team at British Telecom seemed to be viewed primarily as a cost center, a necessary expense. As a result, their team was always pressured to streamline staffing, coached to be as efficient as possible with multiple priorities, and designed to generate the least amount of cost. These measures weren’t bad business principles, but they also didn’t send the best signal to the team. ...
May 25, 2022•28 min
Verint is an expert in the Voice of Customer and have been for over 25 years. Their Verint on the Engagement Capacity Gap report is essential reading for experience professionals today. Fleischaker emphasizes the critical nature of ensuring that you don’t overlook Voice of Customer data, which is crucial part, so you can optimize the relevance of the insights you get from it. Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience Here are a few key moments in the discussion: 03:59 08:07 12:51 20:04 21:57...
May 21, 2022•34 min
How many streaming services do you subscribe to? How many products are on Amazon Subscription in your Prime Account? Do you subscribe to satellite radio? How about music streaming? I think you get the point. We subscribe to everything. Subscriptions are as normal today as texting or drinking $6 versions of coffee that we can make for ourselves at home. Subscriptions have a lot of appealing features to customers. In the U.S. Food and Beverage report by Attest, a consumer research platform, we lea...
May 14, 2022•34 min
Customer Science is a vital part of any organization’s future success with their customer experience. The combination of AI, behavioral sciences, and data is a powerful way to gain insight into your customers behavior so you can provide a proactive and perfect experience for them. But how good is the data you are feeding it? And are you feeding ALL your data into the mix? If our experience tells us anything, it’s that you probably aren’t, which can degrade the quality of the insights available t...
May 07, 2022•31 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. Experiments serve as the gold standard for determining causality. If we create them correctly, we know that an action we take makes something else happen and there isn’t any other explanation. That is, if we create them correctly . Even in my corporate career I realized that d...
Apr 30, 2022•32 min
Prices will never be low enough for customers. After all, have you ever got a customer survey back that said you should charge more for your product or service? Have you ever written that yourself as a customer? Of course you haven’t! Who would? As you may remember, some of our listeners write in to our “I’m in a Pickle” feature of the podcast. This week we consult Peter about his business-to-business (B2B) customers that push back on price. Peter’s company is not the cheapest, nor do they have ...
Apr 23, 2022•29 min
A lot of companies get customer segmentation wrong. Or they got it right, but they did it seven years ago. The fact is that if you have customer segments that were constructed before February 2020, you probably need to do it again. Things have changed dramatically over the past couple of years, and the customer behavior shared by your customer segments is one of them. One of the biggest problems that I see in customer segmentation, besides timeliness, is that the categories do not get into why c...
Apr 16, 2022•25 min
Organizations only pay lip service to CX, and now, we have the numbers to prove it. From Zendesk’s The Trends Report 2022 , you can see a clear dichotomy between what people say they will do and what they will actually do regarding CX. You should read the whole report, but for starters, here are some stats I was surprised to learn (or maybe not surprised as much as interested to see it in print): 73% of business leaders reported a direct link between customer service and business performance 56%...
Apr 09, 2022•39 min
A common mistake organizations make with their experience is failing to understand customer expectations. This mistake will lead to customers feeling unhappy and disappointed—two emotions I guarantee won’t contribute to your customer-driven growth. Expectations are a form of Reference Point, which people use to compare and evaluate experiences. The expectations are rational, emotional, and sensory, and are an essential companion for customers as they walk your customer journey, making them essen...
Apr 02, 2022•32 min
The gas pump is probably where it hurts the most right now. Standing there, watching the total spin by, climbing higher than you ever have seen it before brings home the acute pain of today’s inflation rate. Never mind that housing and health care have much higher cost increases over the past decades…that gas price per gallon is hard to take. Inflation has been rising steadily across the board for the past few months. So much so, that experts, who were not concerned in the beginning are starting...
Mar 26, 2022•34 min
Social media has brought us a lot of things, but key among them is the “Influencer.” It means a person that can affect how people think and behave about things related to their area of interest or expertise. We have influencers that can teach us about makeup, sports books, stock picks, customer strategy (ahem) and, of course, wood working. (It’s a thing, I promise). There are many reasons that the idea of an influencer is critical to marketers today. First of all, it is an excellent way to reach...
Mar 19, 2022•33 min
Who do you feel loyal to in your life? My money is on your answer being your friends and family. The reason you feel loyal to them is because you have an emotional relationship with them. They might do things you don’t like sometimes, usually at the holidays, that drive you crazy. However, you don’t sever ties over it. The same emotional connection happens in business relationships. Also, like your personal relationships, they can weather a little bad news without ending them. However, for this ...
Mar 12, 2022•31 min
Ever been channel surfing and see a movie playing on broadcast that you own in your digital personal library and been unexpectedly delighted? Have you ever then watched that movie, commercials and editing and all, even though with very minimal effort you could watch that movie from streaming without any of that stuff? This episode explains why you were so happy to find the movie and why it was better to watch it that way rather than stream it yourself. It’s related to the idea of serendipity, an...
Mar 05, 2022•40 min
Do you know when in your experience customers decide to buy from you or not? You should. Otherwise, how can you design an appropriate environment to get customers to decide to do what you want? It reminds me of the phrase, "Crossing the Rubicon." The Rubicon river was a northern boundary outside Rome in the ancient Roman Empire. The Senate determined if a general crossed the Rubicon with their army, that was grounds for treason. There is a famous story that as Julius Caesar crossed it with his a...
Feb 26, 2022•31 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. Senior executives have risen to their position for many reasons, but one of them is a love for numbers. Executives live by numbers. So, you can’t just have a “really great idea.” It would be best if you had a “really great idea” and an idea of how it will drive numbers for the...
Feb 19, 2022•28 min
The future of customer strategy is providing proactive experiences based on the predicted needs of your customers. The key to unlocking this future is your customer data, particularly the data you have collected about customer behavior. You have most of what you need to predict your customers' next move in your customers' past behavior. This concept is predicated on the idea of Customer Science. As you might recall, Customer Science is the blending of customer data with artificial intelligence a...
Feb 16, 2022•31 min
We celebrated a significant milestone this year. It’s Beyond Philosophy’s 20th anniversary. Not only that, but Financial Times also recognized our company as one of the top management consultancies for the fourth year in a row. It is always gratifying to reach these milestones and enjoy these accolades. However, they didn’t happen by chance. It was lots of trial and error, hard work, passion, and (a little) luck that went into this business. I once heard on the British version of Shark Tank that...
Feb 12, 2022•34 min
Big Data creates big problems. One of the biggest problems is what to do with it now that you have it. Don’t feel too bad if this is true for your company. Most organizations have no idea to use the customer insights they have collected. Moreover, it’s surprising how many organizations can’t tell you how improving metrics identified by the employed measures translates to providing value to the organization. In many ways, measurement is killing your Customer Experience. But there are things you c...
Feb 05, 2022•35 min
One of our listeners in Finland is in a pickle. Anna wants to operationalize journey mapping to make their Customer Experience more customer centric. Perhaps more importantly, she wants these improvements to prove practical and effective rather than viewed as a “soft and fluffy” exercise that is not practical for the organization to continue to support. Anna is not alone in this problem. Similar situations are everywhere in business today. After all, owners and stakeholders in an organization do...
Jan 29, 2022•39 min
I started Beyond Philosophy 20 years ago when Customer Experience was the next big thing; the new concept that was going to change everything in business. The last big thing, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), was old news. After all, everyone had one at that point. Now, in 2022, I see the next big thing: Customer Science. Customer Science combines the power of artificial intelligence (AI), customer data, and the concepts of behavioral science to help organizations create a winning customer...
Jan 22, 2022•28 min
The metaverse. It is supposed to be a digital world. Some say it will combine social media and virtual reality (VR), like a more complex VR chat. Some say it will be the next level of online interaction where anything can happen. Others are confused by what it is and what it means. Some call it Mark Zuckerberg’s pipe dream. We think it is the future of Customer Experiences. Immersive experiences are part of the metaverse, leveraging the power of augmented reality (AR) and VR. While they have to ...
Jan 19, 2022•29 min
Customer satisfaction is low. What’s worse, we can’t just blame COVID for the problem. Sure, COVID is part of it, but, surprisingly, this problem has other causes. Not only that, but a recent report from the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) suggests that only 30 percent of companies tracked by ACSI improved their score—since 2011. That means that 70 percent of companies either had flat results or saw a decline in customer satisfaction. It’s time to stop making excuses and turn things ...
Jan 15, 2022•32 min
What would it be like if your printer sent you an email to let you know it needed ink? Or if your car could tell you that you need to take it in for transmission service? Or if your refrigerator could tell the repair professional what was wrong with it before you ever said a word? Sound like a futuristic take on product technology? It is, and it’s called the Internet of Things (IoT). However, you might be surprised to know that the ability to have all these things is already available and some c...
Jan 12, 2022•37 min
We all know that feeling when you see which client is calling and you inwardly groan, What is wrong now? Some customer relationships are more difficult than others, for sure. That is to be expected in any organization. However, there are other customer relationships that have moved beyond difficult. The costs of the resources it takes to manage the many aspects of doing business with them has outgrown the revenue the generate. Or they are so heinous to deal with that the money you do make doesn’...
Jan 08, 2022•34 min
Our listeners have problems and they let us know about it. For our I’m in a Pickle feature on the podcast, Tina in New Zealand wrote to us because the engineering firm she works with thinks customer relationships are a waste of time. She wants to know how to convince the engineers that customer relationships are what get the customer strategy gears turning toward long-term success. I found this pickle particularly interesting because I have faced this myself in our global Customer Experience con...
Jan 01, 2022•31 min
Did you know that customer satisfaction scores are the lowest they have been in the past 15 years? It’s true, and you can’t blame it all on COVID, although there is some blame to be cast there. Per the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), only 30 percent of companies tracked by ASCI improved their score; that means 70 percent didn’t, and that’s alarming. It’s also one of seven significant lessons that 2021 taught us. This new year also coincides with the 20th anniversary of me founding m...
Dec 25, 2021•31 min
