In sales, it can be tough to know when a customer is no longer deciding but already decided—unless, of course, they tell you that out loud. So, it is incumbent upon you to read the signs that a customer has decided to buy. For example, I like to make drawings with pen and paper during my sales presentations with a contact. Then, I position the pen toward them during the discussion as an invitation for them to pick up and draw a little bit, too. If they do, it’s a good sign. Scribbling away on my...
Jan 14, 2023•31 min
Every so often, I get a chance to chit-chat with colleagues of mine about the future of customer experience. This time, my colleagues were pioneers in customer experience, Lou Carbone ( Experience Engineering.com) author of Clued In , and Joe Pine (StratgicHorizons.com) , author of The Experience Economy . We discussed what we see changing in CX. We all think we are at a turning point in the movement. There are a lot of things that the recent pandemic has broken. However, organizations haven’t f...
Jan 07, 2023•44 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. Bad leadership leads to bad Customer Experience. To have a great Customer Experience, you have to have great leadership. It reminds me of rabbits. When my kids were little, we kept rabbits in a hutch. One day, I let the rabbits out to enjoy a little freedom in the garden. But,...
Dec 31, 2022•33 min
The end of a year is always a nice reminder to reflect on time passed. It’s a regular milestone where you can check in on your experiences and remember the lessons gained from another trip around our sun. This year has been an interesting one. With a foot half-in, half-out of the pandemic, continuing supply chain issues, rising inflation rates all over the world, and a war in Ukraine, one might even say awful. However, like any year, everything isn’t awful. There have been moments, professionall...
Dec 24, 2022•30 min
Ah, yes! It’s the most wonderful time of the year. When we reflect upon the passing year and make plans for the New Year: what we want to keep, where we want to be, and how we need to change. Then, we make them, our New Year’s Resolutions. However, in just a few days’ time, we will have failed at keeping these resolutions (again) and forgotten all about it. There are a number of psychological reasons why change is hard, and much of it has to do with habits. Habits are part of our Intuitive Syste...
Dec 17, 2022•31 min
Going viral is the goal of any passionate social media poster. Posting your content and watching as the views and shares grow exponentially is the dream for marketers trying to build a brand online. Unless, of course, the viral post is about how you broke a guitar during a customer’s flight and then showed “indifference” to their complaint. (Looking at you, United Airlines.) That’s a nightmare. The trick is actually doing it—and for the right reasons, not a customer service failure. In an enviro...
Dec 10, 2022•31 min
Customers are fickle. Or at least they appear to be. What once may have exceeded your customer’s expectations one day becomes ordinary the next. That’s because People become less sensitive to change as things improve. It’s called Diminishing Sensitivity, and it’s the reason that sometimes you have to work harder to “Wow!” your customers. If you gave $100 to a poor person and a millionaire, it would have completely different effects on their daily lives. While the millionaire would be polite and ...
Dec 03, 2022•30 min
Recession is a natural step in the economic cycle, but it’s easy to get overwhelmed by all of the bad news. When economic downturn occurs, we all feel it. Corporations tend to cut back in a downturn, neglecting things like customer experience. To differentiate yourself from everyone else, you should double down on these services while others cut back. Nobody looks forward to a recession, but being prepared and aggressive can help alleviate its effects. Don’t let yourself get left by the wayside ...
Nov 26, 2022•28 min
Claire Hillman, a loyal listener, a subscriber to our NL, Why Customers Buy , and viewer of our podcast on our new YouTube Channel is in a pickle and needs our help. She asks, Should I move to where my customers are or move them to where I want to be? Now, our first reaction was to tell Claire that she should absolutely meet customers where they are. After all, isn’t that the customer-centric thing to do? However, it occurred to us that at one time, we waited in line at the airport to check in, ...
Nov 19, 2022•30 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. As if the world isn’t crazy enough—with the war in Ukraine, the cost-of-living crisis, the looming threat of recession, and the ostensible beginnings of catastrophic climate change— we learned a flesh-eating bacterium (Vibrio vulnificus) is running rampant in Florida, infectin...
Nov 12, 2022•29 min
What if we told you that we know how you could develop a superpower? You can. We know you can because the method for it it was developed by a Yale’s assistant professor of marketing that was once a door-to-door salesperson and someone who has performed open-heart surgery on a pig. The superpower you can develop is influence and it is essential if you want to make changes in your organization. As champions of Customer Experience, we don’t need to tell you how crucial it is to get people to change...
Nov 05, 2022•37 min
Neither of us is much of a runner. In fact, to get us to run with any kind of speed would require some motivation—like a tiger chasing us. That’s because fear is a powerful motivator. Fear is also a powerful tool for marketers to get customers or potential customers to care about something. So, why does fear motivate us so much? Safety is an important value for all of us. When it is threatened, we notice. In other words, fear is a strong emotion, which makes it hard to ignore or control. In some...
Oct 29, 2022•33 min
This week on our podcast and Intuitive Customer YouTube channel , we address a listener’s “Pickle” with our “I’m in a Pickle” feature . You might remember that a Pickle is our term for a business problem that might be addressed with customer strategy and/or the behavioral sciences. We hadn’t featured one for a while, so we thought it was time to dig into a new one. This week, we hear from a frustrated and disappointed insurance professional named Tonya Dunn who wants to know why, after all their...
Oct 22, 2022•31 min
Organizations need to embrace that emotional side of their experiences. Not only to design an experience that surprises and delights their customers, but also so their Artificial Intelligence works to provide useable insight. Combining the emotional data into the formula with concepts from the behavioral science side will make it so organizations can understand what and why their customers do what they do. However, I worry that they don’t. You’ll remember that Customer Science is the fusion of d...
Oct 15, 2022•32 min
This podcast was created in partnership with Streem Delta thinks I am a liar. Or at least it felt like they did on this phone call with me. If we had a video option, the entire experience would be better for both sides, and I would have the flight I wanted. Video can be the untapped jewel of your experience design, and we will explain why. The problem was a schedule change that put me out of Boston instead of Atlanta. I wanted to switch the flight back to Atlanta on a different one that was the ...
Oct 08, 2022•36 min
When it comes to the behavioral sciences, I love their take on memory. I love it so much, that we did a podcast mini-series on it in three parts. In the first part , we talked about why memories are essential to experiences, when we use them to decide sometimes, and how memories form. The second part covered how memories are connected and the different types of memories we have. In this final episode of the memory mini-series, we explore how we store, retrieve, and forget memories. Why all this ...
Oct 01, 2022•40 min
Memories do not exist alone. They are networked…and this network isn’t a bunch of the same kind of information arranged in neat order and categorized by type. It’s a network of different memory types intermingling facts and feelings, procedures, and judgements, all influencing each other in interesting ways. Memory is what creates customer loyalty. It doesn’t matter what parts of your customer strategy you design. If customers don’t remember that you did it, it won’t matter later. It’s for this ...
Sep 24, 2022•32 min
Memory is crucial to customer strategy. Understanding customer behavior requires a fundamental understanding of how we access and use memories in our daily life and how it drives decision making in our actions and even who we decide to trust. In other words, understanding people requires understanding their memories. Further, it requires knowing what they remember and why, and also, what they don’t remember at all. This week, the Intuitive Customer is going Netflix. We present the first of our t...
Sep 17, 2022•30 min
What did you do during the lockdown? Did you take up a hobby or a new exercise program? Did you watch hours of news coverage hoping for some good news? Were you in the kitchen working with your sourdough starter? Or were you on the couch watching the entirety of Netflix? All were excellent pursuits, by the way, especially the bread making. However, one of my team was spending the lock down a different way: taking a deeper dive on the data we have collected on our Emotional Signature® research . ...
Sep 10, 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. In my 20 years as a consultant for Customer Experience, I have been involved in several successful implementations. The Maersk Line project that I worked on with Michél Patterson , a continuous improvement expert in Lean Six Sigma was one of the most, with an improvement of 40...
Sep 03, 2022•38 min
Intuition is a concept that plays a major role in decision-making for all humans. Intuition is the way we can “know” things without using our reasoning. It is based on our instincts and experiences, and our need to find patterns for things in our lives. Unfortunately, intuition isn’t always right. Knowing when intuition could be correct and when it might not be is a critical skill for any of us, particularly in business. Robin Hogarth’s book, The Myth of Experience , can help. In it, Hogarth has...
Aug 27, 2022•31 min
My iPhone is getting bossy. It suggested widgets based on the time of day I was using it. This proactive experience is the future of experiences. Unfortunately, few organizations know how to build them. While the definition of proactive experience is somewhat fluid at the moment, perhaps the best way to describe it is to solve a problem before the customer knows they have one. This proactive experience is powered by the emerging field of Customer Science, a convergence of data, artificial intell...
Aug 20, 2022•36 min
Is your idea of an ideal evening a nice meal at home and a book or a Netflix queue? Or would you rather be at a cocktail party with people from all walks of life exchanging stories or jumping up and down to a throbbing beat in the middle of a crowded dance floor? How you answer this question is one of many ways that you can explore your personality type. The personality you have will help you determine how to leverage your strengths (and confront your “opportunities”) on your path to success. Ps...
Aug 13, 2022•32 min
We hope you enjoy today's show. If you do, could vote for us in the People's Choice Podcast Award? It doesn't take long to cast your vote and it would really mean a lot to both Ryan and I. Thanks very much. Cheers! To vote, please click here. I am grumpy about customer experience these days. Recently, I vented a bit of my frustration on LinkedIn and asking has the world gone mad? This realization came with a bunch of different things in my life as a customer went wrong, from gate delays on the t...
Aug 06, 2022•32 min
We hope you enjoy today's show. If you do, could vote for us in the People's Choice Podcast Award? It doesn't take long to cast your vote and it would really mean a lot to both Ryan and I. Thanks very much. Cheers! To vote, please click here. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an incredible technology with potential to shape the future of humanity. However, it is fundamentally flawed. Who messes it up? That’s right, human programmers. The common misconception is that AI is a pure technological brai...
Jul 30, 2022•40 min
We hope you enjoy today's show. If you do, could you vote for us in the People's Choice Podcast Award? It doesn't take long to cast your vote and it would really mean a lot to both Ryan and I. Thanks very much. Cheers! To vote, please click here. There is a compelling and interesting Sci-Fi show on Netflix called “ The OA .” But I don’t recommend watching it. I wouldn’t watch it because this show was victim of outdated broadcast content strategy in a streaming-dominated world of television. Howe...
Jul 23, 2022•28 min
We hope you enjoy today's show. If you do, could vote for us in the People's Choice Podcast Award? It doesn't take long to cast your vote and it would really mean a lot to both Ryan and I. Thanks very much. Cheers! To vote, please click here. Usually, we have one pickle per podcast. However, today’s podcast has two pickles per podcast. Sure, it’s still The Intuitive Customer Podcast, just now with an extra pickle. Our first pickle comes from Jane, who works at a large business-to-business compan...
Jul 16, 2022•32 min
When I was still a lad, around 10, I brought home a school report that read, “Colin is the class clown.” I am still proud of that report card to this day. Humor is an essential part of life and, surprisingly enough, business. There are numerous ways to use humor to your advantage in your customer strategy. You might have heard the phrase, “Laughter is the best medicine.” That’s because it is. There are many health benefits of laughter. Laughter reduces tension and increases trust in relationship...
Jul 09, 2022•40 min
I was recently out and about and thought how happy I was that the pandemic was behind us. Many people must feel the same way because retail is bouncing back after two terrible years. However, it’s not bouncing back to the way it was before. Customers have changed how they want things and organizations should take advantage of how a physical and virtual experience work together in their customer strategy. Bjorn contacted us with this very question. He has a business pickle that he wants help with...
Jul 03, 2022•32 min
Breakthrough thinking: Why do we believe things that are not true? There was a car brand several decades ago in the UK called ŠKODA. It was a terrible car, much like Yugo was in the US. However, they have changed their image and today, my son wants to buy one. I told him the jokes we all used to have about ŠKODA and their low-quality construction (What do a ŠKODA and a baby have in common? They never go anywhere without a rattle.) My son doesn’t care. His perception is that they are a great car ...
Jun 25, 2022•31 min
