I get mad when people waste my time. It’s probably why I have such a beef with cable companies and organizations’ call centers that have long hold times. Wasting someone’s time is also a waste of an opportunity to deliver an excellent customer experience. The source of my ire is likely tied to time being our most precious resource by some estimations. Therefore, when you waste it, you are careless with something with a finite supply. Some of us have more than others available—or left as the case...
Aug 12, 2023•32 min
We have all been there. We think we did something great, and we look forward to getting the feedback that tells us so. Unfortunately, when we do get the feedback, we discover that we weren’t quite so great as we thought we were. It’s a matter of perception and understanding this concept can help avoid this mismatch in the future. One of our listeners, Damien, found himself in this pickle recently. His organization has delivery stats that paint a glorious picture of achievement. However, the cust...
Aug 05, 2023•31 min
18 months. That was the timeline Colin gave himself to move from a sales job to a general manager post. It was a long time ago now, the kind of thing one remembers when they look back over a decades-long career. However, it also worked. Colin did make that transition, moving throughout departments and learning new skills, and always with the goal of moving to general manager. Ryan, being from academia, teaches an introductory marketing course to his MBA students. It’s a class they take first sem...
Jul 29, 2023•31 min
At first glance, authenticity appears straightforward. To be authentic, one simply needs to be genuine in their thoughts and actions. However, as is often the case with our discussions in the podcast, the subject becomes complex under scrutiny. Our motivation to discuss authenticity stems from a podcast listener's request. They find themselves grappling with authenticity in their experience and want to know how to improve and leverage it to generate growth with their customers. Consider the Sher...
Jul 22, 2023•35 min
Have you ever noticed how many vitamin options there are at a drug store? If not, you should know there are hundreds. It is bloody overwhelming. All these vitamins got us thinking about differentiation. If your product isn’t that different from another, like a B-12 vitamin, how do you differentiate yourself from the competition? Vitamin companies are not alone here. One of our listeners wrote in with a business pickle about differentiation on how to have it in an ever-competitive market. The ans...
Jul 15, 2023•32 min
Many organizations are making a common mistake when it comes to AI. They fail to capitalize on the potential to enhance Customer Experiences through this powerful technology by building it incorrectly. By changing their strategic approach, they could gain a significant competitive advantage. Take, for instance, a telecom company that developed an AI system to detect customer churn. While it successfully identified customers likely to churn, it fell short in explaining why they were leaving. Here...
Jul 08, 2023•34 min
_________________________________________________________________ Did you know we have a YouTube Channel too? Check it out here . Connect with Colin on LinkedIn HERE . Follow Colin on Twitter HERE . Click HERE to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University. To learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services Click here ....
Jul 01, 2023•32 min
You wouldn’t think to look at it that The Magic Castle hotel in Los Angeles has been ranked in the top ten hotels on TripAdvisor, but it has. A converted apartment building has turned its unassuming appearance into an excellent experience for its guests, and how they do it isn’t that big of a thing, quite the opposite. It’s the little things make a big difference in their customer satisfaction. In this case, it’s things like a popsicle hotline that makes this small hotel a surprisingly successfu...
Jun 24, 2023•33 min
You probably don’t say no to people enough, especially if it’s to your boss. Like most of us, you are conditioned to cooperate with others, which means we usually say yes to most requests to avoid conflict. However, learning to say no in the right way, might also avoid conflict while simultaneously giving you back control over your life. We host author Vanessa Patrick, Associate Dean for Research, Professor of Marketing, and researcher in the Consumer Behavior Marketing field, to talk about this...
Jun 17, 2023•38 min
Your customers are having a relationship with your brand right under your nose. Do you know if it’s a strong, healthy one? Our connection with brands is much like any other relationship in our lives, with some being healthy while others are not. Unfortunately, it's not uncommon for people to form codependent or dysfunctional relationships with brands. Therefore, it's essential to build strong brand relationships with your customers. Despite being legalistic trademarks, brands have become an enti...
Jun 10, 2023•32 min
Getting your new program initiatives accepted requires overcoming a lot. So, to help you get that done—and impress your boss doing it—you need to have a winning strategy. The corporate budget is a funny thing. Getting approval on a budget in the corporate world doesn’t mean you get to spend it. Quite the contrary. You often have to get the budget approved for what you might spend and then when you want to spend it, you get approval again. When you read it written out like that, it sounds super i...
Jun 03, 2023•32 min
Organizations often fail to consider the context in which customers enter the experience, assuming that every customer is the same. However, recognizing the context of a customer's experience is crucial to developing an effective customer strategy. Context is an omnipresent factor in customer experience. Depending on a customer's context, we must create a customized experience. For instance, while working on a project for one of the cellular phone companies in the United States, we discovered th...
May 27, 2023•31 min
Journey Maps can be useless exercises. That’s right…we said it. However, these often-used tools don’t have to be as useless as they usually are. Journey Maps are only useless if you don’t include the customer’s emotional journey in them. Emotional journeys are the “squishy stuff” associated with why customers buy from you. Since customer’s feelings are challenging to itemize, many organizations tend to leave them off. However, the result is a customer process, not a journey map. After all, witho...
May 20, 2023•39 min
Having a high IQ isn’t the most important thing for leadership. It helps, but intelligence isn’t enough to make a great leader. It turns out that IQ without EQ, or emotional intelligence, doesn’t inspire teams to meet or exceed their goals. This EQ concept, popularized by Daniel Goleman , has been a crucial component of the leadership conversation for several years. Similarly, customer service representatives with high EQ are crucial for the emotional management of customers. The ability to unde...
May 13, 2023•32 min
Vijay, one of our listeners, drew my attention to a deficit in my content regarding customer strategy. He asked if we had anything on customer engagement. After a search of both my hard drives (computer and memory), I realized that I didn’t. To remedy this giant hole in our content, we recorded this podcast. Now, part of not having any content on the subject means I didn’t have a definition ready for the term. However, like anyone would these days, I fixed that with an internet search. I found a...
May 06, 2023•29 min
If you have been listening to us for a while now, you probably know about our “I’m in a Pickle” podcasts and the “5 Rules” series. If so, and you’re a fan, today is your lucky day because this podcast is a mash-up of both series. Not only that, but we also added in 5 more bonus rules for 100% more rules. It seems that quite a few people in our audience have a pickle. They want to start a consultancy but don’t know what to do. So, we are here to help. In this episode, we explore the 10 rules for ...
Apr 29, 2023•33 min
One of our listeners has a pickle. They did research that told them a product was just what their customers wanted, so they developed and launched it. But now, there are no sales. They want to know what went wrong. We suspect we might know. Research is a double-edged sword. It has the power to give us answers we want but not always the answers we need. Many things we do, deliberately or otherwise, affect what we hear. In addition, sometimes our sources are unreliable. Customers have different mi...
Apr 22, 2023•30 min
We will admit it. We have made mistakes in our lives. It’s only natural that some of the calls you make in your journey are going to be bad ones. Believe it or not, we are thankful for them. One learns a lot from one’s mistakes or at least that is the hope. Some of the calls were good ones, though, and we are thankful for those, too. Perhaps, even we two, like the blind squirrel, can find a nut once in a while. One of the great things about having a podcast is that we can share information. In t...
Apr 15, 2023•30 min
Did you know that FOMO, or Fear of Missing Out, is a powerful motivator for customer behavior? Organizations today should find ways to leverage the power of FOMO with their customers. I was surprised to learn how much of an addiction social media was for some people and how it linked up with feelings of FOMO. You might be as surprised by these statistics from 2021 as I was: 51% of people visit or log into their social media more now than two years before 27% of people wake up and check their soc...
Apr 08, 2023•29 min
This Podcast produced in partnership with Zuper™. You are probably underestimating the importance of a vital part of your Customer experience. Most organizations do. However, neglecting to address it can have negative impact on your customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, and customer advocacy. Dying to know what it could be? Well, the area that is often underestimated in importance is the impact of your field service engineers. Often the face of your company, these team members deliver a criti...
Apr 01, 2023•35 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. This podcast is full of bad advice. If you do follow the five rules we present, we guarantee you will fail. We realize this might be different than our usual Five Rules episode content. However, we think that presenting the way to fail might be the way to help you succeed. (Ho...
Mar 25, 2023•28 min
Fads come and go. From Tamagotchi’s to fidget spinners, we have seen plenty come and go. However, one fad that will never go out of style is treating your employees as the valuable resource they are. So, to answer our own question, Employee Experience is not just a fad and is definitely the future of a successful organization. We are fired up about this today because one of you, Praveen Kumar is in a pickle and he asked for our help. He wanted to know how to build an excellent Employee Experienc...
Mar 18, 2023•32 min
I have been watching the American Customer Satisfaction Index for over 20 years. Many years, there wasn’t anything too surprising in the report. However, recently there has been, and it isn’t good news for most organizations. After nearly two decades of investment in customer experience, only 20 percent of organizations have managed to improve their customer satisfaction scores—leaving the vast majority, 80 %, having failed to do so. One has to wonder, has it been worth it? We have been working ...
Mar 11, 2023•38 min
One of our listeners, Clive Hearst has a bit of pickle he needs our help with today. He wants to know whether he should invest the time and money in getting his MBA. He wants to know what the true value is of an MBA, and whether it is a must-have for his career. The answer depends on a few things. It might surprise you to know I don’t have an MBA. (Or maybe not). However, I have experience, and much of it leading teams and driving experiences for people, but I didn’t pick that up in a classroom ...
Mar 04, 2023•34 min
Time is our most valuable resource. It’s a resource that you aren’t able to get any more of, no matter what you do, and you are losing more of it every second. When you look at it like that, asking people for their time a much bigger deal than you might have considered at first. Therefore, when you are spending it with them, you should make the most of it. Moreover, you are competing for customers’ time. So, when they do give it to you, they are going to evaluate whether that was a good move aft...
Feb 25, 2023•31 min
Price increases are part of today’s business environment. Unless you live on the moon, you are experiencing them from your suppliers, too, and will pass those on to your customers also. However, if you handle the price increase the wrong way, you will also likely be losing some of those customers, too. One of our listeners, Alan Flower, has a pickle regarding the need to increase his prices without losing his customers. Since our advice not to raise prices or to decrease prices instead will end ...
Feb 18, 2023•27 min
How long does it take to choose a craft beer at a big box liquor store? Four hours. That’s what it felt like anyway. Why did it feel so long? Too many choices. In fact, when I was done, I needed a beer to recover from the exercise of choosing a beer. Of course, if there had only been a few, I would probably complain that there hadn’t been enough options for craft beers. The fact is, we like having choices, until we don’t. There is a point where not enough choices becomes way too many and the end...
Feb 11, 2023•31 min
I have written seven books, countless articles, and tons of keynote speeches, not to mention thousands of emails. As a writer, through and through, I know how difficult it can be to stare at a blank screen watching that blinking cursor wondering where to start. But a new AI-powered chatbot might make my life a whole lot easier, and yours, too. It’s called ChatGPT, and it has the potential to change how we create things and make the power of AI accessible to everyone. It is a conversational chatb...
Feb 04, 2023•35 min
If you have customer segments that read like the drink sizes on a fast-food menu, then this podcast is one you really need. The fact is many organizations get customer segmentation wrong. So, we came up with some critical questions that can get it back on track. One of our listeners is in a pickle and it has to do with their firm’s segmentation. Vijay Patel’s sales haven’t been what he hoped, and he wondered if the problem might be targeting the wrong customers. We think they might be, too, but ...
Jan 28, 2023•34 min
It’s a new year so we decided we needed an update. A few years ago, we gave you some rules for gaining growth. But times have changed, and so the rules need to change, too. Therefore, we took another pass at the questions that can help your organization gain growth in 2023. In some ways, these are more like provocations than questions. However, we aren’t picking a fight. We are, however, trying to be provocative. In fact, we usually ask them because we know that people can’t answer them. We want...
Jan 21, 2023•33 min
