Dobrev shared some fascinating statistics about both digital transformation and Customer Experience. In 2019, companies spent over $2 trillion on digital transformation, and even more in 2020, with COVID-19 driving many of these projects this year. However, success is not high with digital transformation. Experts estimate that anywhere from 50 to 80 percent of digital transformation projects failed in 2018. These projects came with a collective price tag of around $900 billion.

Unfortunately, that trend is not improving by much, per Dobrev. While there have been improvements in common metrics this year, the movements have not been significant. When added to an overall stagnation of the Customer Experience movement, digital transformation does not deliver the results that firms expected.

There are a few reasons for this result. My best way to explain it is through a recent experience I had buying glasses online. I didn’t want to go in for glasses because of the pandemic, so I ordered them online. After placing my order, however, I noticed that it was taking a long time. When I went to the site, I found no way to track them. I later learned that the holdup was because I missed an email where they asked me to measure the distance between my eyes (because they need to know how big to make the glasses). It turns out that their solution was for me to take a photo of myself with a credit card between my eyes. To me, this solution didn’t seem very technical and did not portend a good fitting pair of glasses (that cost around $300-$400, thank you very much). Also, I felt like a bloody idiot doing it. The glasses turned out fine, but I am not sure I would do it again when I reflect on the experience.

My reaction to the digital experience is not unusual, Dobrev says. He says that organizations often come into digital transformation projects with preconceived notions of what to should do that are not necessarily true or take the existing physical customers’ process and digitize it. Also, organizations often use a set number of channels (e.g., online, mobile, and call center) without regard for whether those channels will be useful. Add that to the fact that organizations do not know what provides value for customers in digital experiences, and you have a recipe for disaster. These Value Drivers are essential to success.

Forrester’s Four Categories of Value Drivers

Before we go any further, perhaps I should first explain what Value Drivers are. Value refers to what the organization gets as a payback for their investment of resources. These paybacks can range from increased customer spend, market share, or Net Promoter Score (NPS)*. Value is the result of Value Drivers, which are the parts of the experience that would inspire this type of Customer Behavior.

Forrester, a research and consulting firm, refers to four types of Value Drivers in a recent report from September. Dobrev details them as:

1. Economic Value: Economic Value concerns the perception of the value of your product or offer. Most organizations are trying to get on level terms on this part of digital transformation; otherwise, it’s a race to the bottom on price.
2. Functional Value: This term refers to how easy the digital experience is to use and the speed of service and convenience factors. In many ways, these are the transactional areas of the digital experience.
3. Experiential Value: This area is how the customer feels during the experience. Dobrev says that per his research and Forresters’, the Experiential Value delivers more than the first two areas outlined by the report.
4. Symbolic Value: The last area is about the customers’ self-image and how they feel about themselves when purchasing a particular brand. For example, you think differently about yourself when you buy a Jaguar vs. a Chevrolet. Dobrev says an exciting subset to this term is Social Causes. Many customers like to feel that they are working with a company that supports their social reform desires, whether that’s being green or lifting a social group, etc. The Symbolic Value Driver area of digital transformation is one we talk about a lot on our podcast.

Dobrev says that Forrester identifies one of the most significant challenges to digital transformation: knowing which area of these four steers the most value for your customers. Few companies have data on which of these drivers is most important for their customers. Organizations do have data, but it tends to be fragmented.

In reviewing Forrester’s list and my glasses experience, it occurs to me that if they had injected emotion into the experience, it might have improved my feelings about it. For example, I felt silly with the credit card on my head. Perhaps if they had explained it more or had me print out a guide that seemed more “technical” to me, it would have alleviated that negative emotion for me a bit. Another way to go would have been to embrace the silly; by making the dumb part of putting the credit card on my head even sillier with graphics or funny messages, it might have improved that moment. It is these types of design adjustments that Forrester’s #3 area addresses. To me, digital transformation success depends on recognizing these moments that drive or destroy value for you.

So, What Should We Do With This Information?

Digital experience isn’t going anywhere, certainly not as the pandemic carries on. The problem with unsuccessful digital transformation isn’t going away either. However, there are some things you can do to avoid them.

One of the things I love about digital experiences is all the data you can collect, even about emotions. Customers will let you know how they feel at different moments with their behavior. You can also measure people’s emotional responses to moments with technology like facial recognition software, which detects micro-expressions that denote emotional reactions to stimuli (like a widening of the eyes, a pursing of the lips, or shifts in body posture, etc.). Moreover, concepts like the Peak-End Rule, which describes how we remember our most intense emotion in an experience and how we felt at the end, will help you define the moments people will remember. The good news is all of these things are measurable in a digital experience.

Dobrev also suggests that you analyze your current Customer Journey with an eye toward what should be digitized and what should not. Some moments can digitize beautifully, and others that require a human touch to provide value to customers. For example, he learned on a project with an insurance company that a Key-Value Driver for customers in that experience was a human interaction during claims handling. Responsiveness was vital for them there, and the insurance company was previously relying too heavily on email, which was not delivering enough for customers. Dobrev says using Forrester’s four areas of Value Drivers is essential in this exercise. Then, test your choices, he says. The test results will help you identify where you need to tweak your designs either way.

Perhaps most importantly, this effort requires a strategy rather than a “check-the-box” attitude. Empathy helps, too. You need to understand what is driving value for your firm from your Customer Experiences. If you don’t understand that, you are throwing darts in the dark and hoping for a bullseye. It can be dangerous and passes up a lot of excellent opportunities.

Furthermore, I would add that you need to look at your digital transformation from a Behavioral Science perspective. Customers are not logical, and they do not behave logically as customers. They don’t like putting credit cards on their forehead and taking their picture to get their eyeglasses to fit. You have to take those things into account and design an experience that understands that about customers

Finally, it is vital to measure everything. See how and when they came into your digital experience, where your customers went while they were there, what they felt (using facial recognition technology), how long they stayed, and which way they left. All of this data will tell you what’s working in your digital transformation and what isn’t, among other things.

Another option is to consider an outside opinion. Sometimes you are too close to the project to see what could be a potential problem for customers, and, even worse, have an inside-looking-out perspective that might not realize how different moments make people feel. We have a tool we use called a Digital Experience Health Check to assess what they are doing well in their digital experience and what can use some work. The outside-in approach is more straightforward when the person approaching is on the outside.

Honestly, $900 billion in wasted resources chasing a digital transformation goal that you can’t meet is not a winning strategy. However, by approaching your online experience with the same eye for emotional engagement and with a comprehensive strategic approach to evoke emotions that serve your customers’ unmet needs, you can improve your success and get the results your customers (and your senior managers) expect.

* Net Promoter®, NPS®, NPS Prism®, and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld. Net Promoter Score℠ and Net Promoter System℠ are service marks of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.

To hear more about this idea in more detail, listen to the complete podcast here.

Colin Shaw is the founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy, one of the world’s leading Customer experience consultancy & training organizations. Colin is an international author of six bestselling books and an engaging keynote speaker.

Follow Colin Shaw on Twitter @ColinShaw_CX

The post Digital Transformation Didn’t Work: This Is What You Should Do Now appeared first on Beyond Philosophy.

So, me, you know. You might remember how I came to this field of Customer Experience almost 20 years ago after years of working in the corporate world. Furthermore, you have likely read my schtick about how we should take these ideas “beyond the philosophy” and into the real world. However, I realize that you might not be as familiar with these other blokes. So, allow me to introduce my other colleagues.

Lewis Carbone is a Customer Experience expert and speaker, and founder of Experience Engineering™. If you haven’t already, I suggest you read his book,  Clued In: How to Keep Customers Coming Back Again and Again. In it, Carbone shares his methodology for designing clues into your Customer Experience that signal to customers that you have what they want, so they come back for more. We hosted him to discuss this on a podcast not long ago. As a pioneer in our field, Carbone was one of the first to point out that you have a Customer Experience no matter what; the difference is that some organizations are deliberate (or haphazard) about what that experience is. He was also one of the first proponents of having an “outside-in” approach regarding the experience that you deliver to customers, which, my regular readers know, is one of the principles of which I am keenly fond. Carbone thinks that right now during the COVID-19 Pandemic is probably the most exciting time for Customer Experience Management advancement that he has ever seen because people are more sensitive to the experiences they have in their lives. Furthermore, it has brought awareness that an organization can manage its experience to create an emotional bond with customers.

Joe Pine is the author of The Experience Economy that started it all. As another pioneer for Customer Experience, Pine works with his colleague Jim Gilmore at Strategic Horizons, LLP. Pine and Gilmore have been working with clients worldwide to stage experiences that provide value for customers longer than I have, which is saying something. Pine believes organizations should understand that experiences are a distinct economic offering, not just better service. An authentic, distinctive experience is more than providing good service or being “nice.” Pine says Customer Experiences should be memorable, personal, and emotionally engaging, so customers value the time they spend with your company. In other words, Pine says if customer service is time well-saved, Customer Experiences are time well spent.

What Are Some of the Mistakes of the Past for Customer Experience?

The three of us, along with moderator Chantel Botha of Brand love, discussed in the webinar and a recent podcast some of our past experiences working in this industry, where we are today, and where we are going. Botha began by asking us where we have failed and what we learned from it.

When it comes to failure, my most significant ones are assuming that people are in the same mindset as mine. For instance, when I presented to a German insurance company about how they should use emotions in their experience, the clients asked me for proof that it would work. Unfortunately, at that time, I didn’t have any; I just believed that it worked, with or without evidence. Everyone did not share that mindset, and they still don’t. You have to prove it works. From that moment on, and this occurred back around 2005, my company links our Customer Experience efforts to proof so that the champions of Customer Experience are not caught out as I was all those years ago in that German conference room.

When I shared my story, I learned that Pine was empathetic to my plight. He says he often didn’t understand why other people didn’t believe in the impact of providing an emotionally engaging Customer Experience the way he did. However, he didn’t go the data route to prove it. Instead, Pine would develop frameworks. He and Gilmore would develop frameworks that describe what’s happening and prescribe what the organization should do about it. These frameworks would feature shining examples of these concepts at work to help convert the non-believers.

Often, Pine would have clients acknowledge that their philosophy was innovative but then ask who else had tried it. Pine found this frustrating because if it’s creative, it means that not a lot of companies had tried it. The challenge he encountered was getting senior leaders in interested organizations to feel comfortable enough being the first ones to take Customer Experience as a value enhancement in the marketplace—even if it might lead to failure. Failure is an always-present possibility, Pine says, because you aren’t sure how it will land until you get a real, live human being in the experience. Pine says he tells companies to save some of the budget (around 20 percent) to fix things in the experience that didn’t produce the reaction you wanted.

Carbone says that he has failed in the past by confusing the issue for people, clouding the real meaning of what Customer Experience means. There is a lot of discussion and perhaps not the depth of understanding of how different an experience economy of today is versus the industrial age of the past. He thinks a new distinctive lexicon is essential to clear up these misconceptions in the world of Customer Experience.

Carbone’s primary philosophy works with constructs around Clue Consciousness, which describes how their unconscious processing of Customer Experience signals drives customer behavior. These clues affect our emotions, shape our attitudes, and guide our actions.

Many organizations confuse process improvement and defect elimination with what experience management is, per Carbone. He says we need to begin to understand customer emotions and what stimulates them. Managing that critical aspect creates real power in experience management. Building systems that align the clues and signals goes well beyond process improvement. Customer-driven organizations that are inside the mind and heart, and soul of the customer are the goal. These companies know what customers feel even when the customers don’t know themselves. Moreover, how they think of us as a company is not as crucial as how the company makes customers feel about themselves, which, in turn, is how customers ultimately think about the brand.

What Are We Going to See Next in Customer Experience?

As the discussion moved on to the future of Customer Experience, I brought up the idea of Customer Science. You might recall that I recently discussed Customer Science on a podcast. It appeals to me because it uses a data-driven approach. Customer Science is a product of a perfect storm of artificial intelligence, the information provided by Big Data, and the interpretation of that data through Behavioral Science. This combination of technology and psychology, or understanding what people really do, makes it possible to anticipate and predict what the customer will do through data use.

These psychometric profiles have outstanding value for your Customer Segmentation efforts, an area where most organizations could use some work. Moreover, it enables you to anticipate customer needs and provide them automatically, particularly in digital experiences. Amazon does this, and they do it well, especially with me. Between my activities with the platform and associated products to their brand I use, Amazon knows everything about me from what I buy and eat to when I go to bed and even how many people ring my doorbell. These data points enable them to have a profile of me and provide me with helpful suggestions that I appreciate.

Pine sees that the COVID-19 Pandemic accelerated the shift from physical to digital experiences. However, he believes that the future of Customer Experience is the fusion of the two. An example of what he means is the platform Twitch, where people play video games while recording it and then show it to other people. The critical experience of Twitch is the social interactions that people have watching somebody play a video game. With all the possibilities of what Twitch and other platforms provide, Pine says we will see fewer people going to live events, whether it’s a conference or a festival or a concert, and many more people attending it “live” online. Those watching the live event online will also interact and have a different (and potentially better) overall experience with the amplification of that live event.

Pine says that the current crisis is accelerating is the recognition among people that what we really value are those shared experiences we have with our loved ones, friends, and colleagues. We want more of those and less stuff that sucks up our time, which we don’t want to waste. We spend that time on the meaningful experiences that we value.

Carbone thinks that the future holds an understanding that experience management is a way of doing business embedded in its values. He feels that business is operating on an “industrial age” platform but living in the “fusion economics” age. Fusion economics refers to a time in business when we have a greater depth of knowledge of the science and art of experience, what Carbone refers to as experience management 2.0. Carbone says that experiences are no longer linear but more like a pinball machine, presenting challenges in creating consistency with an emotional bond. Moreover, it is not a siloed responsibility but instead runs throughout the organization and across departmental lines. For instance, a restaurant client of Carbone’s combines the HR and Marketing departments because they realized that their people were their single greatest asset. Carbone says fusion economics enter into an era of virtuality, which understands the elements and role of technology and how to humanize it. This age requires understanding the delicate balance needed for human nature and needs and how the technology works well with these (and how it doesn’t). Perhaps most importantly, this age requires the realization that product attributes, features, and benefits have less influence on consumer decision making than what customers process unconsciously, emotionally, and from the perspective of the total experience.

What Should People Focus on Right Now?

Next, the discussion turned to what people can do or focus on right now to prepare for this future. For my part, I reiterated how I think a focus on how your efforts to create an emotionally engaging experience for customers leads to results. After all, why would anyone support all this if you cannot prove an ROI? In addition to results, I would also encourage people to consider things like the customer’s lifetime value vs. the costs involved with implementing the changes to the experience you propose. Often, by comparison, the value of keeping that customer for the long-term far outweighs the expense in the short-term.

Moreover, we’ve never implemented a Customer Experience program that doesn’t save money because it reduces the costs caused by failures, overlaps, and gaps in current experience. Furthermore, organizations often spend too many resources fixing what’s wrong rather than investing in the best opportunities to have a higher return. In other words, if you can start to identify the real ROI for your Customer Experience program, you will not only find more significant opportunities, but you will also get a hell of a lot more support.

Carbone urges businesses to consider the William Arthur Ward quote that said, “The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.” Carbone says it is time to adjust the sails of Customer Experience. He urges businesses to deepen their understanding of the new order and let go of industrial-age thinking that looks at the experience as a service and instead becomes customer-driven and going beyond customer-centricity. Carbone also thinks it would be wise to understand how customers think versus what they think by delving into unconscious thoughts and emotions. Finally, he recommends adopting a vision of a return on strategy and creating experiential value that will result in ROI. It is crucial to become champions of Customer Experience and convince people that building a culture that understands that the ultimate value the organization creates is in the experiences they provide.

Pine agrees that you should have the right mindset like Carbone suggests. If you have that, Pine says, then everything else can follow. The first thing that people can do is recognize that you’re in the experience business, not services. The second thing is to determine what you would change if you were to charge an admission fee for your experience. Pine says this is crucial is because when you “charge admission,” it inspires you to create an experience worth having. Pine also encourages people to understand that because experiences happen inside of us, it’s a reaction. Pine says there is not enough focus on customizing to the individual customer, the target of that customer-centricity. If you customize your goods or services and your experiences, you’ll thoroughly engage people.

We have come a long way with the concept of Customer Experience from its beginnings back in the late 80s and early 90s. Even since I joined the movement back in 2002, the ideas of what a Customer Experience is, how it works, and what you can do to optimize it have changed a lot. What has not changed through all of these transformations is the need to be deliberate about what you are trying to deliver and the emotional connection with customers you want to create. That is a foundational element that all of us “pioneers” of Customer Experience believe. That can set up your organizations for success to elicit the customer behavior you want that provides the customer-driven growth you need.

To hear more about this idea in more detail, listen to the complete podcast here.

Colin Shaw is the founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy, one of the world’s leading Customer experience consultancy & training organizations. Colin is an international author of six bestselling books and an engaging keynote speaker.

Follow Colin Shaw on Twitter @ColinShaw_CX

The post What Do The Pioneers of Customer Experience See for the Future: And What Should You Do About It? appeared first on Beyond Philosophy.

We discussed Negativity Bias on a recent podcast. The short version of explaining Negativity Bias is that we find negative information to be more compelling, important, and influential than we do positive data. It’s why we notice the 1-star review before the 5-star. It’s also why we scroll through the reviews looking for a bad review if all the reviews are glowing.

If we were using rational thinking about the two reviews, one 5-star and the other 1-star, we could make a case that one person had a terrific experience, and one person had a terrible experience. Then, the average of those two reviews should balance to the middle, 3-stars. However, we don’t. Whenever I am shopping for something on Amazon and the product has even a three-and-a-half star rating, I don’t buy it. It must be four- or five- stars for me to buy it.

Negativity Bias exists because we worry about what could go wrong instead of what could go right. Therefore, we focus on negative information. We do it in the news, too. Most of the stories, particularly now during the pandemic, are bad. It’s easy to blame the people who put together the news media for highlighting the negative, but, in reality, they are only giving us what we want.

However, even when things are going pretty well, we still have a negativity bias. It’s a top-to-bottom bias. We’re looking for the negative stuff. If we get both positive and negative information, we pay more attention to the negative than the positive, like it’s weighted more heavily. Moreover, we’ll remember the negative information more than the positive.

From an evolutionary psychological perspective, which is about the survival of the species, it makes sense. If you only look for the happy things all the time, then you might be happy but then get eaten by a saber-toothed tiger.

From a leadership and Customer Experience perspective, with nary a saber-toothed tiger in sight, we still think it makes sense. You might see Negativity Bias manifest in your looking for bad news when given many stats to review as a result. I am guilty of this, also. Last year, we doubled the number of downloads for our Podcast, The Intuitive Customer, and I didn’t think it was that good; I wanted them tripled!

Leaders should recognize that looking for the negative is what they are doing in cases like my dissatisfaction with the podcast numbers. Too many of us do not say thank you to the teams for a job well done, even though we know that gratitude and attention has a massive effect on people’s motivation and productivity.

The Inevitable Average Performance

Nobel-Prize winning economist Professor Daniel Kahneman, the author of Thinking Fast and Slow, was hired once by the Israeli Air Force to review their pilot-training programs. Professor Kahneman noticed that the Air Force trainers would always give pilots negative feedback about anything they made a mistake on, no matter how small. Moreover, if the pilot landed the plane perfectly, trainers didn’t praise the pilots and instead treated their performance as expected. When Professor Kahneman asked about it, the Israeli Air Force said they do it because that works. If the trainer yells at the pilots, the pilots fix it next time. But if the trainer praises the pilot for a job well done, the pilot gets it wrong the next time.

These trainers were observing Regression to the Mean, which means that data that is on an extreme from the average, either positive or negative, then the data will be closer to the mean if measured a second time. Essentially, Regression to the Mean tells us that it doesn’t matter what the trainer says; pilots were going to average-out in performance anyway. However, our Negativity Bias makes it feel like we’re doing good by focusing on the bad. The reality is we’re not; we only make people miserable in the process of getting the outcome that statistics say would happen anyway.

One could argue that negativity bias is adaptive, that there are good things that a negative bias can do for us. After all, no one ever accomplished a great thing by relying on complacency. On the other hand, there is something perverse about never being happy with objective successes either.

Negativity Bias is related to Loss Aversion. A focus on the negative is a focus on the loss. There will be times when Negativity Bias will lead to less rational, sound decision-making. In those cases, we should eliminate it. However, there are areas where Negativity Bias could be motivational for us or lead to improvements. Those are areas where we might be willing to tolerate more negativity bias.

Insurance companies are successful because of the Negativity Bias. We worry about losing something (i.e., Loss Aversion), so we look at things from a negative perspective. The solution is to insure yourself against the loss. In addition to providing a solution to the effects of Negativity Bias, the insurance industry also shows that there is money to be made by people thinking negatively.

We exhibit Negativity Bias in other customer situations also. If I’m looking at things from a what-could-go-wrong standpoint, I want to take actions that will make me feel more confident about a purchase. Those actions could be reading a review, talking to friends, or buying only from brands that I trust (because I feel confident that the outcome will be okay). All of these actions are part of an overall risk-mitigation strategy.

So, What Should You Do (and NOT Do) with This Bias?

The danger of Negativity Bias is it skews your view of the world, and you might miss the good stuff. For example, despite being amid a global pandemic, things are better than they have ever been over the last 50 to 100 years. Global poverty is down a lot; some types of pollution have decreased, especially in some regions of the world; there have been improvements in infant mortality rates, starvation levels, and world income increases. It’s easy for these facts to get lost in the mix because we’re so focused on the negative.

So, we can use Negativity Bias to get positive results, but we should be careful not to skew the worldview by going too far with it. If we think that our team is doing everything wrong or that our company is failing, we will make bad decisions. It would help if you had an accurate picture of what’s going on in reality.

When it comes to practical applications of Negativity Bias in Customer Experience, we would recommend the following:

• Do periodic checks to ensure any negative assessments you have are based on reality and not bias. If your negativity bias leads you to want to improve things, it could potentially be positive because you focus on what’s not going as well as it could. On the other hand, if your negativity bias leads to inaccurate assessments about the world’s state, that’s not going to help or lead to better decisions. When you find yourself thinking negative thoughts about life, business, or Customer Experience, pause and do a check to see if you can substantiate that with objective measures. Sometimes things are genuinely terrible, but make sure that that’s reality and not just your perception.
• Recognize the fact that you and your customers naturally look at things from a negative perspective. It would be best to try to counteract that. You attract more flies with honey than you do with vinegar, so praising people in your team is essential, particularly in these times.
• Provide customers with solutions to help them. I’m convinced that people will look back and recognize who helped them through these difficult times. That’s a way of building customer loyalty. So, look for ways to solve customers’ problems and help them through this difficult time.
• Think about framing what you say to customers in a positive way. Knowing that customers will receive messages from a negative perspective, avoid communicating in an off-putting way because that will increase the pessimistic atmosphere. Whether in an email, chat, or phone call or your advertising messaging, be deliberate about how you positively frame things to counteract customers’ natural bias. Moreover, you might need an outside perspective to show you how you are framing your messages. We have an Experience Health Check where we act as if we were a customer in your digital and physical experiences, analyze your current experience against the best practices in business, and come back to you with recommendations.
• Don’t forget the upside that can exist in your business. Businesses focus a lot on the things that are going wrong. However, through our Emotional Signature Research®, we discover that there often more significant opportunities that would lead to more considerable gains than the areas on which the company focuses because of losses. Moreover, these differences show that the opportunity is sometimes even two or three times more valuable than dealing with negative things.

It’s easy to slip into Negativity Bias. Despite its name, Negativity Bias isn’t all bad. It can drive us to try harder and raise the bar for performance, which leads to outstanding results sometimes. However, if we let it cloud our judgment and crowd out our successes, then it has gone too far. Like many of the concepts of the behavioral sciences, Negativity Bias requires understanding and balance, so you can reap the benefits without cutting down your successes in one fell swoop.

To hear more about this idea in more detail, listen to the complete podcast here.

Colin Shaw is the founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy, one of the world’s leading Customer experience consultancy & training organizations. Colin is an international author of six bestselling books and an engaging keynote speaker.

Follow Colin Shaw on Twitter @ColinShaw_CX

The post Diagnosing Customers’ New Behavior During the Pandemic appeared first on Beyond Philosophy.

We discussed this phenomenon in a recent podcast and how we all do this. For example, I think the Luton Town Football Club is the best team in the world. The team demonstrates how football (aka, soccer, for those unfamiliar with the British version of the word) should be played. Or they do in my mind anyway. 

However, my mind is at odds with itself. If I am honest, I also know Luton Town Football Club is not that great. While they are in the Championship tier, which is the second of the four levels of the English Football League, the team probably should play in the third tier, called League One. As bad as that assessment sounds for the team, Luton Town Football Club is doing well compared to their history. Not so long ago, my team dropped out of the professional tiers altogether and played semi-professional teams. The Semi-professional league means that somebody, who was a postman in the morning, turns up to play football in the afternoon. 

Many sports fans are familiar with this dichotomy. Your love for the team makes them the best, and your “hope springs eternal” that this year will be their year. However, at the same time, you know deep down that it probably isn’t. 

These contradictory beliefs cause discomfort for us. The two simultaneously-held and conflicting views create tension for us. If we could admit that one of our ideas is wrong, it would relieve that tension. Nonetheless, we still hold onto the contradictions despite feeling uncomfortable about it. 

One time, a gentleman who worked at an oil company picked me up for a speaking engagement in Austin, Texas. Our conversation from the airport led to him telling me how environmentally-friendly he was. However, we had this conversation in the most massive pickup truck I have ever seen that he owns, not to mention that he works for an oil company. 

It’s a funny story, and we can all laugh at his lack of self-awareness in this instance, but he isn’t alone. We all create Cognitive Dissonance. Conflicts abound all the time in all of us. 

We have several common ways we resolve these conflicts and relieve that tension. One way we reduce the conflict is to align our behavior with our beliefs. Another way is to do the opposite, meaning we update our ideas to be consistent with what we see out in the world. 

However, this type of resolution is less common than it probably should be. Moreover, resolving your conflict by changing either your thoughts or actions is a bit dull to study. Psychologists have instead focused on the dysfunctional ways that we address this conflict. The third way people resolve Cognitive Dissonance is to change their perception of the beliefs, which means rationalizing your actions. 

These contradictory beliefs cause discomfort for us. The two simultaneously-held and conflicting views create tension for us. If we could admit that one of our ideas is wrong, it would relieve that tension.

Cognitive Dissonance Theory and the Real World

The Cognitive Dissonance Theory is the work of psychologist Leon Festinger. His book, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, was published in 1957. Most psychologists run experiments and analyze results across conditions, and Festinger did that, too. However, he also did some anthropological work with a UFO cult in Chicago around that time called The Seekers to see how the cult resolved Cognitive Dissonance about an imminent apocalypse they forecasted but didn’t happen. 

Here’s who The Seekers were and what happened. The cult’s leader, Mrs. Keech, thought she was receiving messages from aliens. The messages told her that the aliens were coming to take them, the “true believers,” away in their spaceship on a specific date. Many of the cult members were all in, leaving their spouses, selling all their possessions, and eventually turning up in a field in rural Illinois to wait for the Rapture. They waited and waited, but the aliens never showed.

You can imagine that giving up your earthly existence for a ride on a spaceship you are sure is coming to get you and realizing that it didn’t create significant Cognitive Dissonance. As a result, Festinger and his team could observe what happened with the cult members next. 

There were different reactions to the situation. Some cult members resolved the dissonance by stopping their beliefs. They admitted they were wrong, left the cult, and attempted to restart their lives. However, other cult members resolved the dissonance by committing to it more intensely and changing their perception of their beliefs. These reinvigorated cult members started proselytizing, trying to attract new members. Perhaps the argument was that if this group could believe hard enough, it would make it so. 

I have been guilty of similar thinking—but not about spaceships coming to whisk me away to outer space. Some of you might remember that I love Apple products. But before it was all about Apple for me, it was all about Sony. There was a design that Sony used that held my fascination. I bought everything Sony made, computers, Walkman, TVs, and so on. However, I noticed that as my relationship went on with them, Sony could use some improvements in their usability. As the usability interface worsened, I started to make excuses for them as a loyal customer. Over time, however, I admitted that Sony was not that good anymore, and I moved on to greener pastures.

When we talk about Cognitive Dissonance objectively, it indicates a stickiness where we want to hold onto our beliefs. So, we will minimize by explaining away bad experiences if we’re loyal to the brand. By contrast, if we were all robots, our first disappointing experience with a brand that we were faithful to should then reduce our evaluation of the brand. A linear map could show where every good experience increased our evaluation and where negative experiences decreased it. However, we are not robots, and our maps look different. 

Another form of dissonance reduction takes place where we change the story. Then, once we flip our beliefs, we can then adjust our memories of our own opinions. We do it to get things to line up in our heads. For example, I could revise my account of my erstwhile relationship with Sony by changing my belief that Sony was a good brand and replacing it with the idea that it was not as good as I thought it was. Moreover, I could further amend that recollection to state that I was never overly enthusiastic about Sony in the first place. 

Cognitive Dissonance also happens internally at an organization. Marketing makes a brand promise in advertising, but then the organization doesn’t follow through with it in reality. It creates a conflict for customers, which is terrible for your customer-facing employees on the front lines. In turn, many employees will get fed up with the contradictions and leave in search of greener pastures. Therefore, resolving Cognitive Dissonance is imperative for those in leadership roles at an organization.

So, what should you do about Cognitive Dissonance?

As far as practical applications, I have a few suggestions:

1. Recognize that Cognitive Dissonance is uncomfortable for people. This psychological concept is at play in people’s thinking all the time. If you are customer-facing, understanding that your customers are often dealing with it and recognizing how it changes their behavior is essential. Leadership should look for ways of resolving it for customer-facing positions, whether that means changing policies or operational directives or something else in your organization. 
2. Find Cognitive Dissonance reductions strategies that you or your organization will use. Find ways to ease the discomfort for your customers in their buying decisions by appealing to what they say they need but delivering what they really want. For example, when someone like the oil-company employee wants to buy an environmentally-friendly car, but only looks interested in the enormous trucks, highlight the ways the giant vehicle is environmentally-friendly for its class. Using empathetic humor could be another way to alleviate the dissonance-induced tension that people feel.
3. Remember that customers can’t always tell you what they want. I have said it before, and I will say it again: people don’t always tell you what they want because they don’t know themselves. You have to dig a little deeper, under the surface, to discover what is motivating their behavior and possibly creating dissonance. Our Emotional Signature Research takes into account what people say and what emotions they feel to identify what drives an organization’s value. It can help you find out what customers really want and not just what they say they do.

So, What Next?

Cognitive Dissonance is everywhere. Many of the psychological concepts we regularly discuss in this newsletter are a form of it somehow or another. It is helpful to think of it as a broad umbrella theory with many more specific phenomena under it. Moreover, it’s everywhere because we all participate in activities that create it, and we all take action to resolve the discomfort Cognitive Dissonance causes. 

In situations with human thinking and recall, there’s also only one thing happening. There is also an element of Confirmation Bias, which, you might recall, is our tendency to turn new evidence into that which supports our previously-held beliefs. In other words, I have this view; therefore, I’m going to look out for the things that confirm it. Furthermore, our Intuitive System, which is the type of thinking we use that is fast and automatic, is looking for patterns. So, it notices one part of the experience was terrible, and so was this other part, and then that other thing was bad, too, so maybe that means the provider is not as good as they used to be. 

So, remember, as you’re trying to use this concept and apply it, the desire to reduce Cognitive Dissonance is universal. Moreover, there are many different ways to do it. However, it is essential to reduce the occurrences of it where you can. While there will be a hardcore group of hyper-enthusiastic people who will never change their behavior, most people will resolve the dissonance they feel in your experience. It will often be by abandoning the brand or, in some cases, even turning against the brand to go to your competition. 

To hear more about this idea in more detail, listen to the complete podcast here.

Colin Shaw is the founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy, one of the world’s leading Customer experience consultancy & training organizations. Colin is an international author of six bestselling books and an engaging keynote speaker.

Follow Colin Shaw on Twitter @ColinShaw_CX

The post Why We Think Things Are Good When They Are Bad appeared first on Beyond Philosophy.

Whether consumers articulate it or not, or whether it gets measured or not, emotions have become core to experience response and future consumer decisions.  In a recent article, Robert Passikoff, CEO of Brand Keys, presented statistics which demonstrate the extent to which consumer response to experiences, and the resultant impact on decision processes, has become emotion-dominant.

Based on results drawn from over 100 categories and nearly a thousand brands, Brand Keys has determined that the average category decision process is now 80 percent emotional and 20 percent rational.  This has significant implications for sales, service, marketing, and communications functions for every organization.

In this post, we’ll address what this, prospectively, means to service groups in better understanding how to optimize this component of the customer journey.

Not too long ago, a major high-tech company asked Beyond Philosophy to provide insight into our methods for journey-mapping their multi-channel customer service experience.  In reviewing the overview document they provided, one question which occurred to us was whether the support function was tasked to solve the customer’s problem, as expressed, or proactively own the customer’s issue.  The client responded that they didn’t understand our query; and that response, in and of itself, was profound.

During a later review session with the client’s management team which would be involved with the journey mapping project, we reprised the question.  We explained that beyond solving the problem from a technical perspective and owning the customer’s issue in a personal way was the critical difference between functional and tangible process and emotionally-based experience.  And, when we delved a bit further into the client’s level of understanding about the emotional components of the service experience, it was revealed that such customer research had never been conducted.

Understanding emotional underpinnings of the customer service experience has become pivotal to optimizing both a positive relationship and desirable post-service behavior.  It is also an essential element of customer-centricity.  If an organization fails to identify, on a prioritized and granular basis, which emotionally-driven elements of service value are, and aren’t, being delivered, even the best and most proactive solutions will not build desired customer loyalty.

Customer-centricity, after all, is about more than structure, strategy and systems.  It’s about the differentiation and engagement that lead to bonding between the organization and its stakeholders.  It’s also about giving stakeholders a personal investment in the organization and its ongoing success.  It’s about the enterprise becoming more proactive, transparent and open, connecting with customers through branded, emotional experiences and sustained value delivery, resulting in its operation as a “conscious capitalist”.  One golden opportunity to do this is through personalized service delivery.

Personalized, invested service delivery is also about “being human” as an organization, not just as a buzzword to apply to customer experience optimization.  As Sisodia, Sheth, and Wolfe wrote in their classic customer-centricity book, Firms of Endearment:

“What we call a humanistic company is run in such a way that its stakeholders – customers, employees, suppliers, etc. – develop an emotional connection with it.  Humanistic companies seek to maximize their value to society as a whole, not just to their shareholders.  They are the ultimate value creators.  They create emotional value, experiential value, social value, and, of course, financial value.”

Customers have shown strong desire to affiliate, and bond with, companies that are paradigmatic in providing unique, consistent, and value-based experiences and strategic relationships.  Again, an ideal place to demonstrate the humanity which transcends process and rules is through customer service.

Personalized customer service says a great deal about the enterprise culture. The most valuable customers appreciate and want more personalization, a relationship, and an emotional connection that can be created through service. It’s up to organizations to a) identify the strongest emotional drivers in service and b) effectively leverage them. Successful organizations have either morphed, or have begun, by placing customers’ interests ahead of the enterprise’s. They build a veritable bank account of trust; and high trust, and the positive reputation and image it represents, can be a profitable and sustainable result of more proactive service.  This makes owning the customer’s issue a desirable outcome of any service situation.

Republished with permission from CustomerThink.com

The post Service Process vs. Service Experience: Solving the Customer’s Problem vs. Owning the Customer’s Issue appeared first on Beyond Philosophy.

I have recently been included in Brand Quarterly’s ‘Top 50 Marketing Thought Leaders over 50’ and they asked me an interesting question: “What do I think the next industry trends would be for the year?” I thought I would expand on my thoughts here and give a better explanation.

For those of you that do not know about this,  behavioral economics embraces the fact that often Customers make irrational decisions and as a consequence this affects what they buy. In short, you need to embrace the fact that Customers are irrational.

In our bland world everything is the same to many marketers who still only focus on the 4P’s (Price, Place, Product and Promotion)  and use this as a crutch. Marketers need to recognize that human decision making is far more complex than this. They need to elevate their thinking to a new level of  understanding and embrace behavioral economics to break through the glass ceiling that is engaging them.

Let us start with three simple questions:

1. What emotions are you trying to evoke in your Customers?
2. Do they drive value for your organization ($)?
3. Have you designed these emotions to be evoked in your marketing?

Not sure? Well you should be. To do your job effectively you should understand how emotions are evoked and design this into your Customer Experience or campaign. You therefore need to understand behavioral economics  and how to make the most of Customer’s irrationality. When you have mastered this I then suggest  you look into the whole area of predictive analytics and define how you can predict customer’s true behavior.

The last piece of the jigsaw is making this ‘live’ in an experience. Imagine that you have just designed a campaign that drives the customer into a store and they then have an interaction with  store personnel. How are you going to ensure that the emotion you want to be evoked is actually evoked during the ‘in store experience’? The answer is that the store personnel need to be trained on recognizing how the Customer is feeling when entering the experience. This is achieved through advanced soft skills training. This covers  recognizing Customer’s verbal and non-verbal cues (facial expression, body language, tone of voice ,etc.) in order to identify how the Customer is feeling. Then the store personnel can  implement their training to convert how that Customer feels,  maybe from ‘confused’ to one of the specific emotions that drive value for their organization.

Sounds far fetched? It’s not. This is what our more advanced clients are doing today with great success. One client moved their Customers from:

• ‘Feeling out of control’ to ‘in control’ by 25%.
• ‘Feeling Anxious’ to ‘feeling at ease’ by 10%.
• When Customers were asked, “Would you hire this person?” , a reply of ‘yes’ increased by 25%.

So, understanding that Customers are irrational, embracing behavioral economics, using this to predict their behavior and finally designing your experience and training people on how to convert customers emotions is the new world. Welcome to the new world of practical behavioral economics!

Colin Shaw is the founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy, one of the world’s leading Customer experience consultancy & training organizations. Colin is an international author of five bestselling books and an engaging keynote speaker.

Colin is proud to be recognized by Brand Quarterly’s as one of the ‘Top 50 Marketing Thought Leaders over 50’.

The post ‘Top 50 Marketing Thought Leader’ Reveals Latest Trend appeared first on Beyond Philosophy.

Why do we need to plan for emotions? Simply put, because then we can manage them in others when necessary.

Over 50% of any Customer Experience behavior is driven by emotions. Emotions cause you to grab the product further back on the shelf to avoid people’s cooties and they are why we buy fishing lures we don’t need (or maybe that’s just me).

We’d like to think we buy rationally, but we don’t. It’s emotional and because of that, we assume it’s unpredictable. However, science keeps taking steps to gain the ability to predict emotional responses in people.

A study published in the journal PLOS Biology out of Dartmouth reveals a way to predict human emotions based on the subject’s brain activity. The Dartmouth team found an accurate activation pattern of negative emotions that estimates how negative a person will feel when they look at upsetting photos. The findings are important for treating people with mental or health disorders, and, on a higher level, for understanding how your brain generates emotions. Moreover, because the pattern they mapped out works “remarkably well” with new participants, it shows emotional responses are similar across large groups of people.

These scientific discoveries translate into helpful prompts for how we handle the emotional moments in our business transactions. Let me explain.

In business, there are times in a Customer Experience when things don’t go well, and it is not your fault. Let’s say there is a weather delay during the holiday season and you work at the airline that now has to inform passengers they aren’t going to make it to their destination. You can’t do anything about the weather or the fact that the news is going to generate stress for passengers.

Here’s where predicting the intensity of negative emotions comes in handy. When you predict the emotional response of your Customers, you can prepare to deliver the news in a way that helps mitigate the impact for the Customers.

Stress is caused by the strain of adverse or pressure-filled situations. In the case of a weather delay and being stranded at the airport, stress is caused by not knowing what to do next. A way to mitigate this is to have resources available that help passengers figure out what to do next. Maybe it’s a referral to another airline or car rental agency. Maybe it’s a drink ticket for the local bar. Whatever it is, it should address the problem of “what to do next,” so it can soften the intensity of the stress the passenger feels during their experience with you.

The idea is that by having a resource available to mitigate the predicted emotional response proactively, you soften the blow of the bad news and create a positive memory for the passenger associated with your airline. And based on the study from Dartmouth, you know those emotional responses will be the same with your Customers.

The key takeaways here are simple: Emotions are more predictable and more common amongst a group of people than you thought they were. When you predict emotions, you can plan to manage them to a better emotional outcome than if you don’t plan. If you work for the airline with no plan for how to deliver the weather delay news to passengers, I predict you will wish you had one of those drink tickets I suggested for yourself.

If you enjoyed this post, you might be interested in the following blogs:

• Science Proves What Really Makes People Happy
• Discovering What Customers Don’t Know Themselves
• The Emotional Experience: Shedding Some Light on Emotions

Colin Shaw is the founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy, one of the world’s leading Customer experience consultancy & training organizations. Colin is an international author of five bestselling books and an engaging keynote speaker.

Follow Colin Shaw on Twitter & Periscope @ColinShaw_CX

The post Customers Emotions are Predictable appeared first on Beyond Philosophy.

Skechers lied to us that if we wore their (weird-looking) Shape-up shoes that we could get in shape without setting foot in a gym. BP lied about their compliance with safety regulations for their off shore Oil operations; a lie that resulted in 70 million gallons of oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico. Banks lied to us, nearly crashing the world economy and causing the Great Recession.

I had thought the banking crisis was the pinnacle of organizational stupidity but then last week we hear Volkswagen (VW) lost 30% of their value. Why? Because they lied to their Customers.

According to CNN Money, Federal and state regulators found that VW (that also owns the brands Audi and Porsche) programmed some of their models to turn on the emission control feature only during tests. Experts posit that these vehicles would emit 10 to 40% more than what shows up on the test. Even worse, according to the BBC, a German newspaper reported that they were told by one of their engineers at a part supplier in 2011 that this emissions test was a problem.

As a result, VW faces a number of punitive actions today:

• The EPA says they could be fined up to $18 billion. With a b.
• A class action lawsuit has already been filed in California. Owners of the affected models will be seeking “unspecified punitive damages and legal fees, among other things,” according to the Chicago Tribune.
• The Wall Street Journal reported that the US is conducting a criminal probe as well.

But the biggest penalty is yet to come.

Breaking a Brand Promise Doesn’t Pay

A Brand Promise is at its most basic level a promise. VW marketed the CleanDiesel car models for Audi A3, Jetta, Beetle, Golf, and Passat models to be better for the environment. They charged more for these environmentally friendly cars, too. The hope was the Clean Diesel would boost sales in the U.S., which accounts for only about 6% of global sales for the brand.

When it comes to a brand promise, one of the most basic tenets of it is that you need to keep those promises. VW isn’t the first company to break their promises.

VW is a HUGE brand, and they have just lied to customers. A willful act.
Trust is a basic emotion. It is essential to building Customer loyalty. But like Albert Einstein once said about trust:

“Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters.”

To put this quote in context for VW, one must ask if they have lied over the performance of their cars for emissions standards, then what else have they lied about?

When they were little, I used to tell my kids lying is the worse thing they can do.  If they lie, then people can’t trust them. Without that trust, no one will believe anything they say. What other things have VW lied about?

When will companies learn to stop lying to their Customers? Maybe they all need a “time out” to think about their actions (well, it worked with my kids).

So sure, VW might lose their stock value, and be fined billions of dollars, but I think their real loss is the trust of their Customers. And that has more value than the dollar, the yen, the rupee or the pound.

I am sure now the following pattern of behavior will occur with the resignation of their CEO, Martin Winterkorn:

• • The new guy, Matthias Mueller will come in he will say that everything was terrible.
  • And then he will promise to clear things up. In fact, he already did that.According to the BBC he said, “We will have even stricter governance, compliance, and standards, and I will vouch for that.”
  • Whenever this is referred back to he will say, “Oh yeah that was the last guy, not me, I am okay.“

I hate this pattern. It’s as if the company thinks that a change of personnel at the top exonerates them from blame. That setting new standards, vouched for by the new CEO, will excuse their blatant disregard for the truth in the past.

I for one am tired of the lying cheating and corruption that seems to be taking place in far too many of our well-known brands.

What do you think about this scandal? I’d be interested to hear your take in the comments below.

If you enjoyed this post, you might be interested in the following blogs:

• Is Trust Really an Emotion?
• Target and Snapchat: The Power of Customer Loyalty
• 4 Ways to Gain Customers’ Trust in Data Security

Colin Shaw is the founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy, one of the world’s leading Customer experience consultancy & training organizations. Colin is an international author of five bestselling books and an engaging keynote speaker.

Follow Colin Shaw on Twitter & Periscope @ColinShaw_CX

The post Losing Customers Trust is the Worst Penalty VW Will Face appeared first on Beyond Philosophy.

For example, I recently purchased my new car. Having seen the adverts, undertaking the research online, and comparing various reviews, I narrowed my choices between a GMC Yukon or a Lincoln Navigator. Therefore, the next step was a visit to the local dealers.

Let’s take a look at my two experiences and see what we all can learn about fulfilling the brand promise for our Customers at the Customer Experience level.

First: The Yukon Experience
On visiting the Yukon dealer, my wife Lorraine and I were greeted warmly. We explained what we wanted and we were walked into the back area of the dealership to be shown the latest car, amongst all the puddles and dirt.

Brands and dealers are going to great expense to show the car off in the best environment.  However, this particular dealer was not.

The test drive was good as it enabled me to get a sense of what the car felt like. Therefore, we can learn that playing with the product is a key part of decision-making. Now that I had a better idea about this part of the puzzle, I needed to know the price.

When we returned from the test drive, I asked our sales rep, how much the car cost.  He said, “It’s clear that you are at the beginning of your buying process. I would prefer to give you a price when you have seen all of the other cars you intend to review.I want to be the last guy you talk to about the car you want.”  I told him that I understood that but from a practicality standpoint, that didn’t work for us. So I asked him again, how much?  He refused. I was amazed. I said, “If we walk out of the dealership without the price, we will not return.”  He said, “Okay.” So, we left–with a bad opinion of the representative, the dealership and the brand at GMC.

What we can all learn from this: I find this amazing I even have to say this next sentence. When a Customer asks you how much a product is, tell them. In this case, refusing to tell me a price showed me that the dealer representative was simply trying to coax as much money out of me as possible. This approach does not inspire trust for a major purchase.

On to the Lincoln Experience
Our next visit was to our local  Lincoln dealership. Our experience there was quite different.  The salesman informed us he was not paid a commission, which told us there would be no high-pressure sales techniques. When we asked for the price after the test drive, he gave it to us. However, he wrote it on the back of his business card, which I didn’t think was very professional.

What we can all learn from this: Paying salespeople on commission drives the wrong behaviors. But paying people on Customer satisfaction also doesn’t ensure success, as what followed was a catalog of errors.

What Happened Next?
After discussing the matter with Lorraine, we decided to buy the Lincoln. But the only “offer” we had received from our Lincoln dealer was written on the back of a business card. We asked for a more formal quote, details of what the warranty would cover, and the payments as we decided to lease the car. We expected this to be forthcoming, so we were surprised when we were informed that this wasn’t possible and he’d given us all the figures. I asked to read the contract as I am wary of car contracts and was looking for the loopholes. He said it was a standard contract, and he couldn’t email it to us. He did tell me that I could come “collect” it. Then he said a phrase that always means the opposite of what someone really thinks. He said, “With respect (which really means they don’t respect me), these contracts are signed hundreds of times per day.” To me that means he was saying I should just trust him and not ask such annoying questions! Lincoln is a premium brand; I expect a premium experience and this was now falling far short of my expectation.

Furthermore, all correspondence with the sales representative took place with his personal Yahoo email account, with neither the dealership’s name nor Lincoln as a domain name. This is a miss as it gives this premium brand an amateur feel, i.e., less-professional.

What we can learn from this: When a Customer asks you for detailed information regarding the transaction for a major purchase (read: expensive!), provide them a professional quote detailing what they are getting and what it covers.

Despite our frustration, we placed the order (reluctantly) as their price was the lowest by far of any other quote we received. However, we received no letter of confirmation or thanks for ordering the car–no sign of appreciation or documentation of any kind. We were quoted six to eight weeks for delivery. What followed next was missed dates and failure to contact us when promised regarding the delivery (We escalated the matter to Lincoln Navigator via Twitter, and that did the magic trick in applying pressure!).

When we picked up the car the salesman acknowledged we had issues but asked that we still gave him a high Customer satisfaction score as this is what he was bonused on it. He was clearly gaming the system. When the survey came through I marked it honestly. Some parts good, some parts very poor. What happened next was amazing. the salesman wrote to us complaining that we had given him a poor score! He protested that it wasn’t the dealer’s fault it was Lincoln. I explained they were one and the same.

Suffice it to say, we were not overly impressed with our experience at Lincoln either. Nor our subsequent treatment by their Finance arm in setting up the lease payments, another whole story in itself.

What we can learn from this: Do NOT game the system. When Customers give you a low score, do not write to them and complain! The finishing touches of an experience send us subconscious signals that let us know we just paid for a prestigious service from a prestigious brand. Without these touches (a formal quote, a contract delivery, a thank you note, or even a delivery date in writing), you lose some of the prestige promised by the brand which leaves Customer feeling disappointed with the Experience–and the brand.

Buying a car is just like buying any other commodity; it’s just more expensive than most! Therefore, the value lies in the experience that you have at the dealers. It is so sad to see how great brands can get it so wrong. The money  spent on advertising, promotion, product development, brand building, and infrastructure can be destroyed in the experience with the Customer.

What has been your best or worst car buying experience? What signals did it send to you? I’d be interested to hear your take on the industry in the comments below.

The post Destroying Brand Experience, One at a Time appeared first on Beyond Philosophy.

The University of Oslo researched the motivation and interpretation of sighs in a series of three studies and concluded following about the act of sighing:

• A sigh typically signifies a negative mood (e.g., disappointment, frustration, defeat, ennui, or wistfulness).
• It happens with equal frequency in public and private, an indication that it might not be intentional communication (read: a subconscious reaction).
• People mostly interpret sighing from others as conveying a negative emotion (in the study, ten times more often than positive emotions), usually sadness.
• People interpret their own sighs as frustration.
• When participants were observed assembling a complicated puzzle, 77% of them sighed, but most of them denied they did.

In a study from the University of Leuven, researchers suggest that sighing can also be a physical and mental reset for your body. They looked at the breathing patterns of participants for 20 minutes. They found right before the subject sighed, their breathing pattern varied. Sometimes it was shallower than before and sometimes it was faster. They discovered that when you breathe the same way all the time, your lung function is less efficient. So a sigh can stretch them out again, and create a feeling of relief.

Reading the Subconscious Signal of a Sigh

I found these results interesting. I know I must sigh, but like the puzzlers in the Oslo study, I don’t notice it every time I do it. Also, I am not always negative when I sigh—sometimes I am just happy or content. Or maybe glad to be sitting down for a minute. I’m sure many of you are the same.

However, when the researchers looked at it in more depth, they revealed sighs are a form of nonverbal communication, whether they are intended that way or not. And the nonverbal communication of a sigh is that you are feeling something negative like impatience or sadness most of the time.

When we train front line people on how to read nonverbal communication, we recognize this is a critical part of emotional intelligence. We all do it all the time. We know when our significant other has crossed arms they are feeling stern (or cold. I prefer that one, because it’s usually easier to fix than stern). We know when someone isn’t meeting our eye they are hiding their feelings from us. We know when someone spits the words out, they aren’t happy. How many times have you heard in the midst of an argument, “It’s not what you said! It’s how you said it!”? Non-verbal cues, like sighing, are another part of this interpretation as well. When training front-line teams, it is critical they can interpret not only what Customers nonverbal clues communicate but also what they communicate with their own.

Why Do You Sigh?

So if sighs are a common part of your nonverbal communication, and sighs have a general association with negative emotions, does frequent sighing make you a negative person? Maybe or maybe not. But what the study revealed is that negative is what people interpret when you do it.

Considering that most people interpret sighs as a negative nonverbal communication, you would be wise to gain self-awareness about the frequency and the motivation for your sighing. Even if it isn’t driven by a glass-half-empty mindset, that’s what it usually communicates. Furthermore, you aren’t always aware you are sighing, so you could ostensibly communicate this negativity more often than you think.

So…what do you think? Do you think sighing is a negative nonverbal communication? I’d be interested to hear your opinions in the comments below.

If you enjoyed this post, you might be interested in the following blogs:

• Negative Emotions and Their Positive Effect

• Happiness Exploded: There’s More to Positive Emotions Than You Think

• Creating Successful Relationships

Colin Shaw is the founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy, one of the world’s first organizations devoted to customer experience. Colin is an international author of four bestselling books and an engaging keynote speaker.

Follow Colin Shaw on Twitter @ColinShaw_CX

The post Training Employees on Nonverbal Clues appeared first on Beyond Philosophy.