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 talked about Priming on a recent podcast. From a technical perspective, Priming is a term that describes doing a little bit of something that will activate some idea in your mind and getting a response out of it. The word Priming comes from the old term “priming a water pump.” So many old water pumps would need someone to pour a little bit of water into the pump so that the water would come out.

“There is only one thing worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” -Oscar Wilde

Social psychologists often use Priming in their experiments. For example, some researchers did a study in a wine store. They discovered that music playing affected customers’ choices. When playing French music, French wine sales went up by a ratio of five to one. The exciting bit was if you had asked the customer, “Why did you buy French wine?” customers wouldn’t say, “because of the French music.” Priming is a subconscious element. Customers don’t understand why the French wine looked more appealing to them that day, but the social psychologists did.

Priming Memories

Memory is crucial to customer loyalty. You can’t be loyal to something that you don’t remember. However, memories are like a fishing net, and understanding why could help you know a little about the significance of Priming.

So what do I mean by memory being like a fishing net? Imagine there’s a fishing net that’s under the water. You pull out the net by one knot. As the knot breaks the surface, some tangles are out of the water, and some under the water.

Now imagine that the one knot you are holding is a customer memory. All the other knots in and out of the water are customer memories, some above the surface and below. The memories are connected, just as the fishing net knots connect.

Those knots’ strength is affected by many things, not least because some memories were more emotional than others. Regardless of the strength, all the memories connect, and when you activate one of them, you activate the rest to a certain degree.

This fishing net example helps us understand what Priming does. 

If, in this metaphor, the water represents our subconscious and pulling some of those knots above the water level means bringing it into consciousness. Therefore, those memories are the ones that we’re aware that we’re thinking about it. Priming pulls some of those knots close to the surface, lurking just below consciousness in the subconscious. We are not aware of remembering these.

Some of those knots around the one you are holding can be different things like images or pictures, an advert that you saw the night before, or that as you walk past the aisle in the grocery store. You see the same picture that makes you remember the product or service.

For example, if I make it cold, you’re consciously aware that it’s cold. That knot of coldness and everything associated with it may have pulled above the surface. But under the surface, maybe a desire to feel warmer and situations where you felt warmer probably haven’t broken the surface. But because you pulled up a part of the net, you’ve primed one knot. Then, the other ones around it are now closer to the surface where they can start to influence your behavior even if you’re not aware of it.

Smell is a vital memory evoker and primer, too. Have you ever been to a Lush store? Lush sells bath salts, soaps, various things that have the feel of handmade or at least not mass-produced. The smell is strong. You can tell there’s a lush store a hundred yards away. If you smell something, you’re probably aware that you’re consciously smelling something, but that smell will pull up a part of that net, and that’s going to pull a lot of other things up to the surface, maybe including a desire to go into the store.

Regardless of the strength, all the memories connect, and when you activate one of them, you activate the rest to a certain degree

Priming Experiences

When you apply Priming with the Customer Experience lens, you also realize that some organizations are not aware of how the little things they are doing are priming the customer. For example, cable companies do not prime you properly. (What a surprise!) You are already fired up because your bloody Internet’s gone down for the 497th time that week, and they are trying to sell you bundles through the hold. Of course, that intermixes with the repeated message that that “your call is important to them.” The effect is the opposite. Each time the terrible music pauses to let in the “your call is important to us” message, I cringe. It reminds you of every other time you’ve been frustrated and waited on the line for resolution and every different negative feeling.

Primers pull some of those responses to the surface. So, as an organization, you have to ask yourself, are you drawing positive or negative reactions?

We worked with an insurance company in the UK, where we were looking at the fact that they had several repeat calls into a call center. We discovered that after placing an order, the insurance company agent would tell the customers, “Your policy documents should be with you within five days.” And 76 percent of people that had that experience were then phoning back after three days and saying, “I’m sorry, but when was I meant to be getting my policy documents?”

It was the word “should.” By saying, “you should,” it primed feelings of doubt. We had the agents say instead, “Your policy documents will be with you within five days.” The call volumes move from 76 percent down to six percent within three weeks.

It is important to note that the callers had no idea why they called back before making the change. If we had asked, they would have said something else. However, the words you use are essential when it comes to priming correctly. While I dislike scripts, guiding people on the type of terms you would prefer for them to use, and giving them feedback is appropriate. These subtle word changes can influence people’s reactions to their situation.

When managing your customer experiences, think about whether you can steer customers in the right direction by pulling up some of these more positive associations in their memory’s fishing net instead of some of the more negative ones.

The idea of priming properly to evoke positive associations dives down into Journey Mapping. When you’re designing your customer journeys, understanding how you prime customers can explain what causes them to do things you don’t want them to do. Furthermore, look for what you can do to prime the memories that influence customer behavior in the most important ways for your business. It would be essential to consider:

• What music are you going to be putting on hold?
• Which images are you going to be using?
• How does it smell in your physical location?
• What are the words that you want to use?

All of those things should be priming customers to do something that you want. However, it should be appropriate.

Anchoring is a heuristic, which you might recall means a shortcut in our thinking to help us make decisions, resulting in a bias. Anchoring describes where you start with something, typically a number, and then adjust from there. The bias occurs because we choose bad anchors, and then we often under-adjust from there. For example, if you have people list at the last four digits of their Social Security number and then have them estimate the price for something, the price they estimate will be biased towards whatever number they listed first—even though people know that a social security sequence has nothing to do with the cost of the item they are estimating.

Anchoring is like Priming because you put a thought in somebody’s mind. There is a sales technique that somebody was talking to me about the other week where you tell a customer the rough price. It becomes an anchor, but also it weeds out those customers who can’t afford it, helping you qualify your prospects. Moreover, much evidence shows that the first party in a negotiation who offers the opening bid becomes an anchor. Typically, it is better to open the talks yourself because you’ll end up somewhere closer to where you want to be rather than if you allow the other person to open negotiations.

Some of the things you’re priming your customer with you might not realize. It could be you are priming them to have an unrealistic expectation. A lot of advertising does this. Customers see great things on TV, these incredible images of what it’s going to be like when you interact with this organization, and then it’s something terrible in reality.

We’ve talked before about the two cognitive systems that people have, the Intuitive System and the Rational System. Priming occurs because your Intuitive System is always there in the background, trying to help monitor what’s going on. When you’re trying to decide, your Intuitive System is trying to make you more efficient. It will pull up related ideas if you might need those, pushing those closer to the surface so that they’re available. With Priming, your intuitive system is monitoring what’s going on and sees the prime and says, “oh, this might be important.” It pulls up these memories, these thoughts, these feelings, and pushes them closer to the surface if they might be useful to you, and influences your behavior.

So, we shouldn’t think of Priming as something malicious. It doesn’t turn people against their best interests, hijacking them. Instead, Priming makes ideas available that the Intuitive System processes and then can bring to bear for the person who’s for the customer.

So, What Do You Do With This Information?

The first thing you should do with this information is to recognize that you will be priming your customers now one way or the other. There’s no neutral point on this. It will impact your customer. The issue for me is, is it deliberate? Did you mean to do it?

The second thing you should consider is whether you want to continue with these primes. Are they yielding the right behavior? Are you getting the results you want?

The third thing you should do is adjust your primes. Given the experience you want to give your customer what new primers should you be putting in place? Bear in mind that these are not universal. Different groups of customers will feel other primes depending upon what’s important to them. So the whole area of customer segmentation and everything else plays a part in this.

Moreover, if you are not aware of why primes will inspire what behavior, or even what primes your customers want, we recommend undertaking research. When you understand what customers value, you can design an experience that gives it to them.

However, it can be challenging to discover what customers really want; sometimes, customers don’t know themselves. In these cases, it is vital to undertake research to uncover them. Our Emotional Signature Research® discovers what level of emotional engagement you already have with customers and which emotions will drive the most value for your organization. The method we use can uncover these hidden needs, meaning the ones even customers didn’t know they wanted. Having the hidden-needs-want list is an excellent way to design Priming elements that inspire the customer behavior you want.

Most importantly, remember that you’re already doing this. People’s Intuitive Systems are already on the lookout for these primes because that’s what the Intuitive System does to help. So, give some thought to it. Are there ways to improve the customer experience by being sensitive to the primers you’re sending out instead of being ignorant and potentially making things worse accidentally?

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 Small Things That Have a Dramatic Impact on Your Customer’s Experience 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.

September 1st, the high-end yoga-wear maker introduced their new Pant Wall. The new fits are arranged according to how they feel when worn, rather than the silhouette as it was in the past. The new pants range from Tight fit to Relaxed and include other fits such as Held in, Hugged or Naked.

I realize of course that I am not the target of Lululemon, since I would never wear yoga pants (you’re welcome!). They certainly wouldn’t have my size. And if they did, the sight of me wearing this is enough to put everyone off their food for a week! However, the last fit description sounds interesting, to say the least!

The new fit descriptions are designed to help Customers know which fit is appropriate for what activity. The new wall is in response to Customer Feedback that they were confused about how the pants should fit and sometimes bought them too big. The Pant Wall was designed to help Customers feel less confused in the store more satisfied with their purchase after they leave.

The Customer response to the change seems to be positive, according to analysts. They are upgrading the stock and forecasting a positive turning point the brand by the 4th quarter. Morgan Stanley upgraded LULU, predicting that the stock will continue its success in earnings for 2016.

The VOC is the Key

So what does this story show us? It shows us two things. First, that listening to the Voice of the Customer (VOC) is an important part of your brand strategy. Second, that incorporating what you hear in the VOC to your Customer Experience pays off for your bottom line, a.k.a. stock price value rising.

An important part of your success (a.k.a. stock price value rising), is having a few ways to keep in touch with the VOC. Lululemon has a few channels in place to listen to the VOC:

• There is the Ambassador program, designed to give local athletes and brand ambassadors a way to weigh in on the product lines.
• Then there is the heylululemon.com site (also called their feedback page) where they invite their Customers to make suggestions and submit ideas.
• There is the Guest Education Centre, where they answer all questions and concerns via email, live chat, or call center.

They also do roundtable research at the store level. One of my work associates emailed me recently regarding a recent experience she had with Lululemon. When she was invited to an event at the store, she thought it was a party with drinks and snacks and would feature an exclusive preview for new products. However, it turned out to be something much more rewarding. Here’s what she described:

“…Don’t get me wrong, there were drinks and snacks. However, I, along with about 10 other people, had the opportunity to not only network a bit, but also sit at a round table where we were asked about our lives and what inspires us, as well as our thoughts, likes, and reasons for shopping with Lulu.  Then, they offered us a chance to give feedback on our concerns and what they could change and improve (whilst notes were taken by the store and Regional managers of the brand). They also had new products we were given the opportunity to try on and give feedback as well. At the end of the evening, it was also a nice surprise to be given a gift card to shop with them again.”

All of these listening channels are paying off—and according to stock pundits, by next year or even the fourth quarter this year, quite literally.

It’s nice to see a brand remember what makes Customer Loyalty and Retention work. Lululemon had begun to lose their balance with their Customers coming out of their pose as the top Yoga-wear brand.  But by realigning their strategy with a Customer focus and listening to the VOC, they are once again finding their Customer Center, and positioned to take the top spot once more.

How are you listening to the VOC with your brand?

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

5 Ways to Make a Great Impression on Your New Customer

When It Comes to Customer Experience, You Have to Keep Rolling the Dice

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly in Customer Experience Lately

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 Yoga Pants Can Realign Customer Experience 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.

What do I mean by this? I’ll explain by using some examples from a hotel room. The nature of my job means I spend a lot of time in hotel rooms. So while it might seem I am picking on them, the truth is I just have a lot of experience dealing with hotels and the “little things” that make an experience what it is there.

Convicted without a trial.

When I first get to a hotel, I get settled. I kick off my shoes. I set my computer up on the desk. I put my bag down on the bed and unzip it to put my hanging clothes in the cupboard. However, when I open the door, I almost always encounter this:

To me, this says, “Hello, thief!”

When the hotel decided to reduce the theft of their hanger by installing these, they send the subconscious signal that every hotel guest can’t be trusted to resist the idea of picking up a few new hangers on their trip. In my case, this is justified, because whenever I see the regular kind of hangers, I fill up my suitcase. It seems about right considering the expectations set for my moral character.

Location, location, location.

What I lack in trustworthiness, I make up for in cleanliness. I nearly always exercise good grooming when I travel. But I am often surprised by the location of my supplies. It’s not uncommon to have this type of bathroom counter encounter:

Maybe I’m doing it wrong…

When you stay in a hotel, where do you wash your hair? In the sink? I’ll wager not. Maybe I’m strange, but I wash my hair in the shower. However, hotels nearly always put the shampoo next to the sink. Why don’t they put it the shower where the majority of people are going to use it? The answer is because they didn’t think about that; they didn’t deliberately look at where they put the shampoo and how that plays out in the Customer’s experience. And in most cases, it’s not a big deal, either. But having the shampoo in the shower is handy—especially if you are already showering and are ready to wash your hair, and didn’t necessarily remember to grab it off the counter next to the bloody sink.

For MY convenience…I think not!

Next to airlines, few places on Earth take greater advantage of Customer’s poor planning and laziness than the hotel mini bar. Stocked with alcohol and carbohydrates in their many forms, the hotel mini bar is a lesson in supply and demand (and by supply, I mean right-there-without-going-to-find-a-convenience-store supply), as anyone who has paid $7.50 for a mini-bag of cookies can attest. However, it is also a lesson in subconscious messages, particularly the sign that read, “For your convenience, items that are removed will automatically be charged.” However, I don’t think that is for my convenience but for the hotel’s.

Am I just hacked off at hotels? No! Well, okay…maybe a little. However, I reserve my ire for hotels that don’t think about the Customer first and the organization second.

If you asked the managers of the hotels where these instances occurred if it was their intention to send these signals, that hotel guests were hanger-thieving, sink-bathing, cookie munchers, they would likely deny it. They would also probably wonder why you asked. Because the truth is, many hotels don’t realize the messages their experience moments are sending. The hotels are who they are and that is what comes across in their Customer Experience, making their experience, in many little ways, an accident.

Many chains do the right things for the Customer that make he or she feel like valued guests instead of derelicts. The Mandarin Oriental Hotels are an example of a hotel that puts much thought into how to put the Customer at the center of what they do. How do they do this? They do it by looking at thing as if they were a Customer, or what we call and outside-in approach.  They make sure there is nothing accidental about their experience, but instead deliver a deliberate experience that appeals to the conscious and subconscious emotions of their guests.

Listen, accidents happen; it’s part of business. But how you treat your Customer should never be one of them. Each detail of your Customer Experience should be designed to evoke the right emotions from your Customers—and not be left to chance.

Is your Customer Experience an accident?

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

• Are You Deliberate with Your Customer Strategy or Just Taking a Chance
• Are You Inside-Out or Outside-In? Designing A Customer-Focused Process
• Why Most Customer Experience Programs Fail

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 best-selling books and an engaging keynote speaker.

Follow Colin Shaw on Twitter @ColinShaw_CX

The post Is Your Customer Experience Accidental? 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.

According to a new study by the researchers at Harvard Business School and Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, apologizing for the rain can be a way to get perfect strangers to loan you their mobile phone. I wonder, should organizations have customer-facing employees “apologize for the rain” to have better experience for customers?

What is Apologizing for The Rain?

The study I am referring to involved having an actor go up to 65 strangers at a train station with the objective to ask to borrow their phone. In half of the interactions, he started with an apology about the rain as in, “I’m sorry about the rain!”, as if he had something to do with it. Apparently, that apology was more effective in getting people to loan him their phone, resulting in a 47% positive response over a 9% response rate when he didn’t preface his request with an apology for the rain.

The article does point out that the apology itself may not have been the catalyst for success, however, since the second group didn’t have another neutral statement given before the actor made his request. The authors of the article point out that it could have just been the small talk aspect of the apology that put the strangers at ease. In this way, I equate the “apology for the rain” as an icebreaker or small talk to ease into a conversation.

To me, the fact that the apology first was more successful is logical. Small talk does put you at ease. If you begin to relate to a person on a small talk level, isn’t that nearly always a gateway to a deeper level of interaction? Isn’t that in many ways how most relationships get started at some point? I would say that when the actor “apologized for the rain” to a stranger, it was a way that he was initiating an exchange with the stranger, like a pick up line in a sense. Only instead of his or her number and a chance to go for a drink, he simply wanted to borrow their phone.

What Are The Implications for The Customer Experience?

Having good people skills is essential for your customer facing employees. They need to be able to put customers at ease and manage the emotions of the exchange. We call this emotional intelligence and “apologizing for the rain” is in many ways a tactic that one can use to demonstrate a high aptitude in this area. I often use this tactic with my wife, Lorraine.

I have said before that she and I have few confrontations in our marriage because we are very good at communicating with each other. One skill I have picked up in 25 years of marriage is that I should always apologize for the rain when she is feeling upset. Lorraine knows that I am not responsible for whatever the rain is in her life, but to her, it’s a signal that I know she is upset and that I’m sorry she feels that way. Likewise, she will do the same for me. We avoid a lot of miscommunications by employing this tactic with each other.

The truth is that your customers are often arriving at your experience feeling certain emotions, which are not always positive. They could be scared, stressed, in some cases hurt, in still others angry. When your organization first interacts with them, acknowledging how they feel and “apologizing for the rain” is a great way to get the customer experience journey started off on the right foot. Chances are if you have hired the right team to handle your customer interaction, this will come naturally to them anyway.

Small talk is an effective way for organizations to help put their customers at ease, to get them to be amenable to resolving the situation in the case where the customer is experiencing some “rain.” Apologizing for it can be the difference it takes to “use their mobile phone.”

The post Small Talk and Trust appeared first on Beyond Philosophy.

Procter and Gamble (P&G) understands the importance of building an emotional brand connection with their customers. They also know their target audience well and what makes them feel. In 2012, they had an ad called “Best Job” that depicted the role a mom plays in the forging of a future champion. The tearjerker ad won the Emmy for Best Primetime Commercial as well as two Gold Lions and three Silver Lions at Cannes.

Not be outdone, they have produced a sequel for the recent Sochi Olympics, this one called, “Pick Them Back Up.” In case you haven’t seen it yet, here it is:

My wife likes to watch things that make her cry. I think she is absolutely mad. Who wants to watch something that makes you sad? Apparently, my wife and most of the other women I know.

“But I’m not sad she says. I am happy.” She tells me by way of explanation.

Now of course I know she’s mad because who cries when they are happy? Again…my wife, and apparently most of the other women I know.

So it came as no surprise to me when she cried while watching the new follow up ad that thanks moms for “teaching us that falling down only makes us stronger.”

Emotional engagement is a critical part of branding successfully to build customer loyalty. Forbes magazine wrote in 2013 “if you don’t stand for something, you’ll never be able to differentiate yourself on an emotional basis.” In the results they announced for their 17^th Customer Loyalty Engagement Index, they revealed that most desire for a brand was driven by emotional engagement and if you could locate where that emotional engagement is in your category, you will be able to create it with your customers.

Guinness did this last fall with men. They appealed to our sense of being a hero, or specifically ‘made of more.’ But that was for beer and they were clearly targeting men.

P & G, which is the parent company for Tide, Pampers, Duracell, amongst others is targeting women, even more specifically, Moms. They are tapping into what creates emotional engagement for these women. Specifically it points out how much work it is to be a mom and how long it takes. It thanks moms for always being there with a sympathetic ear and a warm bowl of water and Epsom salts to warm and soothe cold, sore feet.

The reason that my wife and nearly every other woman I know cry when they see this ad is because they all have been there, done that and probably most importantly, felt that. Plus as I mentioned before, my wife loves things that make her cry.

Emotions play a really big role in brand loyalty.  We associate brands with an emotion at a subconscious level.  In my post, “How We Really Make Decisions” I talk about this response and how essential it is to design a customer experience that addresses it. In our white paper, Implicit Association Test: Measuring the effect of the subconscious on a Mobile Phone Brand’s Value’ we talk about the 10 emotions that make up the subconscious experience. We show that there are some emotions that our consumers are aware of (conscious) and some that they aren’t (Subconscious), but that both sets of emotions drive their choices. We believe that by taking this into account when you are branding your organization, you can positively influence the emotions consumers feel about your brand on both levels.

The Winter Olympics have just finished. The ads promoting the event were successful. News stories about Vladimir Putin’s chance to put on good games were airing on the 24-hour news channels. This international audience of an immense scale is an excellent place to build a brand.

P &G is brilliant with these ads. They know whom to target and how to emotionally engage them (read: make them cry while watching the Olympics). As a result of their emotionally engaging strategy, millions of moms will choose their brands on the supermarket shelf, over and over again. They have earned their customers loyalty by bringing them to tears.

The post Emotional Engagement and Brand Loyalty: Procter and Gamble Gets it…do you? appeared first on Beyond Philosophy.