We discussed the findings of the interface of technology and human beings with Professor Shiri Melumad on a recent podcast. Professor Melumad is an assistant professor of marketing at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and has worked a lot in a relatively new research area about people’s relationship with mobile phones.

We Are More Emotional on Our Phones Than Computers

Professor Melumad published a paper last year that examines how the way we express ourselves in different types of user-generated content is affected by the device we use to write them. The focus was on customer-generated reviews, like restaurant reviews. The research team discovered that in specific contexts, like restaurant reviews, we express ourselves more emotionally when using our smartphone than our PC to write the review. 

To me, this makes sense at an intuitive level. My smartphone feels a lot more personal to me than my PC. Moreover, as many of you might know, my love of Apple and their iPhone is connected to my identity. 

Professor Melumad had the same feelings going into the research. However, her evidence showed that the smartphone’s form drove the emotionality more than the relationship we have with it. The phone has a smaller keyboard and screen. When using it, people have increased challenges in generating content. We tend to write less on our mobile than we would on a computer. We also get to the point more quickly, which favors our emotional evaluations of that experience. For example, writing “I loved it,” or “I hated it,” gets the message out quickly without a lot of supporting reasons why.

The way we express ourselves in different types of user-generated content is affected by the device we use to write them

Professor Melumad also said the situation also influences the review. The challenge with feedback and reviews is they are frequently solicited but infrequently completed. However, when an experience is extreme, a customer is more likely to review it. If I have a fantastic or terrible experience at a restaurant, I am more likely to write a review than if it was okay or even pretty good. It also means that you don’t get a representative sample of surveys. However, Professor Melumad says that this problem exists regardless of the device used.

Also, your situational proximity to the experience you review matters. Professor Melumad says that the research team analyzed data like scrape reviews from TripAdvisor. The research team learned that another part of what’s happening to increase emotionality in these reviews is the temporal proximity to the experience. You tend to gush more right after something great happened, and vice versa. If you write the content on your computer at home, you have likely calmed down a bit, and your review reflects that. 

However, Professor Melumad and the team took great pains to control the temporal proximity variable in their research. In the lab, researchers randomly assigned participants to write a review on their phone or their computer about their most recent dining experience. Everyone was in the lab, which controls for temporal proximity, so any differences in emotionality the research revealed were not because reviewers were still at the restaurant.  

Professor Melumad says a vital driver of the emotionality between the two types of reviews is that we write less on our phone (she estimates around 20 words is the average length). Therefore, we’re trying to convey the main takeaway when we write on our phone.

I am fascinated by the significance of emotion as drivers of customer experience and behavior. Professor Melumad’s research signals the importance of considering the emotional aspect of an experience. However, will that always be the case? Or will rational information ever take precedence in the short version of the review? 

Professor Melumad says there will always be boundary conditions to this effect. For example, reviews of refrigerators will not be as emotional as reviews of a controversial video on current affairs. There will be a context in which your emotional evaluation of something is not going to be what you think is the most important takeaway from that experience. There will be other situations where it is.  

Professor Melumad says there are two important takeaways here. The first is that positive emotions drive the greater emotionality of smartphone-generated content. This takeaway supports another well-established finding that word-of-mouth communication favors the positive. Professor Melumad says this slant toward the positive is because people have self-presentational concerns where they want to seem more positive than negative. So, the owner of a restaurant or other service provider would want to encourage customers to write reviews on their phones by sending them surveys or other mobile prompts. 

The second key takeaway from this study is that the reviews written on phones were more persuasive. The team showed participants a set of reviews without sharing what technology customers used to write them. Then, researchers asked the participants how compelling the reviews were. The results suggested that the emotional, smartphone-generated reviews drove perceptions of increased persuasiveness. Suppose you want to increase the likelihood that a report written by a customer will contain a selective inclusion of emotionality that’s specifically positive in tone. In that case, you may want to encourage them to write it on their phones.

We Love Our Phones

In another paper, Professor Melumad’s research shows that people tend to be more self-disclosing of personal and intimate information on their phones relative to their PCs. Moreover, the team found this across a wide range of domains, including the participant’s willingness to respond to sensitive questions in a survey. For example, in one study, she asked participants to admit to and describe an embarrassing product purchase they made, and they did—on their phones.

Professor Melumad used tens of thousands of ad campaigns online on mobile and PC for her research. The call-to-actions (CTAs) solicited personal information, like your email address, substance abuse history, bankruptcy history, or home address. When delivered on their phones, people are more willing to provide that information than on their computers. Not only that, but Professor Melumad also says that this fantastic effect had robust results.  

The team finds two parallel explanations for this effect. One has to do with what I mentioned earlier about how my phone was more personal to me than the PC was. Professor Melumad says this is because of a unique combination of properties that our phones exhibit:

• We have the phone with us almost always because it’s small.
• We rely on our phones to give us the ability to use it whenever and wherever we want.
• We employ the phone for personal contact with friends and family.

This unique combination of properties means our phone provides greater psychological comfort on average than when we engage in the same task on our laptop. Professor Melumad says when the participants in their study felt more comfortable, they were more comfortable sharing personal and intimate information. 

If you’ve been on public transport before, you’ve probably seen people completely immersed on their phones doing very personal things. This behavior is called Attentional Blindness. A task on our phone is more challenging for us than our computer because of the smaller keyboard and screen. Engaging in that task on our phone requires more cognitive resources. Attentional Blindness describes how we focus our attention on what we are doing, which blocks out what is happening around us and distracting thoughts unrelated to the task. Professor Melumad says there is less mental space to worry about how others might react or what other people nearby are doing, or even how the personal information disclosed on the phone could be misused. 

Our phone provides greater psychological comfort on average than when we engage in the same task on our laptop.

So, What Should You Do With This Information?

Many applications can be helpful for Professor Melumad’s findings to manage customer behavior. In particular, it has implications regarding reviews, social media, and customer research. 

It can help with critical health-related disclosures. We hear a lot about contact tracing these days, meaning people who have tested positive for Covid-19 should disclose the list of people with whom they have had physical contact. Professor Melumad believes contact tracing would be successful as an app because of the ability to target mobile-based customers and people’s willingness to disclose personal information on their phones. The same goes for doctors’ appointments. People could answer questions on their phones and be more willing to disclose sensitive, health-related information.

From a managerial perspective, Professor Melumad says these findings have pertinent information for customer welfare, also. A firm that is looking at posted reviews about their experience should focus on smartphone-generated reviews. These reviews may be more persuasive and influential to readers. Also, smartphone-generated reviews are more self-disclosing, which implies one could get an accurate sense of customers’ preferences and opinions. These reviews are diagnostic of how people sincerely feel. Moreover, if you can encourage people to complete surveys on their phones or give your personal information with CTAs for ads, you will improve the data and response rates. 

For my part, I’ve never really thought about the effect of using different technology. It’s just another example of how small things can affect customers and their feedback. 

Professor Melumad’s research also fits into a broader category of Behavioral Sciences research that emphasizes the importance of small changes in affecting people’s behavior. Here we have identical actions on devices that are functionally equivalent and a lot of ways. However, because of the physical properties of the technology or the emotional features of people’s relationships with the technology, you have different outputs. So, as we’ve said before, it is critical to focus on the little stuff in your experiences. It matters whether you target mobile customers or PC browsers, so figure out what you want to get out of your customers when you make these decisions.

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 Reviews Completed on Your Phone Are More Emotional 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.

Consumers for the luxury brand can look forward to a change in their experience. According to Business Insider, the new experience is called a “guest journey” and the sales associate is now their “muse.”

However, the names are just the start of the changes. The associates (muses) are tasked with not just “making the sale,” but first and foremost to engage with the Customer. In other words, the muses must determine how the Customer wants the experience to go that day, and then deliver that version of it. Muses will now also greet the guest only, but they won’t show product unless asked specifically to do so.

I’ll be honest, today we are exploring the experience of an industry I know NOTHING about, women’s fashion. But I do know enough to see that there is a great benefit to making the Customer feel like they are on a journey—particularly when they are spending the kind of money they are at one of these shops.

Setting the Expectations As High As Possible

Luxury brands, more than most, have set an expectation in the minds of their Customers, and it’s as high as the prices on the merchandise. By revamping the Customer Experience to reflect the brand value of luxury, Kate Spade is joining the ranks of Apple and Lululemon.

One key for a luxury brand is called “aspiration.” When retailers of luxury brands talk about aspiration, they refer to the value the brand name implies in the mind of the consumer. Aspiration is what drives a woman that sees a Kate Spade bag in the window of the shop to figure out if she can stand to eat noodles for the next month to pay for it. Aspiration means that consumers pay a premium to be a part of the brand, and are thrilled about it.

However, to remain aspirational, a brand can’t be too popular—or too accessible. Michael Kors, an equivalent brand for women’s fashion (or so I’m told…) is suffering from too much of both, and it shows in their sales numbers. To maintain their aspirational status, Kate Spade is pulling back from discounting and flash sales this year, a gutsy move in an economy that is still in recovery mode for many.

They also want a younger vibe. Their millennial-focused Kate Spade Saturday Stores closed last winter, but the line will continue in the Kate Spade New York Stores. They have a great new campaign with actress Anna Kendrick, called #missadventure:

The Warm Glow of Meeting Expectations

All of these measures, from calling sales associates muses to hiring a spokeswoman that personifies their target Customer, Kate Spade New York is sending a subconscious signal to consumers. Eventually these manifest into a brand message that sets an expectation for the quality of the experience. And this brand promise will convince a young twenty-something woman to spend her rent money on a great bag. Buying it from her muse, who delivers the experience, I mean “guest journey” she went to the store to have will give her a warm glow—which is great, because she’ll need it when she has to sleep in the park next month!

All joking aside, the idea that your retail experience should reflect your brand values is a tenet essential to creating a great Customer Experience for a Luxury brand. And that’s something that Kate Spade New York is designing their experience to do—in spades.

What other luxury retail experiences deliver their brand promise in spades? I’d love to hear your opinions in the comments below.

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

Discounting a Luxury Brand: The Power of the Attention Cluster of Emotions

Bergdorf and the Subconscious

Apple: Imitation is the Highest Form of Flattery

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

Follow Colin Shaw on Twitter & Periscope @ColinShaw_CX

The post Kate Spade Revamps Retail Experiences to Deliver Brand Values appeared first on Beyond Philosophy.

Competition in the marketplace is fierce. Every brand needs to find any way possible to differentiate themselves from their competitors. My angle is typically about Customer Experience. My regular readers know that how your Customers feel about your experience is a big part (over 50% based on our research) of how they feel about your brand and their loyalty to it. I regularly beat the drum of evoking the right emotions from your Customers with your Customer Experience and brand promise.

Women make the lion’s share of shopping decisions in many categories. Therefore, appealing to what matters to them is important. The Nielsen Global Survey discovered a new way one could differentiate their brand and evoke positive emotions from its female Customers: through promoting their social responsibility programs. It is important to note that while the greater impact for most of the social responsibility programs was on female consumers, male consumers also preferred companies that go green, create sustainable products and give back to society.

Women said they felt strongly connected or somewhat agreed with the following causes:

• 63% to increase access to clean water; men were at  56%
• 57% to eradicating world hunger; men were at 50%
• 55% to combating communicable diseases; men were at 47%
• 55% to reducing child mortality; men were at 45%

Corporate responsibility is growing as an important litmus test for consumers. A 2014 Nielsen survey revealed 55% (global average) of respondents, male and female, would pay more for products from companies with a commitment to corporate social responsibility. This percentage represented an increase of 10% over the previous three years (45% global average in 2011).

Being genuine and appropriate is the best way to brand using social responsibility as a platform. In other words, just slapping any old socially responsible program on your brand doesn’t work as well as one that “fits” your brand. Nielsen learned the most successful companies branding on social responsibility identified a social cause internally they felt important to their organization and matched it to what consumers expect from them based on their product or service. This 4-minute video by Nielsen explains it best.

Nielsen makes it clear your brand needs to make strong connections to appropriate socially responsible programs to evoke the proper emotions from its Customers, particularly when women are your targets. These should be important to your Customers, and also important to your organization to have the most appeal in the court of public opinion. Furthermore, these should not be kept a secret but shouted from the mountaintops to differentiate your brand in the crowded and fierce marketplace we contend with today.

We know that how Customers FEEL about your brand, regardless of their gender, is critical to your bottom line. What we are learning through Nielsen’s research is that how they feel about how you generate that bottom line—with social responsibility—is also critical to how they FEEL about your brand. Especially, as it turns out, when you consider your female Customers.

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

• Why Men and Women Remember Things Differently.
• Men vs. Women: Why Difference Doesn’t Mean Inequality
• Are Women Better at Building Customer Relationships and Loyalty?

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 Women Want Social Responsibility from Their Brands appeared first on Beyond Philosophy.

What is the point of doing research is you are not going to do anything with it?

Let me give you an example. It was the first few days after I had been promoted to the SVP, Customer Experience for British Telecom a number of years ago. One of my first acts was to attend a feedback session intended to give us the results of our annual customer research project ordered by my predecessors, the third or fourth year we had commissioned it in as many years.

The truth was the agency presenter’s demeanor surprised me. Her attitude was matter-of-fact, and her body language clearly read, “I don’t want to be here.” I felt as if she were advertising the fact this session was a total waste of her time. After about halfway through the presentation, I felt compelled to stop her.

“Why are you delivering this presentation like you don’t care?” I asked her, challenging her on her bad attitude.

“Don’t care?” she said, smiling as though to say that was ironic. “I don’t care?” I could instantly see that I had hit on something, and clearly it was a raw nerve. She continued, and what she said made an impact on me:

“We have been undertaking this research for you for the last three or four years. Each year we tell you that your Customers are unhappy with the service you provide and they want you to change it. Each year people sit here and nod in agreement. And then, guess what? Nothing happens! Therefore, the following year we do the same research, which tells you the same thing; the only change is it’s just got worse. Again, people nod, and nothing happens!

“So with respect, it is not that I don’t care, it is that you don’t care. You don’t care that Customer service is getting worse. What I really don’t understand is why you waste your money in doing this research if you are only going to ignore it!”

I was taken aback by her outburst, but could understand her frustration and her passion. More importantly, she was right. We didn’t care. We just did the research, because we were a big company and that’s what big companies do. It was another box ticked. It just shows the lack of Customer Centricity of the organization.

I thought about that conversation many times over the next couple of years. I used it as motivation to change this behavior for my company. My new role was to take action, not just read reports and listen to presentations about what we should do.

Taking action in a large company, however, isn’t a simple task. The internal challenges we all face can be daunting and could be very demotivating for my team. As with many companies, despite having an internal company value that said, “We put Customers first,” that was not the case. The reality was that senior executives were more concerned about keeping expenses low and cutting costs than improving the Customer Experience. Even though they said all the right things when push came to shove, it was always cost cutting that took priority over improving the Customer Experience.

However, here is the insight: It is about how you position things. Like the old saying goes, “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” I quickly learned trying to make a case for change based on improving the Customers’ Experience wasn’t going to work, especially if it cost money. I had to change the way I thought and positioned things.

After failing more than once in my efforts to persuade them to invest in the Experience, I finally realized that presenting my Customer Experience changes under the cost-savings banner was the way to win over my senior executive team. How could we save costs AND improve the Customer Experience? The trick was to consider all the costs that the company incurred through this poor service, including management’s time in dealing with complaints etc.

My team and I quickly discovered that poor service costs money. We discovered huge savings could be made by eliminating poor service. Every case we presented lead with the information on how we could save costs and, “Oh, by the way, improve the Customer Experience as well.”

Eureka! It worked. I am proud to say that once we took action we had some great results. The truth was the market was crying out for the types of changes the research was telling us we needed, and the results we achieved by making these changes were worth the effort.

Research is excellent, important, and critical to making a strong plan. But understanding the situation is only half the battle. The other half of the battle, the most important one, in fact, is to get people to take action on the research. In other words, to stop analyzing and start acting.

So the question I have for you is: Is it time for you to stop analyzing and start acting?

“Unlocking the Hidden Customer Experience: Short Stories of Remarkable Practices that Ensure Success” is designed to help organizations take their Customer Experience to the next level. This book focuses on what it takes to evoke the best emotions from your Customer Experience and the vital role of the conscious and subconscious experience with real-world examples. It became available today, for only $9.99! Read more here.

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

• 4 Actions to Exceed Customer Expectations
• How to Get People to Do What You Want
• Philosophies to Improve Your Customer Experience in 2015

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 offour bestselling books and an engaging keynote speaker.

Follow Colin Shaw on Twitter @ColinShaw_CX

The post Best Advice: Stop Researching Your Customers — and Do Something appeared first on Beyond Philosophy.

Here is the ad, in case you missed it:

Part of the reason these studies showed the link is because music activates many centers across the brain, including the emotional ones. From classical music to the Gershwin tune used in the Apple ad, these areas are active and processing the data. When this occurs, memory is triggered and a perception is formed. In addition, music has the ability to take us back in time to emotions we felt, even to the music of our parents or grandparents as is depicted in the Apple ad.

So Why is Music So Emotionally Charged for Us?

I once read  “Music comes the closest to expressing the inexpressible.” I couldn’t agree more. This is because music has a language of its own.  Malini Mohana, Neuropsychology researcher from the University of Cape Town, South Africa defined it like this:

“Music can be thought of as a type of perceptual illusion, much the same way in which a collage is perceived. The brain imposes structure and order on a sequence of sounds that, in effect, creates an entirely new system of meaning.” (Source: psychcentral.com.)

The language your brain associates with music creates emotions. This language is why you turn up the volume when you hear a song from your youth and sing along joyfully, particularly when you haven’t heard it in a long time. Your brain is producing happy memories that evoke strong emotions. It’s a reason that many people look forward to Holiday music after Thanksgiving (or in some cases just after Halloween!). Mohana explains also that the brain’s emotional, language and memory are all active when listening to music, making it synthesize a memory of your feelings associated with the sounds and rhythm of it.

Several studies have revealed music has a link with our memory. In one study, researchers discovered singing aids in learning a foreign language. Perhaps it is also why those of us around in 1971, (I was 13),  know that Coke would “Like to Teach the World to Sing” is a classic and made everyone sing this song.

Branding with Music Creates a Memory…Just Hope it’s a Good One

Apple and Coke have chosen good songs to create the memory with their Customers. In both cases, the song and the resulting connection is likely to keep positive emotions associated with the brand name. They did a great job.

Using music is not a guarantee of good feelings however. Consider this gem:

Wow. Just wow.

This one is making my brain language laugh in earnest. Laughing is positive, I suppose, but it’s better when it’s “with” not “at.” David’s Pizza has a cheesy ad. Now, you might argue, cheesy isn’t bad when you are selling pizza, but I doubt it would work for a national soda brand or elite tech company.

Why is the Gershwin song great and the David’s pizza song well, …not great? According to Mohana, it’s because the brain structures are wired to anticipate rhythm and melody. Your brain automatically starts to synchronize with the beat and predicts the next one. This happens in the subconscious. Skilled composers are masters at balancing when these expectations are met and when they are not.

Music and branding are a great combination for any organization. Having a great song, jingle, or score makes the ad create positive emotions in the minds of your Customers. It gives your brand promise a foundation built on good memories. From there, you can build the brand to attract them to your business.

Of course, you’d better make sure that the Customer Experience they have when they get there is as advertised. As I have written before, disappointed is never an emotion that leads to a good Customer Experience.

Apple’s new Holiday ad is heartwarming; it’s also genius (punny!). By reaching in and plucking your heartstrings, it embeds its brand right into your subconscious mind.

What song/ad combination do you love? Please share your examples with all of us in the comments below.

“Unlocking the Hidden Customer Experience: Short Stories of Remarkable Practices that Ensure Success” is designed to help organizations take their Customer Experience to the next level. Celebrating the launch of this new eBook, I am hosting a LIVE webinar focusing on what it takes to evoke the best emotions from your Customer Experience and the vital role of the conscious and subconscious experience with real-world examples. Read more about the book and register for the webinar, here.

All attendees will receive a discount code for 50% off the eBook.

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

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

Sources:

“Music and Memory: 5 Awesome New Psychological Studies.” www.spring.org.uk. Web. 16 December 2014. < http://www.spring.org.uk/2013/12/music-and-memory-5-awesome-new-psychology-studies.php>

Mohana, Malini. “Music & How it Impacts Your Brain, Emotions.” Psychcentral.com. Web. 16 December 2014. < http://psychcentral.com/lib/music-how-it-impacts-your-brain-emotions/00017356?>

Title:

The post Music: A Marketing Tool appeared first on Beyond Philosophy.

At times it seems like the most popular individuals are those with the most signs of external success – the car, the house, the wife (or husband), the children, the dog, the cat – whatever. In other words, “the Joneses.”

Dr. Kelly Campbell’s work More than Chemistry: What Makes Relationships Tick brings great news. You don’t have to get the car, the house or the job to have natural chemistry with others. The key determinants of friendship chemistry according to her article are openness, conscientiousness and agreeableness.

Openness goes hand-in-hand with adventurousness, imagination and emotional presence. Conscientiousness refers to competency, discipline and work ethic. Agreeableness means overall friendliness, cooperativeness and considerate behavior toward others. Other traits that facilitate chemistry between individuals are being non- judgmental and similarity.

With this information, it’s hard to underestimate the worth of recruiting the right people to work on your front line. Employees who are emotionally present, hardworking and considerate toward others can’t go wrong with the customer. An attitude of non-judgment makes a customer feel comfortable and “at home.” Combined with perceived commonalities, customers are more likely to open up to employees and share valuable information that can be used to create an excellent experience and build loyalty.

Taking the time from the outset to screen for these three key traits (openness, conscientiousness, and agreeableness) and combining good candidates with adequate training initiatives can save headaches in the long run.

The post Relationship Chemistry: Hiring Employees that Build Loyalty appeared first on Beyond Philosophy.

The question of whether societies experience mood states that affect their collective decision-making is a provoking one, and it’s one that Dr. Johan Bollen – a computational mathematics researcher at the University of Indiana – asks in his 2011 paper “Twitter mood predicts the stock market.” In the past five years, the potential of speculative markets to accurately forecast trading behavior has attracted the attention of several prominent business writers.

James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds, Cass Sunstein’s Infotopia, and Douglas Hubbard’s How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business evidence this point. Traditional thinking about holds that market losses precede negative feelings, where in fact the opposite is true: negative feelings precede market losses.

Dr. Bollen and his colleagues used large-scale Twitter feeds to investigate the public mood and examined the correlation to the value of the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DIJA) over time.

Mood tracking tools OpinionFinder (measures positive vs. negative mood) and Google-Profile of Mood State (measures moods in terms of calm, alert, sure, vital, kind, and happy) calibrated the emotional timbre of the text content in these large-scale Twitter feeds. To test the reliability of these tools, Bollen’s team cross-verified public sentiment with the 2008 presidential election and Thanksgiving Day.

At 87.6 percent, the accuracy rate of this correlative analysis is surprising. Even more surprising is that Dr. Bollen’s methods account for more than a six percent reduction of the Mean Average Percentage Error (MAPE) employed by other market prediction methodologies.

Because negative public mood states are strong predictions of changes in Dow Jones Industrial Average closing values, companies like UK-based Derwent Capital Market and US-based Wise Window have spent millions on speculative analysis. While Dr. Bollen’s study is innovative in its methods, his conclusion reflects Beyond Philosophy’s position that social media is the next game-changer in customer experience management.

If you are interested in learning more about how behavior economics and customer experience management overlap, see our blog “Rethinking Objectivity: How to Use Emotions in the Customer Experience for Effective Decision Making.”

The post Buy or Sell? (In 140 Characters or Less) appeared first on Beyond Philosophy.

Author: Colin Shaw

2010 Customer Experience Impact Report

View more presentations from RightNow Technologies.

2010 Customer Experience Impact Report
View more presentations from RightNow Technologies.
RightNow, a corporate customer experience product organisation put together this deck full of customer experience statistics that I thought was useful to share.

Would love to hear your thoughts and builds

By COLIN SHAW | Published: FEBRUARY 3, 2011

The post Some great customer experience statistics for 2011 appeared first on Beyond Philosophy.

Author: Colin Shaw

Are you providing a multi-lingual customer experience?
NPS®FK reports that “In the past year, China has acquired a whopping 36 million new internet users, tipping the grand total to over 440 million users. With China’s steadily increasing growth, English may soon be dethroned as the most widely used language on the internet in possibly less than five years.”

Although your store or service may only be based in one country, the internet spans across the globe. Have you planned out your international customer experience? What happens when someone from another language visits your site?

By COLIN SHAW | Published: JANUARY 23, 2011

The post A Chinese Customer Experience [infographic] appeared first on Beyond Philosophy.