My podcast partner, Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University, and I were honored to celebrate our 200th podcast, The Intuitive Customer. To mark the occasion, we each chose three of the best episodes from the first 200. Here are our picks and the key things we learned from each.
Colin’s Picks:
How Apple Uses Psychology To Construct An Outstanding Experience
The Massive Importance of Memory in a Customer’s Experience
Ryan’s Picks:
5 Rules for Ensuring Behavioral Science Works for Your Business
Are You Using This Valuable Marketing Tool for Growth?
Is Facial Recognition Creepy, Or Is It Just the Future?
Let’s take a closer look at what we learned from each of these (in no particular order).
How Apple Uses Psychology to Construct an Outstanding Experience
This episode encompasses what we’re trying to do on the podcast: discussing theory but then seeing the idea translate into reality. When I think of Apple, one of the things they do well is make using their product feel like you belong to something, whether it’s a tribe or an exclusive club. I feel like I’m part of a community there. Apple achieves this “part-of-the-club” feeling by using Behavioral Science.
For example, Apple uses Halo Effect pricing. The Halo Effect dictates that your impression of the brand influences how you perceive what they do. If you have a positive Halo Effect, you judge their actions positively and vice versa. Apple is not the cheapest, but they don’t care because their impression is of high-quality.
We cover ten different things in that episode where you can see Behavioral Science theory, like the Halo Effect, manifest itself in an experience. Apple goes “beyond the philosophy” and does something, rather than just talking about doing something.
To listen to the whole podcast, please click here.
5 Rules for Ensuring Behavioral Science Works for Your Business
Most of the podcast breaks down behavioral science topic by topic by how it applies to the real world. Then, we provided helpful advice for how to get this stuff to work and move it beyond theory to something useful for people.
This episode began because one of our listeners wrote in with a question. Jeff asked how he could advise clients to implement behavioral-science-driven initiatives at zero cost. So, the entire episode is general advice on how to implement these ideas to your Customer Experience on the cheap. First, we chose a principle, explain how it works, and then apply it to experiences.
I especially liked this episode because we advised people to work out their goals first and then apply principles that will get them there. But, unfortunately, this process often goes the other way round, and that doesn’t always work or maximize the benefits of the effect on a company’s bottom line.
To listen to the whole podcast, please click here.
Are You Using This Valuable Marketing Tool for Growth?
This episode is about the Availability Heuristic, a crucial behavioral science concept. The Availability Heuristic suggests that we feel like things are more likely to happen when things come to mind quickly. It’s a straightforward but powerful idea. For example, when you read a news story about something that happens, you feel like it will happen again or happen to you.
The Availability Heuristic biases us in interesting ways. For example, I watched Shark Week on TV and was suddenly much more aware of the danger of a shark attack. However, in reality, the number of shark attacks is small, and my risk or danger level is extremely low. The Availability Heuristic dictates that the more we hear about shark attacks, the more afraid we are of it happening to us.
To listen to the whole podcast, please click here.
The Massive Importance of Memory in a Customer Experience.
Memory is my favorite topic, so it’s no surprise I picked this one. Memory is massively crucial for Customer Experiences. Professor Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for Behavioral Economics, and Kahneman once said we don’t choose between experiences; we choose between the memory of experiences. Therefore, understanding how memories form is essential.
To quickly summarize memory formation, there are two ways. First, Kahneman talks about the Peak-End Rule, which means that customers remember the strongest emotion they felt and how they felt after it. Second, memories associate with other memories in a network structure. When you activate a memory, you activate a node in that network also.
To explain what we mean about the memory network, we use the Fishing Net analogy. If you imagine a fishing net laid out at the bottom of a shallow pool, then picture pulling it up towards the surface by one of the knots. The surface of the shallow pool represents where you can remember the memory. However, the net knots represent all the other connected memories, and they are right there at the surface, too. So, as you remember that one thing, you also remember many other things related to it. Some of those other things don’t break the surface of the water. Some are also more active than others.
So, the idea is that that when you remember something, you never remember just one thing. Instead, you’re recalling a cluster of things, some of which may influence you without you even being aware of it.
To listen to the whole podcast, please click here.
Is Facial Recognition Creepy, Or Is It Just the Future?
We occasionally invite experts to speak with us about various topics. In this podcast, Professor William Hedgcock from the University of Minnesota discusses using facial recognition technology. First, Hedgcock explains how this technology works. Then, after explaining the technology, we dug into the Customer Experience part of it. In particular, we talk about how people will react to computers monitoring their faces and deconstructing their emotions based on their micro-expressions.
The conversation was great. We talk about what makes something creepy and how we can make these things less weird. We also share how to reap the benefits for our customers without turning them off.
The specific research that Bill told us about was when he looked at security camera footage at a cafeteria on campus. The research team could read the emotions that the average customer had coming into the cafe based on the time and the day of the week. The result was recommendations about the types of food the cafeteria should carry based on these emotional reactions. It was fascinating work.
To listen to the whole podcast, please click here.
What is Customer Science?
I describe Customer Science as a new variant of Customer Experience. According to several reports, not least of which have been people like Forrester and a couple of others, Customer Experience is stagnating in results. So, it begs the question, where does the future lie? For me, it’s in Customer Science.
Customer Science has three parts, including behavioral science, data, and AI. Combining those three things helps organizations understand how the customer is feeling entering the experience and how to segment these customers in different and dynamic ways based on what they do. As a result, Customer Science allows organizations to provide an experience proactively.
Customer Science is fundamental in the future. In ten years, we will talk about Customer Science the way we talk about Customer Experience today.
To listen to the whole podcast, please click here.
We’ve said from the beginning that we want our podcast to be a resource for people. We are proud of those episodes, and there’s a lot of learning in there. We’ve given you the headlines, but there’s so much more information in each of those episodes. We hope you decide to listen to one (or all) of these, maybe even subscribe.
There you have it. No promotions, no gimmicks, just good information.
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