podcast

How to Understand Customers Preference

Have you ever noticed how some people put a lot of letters after their names in their signatures and bylines? Some of them go on for quite a while, like a second surname. It annoys me sometimes.

Then, I remember that when I introduce myself, I often refer to my status on LinkedIn as one of the top 150 Business Influencers. I do it because I am proud of it. I presume that people with the degrees are feeling proud of their hard work and accomplishment earning that degree and qualification, too.

However, there is another reason people list their degrees and qualifications with their signatures, and I let everyone know about my LinkedIn achievement. We talk about it in this episode of The Intuitive Customer podcast.

Why Are We Scared of New Technology? 

We have some exciting new technology for CX. Facial recognition technology and facial expression analysis yield some new and exciting data about how customers feel during a Customer Experience. The only problem is that many people find it creepy.

This episode of The Intuitive Customer asks the question Why Are We Scared of New Technology? It turns out, we have been here before with new technology. Of course, that time, it was something far more crazy than recording facial expressions and using software to determine how a person feels. 

What was this crazy technology? It was trains.

According to mentalfloss.com, some people believed back when the first trains were running that if women traveled over 50 mph, their uteruses would fly out of their bodies. Other people thought humans would just melt.

Luckily, neither prediction came to pass. Now we travel at hundreds of miles an hour with no concern for melting or reproductive organs flying out of anyone.

In other words, we got used to the idea of riding trains and other transport at high rates of speed, and we don’t worry anymore.

I believe the same pattern of fearing technology and then getting used to it will be valid for facial recognition and facial expression analysis technology also. However, before we get into it any deeper, we should clarify the difference between the two technologies.

• Facial Recognition: Uses your facial features to identify who you are.
• Facial Expression Analysis: Uses your facial expression to identify how you feel.

In both technologies, the software records the spatial relationships of your features and compares them to a database. However, with facial recognition, it’s a database of people’s identities. With facial expression analysis, it’s a database of unconscious reactions our face makes in response to how we feel, e.g., dilation of the pupils or a widening of the eyes, tightness around the mouth, etc.

There are excellent applications for this technology for Customer Experience strategy and design. As global customer loyalty consultants, we believe knowing how your customers feel at the different moments of their interaction with your organization is invaluable when you are seeking to foster customer retention. Best of all, you don’t have to ask them about it, which can introduce some other influences that may or may not skew the data.

However, we have also learned that many don’t like the idea that cameras are recording their reactions and analyzing their unconscious reactions to how something makes them feel. 

Facial recognition and facial expression analysis is the future of research for Customer Experience. I think we can get over this creepy factor and embrace the technology for our industry. Also, before too long, I believe we will wonder how we ever lived without it.

Listen to the podcast in its entirety to learn more about Why We Are Scared of New Technology for your Customer Experience.

The Intuitive Customer podcasts are designed to explain the psychological concepts behind customer behavior.  

If you would like to find out from one of our CX consultants how you can implement the concepts we discussed in your organization’s marketing to improve customer loyalty and retention, contact us at www.beyondphilosophy.com.

To subscribe to The Intuitive Customer and never miss a podcast, please click here.

The Massive Importance of Memory in a Customer’s Experience

Customer loyalty is a function of customers’ memories. That is to say, customers don’t choose your experience over another; customers choose the memory of your experience over another. Therefore, we feel it is vital that you ensure your customers have an excellent memory of your Customer Experience.

This episode of The Intuitive Customer explores the massive importance of memory for a Customer Experience and how our brain influences what we remember about them.

The human memory is imperfect. Our brains hold onto specific types of information when forming memories and let other information go. So, good experiences might not always turn into equally good memories, and vice versa. We could remember things better or worse than they were.

Understanding how memories work is essential to building customer loyalty. If you don’t understand how the brain forms memories, you could end up creating the wrong memories about your Customer Experience.

To understand how memories work, you must first know the Peak-End Rule. The Peak-End Rule says that what people remember about an experience is how they felt at the moment when emotion was the strongest and how they felt when the experience was over. 

When it comes to Customer Experience design, an organization must be clear where the peak emotion occurs during the customer interaction, as well as how the customer feels at the end. These emotions can make or break your chances for customers to form Customer Loyalty.

To create the memories you want, you need to evoke the customer emotions that you want. To do that, we suggest you start with these three key questions:

• What’s the experience that you’re trying to deliver? You need to define what that is so that everyone on the team is working toward the same goal.
• What emotions are you trying to evoke? These feelings are your target for the peak of the experience and how it ends to ensure that your customers remember the right things about your brand.
• How will you deliver these emotions consistently? We suggest walking the experience as if you were a customer yourself so you can see when and where you are evoking emotions you want, and, perhaps more importantly, where you aren’t. 

Listen to the podcast in its entirety to learn more about The Massive Importance of Memory on Your Customer’s Experience.

The Intuitive Customer podcasts are designed to explain the psychological concepts behind customer behavior.

If you would like to find out from one of our CX consultants how you can implement the concepts we discussed in your organization’s marketing to improve customer loyalty and retention, contact us at www.beyondphilosophy.com.

To subscribe to The Intuitive Customer and never miss a podcast, please click here.

Creating a Frictionless Experience 

As a global customer experience consultant for nearly two decades, I have never heard a customer say, “Gee! I wish that buying process was just a little more complicated!”

Why? All customers want their experiences to be easy. When things aren’t easy in a given moment, we describe that as friction. Every organization needs to find their moments of resistance in a Customer Experience and fix them—before the competition beats them to it.

We don’t like uncertainty. It affects our lives in many ways, and especially as customers. Consider the fact that we buy insurance. We purchase peace of mind that we are covered if something unlikely (and terrible) happens. Likewise, we buy Powerball tickets in the improbable event that we will win.

In other words, we are terrible at estimating the probability of unlikely events, for good or ill. This episode of The Intuitive Customer explores why that is at a psychological level and what you can do about it in your Customer Experience Design.