I posted on LinkedIn recently that the world is going mad (or crazy, depending on which side of the pond you read this). I did it to see if I was becoming a grumpy old man or if others had noticed this too. It turns out I am not alone in my assessment. Many of my followers weighed in with their own experiences that tell a truth that is hard to swallow, the world has changed for good, but it’s not good for customers.

I felt worked up about a few things around this time. First, I had flown for a quick trip to New Jersey, landing at JFK in New York, which is anything but quick at seven hours flying time. Then, we sat for an extra 45 minutes on the tarmac while the airport found us a gate. Sure, it happens, I thought. Then, on my return flight, we learned after taxiing through Heathrow that we were delayed because “the gate was not calibrated for the plane.” That was a problem I had never heard of, and that is saying something because I fly a lot. Then, to add insult to injury, we had a lot of projects at the house that had gone haywire because of delayed timelines for radiator deliveries and a decorator’s inconsistent approach to project management.

So, to answer my question, I was a grumpy old man. However, was I justified? Is it me alone?

It turns out it wasn’t.

Mandy Morgan wrote in with a litany of comments that support how I feel. She thinks customer service is out the window and that getting a good experience is a pleasant change from the usual. Also, great people out there who are still trying to deliver good experiences are exhausted.

Mandy is right. Customer service is not going well these days, and many problems are out there. People are exhausted.

Mandy also wrote that nobody wants to work anymore, and everyone wants more money. However, that’s always been true. It’s human nature that people want more money for less work. So, we must try something else.

Some other readers had good advice. For example, Justin C. Reviczky wrote as a leader, learning from the team what makes them tick at an individual level. Then, he encourages them to see the bigger picture for the group dynamic. Using this approach, he says at the end of the day, each team member should be proud to embrace the culture, vision, and goals and work towards achieving them. Why? Because they’re pleased and thankful to be part of something that not only sounds good but that benefits them and their families over the long run.

In England, hiring managers are having a hard time getting people to show up for interviews, let alone jobs. This situation could be a money thing; however, I think there is something more. After the pandemic, people realized what they wanted out of a job, and many times, it wasn’t these customer-facing positions. Moreover, people don’t feel like they are part of the organization. However, if you can create a culture that makes them feel like they are part of the organization and that the company has a vision and a path for them, it can help them overcome these feelings that the job isn’t worth it.

Neal Woodson had a similar experience to mine at Heathrow, which was a madhouse. He describes a scenario where people hardly knew what they were doing, patience was in short supply, and tempers were flaring. He said he thought the combination of high customer expectations, lack of customer awareness, insufficient staffing, and absence of empathy led to a perfect storm for poor experiences.

It’s not just airports that seem understaffed. The postal service isn’t breaking customer experience records right now either. Michael G. Bartlett wrote to me about a recent experience dealing with the United States Postal Service. When rescheduling a package that failed to deliver, a typo in the postal code ended up with him unable to use self-service, then spending half an hour trying to reach a human employee to remedy it.

Big-name brands are blowing it, too. Recently, life-long customer Doug Rabold could not renew annual passes at Florida’s Disneyworld Park, after getting the runaround on the phone and at the park in Guest Services. The reason he was given? The system is not updating Annual Passes right now. As he writes, the lessons learned is that Disney tells customers “no,” now, a policy is more important than serving loyal customers, and $1200 in recurring annual revenue is not a compelling motivator for them.

Rabold’s story reminded me of a funny sketch by Little Britain, “Computer says no,” although it has a bit of fruity (aka: bad) language at the end:

Another reader, Robin Domek, cites that the problem with employees is a lack of empathy and compassion for overworked, overwhelmed workers from business leadership. Moreover, the job is more complicated; many customers are impatient and angry, and these front-line employees have to deal with them all day. In this environment, it is impossible to recruit customer-facing workers. Then, you try for warm bodies, which gets people in the jobs, but now they aren’t the correct type of people for that position. As you know, having the wrong people working with customers doesn’t do your experience any favors.

Esther Quinlan discussed the shortage of pilots. The deficit happened because people were not flying as much during the pandemic, so the airlines laid off the pilots. Now, travel is back on, so airlines need pilots. But some retired, others got into other businesses, and there aren’t any pilots. So now, airlines have staffing shortages and cancellations. Short-term, the pilot layoffs made sense since no one was flying during the pandemic, but long-term, not so much.

Similar things have happened at restaurants. However, the restaurants re-opened without sufficient staff. Whether understaffed or undertrained, diners like Kaylor Hildenbrand were told at a recent experience that they couldn’t order a meal just then as the kitchen was shutting down for a while to get the orders they already had out. But wouldn’t she like another drink while she waited?

However, some of these things were broken before COVID. For example, many of the problems in the UK have to do with Brexit. People left the UK after Brexit, which caused a shortage of people in the labor pool. Also, trade is down with Europe, which doesn’t help with inventory and related issues. As Laura Spoelstra, who is from the Netherlands, points out that many things broken in experiences British people have learned to accept, from potholes in the roads to trains and appointments that are “on time” even when they are five to ten minutes late, to A & Es (Emergency rooms in the UK) that don’t accept emergencies. So, maybe the world has been going crazy for some time now.

It’s not all bad out there. Patty Soltis had problems with her seating assignment on a recent flight with Delta Airlines, which couldn’t be resolved at the time. However, the empathy and extra effort she witnessed from the humans in trying to fix the digital system issue made up for the inconvenience it caused. So, all is not lost.

So, What Should You DO about This?

One of my readers, Jose V., wrote: Business failures mean business opportunity. We live in a special time. Beating broken businesses is easier than ever. With this idea tucked up front in our minds, let’s consider what this means for you in today’s business:

Accept that the world has changed. From both a customer and employee experience perspective, nothing is the same. It can be challenging to accept and deal with, but it is a fact. How things used to be and how life used to operate are different now, and the sooner we accept it, the faster we can move toward success.

Be honest with customers and employees. In the flight example, it was clear that overbooking is currently rampant, as are last-minute cancellations. Both actions create problems for your experience, for which your front-line employees shoulder the burden. Stop making these problems for yourself, and when you discover a problem, communicate openly about it with everyone—and give everyone as much notice as possible.

Consider the long term. Too often, organizations are tied up with short-term gains, making decisions that benefit them in the present. However, these same decisions are killing their long game. When making business decisions that you need to make for short-term gains, it would be best if you implemented a long-term strategy to help you counteract what it will do to your business down the road.

Define what drives value. We helped the world’s largest shipping organization, Maersk Line improve their customer experience to the point that their Net Promoter Score® improved 40 points over 30 months, leading to a 10 percent rise in shipping volumes. So, what was the secret? There were many, but the best way to summarize it is to say that they determined what drove value for their customers, and—this is the critical part—Maersk gave it to them. This strategy has proven successful time and again for many different organizations, and even ones like yours.

The world is changing. It doesn’t do us any good to complain about how things used to be and wish they were better. We need to make changes. We need to adjust. If business failure makes business opportunities, which side of that saying do you want to be: the failure or the opportunist?

We hadn’t been through something like this before. So, these supply chain issues that delayed my radiators, the information chain issues that don’t have the gate ready at the airport for an arriving flight, and the recruitment issues experienced by many customer-facing departments are the result. We haven’t had these problems; labor inventory and supply chains have been predictable for a long time, making the “just-in-time” way of doing business popular for some time now. However, things have changed, and it is probably time to figure out the new standard moving forward with new ideas.

If you have a business problem that you would like some help with, contact me on LinkedIn or submit your pickle here. We would be glad to hear from you and help you with your challenges.

There you have it. No promotions, no gimmicks, just good information.

Think reading is for chumps? Try my podcast, The Intuitive Customer instead. We explore the many reasons why customers do what they do—and what you should do about it. Check out our latest episode on iTunes here. Subscribe today right here.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is such a promising technology. It’s so exciting that I worry a little that people treat it like magic. However, it could be that magic is the wrong word. Instead, it could be the same old human biases coming out in ones and zeroes but given a new authority it might not have earned.

We discussed this on a recent podcast  with our guest, Broderick Turner, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Marketing at Virginia Tech. Dr. Turner founded TRAP LAB (Technology Race and Prejudice LAB) intending to expose the inherent biases about race and racism that have mixed into the foundations of marketing, market places, consumer technology, and market research. They have a weekly lab meeting that will resume in September, and he invites our audience to join. The Zoom meetings feature research-active faculty from across the globe and from all academic disciplines and are designed to enhance organizations’ economic, environmental, and social outcomes. Click here to join the TRAP.

Dr. Turner explains that he thinks of AI the way author Cathy O’Neil does in Weapons of Math Destruction: Algorithms are opinions embedded in code. Dr. Turner believes that description is exactly how algorithms and machine learning works. In his classes, Dr. Turner asks students if they are familiar with the basic linear regression formula, Y=X + B? They are (although I might have been hard-pressed to remember that one without his help, I must admit).

Dr. Turner explains that AI decides the “Y” of an outcome. For example, approve a loan or not? Approve parole or not? These are the Y. However, what Dr. Turner says matters is how much weight is placed on the “X.” Since AI is only doing the math, what matters is how much importance the programmer puts on the inputs and who decides them. As of now, only humans decide; AI hasn’t progressed to that level of decision in this scenario.

So, Dr. Turner says, AI is not magic. Instead, it’s a 10th-grade algebra formula stacked on top of itself.

Moreover, we have not reached the point where AI decides its inputs’ importance; human beings did. So instead, we humans made a bunch of small decisions that add up to something that looks big and magical but is, in reality, a 10th-grade algebra equation stacked on top of itself.

The misconception is that machine learning and forms of AI are pure. That technological brains built ideas from scratch without the influence of emotional clutter and self-developed to generate new revelations. So it might someday, but today, Dr. Turner explains, it is built by humans, and, like anything made by humans, it is at risk of human influence, which can imbalance the results.

In other words, there is no need to build a panic room or stock up on canned goods for a SkyNet takeover just yet.

A machine takeover is purely (ridiculous) fiction with the technology we have today, per Dr. Turner, because using a bunch of linear regressions to replace the complexity of human thought and cognition doesn’t make any sense. The way humans process information is much more complex. Dr. Turner says a person with below-average intelligence has more to offer than the “smartest” AI today. As it stands, Dr. Turner says AI should not stand for artificial intelligence but for artificial ignorance.

So, What’s AI Good for Then?

Even with these limitations, it is clear that people are excited about AI and its future potential. People are looking for it for use in various applications. So, what are the advantages of it? Dr. Turner says it depends on the weights that humans put in there. Humans make those decisions, even in unsupervised machine learning, which means it is still an opinion about what those will be, affecting AI’s suitability. Therefore, Dr. Turner says today’s AI works well in spaces with limited inputs that we humans have high confidence about what that weight should be.

From a consumer perspective, it is interesting to consider the most successful AI robotic product. Any guesses?

If you said, “The Roomba,” you are right.

Let’s be honest. That’s not quite what we were promised in our youth about the future of robotics. But the Roomba does clean the floor decently, and when it bumps into the sofa, it turns around and goes the other way. So Dr. Turner says we should get used to it because that’s as good as it will get for quite some time.

AI tends to work well when there are limited numbers of inputs, when the correlations with outputs are pretty straightforward, and there are rule systems to access, such as mapping a room or playing chess.

So, if algorithms are opinions written in code, and it’s lots of opinions, we can start to use some of the tools that we’ve learned as social psychologists or cognitive psychologists, or consumer behavior researchers to investigate what those opinions are and what outcomes come out of those systems.

The Opinions in Algorithms Affect What You See 

One of the things that Dr. Turner learned in his research with an Algorithm audit was that algorithms are only as unbiased as humans can make them. Unfortunately, our biases creep into results in many ways.

For example, when an algorithm is used to suggest a thumbnail for a social media platform content, the biases become clear. If a video has a person in it, nearly all the platforms will gravitate toward a frame for the video that includes a human face.

However, which emotion they show on their face differs between platforms. For example, YouTube is likely to show a smiling face; on Facebook, a frowny one.

No matter its expression, it is most likely to show a white male. Twitter’s algorithm gained notoriety for its racial bias. The automatic cropping of images favored a crop to include Senator Mitch McConnell instead of President Barack Obama when they were in the same large photo that needed resizing. Twitter decided to ditch it after this bias came to light.

So, What Should You Do About This?

This fascinating area of bias and algorithms and AI is a discussion I can indulge in for a long time. However, in terms of practicality, what is the key takeaway here? Besides that you don’t have to worry about T-800 in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s likeness rolling up on you with a sawed-off anytime soon. Dr. Turner has a few for you, starting with:

Investigate claims. Dr. Turner encourages you to look into who is making the claims that a new AI is sentient or “superhuman.” For example, if a Google engineer says the language model is aware, it probably isn’t. AI isn’t there yet.

Find out who put the inputs there. If you use the technology and are developing it, find out who decided what the information was in the algorithm and how they were weighted. The AI isn’t capable of choosing it themselves. Someone had to select it, and that’s where the biases will start.

Experiment with your algorithms. Dr. Turner encourages researchers to use their skills to experiment with their inputs and see if they pass the test for biases. The tools are in place, so use them to perfect the organic nature of your results.

This discussion gave me a radically different view of AI. It certainly gave me another way of thinking about it.

We all need to become more familiar with these systems as consumers. Moreover, for those of us that work for companies or systems where AI use is becoming more widespread, it is essential to overcome some misunderstandings of what AI is and how it works at this point. Sure, it does incredible things and is advanced. However, AI also introduces a black box effect where we optimize these outcomes and get better results but don’t remember why we are getting them. The system is opaque and doesn’t allow us to see what led to these outcomes and what caused them. Audits will enable us to reclaim some in-between knowledge where we can back away into that original Sophomoric equation. This process is valuable and essential and can apply to all spaces.

There you have it. No promotions, no gimmicks, just good information.

Think reading is for chumps? Try my podcast, The Intuitive Customer instead. We explore the many reasons why customers do what they do—and what you should do about it. Subscribe today right here.

If you have a business problem that you would like some help with, contact me on LinkedIn or submit your pickle here. We would be glad to hear from you and help you with your challenges.

Netflix has a great show called “The OA,” but you shouldn’t watch it. You will wish you hadn’t if you ignore me and queue it up. This fantastic and disappointing show is the victim of using old metrics for televisions’ success to measure performance in a new delivery channel. The problems with this show represent how the implications of the Long Tail in today’s environment dictate changing how we invest in our businesses and experiences, and that ignoring it will be detrimental to your customer strategy.

Now, you might be thinking, what is the “Long Tail?” and are prepared to Google it. Moreover, you might feel tempted to look up “The OA.” Let me save you the trouble on both counts, starting with “The OA”:

As you can see, this mysterious program was a Sci-Fi show about people that could travel between realities in the multiverse. The show was written with a five-season arc. At the end of season 2, it ends with a shocking cliffhanger. Fans of the show couldn’t wait to see what happened next.

But they will never know; Netflix canceled the show after season 2.

“The OA” was the victim of Netflix’s policy to give deals for two seasons of new content. Netflix bases renewals on engagement with the show. Netflix determined that not enough people were watching the show to order any more seasons.

However, if you wanted to—and, again, I don’t recommend it—you could watch those two seasons, which they call parts, on Netflix right now. You could also feel profoundly unsatisfied after Part 2 when you don’t know what happens next.

This situation leads me to my explanation of Long Tail (which Investopedia explains well). The Long Tail refers to the difference between what is possible with brick-and-mortar and virtual inventory.

The Long Tail is the business strategy that allows businesses to sell low volumes of a large number of products to people, as opposed to a more traditional business model, which involves selling large numbers of a few products to people. However, it requires a distribution channel that is large enough to handle this inventory.

For example, a book store can only put the most popular books, the top of the top best sellers, on their shelves for customers to come and buy in their physical location. Amazon did not have those restrictions on inventory. They could have any number of books, even an infinite amount because Amazon didn’t need to consider shelf space. Many of their books might only sell to a few readers, but it doesn’t matter to Amazon because it cost them practically nothing to have them “in stock.” The books were part of the Long Tail catalog of books, available when needed and not in the way when they weren’t.

Netflix isn’t the only content provider that uses the “perform-or-get-canceled” model for renewal. Television broadcasters have used it for years. Television broadcast networks, like ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, etc., would order a season or several episodes of a new TV show for airing on the network and then see how it performs with audiences. The show’s rating or market share would determine if the TV show was renewed. In other words, if no one or not enough people watched the show when it aired, the network canceled it.

However, many people don’t watch shows the same way these days and certainly not when they are watching content on streaming services. Someone today might see a show pushed toward them in recommendations but not watch it for six months or six years. However, when streamers do watch, they might watch the whole season in one weekend.

So, using the old broadcast model for streaming shows doesn’t make sense because it doesn’t match people’s new TV-watching behavior. Plus, it creates a new problem: unresolved content. Netflix paid all that money for the first two parts of “The OA.” It’s part of their catalog now, but it’s incomplete. So that investment is now more or less wasted because the content is unresolved. People that watch it will leave the series feeling unsatisfied, which will not reflect well on Netflix’s experience.

Netflix is paying attention to what’s happening with their experience, too. Earlier this year, Netflix reported that they were losing subscribers. Soon thereafter, they lost $50 billion in market capitalization. There were a lot of reasons why this happened and other streaming services lost subscribers, too. So, we don’t mean to imply that their renewal policy is the culprit here. However, providing incomplete subscriber experiences isn’t going to help matters. People need things to conclude, not an unresolved cliffhanger, to feel satisfied.

Fixing Things with Their Long Tail Content

Streaming services want a blockbuster that everyone watches. Finding those series might mean that you have to cut resources to another that is still finding an audience. That makes good business sense.

However, there is a Long Tail to consider regarding your investment, also. When things are unresolved, it creates cognitive dissonance. That’s an uncomfortable state for many of us, and some more than others. As a result, we develop strategies for overcoming cognitive dissonance. Unfortunately for Netflix, that could mean not exploring unknown (read: as-yet-unpopular) content that could leave the audience hanging. All of those assets will linger, unwatched. Eventually, it could mean subscribers leave the streaming platform altogether because “there’s nothing there to watch that I haven’t already seen.”

Cliffhangers were a technique for the old way of watching television. If you ended a broadcast season on a cliffhanger in the spring, people were eager to tune back in the following fall to see what happened. Moreover, viewers tolerated this uncomfortable “hanging” state because there wasn’t another option.

However, as I mentioned before, people don’t watch TV as they did during the broadcast era because they have other options. So, while the cliffhanger strategy was good in the old days of TV, it isn’t for the new. Or at least it isn’t for the end of every season. Moreover, if Netflix keeps its content that was canceled after a cliffhanger ending of season 2, they could get a reputation for it, poisoning their Long Tail content.

Netflix could change that for themselves, however. For example, they could stipulate that no new show can end in a cliffhanger for the second season. That way, they could stick to their two-season investment strategy and still have a complete show for their long-tail content if the show doesn’t thrive in viewership the way Netflix expects.

So, What Does That Mean to You?

The conversation about Netflix hits several critical points for organizations and their customer strategy. Looking at the situation that Netflix finds itself in now, there are some essential lessons from which we all can learn.

• Remember that you should resolve things in your experience for people. Creating cognitive dissonance for your customers leads them to take matters into their own hands to resolve it, and you might not always like the way that goes for you.
• Ensure that you are competing in today’s business model. What are the “ending the season on a cliffhanger” moments in your experience that you might need to address to compete in today’s market?
• Consider your Long Tail inventory opportunities. People approach purchases today differently than when brick-and-mortar locations dominated the marketplace. Have you taken advantage of the options in your business vertical to optimize your Long Tail inventory?

No matter your customer experience, the need for completion is an essential driver of customer behavior.

Part of the reason that Netflix has some of this unresolved content in their Long Tail is they were competing in a new industry using an old strategy. Now, they must confront the realities where they’re no longer seeing growth.

This situation often happens in business where we get stuck competing under the previous reality. It’s a natural human thing for us to look back and try to anticipate the future based on what we saw in the past instead of looking at the reality on the ground right now. With a new expanded inventory business model, organizations need to optimize their customer strategy and use different metrics for success, or they might find the opportunities with their Long Tail cut short.

There you have it. No promotions, no gimmicks, just good information.

We hope you enjoyed this issue of Why Customers Buy. If you have, please forward it to a friend or colleague.

Think reading is for chumps? Try my podcast, The Intuitive Customer instead. We explore the many reasons why customers do what they do—and what you should do about it. Subscribe today right here.

If you have a business problem that you would like some help with, contact me on LinkedIn or submit your pickle here. We would be glad to hear from you and help you with your challenges.

As many of you know, I also have a podcast. We invite our listeners to share their business problems, which we call pickles, with us and address them in the episode. This past week, our podcast featured two pickles, and I thought I would share them here since many of you are facing similar issues in your organization.

When I was ten, the teacher wrote on my school report, “Colin is the clown of the class.” To this day, I am still proud of that report card. Humor matters and can provide business benefits. Today we will talk about how to be funny and use humor to your advantage.

When we make people laugh, it’s disarming. People are often more willing to listen after someone makes them laugh, making way for us to be more persuasive. There are also a bunch of documented health benefits of laughter. It can reduce tension. It can be good for our relationships. 

The Future of Brick and Mortar

One of the features of The Intuitive Customer podcast is “I’m in a Pickle,” where listeners come to us with business problems that they would like our advice on solving. We had a pickle about the future of brick-and-mortar after the pandemic that I thought I would share with you, too.

Here’s what Bjorn had to say:

Hello, Ryan and Colin, and thanks for a great show. I follow you every week, and I have a pickle. It’s about brick-and-mortar retail because, after the pandemic, physical retail is bouncing back as people want a real-life experience after the lockdowns and other events. Customer Experience management has been absorbed into Customer Science in the past couple of years; how will that apply to brick and mortar? How can these retailers benefit from the new technologies? Thanks for considering this topic, and have a great day.