Understanding Customer Habits: A Practical Guide

Habits can be excellent or terrible for your Customer Experience. When it is the customer’s habit to buy from you, then there is not a problem. However, when it goes the other way, well, let’s just say some habits are meant to be broken.

Understanding what habits are and how they work is vital to your Customer Experience. When you understand customers’ habits, how they form and how they are governed by the mind, you have a much better chance of making those crucial changes in customer behavior to become their habitual brand.

So, what are habits? Habits are automatic behavior for a repetitive action that is triggered by a cue.

Maybe the cue is a time of day or an activity. Perhaps it is the aisle at the grocery store where customers do most of their shopping. The important thing about triggers or cues is that you must disrupt them somehow to interrupt the automatic response that will follow.

When discussing habits, we talk a lot about the two systems of thinking that we all share. Originally conceived of by Nobel-Prize-winning economist Professor Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking Fast and Slow, there are two systems we use in our thinking. Kahneman called them System One and System Two. System One is fast and emotional thinking and it is always running in the background ready to jump in when needed for making decisions. System Two is slow and deliberate thinking that is used for logic and reasoning. It is not always running, however. Instead, System Two is resting a lot of the time.

We used the two systems of thinking in our own book The Intuitive Customer. We called System One the Intuitive System and System Two the Rational System. As it turns out, System One or the Intuitive System is the part of our thinking that handles habits. That means if you want to change behavior you need to appeal to the quick and automatic thinking of the Intuitive System.

This episode of The Intuitive Customer takes a deeper dive into habits and how they work in our brains. We also share a practical guide on how we can use the way habits work—and the system of thinking that governs them—to change them for the better.

The Intuitive Customer podcasts help you take your Customer Experience to the next level by unlocking the “hidden” aspects of your experience and determining what really drives value for your customers.

To find out more about how your organization’s marketing can improve customer loyalty and retention, contact us at www.beyondphilosophy.com.

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