The Intuitive Customer - Helping You Improve Your Customer Experience To Gain Growth

Ep 178 5 Rules for Making Customers Feel 'Cared For' and 'Valued' A lot of the behavioral sciences can feel intimidating. However, it doesn't have to be. The Five Rules Podcast Series is our attempt at giving you an easy entry point into the complex and messy world of Behavioral Science. We know that the most significant influence on a Customer Experience outcome is how a customer feels about it,...

In the UK, there is a lot of talk about how to come out of the pandemic stay-at-home orders now that more people have been vaccinated. The idea of a vaccine passport has been circulating, which would allow those that are vaccinated to do things unvaccinated people cannot. However, some think that vaccine passports are discriminatory, particularly as it pertains to getting a job.   The idea of vacc...

We often hear requests for the best practices in Customer Experience. We understand why, too.   Who wants to endure trial and error if there is a tried and true idea guaranteed to get results? However, no tried and true idea always gets results. Instead, there are only expert opinions served as advice about what has worked in the past. These are often the "best practices." We argue that best pract...

Way back in 1998, I read a book by  Joe Pine  (@joepine), co-founder of  Strategic Horizons, LLP,   and Jim Gilmore called  The Experience Economy.  I was gobsmacked by it.  I dashed down the hall to my boss at British Telecom. He read it and had a similar reaction to mine. The next thing I knew, he put me in charge of improving the Customer Experience for our company, and the rest is history.  Yo...

A lot of the behavioral sciences can feel intimidating. However, it doesn't have to be. The Five Rules Podcast Series is our attempt at giving you an easy entry point into the complex and messy world of Behavioral Science. Customers buy habitually, and that's great when their habit is to buy from you. The problem is sometimes they aren't buying habitually from you, but instead from your competitio...

In job descriptions and resumes, there are new required skills for candidate's resumes in Behavioral Science. These jobs might be the most important new jobs in business today. But why? Behavioral science and the scientists that use it will tell you that understanding the "why" of what customers do has become table stakes in some industries today.   In this episode of The Intuitive Customer, we di...

You have only half a second to make an excellent first impression with your customers with your digital experience. Per the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department at Harvard , most people form a first impression of a website in 500 milliseconds. So, the question is whether you are proud or concerned about your digital experience after hearing this stat? This episode explores the sc...

We recently spoke to Customer Experience experts who shared an interesting insight. They all say they wish people understood that there was no one thing to do, no silver-bullet-solution for Customer Experience. We couldn't agree more. We believe that the best way to improve Customer Experiences is to do a lot of little things that add up to significant improvements. In other words, there is no one...

No matter what business you are in, the best way to connect with your customers is through the experience you provide them. However, connecting requires knowing what customers want, and today, that isn't the same as it was 20 years ago. The Experience Economy dictates that people value experiences over material things these days.  In addition to knowing what customers want, wouldn't it also be gre...

Vital for 2021 - Digital Nudging Will Revolutionize Your CX Whether you realize it or not—and even if you don't know what they are—you use Digital Nudges in your online experience today. Digital Nudges are the interactions you have with customers online in your experience that inspire their actions. Every online experience has them, but not all of them are deliberate. In this episode of the podcas...

There's light at the end of the tunnel! - Re-imagine your customer experience! There was a time when we thought this moment would never come, but we are almost there. As vaccines roll out worldwide for the SARS-CoV-2 virus, we can see the light at the end of the pandemic tunnel. This unique situation provides an unprecedented opportunity to reimagine your Customer Experience to respond to how the...

This is the Most Significant Thing We Learned in 2020! Like many people, we are not sad to see the year 2020 slip into the past. We look to ringing in the new year with happy anticipation of better things to come. With a vaccine headed to us all and a new appreciation for what we share when things are "normal," we are all practically giddy at the prospect of sending this year off to the annals of...

Designing Country Culture into Your Global Experience A dull and awkward presentation in Singapore many years ago taught me an important life lesson: One must know the local culture when presenting an experience to people to evoke the desired response. In this case, I didn't realize it was going to be different to presenting in the USA or UK. So, I kept asking for audience participation like I usu...

 If the Stress Is Becoming Intolerable, This is What to Do If there is one thing 2020 has given all of us, it's a lot of stress. Coping and managing stress is a skill leaders need to relieve the pressure in their lives and help employees manage their stress so they don't pass it on to customers.  I often say, Happy Employees Make Happy Customers, which is also the title of my latest book. However,...

The Five Rules for Measuring and Managing Customer Emotions A lot of the behavioral sciences can feel intimidating. However, it doesn't have to be. The Five Rules Podcast Series is our attempt at giving you an easy entry point into the complex and messy world of Behavioral Science. Ignoring emotion in your Customer Experience strategy is a big mistake and one you can't afford to make. Emotions are...

Retail is Broken: This is the Solution Some might say that retail is dead, another victim of COVID-19. However, I would argue that it is merely changing but far from finished. The pandemic has hastened changes to physical and digital retail experiences and customer behavior. Still, organizations that recognize and anticipate the shift can adapt and benefit from the new business-as-usual. Key Ideas...

Digital Transformation Didn't Work: This Is What You Should Do Now . Experts estimate that companies wasted around $900 billion in 2018 on failed digital transformation projects. Nevertheless, organizations have spent upward of $2 trillion (with a t) on digital transformations in 2020. How do we know that this is not just a big waste of time and money this time around? This episode of The Intuitiv...

What happens when you get three Customer Experience Pioneers together to discuss the past, present, and future of Customer Experience? This episode of The Intuitive Customer, for starters. Recorded in celebration of the recent CX day, Colin joins fellow experience experts and champions Lewis Carbone and Joe Pine to talk all things Customer Experience.  Lewis Carbone is the author of  Clued In: How...

The 5 Rules for Designing Great Digital Experiences A lot of Behavioral Economics can feel intimidating. However, it doesn't have to be. The Five Rules Podcast Series is our attempt at giving you an easy entry point into the complex and messy world of Behavioral Science. In 2020, we have all been doing many more online customer experiences than we thought we would. Some of these digital experience...

When I am shopping on Amazon, and a product has 3.5 stars, I don't buy it. Now, 3.5 stars isn't a bad rating; in fact, it's above average. However, for me to place that item in my Amazon cart, it needs to have a rating of at least four stars or more. My behavior on Amazon is part of a broader concept called Negativity Bias, and it's a massive influence on customer behavior.  This episode of The In...

5 New Rules Guaranteed to Build Trust A lot of Behavioral Economics can feel intimidating. However, it doesn't have to be. The Five Rules Podcast Series is our attempt at giving you an easy entry point into the complex and messy world of Behavioral Science. A great idea is a beautiful place to start when it comes to improving your Customer Experience to benefit your bottom line. When combined with...

When you bring attention to something, it influences people's behavior. For example, The food and household goods supplier in the UK, Tesco, was recently accused of profiteering by raising the prices of a yeast extract spread called Marmite. There was quite an uproar about it in the UK. You would think that this would mean sales of Marmite would go down.  You would be wrong. After the kerfuffle ab...

Like the rest of the world, the Customer Experience world is changing. Customers have new expectations and are doing business in new ways. While we adapt to the world that COVID-19 presents, we change what we want as customers and how we think about our relationships with the entities we buy. As Customer Experience managers, we must rise to meet this challenge by getting inside our customers' mind...

The 5 Rules for Driving Down Costs Without Affecting Customers A lot of Behavioral Science can feel intimidating. However, it doesn't have to be. The Five Rules Podcast Series is our attempt at giving you an easy entry point into the complex and messy world of Behavioral Science. If you are like most businesses in 2020, you are facing a very different year for your bottom-line performance, and in...

How Well Do You Know What You Really Want? Have you ever bought a book you thought you should read and then didn't read it? Did you ever buy a variety of yogurt flavors and then throw out some of them after they expired because you never wanted that flavor when it was time to eat yogurt?  We do these things because we often overestimate how much variety we want in the future. In psychology, it's c...