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

People know an expensive brand when they see one. They also can spot a discount retailer at fifteen paces. So, why do they get it wrong so often? They get it wrong because of a concept called Price Image. Price Image is a concept that describes how people form impressions about whether your brand is high- or low-priced based on many non-price indicators. These ideas have a lot of influence on cust...

Are We Talking Ourselves Into a Recession You hear it all the time on financial media. "Consumer Confidence is low." It describes how people think that something terrible is going to happen to the economy, and it affects their spending behavior. Confidence is a feeling, not a fact or a physical item. However, this emotional reaction has serious implications on the economy, as well as your bottom l...

Unless you serve robots exclusively, your customers are humans. Human feelings influence our actions and drive customer behavior. Therefore, you must design a Customer Experience that makes your customers feel a way that drives value for your organization. In our global Customer Experience consultancy, we have said for nearly 20 years that customer's emotions account for over half of the outcome i...

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 custome...

What is the Secret of Airbnb? I would never be an Airbnb host. Having a stranger staying in my house doesn't fit with my personality.  That said, there are a lot of people that would do it. Airbnb has over seven million listings in 100,000 cities worldwide and reported revenues of $1 Billion (with a b) in the second quarter of this year. They are so successful; they have plans to become publicly t...

A practical guide to Customer decision making When the Nobel-prize winning economist professor Daniel Kahneman wrote his book Thinking Fast and Slow , he introduced the concept that we had two ways of thinking about things. He named them System 1 and System 2. The two systems work together to help us make decisions about things.  When we applied these concepts to decision-making in Customer Experi...

Case Study: RICOH Printers (Canada)   I spend a remarkable amount of time complaining about how organizations get things wrong with Customer Experience. However, not every cause is lost. Some companies get their Customer Experience right, and we can all learn a lot from their journey. In our global Customer Experience consultancy, we have the honor of working with fantastic organizations that are...

The Key to Successful Marketing Communications There are a lot of people that do not know the difference between Marketing and Advertising. Many people assume they are the same thing, but they are not. Marketing is deciding what you are going to say; Advertising is saying it. In my corporate life, I worked in Marketing for a long time. One of the things I learned was that Marketing should know the...

How To Overcome Organizational Silo's To Make Progress In The Fellowship of the Ring , Gandalf the wizard calls all the creatures of Middle Earth—the elves, dwarves, men, and hobbits— to a council. Their goal is to determine what to do with the Ring that threatened to end life as they knew it. Gandalf reasoned that since the Ring was a problem for all of Middle Earth, everyone should be involved....

Is Any Attention Good Attention?   I like Oscar Wilde. His best quote is, "There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about." Of course, there are times when people are talking so bad, one might wonder if it is worse than being ignored. This episode of The Intuitive Customer explores if there are times when the bad press can be good news for your br...

Customer Satisfaction is Declining in the UK! A new report by the Institute of Customer Service indicates that Customer Satisfaction is declining in the UK. Earlier this year reports from both Nunwood and Forrester, two firms entrenched in the Customer Experience movement, presented similar sentiments. All of this disappointing news about the state of Customer Experience makes one wonder what is g...

How and Why We Stereotype People and Things Stereotyping is not considered a good thing, certainly not in politically correct circles. However, our ability to do it is hard-wired into our brains, and it doesn't only apply to people. We can stereotype an organization, too. Let's say you need to name a type of business that is frustrating across the board. My first thought is internet service provid...

The Secret of Creating an Effective Customer Experience (CX) Strategy   What is the experience you are trying to deliver to your customers? This is one of our key questions we ask organizations when we consult with them. It seems a very simple question and yet in reality, the answer is very strategic and critical to moving your CX to the next level. What is surprising is most organizations do not...

I have a few things that drive me crazy in the business world. In this episode of The Intuitive Customer, we are going to talk about how organizations often define loyalty, and why I think they have it all wrong. It makes me upset when I think about it. Many, if not most, companies believe that when a customer gives you all their business, it means they are a loyal customer. After all, isn't that...

Relationship Types and How to Use Them We act differently in our various relationships. We have a way we operate at work or school; we act a certain way in public and another way with our friends and family. The difference is the type of relationship we have with the other people involved. This variance in behavior is also at work in our relationships as customers. In this episode of The Intuitive...

Are You Using the Right Measures? Measuring your progress for your Customer Experience strategy is an essential aspect to your program's success. Not only will it show if your program is working to provide an excellent experience for your customers, but it also shows what customers really value, which can be an elusive thing to discover. In this episode of The Intuitive Customer, we discuss the im...

Why Some Friction is Good We owe you an apology. Even though the lawyers say we shouldn't say this, we feel we might have misled you on the subject of friction in your Customer Experience strategy. We have been telling you to make your experience as easy as possible, and you should. However, there is some merit to making things a little bit difficult in some cases. In other words, it turns out tha...

How Customer-Facing People Should Evoke Emotions in Customers I have always thought that talking about how to do something was important, but not as important as actually doing something. I feel so strongly about this idea that I named my company after it. I want my clients to take their ideas "beyond the philosophy" and into action. To that end, this episode of The Intuitive Customer discusses ho...

Can We Trust Facebook? Upon reflection of Facebook's latest privacy violation and $5 billion fine, one must wonder whether we can trust Facebook. After all, the social media platform hasn't exactly been keeping our private information under lock and key. On the contrary, it appears as if our likes and dislikes, networks and preferences are for sale to the highest bidder.  This episode of The Intui...

When I worked in the corporate world, people often asked me what I did all day. Facetiously, I would say that I played chess. While it was meant to be cheeky, the joke was not far from the truth. I spent my day navigating company politics. You will not find training programs on company politics or how to deal with them. It is a bit shocking considering their significance in the corporate world. Ou...

Choice architecture is a significant factor in buying decisions you make every day. From how they stock the buffet line to how likely you are to donate your organs after you die, the psychology of choice is influencing your decisions every day. In this episode of The Intuitive Customer, we explore the concept of Choice Architecture and how it affects our daily lives. We also discuss the different...

The Vital Art of Creating Memorable Messaging   When we make buying decisions, we usually are choosing from a short list of options. Our memory assembles these options. So, from a Customer Experience perspective, it is vital that your product or service is one of these options recalled at the moment of the buying decision. In this episode of The Intuitive Customer podcast, we explore how our memor...

How Can We Measure Customer Emotions in Our Digital World When you think about the Olympic medalists on the podium during the awards ceremony, who do you think is happier, the silver medalist or the bronze? Objectively, you might say the silver medalists because, after all, they came in second and the other competitor was third. Objectively, the silver medalists had a better outcome and should be...

Customer Journey Mapping Using Behavioral Science Journey mapping is how organizations look at the customer journey, or the steps a customer would take from the beginning to the end in their experience. However, we would say regarding journey mapping that it is not only vital to consider the customer journey from beginning to end but also to view it from the customers' perspective. Journey Mapping...

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...