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

Your customers are having a relationship with your brand right under your nose. Do you know if it's a strong, healthy one? Our connection with brands is much like any other relationship in our lives, with some being healthy while others are not. Unfortunately, it's not uncommon for people to form codependent or dysfunctional relationships with brands. Therefore, it's essential to build strong bran...

Getting your new program initiatives accepted requires overcoming a lot. So, to help you get that done—and impress your boss doing it—you need to have a winning strategy.   The corporate budget is a funny thing. Getting approval on a budget in the corporate world doesn't mean you get to spend it. Quite the contrary. You often have to get the budget approved for what you might spend and then when y...

Organizations often fail to consider the context in which customers enter the experience, assuming that every customer is the same. However, recognizing the context of a customer's experience is crucial to developing an effective customer strategy. Context is an omnipresent factor in customer experience. Depending on a customer's context, we must create a customized experience.   For instance, whi...

Journey Maps can be useless exercises. That's right…we said it. However, these often-used tools don't have to be as useless as they usually are. Journey Maps are only useless if you don't include the customer's emotional journey in them.   Emotional journeys are the "squishy stuff" associated with why customers buy from you. Since customer's feelings are challenging to itemize, many organizations...

Having a high IQ isn't the most important thing for leadership. It helps, but intelligence isn't enough to make a great leader.   It turns out that IQ without EQ, or emotional intelligence, doesn't inspire teams to meet or exceed their goals. This EQ concept, popularized by Daniel Goleman , has been a crucial component of the leadership conversation for several years. Similarly, customer service r...

Vijay, one of our listeners, drew my attention to a deficit in my content regarding customer strategy. He asked if we had anything on customer engagement. After a search of both my hard drives (computer and memory), I realized that I didn't. To remedy this giant hole in our content, we recorded this podcast.   Now, part of not having any content on the subject means I didn't have a definition read...

If you have been listening to us for a while now, you probably know about our "I'm in a Pickle" podcasts and the "5 Rules" series. If so, and you're a fan, today is your lucky day because this podcast is a mash-up of both series. Not only that, but we also added in 5 more bonus rules for 100% more rules.   It seems that quite a few people in our audience have a pickle. They want to start a consult...

One of our listeners has a pickle. They did research that told them a product was just what their customers wanted, so they developed and launched it. But now, there are no sales. They want to know what went wrong. We suspect we might know.   Research is a double-edged sword. It has the power to give us answers we want but not always the answers we need. Many things we do, deliberately or otherwis...

We will admit it. We have made mistakes in our lives. It's only natural that some of the calls you make in your journey are going to be bad ones. Believe it or not, we are thankful for them. One learns a lot from one's mistakes or at least that is the hope. Some of the calls were good ones, though, and we are thankful for those, too. Perhaps, even we two, like the blind squirrel, can find a nut on...

Did you know that FOMO, or Fear of Missing Out, is a powerful motivator for customer behavior? Organizations today should find ways to leverage the power of FOMO   with their customers.   I was surprised to learn how much of an addiction social media was for some people and how it linked up with feelings of FOMO.  You might be as surprised by these statistics from 2021 as I was:   51% of people vi...

This Podcast produced in partnership with  Zuper™. You are probably underestimating the importance of a vital part of your Customer experience. Most organizations do. However, neglecting to address it can have negative impact on your customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, and customer advocacy.   Dying to know what it could be? Well, the area that is often underestimated in importance is the imp...

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. This podcast is full of bad advice. If you do follow the five rules we present, we guarantee you will fail. We realize this might be different than our usual Five Rules episode...

Fads come and go. From Tamagotchi's to fidget spinners, we have seen plenty come and go. However, one fad that will never go out of style is treating your employees as the valuable resource they are. So, to answer our own question, Employee Experience is not just a fad and is definitely the future of a successful organization.   We are fired up about this today because one of you, Praveen Kumar is...

I have been watching the American Customer Satisfaction Index for over 20 years. Many years, there wasn't anything too surprising in the report. However, recently there has been, and it isn't good news for most organizations.   After nearly two decades of investment in customer experience, only 20 percent of organizations have managed to improve their customer satisfaction scores—leaving the vast...

One of our listeners, Clive Hearst has a bit of pickle he needs our help with today. He wants to know whether he should invest the time and money in getting his MBA. He wants to know what the true value is of an MBA, and whether it is a must-have for his career. The answer depends on a few things.   It might surprise you to know I don't have an MBA. (Or maybe not). However, I have experience, and...

Time is our most valuable resource. It's a resource that you aren't able to get any more of,   no matter what you do, and you are losing more of it every second.   When you look at it like that, asking people for their time a much bigger deal than you might have considered at first. Therefore, when you are spending it with them, you should make the most of it.   Moreover, you are competing for cus...

Price increases are part of today's business environment. Unless you live on the moon, you are experiencing them from your suppliers, too, and will pass those on to your customers also. However, if you handle the price increase the wrong way, you will also likely be losing some of those customers, too.   One of our listeners, Alan Flower, has a pickle regarding the need to increase his prices with...

How long does it take to choose a craft beer at a big box liquor store? Four hours.   That's what it felt like anyway. Why did it feel so long? Too many choices. In fact, when I was done, I needed a beer to recover from the exercise of choosing a beer.   Of course, if there had only been a few, I would probably complain that there hadn't been enough options for craft beers.   The fact is, we like...

I have written seven books, countless articles, and tons of keynote speeches, not to mention thousands of emails. As a writer, through and through, I know how difficult it can be to stare at a blank screen watching that blinking cursor wondering where to start.     But a new AI-powered chatbot might make my life a whole lot easier, and yours, too.     It's called ChatGPT, and it has the potential...

If you have customer segments that read like the drink sizes on a fast-food menu, then this podcast is one you really need. The fact is many organizations get customer segmentation wrong. So, we came up with some critical questions that can get it back on track.   One of our listeners is in a pickle and it has to do with their firm's segmentation. Vijay Patel's sales haven't been what he hoped, an...

It's a new year so we decided we needed an update.  A few years ago, we gave you some rules for gaining growth. But times have changed, and so the rules need to change, too. Therefore, we took another pass at the questions that can help your organization gain growth in 2023.  In some ways, these are more like provocations than questions. However, we aren't picking a fight. We are, however, trying...

In sales, it can be tough to know when a customer is no longer deciding but already decided—unless, of course, they tell you that out loud. So, it is incumbent upon you to read the signs that a customer has decided to buy.  For example, I like to make drawings with pen and paper during my sales presentations with a contact. Then, I position the pen toward them during the discussion as an invitatio...

Every so often, I get a chance to chit-chat with colleagues of mine about the future of customer experience. This time, my colleagues were pioneers in customer experience, Lou Carbone ( Experience Engineering.com) author of Clued In , and Joe Pine (StratgicHorizons.com) , author of The Experience Economy . We discussed what we see changing in CX.     We all think we are at a turning point in the m...

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.   Bad leadership leads to bad Customer Experience. To have a great Customer Experience, you have to have great leadership.     It reminds me of rabbits.     When my kids were li...

The end of a year is always a nice reminder to reflect on time passed. It's a regular milestone where you can check in on your experiences and remember the lessons gained from another trip around our sun.     This year has been an interesting one. With a foot half-in, half-out of the pandemic, continuing supply chain issues, rising inflation rates all over the world, and a war in Ukraine, one migh...