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

Research in Harvard Business Review last year suggested that some companies with poor customer service are terrible on purpose to wear out disgruntled customers so they don't have to fix customer problems. Moreover, the HBR authors suggest that this method makes these organizations more profitable. This episode of The Intuitive Customer explores this idea in more detail. We discuss businesses that might benefit from this strategy, and which ones would not. Find out which group you belong to and why.

Where AI Meets CX: The Remarkable Future for Humanizing Brands Artificial Intelligence (AI) will transform the customer experience in many ways in the coming years. One area that we see interesting applications of AI Technology is the brand personification and social media management. This new way of creating meaningful interactions with your customers will build emotional engagement with your company, even though the entity doing it is not a human being. Brand personification is a fundamental principle of the concept of Conversational Commerce first introduced in 2016 by Chris Messina, tech expert, and inventor of the hashtag. Conversational Commerce is a way to describe how customers interact with brands on social media and other channels to move them through the sales cycle. These interactions will be handled more and more by AI, at least in the beginning stages. Brand personification represents how the values of your brand become a persona that interacts with customers in this way. When you consider brand personification, you can see it follows the "cult of the entrepreneur" prevalent over the past 20 years. Brands like Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Tesla all have a persona, and it seems to resemble the founders that introduced them to us. These organizations are a manifestation of the entrepreneurs themselves, from how they do business to the culture that supports their work. Messina says that you don't have to have a super-famous founder to have a brand persona. Any organization can adopt one. By using a set of principles your team decides best represents the values you want to deliver in your Customer Experience, you can "humanize" your brand to be a persona that says and does things that communicate these values. Many of these communications will take place on social media platforms. In other words, you use your values to envision what that would look like in a real human. Then, you communicate as if that human were your brand in your social media presence. As this technology progresses, chatbots will do the heavy lifting in these efforts. Moreover, they will populate with responses from AI-powered technology. AI will help technology mimic authentic human behavior. However, organizations will still need to determine what they want these personas to be. In this episode of The Intuitive Customer, we discuss with Messina how an organization should undertake humanizing its brand for customers in the second of a two-part interview. Building on the concept of Conversational Commerce addressed in Part 1, we take a deeper dive into the practicalities of developing an AI-powered anthropomorphized brand that will interact on social media on your behalf to build a relationship and how that might affect customer behavior and, perhaps most importantly customer-driven growth. 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. To subscribe to The Intuitive Customer and never miss a podcast, please click here. This podcast is produced by Resonate Recordings. Click here to see how they can help you.

Social media has changed many things about our lives. Not only can we have a blow by blow account of what our friends and family are up to, but we can also see what they had for dinner. We can even see what friends of our friends had for dinner. One of the other ways social media changed our lives is in how we interact with brands. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter gave us direct access to brands in a way we hadn't had before. However, it also gave them direct access to us. Conversational Commerce was conceived in 2016 by the inventor of the hashtag, Chris Messina. It describes how we interact with brands over several different channels in various ways, including social media. Messina, who has a career in tech and tech platforms, recently co-founded and launched a conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) company called Molly. Molly will skim your social media presence to find answers to your customer questions on your behalf. However, Messina sees applications like Molly as just the beginning of AI handling customer interactions on the social media platforms. He also sees a future where brands interact with people as if the brand was a person. Humanizing brands is the future of social media. Moreover, it will be handled by AI, not humans. But how should organizations create this anthropomorphized brand for themselves? What should they use to create it and how should it respond to queries? After they establish a humanized brand that can respond, how should it affect the customer journey and contribute to the relationship. These are all questions that Messina and other experts ask about the future of brand interaction. This is the first of a two-part interview with Messina about his concept of Conversational Commerce and how it will affect the future of Customer Experiences on social media and the relationships that develop there. We also discuss the essential considerations that every brand should make before launching their personalized interactions that aim to deepen the customer relationship and facilitate customer-driven growth. 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. To subscribe to The Intuitive Customer and never miss a podcast, please click here. This podcast is produced by Resonate Recordings. Click here to see how they can help you.

This is The New Imperative for 2020 Our global Customer Experience consultancy engaged research at the end of 2019 to determine our direction for the next decade. We learned that, first and foremost, organizations want to gain growth. So, we have a new focus for 2020, helping organizations achieve the growth they want by assisting them in providing the Customer Experience they need to do so. Growth is challenging today. Competition is intense due to many factors. One critical reason is that the time from innovation to imitation is down to weeks in many cases. Today's businesses must face the challenges of new product and service launches in a commoditized market, fueled at least in part to massive growth in online commerce. However, gaining growth is not impossible, in fact, far from it. Growth can come from many different strategies. Chief amongst the approach is by providing a Customer Experience that meets your customers' needs, even the ones they are not entirely aware they have. Meeting these unmet needs is the foundation of what we call customer-driven growth, which is growth powered by exemplary Customer Experiences. Since 2002, Beyond Philosophy has focused on growth driven by an improved Customer Experience. Our work with Maersk Line, the largest shipping container company in the world, improved Maersk's Net Promoter Score® (NPS)by 40 points in 30 months, a statistic I often share. However, the next part is essential to realize; they also increased their shipping volumes by 10 percent. Moreover, our work with RICOH Canada, the printer company, improved their NPS by 34 points in 30 months and also increased printer sales by 10 percent—and this was in a declining market. If organizations want growth, we are going to give it to them. So, how do we get growth? Where do we get new customers? This episode of the Intuitive Customer explores the types of growth that organizations can focus on, how to approach gaining it in today's marketplace, and the four essential steps to take to be successful in this effort. Moreover, we show how improving Customer Experience leads to this growth and why. 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. To subscribe to The Intuitive Customer and never miss a podcast, please click here. This podcast is produced by Resonate Recordings. Click here to see how they can help you.

Discover This Powerful Marketing Technique to Gain Growth How you present information has a significant effect on how your customers perceive the message. It's no secret; it's why there are marketing departments. However, what is fascinating is that when we present information, we can take advantage of things that shouldn't matter when you think about them rationally, but that do matter quite a bit when it comes to customer-driven growth. For example, if I were to tell you Forrester, a global research company, predicted that 1 in 4 Customer Experience professionals would lose their jobs this year, does that sound like good news? It doesn't seem to be to me—and probably not to you if you happen to have a job title with Customer Experience in the title. Now, let's pretend that I told you Forrester predicted that 3 out of 4 Customer Experience professionals would keep their jobs this year. Does that sound as dire as the first prediction? In my opinion, it doesn't. I am not sure I would even mention it if it were positioned that way. Both predictions tell you the same thing and have the same facts supporting them. However, one sounds like doom and gloom, and one does not. How we perceive the news about the future of Customer Experience employment is affected quite a bit by how we heard the prediction. This phenomenon has a psychological term that describes it called Framing Effects. The scientific community defines Framing Effects as giving people information that does not change, but varying something about how you present it to position the data in a specific way. Framing art is a useful way to understand how Framing Effects work for information. If you think about mounting a painting or photo, different frames change how you perceive the artwork. A different color frame might bring out a color in the picture, or a different material might present the art as more or less valuable than it is in reality. The way you present the art in the frame will affect how it affects the viewer. This episode of The Intuitive Customer discusses how Framing Effects change how people perceive the same facts or situations and why. We also discuss how you can use the way Framing Effects change communication to foster customer-driven growth or improve the Customer Experience for your organization. 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. To subscribe to The Intuitive Customer and never miss a podcast, please click here. This podcast is produced by Resonate Recordings. Click here to see how they can help you.

Discover This Powerful Marketing Technique to Gain Growth How you present information has a significant effect on how your customers perceive the message. It's no secret; it's why there are marketing departments. However, what is fascinating is that when we present information, we can take advantage of things that shouldn't matter when you think about them rationally, but that do matter quite a bit when it comes to customer-driven growth. For example, if I were to tell you Forrester, a global research company, predicted that 1 in 4 Customer Experience professionals would lose their jobs this year, does that sound like good news? It doesn't seem to be to me—and probably not to you if you happen to have a job title with Customer Experience in the title. Now, let's pretend that I told you Forrester predicted that 3 out of 4 Customer Experience professionals would keep their jobs this year. Does that sound as dire as the first prediction? In my opinion, it doesn't. I am not sure I would even mention it if it were positioned that way. Both predictions tell you the same thing and have the same facts supporting them. However, one sounds like doom and gloom, and one does not. How we perceive the news about the future of Customer Experience employment is affected quite a bit by how we heard the prediction. This phenomenon has a psychological term that describes it called Framing Effects. The scientific community defines Framing Effects as giving people information that does not change, but varying something about how you present it to position the data in a specific way. Framing art is a useful way to understand how Framing Effects work for information. If you think about mounting a painting or photo, different frames change how you perceive the artwork. A different color frame might bring out a color in the picture, or a different material might present the art as more or less valuable than it is in reality. The way you present the art in the frame will affect how it affects the viewer. This episode of The Intuitive Customer discusses how Framing Effects change how people perceive the same facts or situations and why. We also discuss how you can use the way Framing Effects change communication to foster customer-driven growth or improve the Customer Experience for your organization. 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. To subscribe to The Intuitive Customer and never miss a podcast, please click here. This podcast is produced by Resonate Recordings. Click here to see how they can help you.

The Secret of Pricing Academia has a problem with names. They are not always, well, intuitive. Hyperbolic Discounting is an excellent example of a pertinent business area disguised in a difficult-to-interpret label. Hyperbolic Discounting does not mean what you might think. If you take a look at the words in the name, you probably imagine it means embellished markdowns. However, Hyperbolic Discounting is a vital psychological concept that influences your customer's behavior and could be getting in the way of your customer-driven growth. Hyperbolic discounting describes how we undervalue the benefit of something that happens in the future. Also, the concept covers how we overvalue the cost to us for waiting for something. In other words, we want what we want right now, and if we have to wait, then you better offer us something good for our trouble. Unlike many psychological concepts, Hyperbolic Discounting is easy to predict. Why? It is easy to anticipate because all of us have this bias for immediacy. When faced with a situation where we choose between gratification in the short term vs. more significant rewards in the long run, we feel tempted to choose the former over the latter. It is one more way that we, as a human race, are irrational. Now, we can overcome our bias and make decisions that have long-term benefits, especially when it is something essential, like retirement savings or investing in life insurance to protect our family if something happens to us. However, with less critical choices in life, options with long-term benefits often get passed over for opportunities with immediate gratification. One example from life is my diet. I know that if I eat less and exercise more, I will lose weight and feel healthier than I do now. However, the cookie I have in my hand will taste good now. This episode of The Intuitive Customer explores the critical (and poorly named) concept of Hyperbolic Discounting. We explain in more detail what it means and how Academia came up with the name, as well as how you can recognize it in your customer's behavior. Perhaps most importantly, we discuss how you can use it to promote customer-driven growth in your organization. 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. To subscribe to The Intuitive Customer and never miss a podcast, please click here. This podcast is produced by Resonate Recordings. Click here to see how they can help you.

How AI will Change CX for the Future Customer loyalty is what most businesses want. The more your customers buy from you, the more you improve your bottom line, not only in increased sales but also in decreased customer acquisition costs. Improving your Customer Experience to foster customer loyalty is often an expense that senior management can get behind. However, there is a common misconception that customers are loyal to you based on the Customer Experience you deliver. The truth is that customer loyalty is based on memory. In other words, customers are loyal to you based on the customer experience they remember you deliver. How memory works is a fascinating thing. There are experiences, thoughts and feelings, and facts and ideas that all mix to comprise them. Also, there are associated memories that connect, some more closely than others. Furthermore, other people's memories can mix in there too and connect to the personal memories a customer has of your brand. We often compare memory to a fishing net, where each knot of the net represents a memory. If you imagine picking a net up off the floor by a knot, you can picture how all the related knots in the net rise with it. You are holding the one knot, but all the other knots are there dangling close by, too. Artificial intelligence (AI) has some exciting capabilities to create these fishing nets on behalf of your customers. It can analyze past customer behavior to predict their future actions. It can make connections between experiences based on the data it explains. Then, once it has constructed the virtual fishing net, it can tell you what knot the customer wants to make next. But will AI get it right or wrong? This episode of The Intuitive Customer explores the relationship between customer loyalty and the future applications of AI in Customer Experience strategy. We take a look at the complicated way memories associate to influence our behavior. We also look at how AI can mimic this process and use the results to predict customer behavior. Finally, we discuss what you can do to prepare for this technology and how you can use it to personalize a Customer Experience that gives that individual customers what they really want next. 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. To subscribe to The Intuitive Customer and never miss a podcast, please click here. This podcast is produced by Resonate Recordings. Click here to see how they can help you.

1 in 4 Will Lose Their Job in 2020 At the end of 2019, global research firm Forrester predicted that 1 in 4 Customer Experience jobs will be cut in 2020. While we find this prediction grim, we do not disagree. We believe that this reality has been on the horizon for some time now. There are many reasons why it has come to this point. One of the most significant is a misconception about what Customer Experience is and how it affects the bottom line. Customer Experience requires an investment in time and resources. It should be no surprise that businesses expect to see a return on investment. When Customer Experience programs lack proper measurement of their results, how can senior management justify their expense? Another reason Customer Experience as a concept is under fire is because many organizations do not understand what it requires to improve it. They underestimate the importance of tackling the more significant causes of dissatisfaction in favor of smaller (and easier) changes. However, these less significant areas will not produce the results needed to justify the programs moving forward. I began working in Customer Experience nearly twenty years ago. I was into Customer Experience before it was a corporate term bandied about by consultants and marketing conferences. I have seen it rise into the spotlight and saw the bandwagons roll by, crowded with the latest organizations that decided they should embrace the idea of Customer Experience because "well, everyone else is." Unfortunately, many organizations don't understand how to improve the Customer Experience. One thing I have learned over the years is that Customer Experience is, in many ways, a mindset. Once you have it, you realize how it works and how it is integral to everything that happens at an organization, not the least of which is customer-driven growth for your bottom line. Many things come together to create success for the concept of customer-driven growth. It is essential to understand what drives value for your organizations and design ways for you to engage customers and promote that value to them. Perhaps most importantly, you need to measure your results, if for no other reason than to prove it works to people who do not share your mindset of putting the customer at the center of everything you do. In this episode of The Intuitive Customer, we explore the ways that Customer Experience professionals can be a part of the 75 percent that keep their jobs and what they can do to facilitate an environment that nurtures customer-driven growth. 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. To subscribe to The Intuitive Customer and never miss a podcast, please click here. This podcast is produced by Resonate Recordings. Click here to see how they can help you.

If I asked you for $100, what would you say? My guess is no. You probably have a rule against giving people money just because they asked you. But what if I asked you for $1? Most of us would probably be okay with that. Sure, it's still giving money, but it's only $1, and that isn't the same thing. However, by saying yes to giving me $1, you broke your rule about giving people money just because they asked you. It's not a big deal, of course, but it does make it more likely that if I came back and asked for $5, $10, or $20, that you would give it to me. Moreover, if you discovered that you didn't mind giving me money, you might say yes the next time I ask for $100. There is a name for this method of getting people to do what you want. In psychology, it's called the Escalation of Commitment. In laymen's terms, it's called "in for a penny, in for a pound." We refer to it as making it easy for your customers to say yes. Escalation of commitment works on more than just money. It also works for time, like volunteering, or effort, like getting someone to work harder or run farther. The idea is you make it easy for someone to say yes to you over something small and then slowly increase the amount of whatever resource you want from them over time. In this episode of The Intuitive Customer, we explore how Escalation of Commitment works and applies to Customer Experience. We also explain how you can use it to segment your customers to give you an idea of where they are on the commitment spectrum with you. Finally, we caution you on what not to do when getting your customers to yes to avoid creating negative feelings toward your brand and organization. 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. To subscribe to The Intuitive Customer and never miss a podcast, please click here.