Let me start this important topic with a few points that should be intuitively obvious: The benefits associated with delivering an outstanding customer experience accrue from influencing customer behavior Customers either deliberately or incidentally change what they do when they experience something that makes them feel or think differently In most competitive markets, there are straightforward financial benefits associated with changing customer behavior. These positive changes in customer behavior lead ... read more

Would you decide to just go out and spend $15,000 on tools to do a little work around the house? Are the improvements to your backyard worth the $12,000 you ended up spending? Would you decide to invest $3,000 on repairs to your old, unreliable car, even though it was only worth about $4,000 in the first place? Or, is your prize collection of beanie babies, figurines, watches, or ___________ ( ... read more

If you’re looking for a good introduction to behavioral economics leading up to the emerging field of neuroeconomics, check out Michael Shermer’s The Mind of the Market. The Mind of the Market isan easy to read summary of some of the work of many of the brilliant contributors to this field including: Daniel Kahneman and < ... read more

I’ve gotten accustomed to taking my car to the Jiffy Lube near my house. Over the 30 years that I’ve been driving, I’ve had the full range of good and bad experiences with auto service shops. However, this Jiffy Lube has a distinctive and effective way of interacting with me regarding the cost of my service. At the end of each visit, they bring me over ... read more

Years ago, P&G ran a promotional campaign in which customers could win prizes for writing the best essay about why they loved one of P&G’s products. In response to this promotion, tens of thousands of customers voluntarily submitted short essays for the chance of winning. This brilliantly influential campaign leveraged one of the same techniques used by the North Korean military to influence (a.k.a. brainwash) prisoners of ... read more

I’ve received several requests to put together a “roadmap” to the Customer Innovations blog posts I’ve done. Here is an organized path through the material I’ve posted so far. I haven’t tried to be all inclusive but have just the most substantial posts. Grab a venti dark roast and enjoy! Customer Experience 101: Customer Experience and Why It’s Important? Characteristics of an Outstanding Customer Experience read more

My colleagues and I have been lucky enough to have the chance to help a wide range of companies improve their customers’ experiences. As we’ve done this work, we’ve always started with the customer. Who are the customers? What are their priorities and underlying needs? What are they trying to accomplish? What is the natural path they follow to accomplish those things? ... read more

Over millions of years of human development, our ability to predict has translated into our ability to survive. We live in an inherently unpredictable world. As a result, we have evolved a strong motivation to learn in a way that improves our predictions. Not only does this motivation lead to a clear survival advantage, but, in a social setting, learning how to better predict other people’s behavior leads to small ... read more

Most business leaders now recognize that organic growth is a direct result of their ability to deliver a differentiated, compelling, and increasingly personalized customer experience. Effectively delivering such an experience is dependent on the organization’s ability to understand what attracts customers’ attention and what drives customers’ behavior. As you know, recent advances have lowered the investment threshold for consolidating and analyzing the massive amount of data that most organizations’ have ... read more

Customers don’t buy products, they buy desired states. One of the most significant mistakes any organization can make is to assume customers should care about their products or services. This doesn’t imply, however, that a company can’t play a very meaningful role in the lives of customers.The best companies enable people to have experiences that are highly meaningful in their lives. Customers tend to care a lot about those experiences; ... read more

A persona is a fictitious person created for the purpose of helping designers and decision makers understand how people actually experience their interactions with a product, service, or organization. The use of personae was popularized by Alan Cooper in the book “The Inmates are Running the Asylum.” In this critique of the software development industry, Cooper recommends the ... read more

So, if you get that Porsche, will you be happy? How about the larger house on the other side of town? What about the Plasma TV, new outfit, pair of shoes, etc…? If you take a minute to reflect on all the things or situations you’ve really wanted… and eventually got. How many of these contributed to your overall level of happiness as much as you thought they would when ... read more

How do you get to the bottom of customers’ needs, desires, priorities, experiences… ? Traditional means involve doing things like: market research (interviews, focus groups, surveys, etc…), getting feedback from your sales or service people, listening to what customers ask for or complain about on-line, etc… In general, we’ve found that these approaches are sufficient for identifying opportunities for incremental improvements in service levels associated with your existing touchpoints with the ... read more

A couple of months ago,the Harvard Business Review carried a great article “Companies and the Customers Who Hate Them” by Gail McGovern and Youngme Moon. In this article, the authors describe several situations where companies generate a significant portion of their profit by penalizing customers for bad behavior. Examples cited by the authors include: Video rental stores that generate a significant ... read more

In a previous post (Cognitive Ergonomics: What is a Customer Experience Anyway?), I discussed the fact that a customer experience exists only in the mind of the customer. We define a customer experience to be… how the customer reacts both rationally and emotionally… across their end-to-end process… of accomplishing one or more things that are important to them. For years, we’ve been helping organizations enable their customers to have better ... read more

There’s a lot of talk about “customer” experience today. In previous posts, I’ve mentioned our working definition of the customers’ experience: how the customer reacts both rationally and emotionally… across their end-to-end process… of achieving one or more goals that are important to them. If you think about it from this customer-centric perspective, what actually makes it a “customer” experience? It’s really just an experience a person has that, while ... read more

Too many companies want their customers to “have an experience” with them. Unfortunately, customers don’t have time for this; they’ve got way too many things to do. Alfred North Whitehead once said that “Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.” If you consider how busy your life has become, it’s easy to see that a fundamental requirement for maintaining sanity ... read more