Getting Inside Your Customers’ Mind

Oct 10, 2020

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' minds. 

This episode of The Intuitive Customer hosts Lewis Carbone, Customer Experience expert and speaker, and founder of ExpereinceEngineering™. His book,  Clued In: How to Keep Customers Coming Back Again and Again, discusses his methodology for designing into your experience clues that signal to your customers that you have what they are looking for, so they keep coming back for more. 

Key Takeaways 

Carbone shared several essential insights from his decades in the field of Customer Experience. Here is a quick summary of what he had to say:

 

• The unconscious mind makes decisions long before the conscious mind rationalizes it. Many decisions we make happen at a primitive, emotional level, per Carbone. Therefore, it is essential to build your Customer Experiences on this foundational principle to increase your emotional engagement with customers. 
• Few companies are using this principle as their foundation, even still today. Many companies know that customer emotion is vital to experiences, but they still don't emphasize them in their day-to-day. Carbone says this is because they don't know what to do, so they stick to methods with which they are comfortable. 
• Knowing how customers think is more valuable than what they think. Carbone believes that once you have the code for customer decision-making, you can unlock how to give customers what they want and evoke the emotion you want them to feel. 
• The clues you leave in an experience help you achieve this outcome. Carbone shares the example of how the toilet paper triangle signals a freshly-cleaned hotel bathroom. If he ever uses his bathroom for the first time and the paper doesn't have a triangle, Carbone wonders who was there before him or if the staff forgot to clean the room. In other words, if the clues you leave send the wrong signal, you evoke the wrong emotions. 

Recommended Actions

Carbone says that when it comes to the next evolution of Customer Experience, it is essential that organizations and individuals who seek to manage them should increase their self-awareness of how well they understand the field. The behavioral sciences are crucial to help you design experience that leaves the appropriate clues. 

Carbone also shared his Five Absolutes for Customer Experience Management, which include:

1. Moving from the idea of "making and selling" to the concept of "sensing and responding is the best approach.
2. Considering the emotional and rational bonds you have with customers is essential. 
3. Ensuring that you understand and leverage the role the unconscious mind plays in customer decision-making is foundational to your design.
4. Becoming "Clue Conscious" of signals your experience sends in the language you use, physical space characteristics, and gestures by employees, among others, is critical to your success.
5. Developing a robust system for clue management, along with a Clue-Conscious culture, is vital for your organization. 

Also, an outside perspective can help. As global Customer Experience consultants, we find that we can see experiences with new eyes. We often engage in what we call Customer Experience Health Checks, which involves us walking the experience as if we are customers, and conducting internal interviews to get an idea of the company culture. Then, we present our recommendations based on what we discover.

Finally, remember to design not only for fixing problems but also for customer motivations. Whether it's feeling safe or feeling cared for, knowing what motivates customers to do business with you helps you design the right experience to give it to them. Solving problems often have too narrow a scope; widening your perspective will yield better results in the long-term. 

To discuss this further contact us at www.BeyondPhilosophy.com

About Beyond Philosophy:

Beyond Philosophy help organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). We then capitalize on this by improving your customer experience to meet these needs thereby retaining and acquiring new customers across the market.

This podcast is produced by Resonate Recordings. Click here find out more.