customer experience
223 posts
The Value Of Challenging Our Assumptions
It’s 6am, and a passer-by bends down to leave a couple of bananas next to the homeless guy who is turning over in his sleeping bag in the doorway of 7-Eleven. When he wakes, he gathers his things and the few coins in his tin. He drops the fruit in a nearby bin and heads…
Brand Storytelling And The Rule Of One
Have you ever wondered why movies like Toy Story are so compelling and successful? The best writers in the world speak to universal human themes—the things that drive every one of us no matter what our worldview is. Compelling storylines work because we see ourselves reflected in the characters. The
Because We Can
It’s a brisk Autumn Monday. The city’s lunchtime trams are busy. As we turn into Collins Street the tram driver begins an unscripted dialogue. He tells us that we’re at “the Paris end” of Collins street in the world’s most liveable city, reminding us that this is “no flash in the pan” because Melbou
Optimising For Customer Delight And The Peak-End Rule
Jody and Jim (not their real names) run a small web design studio. Their initial pricing strategy was to keep base prices low, putting time caps on every deliverable during the website design and build. New clients were informed about this policy up front. Things like design time and content populat
The Importance Of Happy Endings
When we’re serving customers we tend to front-load our effort. Hotel reception staff are well-versed in making a great impression when the guest checks in. Good waiters quickly seat new diners and take orders promptly. Retailers station greeters at the store entrance to welcome and orient new custom
From Awareness To Loyalty
The purpose of your brand story and of every piece of marketing material is to move a prospective customer from awareness to loyalty. When we imagine the customer decision journey as a timeline it’s clear that we need to treat customers differently according to where they are on that journey. THE CU
The Cost Of Interruption
The web design firm can access thousands of contact details for newly registered domains each day. It’s easy from there to hire a bunch of poorly trained phone operatives (who are overqualified to do soulless work but need the money) to interrupt people. It’s possible to scrape, buy, trawl and inter
When Rational Sales Strategies Don’t Work
A couple of years ago Mrs Jones spent $12,000 to install a hydronic heating system. She hasn’t had the boiler serviced since. She politely refuses when the guy from the service department calls her to arrange an annual service for just $164. He pushes back a little, explaining about voiding the warr
The Value Of Customer Questions
Every day our customers give us clues about what’s important to them and what they really want. Often we ignore them. Questions like the one asked of a running shoe manufacturer, which was followed up with this response: “Thank you for your email regarding shoes for a mud run. Unfortunately, we don’
The Purpose Of Clever Packaging
If you love chocolate as much as I do you’ve probably heard about the Mast Brothers scandal. The artisan chocolate makers are accused of not being completely transparent about their process when they launched in 2007 and of pulling the wool over customers eyes with “clever packaging”. Transparency a
3 Things Your Product Story Must Do
When we market our products to customers we often use a persuasive tone designed to convince. We describe by leading with features and benefits. We try hard to give customers reasons to choose, forgetting that most purchasing decisions are not rational, but emotional. In short we forget why people b
The Alternative To Winning The Awareness Game
The top 200 advertisers in the U.S. spent $137.9 Billion on ads in 2014. When you’ve got those resources it’s easy to play the awareness game. What if newspaper presses came to a stop and banner ads were abolished on the grounds of inciting mindless consumption? Imagine a world where billboards were
The Power Of Posture
How is it that we can go into the same cafe two days running, order the same drink, pay the same price and yet leave feeling entirely different about the experience depending on the interaction we have with the person who is serving? Just as it’s possible for one yogi to hold a more graceful…
How To Optimise For Customer Delight
“You’re here for the Valium?” blurted the dental receptionist as they arrived. The young man looked blankly at her and then at his mother. He was about to have three wisdom teeth removed under local anaesthetic. He had arrived early to be prepared for the procedure and dutifully took the 20mg of Val
How To Build Brand Equity
The toilet paper manufacturer has seemingly found a new way to increase customer engagement and build brand equity. Instead of just embossing patters on the paper, the company has decided to emboss its logo on every sheet. Imagine the meetings, time, energy and a myriad of other resources (including
The Noisy Bell And Napkin Worthiness
John Lydgate was right, “you can’t please all of the people all of the time.” And yet a huge part of our job as business leaders, entrepreneurs and product creators is to meet a standard that pleases most of the people we serve, most of the time. Feedback—the information and reactions we receive abo
How Do You Know?
How do you know which product to launch next? How do you know which packaging works best? How do you know what it feels like for someone to encounter your brand? How do you know what story your customer will tell tomorrow about the experience he had today? What we know (or perhaps don’t yet…
What Are Your Rules Designed To Do?
It’s never a good sign when a flight doesn’t board on time. When the ground staff make announcements about ‘engineering faults’ and begin handing out meal vouchers you know you’re in trouble. And so it went last month for flight 029 to Hong Kong. Three hours after the first announcement the flight w
What Your Marketing Needs More Of
Think of a person you love to be around, someone you have rich and satisfying conversations with. It’s likely your conversations are a two-way exchange including acknowledgement, pauses and even moments of silence. Compare that to how we market to customers. We know that the best conversations make
Where’s Your Magic?
The long Sunday morning croissant line at Lune moves slowly and never gets any shorter. Not a single person in the queue complains or shoots a frustrated glance at the time that is clearly slipping by. The servers work slowly, carefully boxing each pastry as if it were made of porcelain. All the whi
