Colin Shaw on Focusing on Emotional, Subconscious, and Psychological Aspects of the Experience

Colin Shaw on Focusing on Emotional, Subconscious, and Psychological Aspects of the Experience

Welcome to be customer led where we’ll explore, help leading experts in customer and employee experience are navigating organizations through their own journey to be customer led and the actions and behaviors, employees, and businesses exhibit to get there. And now your host bill stagos.

If I can use some, some hip hop par. Really cool. LinkedIn is recognized Collin as one of the world’s top 150 business influencers. And he’s got almost 300,000 followers on LinkedIn. A boy can only dream. So he’s also the founder and CEO of a company called beyond philosophy, which does some really cool and exciting stuff.

And it’s his company. He started it, a number of years. And he’s been recognized by the financial times as one of the leading management consultancies for the last four years in a row. That’s not easy. And that is a very recognizable global paper. That’s not some rag that you buy for 25 cents in the street.

And Colin is also the cohost of an amazing podcast. And I really recommend all listeners to check it out. If they haven’t already it’s called the intuitive customer podcast. And it’s rated in a tough 5% of all podcasts by buzz sprout, which is a really big hosting provider for podcast. Colin. I am so jazzed to have you on a show, really excited for this.

I was

I look like you I’ve been in this space for a long while. there are certain folks that are out there sort of, in social media or doing whatever. And you’re like, okay, this is a lot of high level stuff. They they’ve never been a practitioner in a life, but I, what I value most about you is I know that you are helping practitioners and leaders be successful every single day.

And I just really appreciate you for that. And I’ve looked up to you and all the stuff that you guys are doing for a long time. So. Great. Thank you so really quickly, Colin, just before we get going on the show. I mean, obviously you’ve been in this space. I wanna talk about sort of the changes in CX. And, but more importantly, you focus a lot on emotional, subconscious and psychological aspects of the experience and the work that you’re doing.

And I don’t think enough CX teams are doing this and, or bringing this kind of thinking in their day to day. So I’m excited to get into it. But before we do share with our listeners your journey and what were some of the differentiating factors in your career, you’ve been running your consultancy for over 20 years now.

I think our listeners wanna hear this journey.

Sure, absolutely. really good book book. Yeah. Yeah, really good book. And. It’s like the bit about, when you get to the position that you’ve been sort of trying to achieve all your life, you get there and you, you, after a year I went, is this it is this what I’m gonna be doing for the rest of my life and the home move?

My cheese had a,asked a really good question, which is what would you do if you weren’t scared? And I had a conversation with my wife to. If I wasn’t scared, I, earning lots of money and kids going to university and blah, blah, blah. I would actually start my own consultancy, in this new area that I thought was coming on called customer experience.

Cuz obviously 20 years ago, nobody was talking about it. Yeah. And that’s what I did. So a took a risk and, and started, started, beyond philosophy 20 years ago. And yeah, we’ve done fairly well. That’s

Although I do like working for, for one in the company that I work for today, Medallia, but also for the banks and other financial services I have in the past, I get to drive a lot of good change, but. The courage and that sort of, that leap of faith feels like it’s always there. It,

I’ve written seven now. Yeah. I wrote my first book and you think yourself, am I gonna find this in this barking basement bookstore for 25 cents? , am I gonna end up with egg on my face and have to go back to the company I’ve just left and go, Hey, I wasn’t good enough to do this or whatever.

But now it’s proved to be one of the best decisions we’ve ever made and thoroughly enjoyed it ever since. Cool.

And then we’ve really invested in looking into what a customer experience actually is in much more detail, which is where we’ve moved on to look at it from a subconscious and psychological perspective. Mm-hmm so what we, so to answer your question, what have we do differently? Well, first of all, and I think this is actually baked into some of the things that you were talking about at the beginning, I purposely called the company beyond philosophy.

Which was try to get over the fact that you can have a philosophy, but you’ve actually gotta go over. You’ve, you, I, your strategy a direction, but you’ve gotta go beyond it and do something. So my background is operational and therefore you’ve gotta set the strategy in place, but you’ve then gotta make sure that you could go away and actually implement things.

Yeah. I. Too many organizations talk a good shop and don’t do that. Basically don’t lead it into implementation. The second side is we are focusing on customer behavior at a much deeper level. I think one of the mistakes that lots of organizations still make is they still think of a customer experience from a very rational perspective, a very left brain perspective.

Just from a, and, and we’re not just talking customer experience now. Yeah. But the whole of human dynamic. And why. And then how does that apply to in the customer experience environment?

Sure. What are the, some of the core tents of, of CX for you and are they similar in some level, maybe to the employee side?

So all the things around. So, the, the key tenant for me is a key question is what’s the experience you’re trying to, what is the experience you’re trying to deliver? Have you got a clear picture of that? Most organizations don’t don’t that’s right. What emotions are you trying to evoke in your customers?

Most organizations don’t. What emotions drive most value for you? In other words, what return do you get? Most organizations don’t know now to answer your question, flip that to employees. Okay. Are employees humans, are they human beings? Do they have the same? Traits that, customers have. Of course they do.

Yeah. So the same thing applies, the same questions apply, what’s the employee. What employee experience are you trying to deliver? What emotions are you trying to revoke in your employees? What drives most value for, an employee? So everything, everything we talk about on in customer experience, you can.

Take the word customer out and put employee in and the whole thing applies to employee experience as

Employee experience is a discipline. I feel like has certainly come more to the four given sort of the pandemic in the last couple of years. How do you think that has, that needs to change further for companies to really bring those two together in a meaningful way? Like what do you think that we need to start seeing more of at organizations

And understanding, and it’s like that Einstein quote, which is, goes along the lines of you can’t solve today’s problems. you can’t solve today tomorrow’s problems based on what, today or words to that effect. Yeah. I’m sure he said it a lot better than I did with a German accent too, with a German accent.

Yeah. But the, the, so the point for me is, is this. Too many organizations look at their customer experience and their employee experience through blinders. Yep. They only look at them from a rational perspective. I wish I had a dollar for every time. Someone told me the most important thing that drives value for their customers is price because clearly it’s not absolutely.

And, and all research we’ve ever done for clients. that’s not the, no, it’s not the case. So I think that the big battle with organizations from a customer and an employee experience is understanding that human behavior, which is, again, what we obviously are talking about a lot on the podcast, which is understanding that people have emotions, understanding that with those, those emotions gets caused by things.

Some of those are caused by the behavioral aspects. So without getting too technical, but, heuristics and biases and everything else that, that we have. But understanding those cause and emotions. So to truly identify good customer experience and a bad customer experience, you’ve gotta give it into that detail.

And most organizations aren’t even there. I mean, again, it was 20 years ago. I wrote about emotions and still the majority of organizations are not, it’s not a conversation you have, isn’t it. I mean, how many times have you, do you hear organizations go? What emotions are we evoking on our customers today?

What measurement do we have around. Customer emotions and those things whilst they’ve got better, they still a long way to go.

Sure. Through the design that I’m creating. Right. Or I wanna emote some kind of, I wanna create some kind of emotion in the design that I’m creating and delivering, even in a B2B context. And when you get those people, like, I’m just, okay, let’s start working together cuz you, you sort of sure. You know what you’re doing?

I, is it just because it’s hard? Is it because maybe emotions isn’t something that the CEO wants to talk about are here, maybe it’s too fuzzy. What do you think differentiates those who get it versus those who don’t based on your experience.

Yeah. Okay. Fair enough. So one thing is that people who are running organizations tend to have got there because they’re good at doing what they do. Yeah. Which has been focusing on the, the more rational parts of things. Some of the other things are around just their level of emotional understanding or, or.

EQ, emotion, their level of emotional intelligence. And third thing is, you are always doing what you’ve always done. So if you’ve been successful, if your organization has been successful and you’ve been successful by doing these things, then that’s what you’re gonna carry on doing.

It’s the, you, it’s building that more enlightened group of people. And there’s nothing I enjoy more than having talks with people, even say the podcast and stuff like that. Yeah. Where you can start turning lights on and people go, blah didn’t. Yeah. Now you’re saying that that fits with. Now not everybody does that immediately because they don’t have that level of emotional intelligence.

Quick story. I, I always remember getting a phone call. We, we were dealing with a water company and I remember, I’ve been chatting to this, VP of customer experience in this water company. And he phoned me on a Saturday morning, after about six months from me seeing him. And he came from an engineering background.

Okay. So very left brain orientated. And he phone me on a Saturday morning saying he said, Colin. He said, I’ve just been into a gas station and this happened. And that happened. And that happened. And I felt this, this, and he said, everything you’ve been telling me for the last six months suddenly fell into place.

And he said, I’m, now I now understand what you’re talking about. And he really did. And he became one of those converts, that people with, were anti something at the beginning. Yeah. And then suddenly get converted. They’re even more enthusiastic than anybody else. So it does take a while to get things.

Yeah. You talk about, so let’s kind of dig in here a little bit. You talk about moving beyond just understanding. The rational experience of customers and start focusing on the emotional subconscious and psychological aspects of the experience. So more of a behavioral economics view, right? Yes. There’s a big difference from what we’ve been talking about.

Just CX teams today are focused on in my personal opinion. Sure. How do you start to make this real for this CEO or the CFO, or even sometimes with the CXO, for them to be able to communicate this? Sure. In, in a way that resonates with a CEO, maybe.

Okay. So I know that customer comes in, I don’t know, to a bank and they, they go, they enter the line and they do this and they do that. And they do that. Everybody understands the bit, the next bit of the education is going okay. So how are they feeling? when they walk into the bank and they see the line and it’s 20 people deep, maybe this is pre pandemic actually but it’s 20 people deep and their, their heart sinks.

Yeah. As they think I’ve now got half an hour weight. Yeah. Yeah. But then their, and the next level of understanding is the, is that subconscious psychological aspect. So it’s when you go into a bank and you go, hold on, we’ve got pens on chains. And that sends a subconscious message that we don’t trust our customers, is that what we’re trying to do and understanding that psychological things.

So it has to be through that education. Okay. But go back to the company and beyond philosophy. It can’t just be a theory. Okay. So let me give you an example. This may be a little difficult to do on a podcast, but I went to donate some money to a charity the other day. And the charity was the Royal national lifeboat Institute in the UK.

Okay. They do all the, life saving sort of in, in then the first 20 miles of the shore. Anyway, I went to donate some money and on the, on the, on the screen, it gave me three options, 150 pounds, 50 pounds or 20 pounds. Okay. So 150 pounds. That’s probably $200. $200, $75, $30. Now, first of all, so there, what am I telling you?

This, I’m telling you this, because there’s a number of psychological things that they’re using here. Okay. So the first thing is anchoring. So they’ve anchored the amount, the minimum amount they’re expecting me to donate to 20 pounds at that point. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I was only gonna donate 10. 10 pounds.

Okay. And I suddenly thought, oh, maybe I’m gonna be a bit bit, not

very

Yeah. Yeah. But so what they’ve done is there’s two different things. That are happening here. and the first is what they call extremeness aversion. Okay. And that is people don’t like extremes. Okay. So we are having some work done on the house and we have a decorator come in and the decorator, we have three decorators.

We always have three. Okay. And this is, most people typically have three and we never go with the cheapest. We never go with the most expensive. Typically we always go with the one in the middle. Okay. And that’s what the majority of people do. Mm-hmm and that’s what they were doing on this screen. Yeah.

They know that 150 would actually put me off. What they’re trying to do is they’re trying to push me into giving them 50 pounds, the middle option rather than the other option. So I’m not gonna go onto it, but the point I’m trying to make. This stuff is everywhere. Okay. this stuff is happening all, all over the mm-hmm.

all over the place. And the issue is, are you in control? Okay. Do you understand what you are doing? So when I, if I went to the CEO and I said, why are you putting pens on chains? Are you trying to send a message to your customers that you don’t trust them? I’m sure he, or she would say, no, I didn’t even think about that’s right.

That message. That subconscious message. But it’s clearly a message that I’m picking up now and that’s in a subconscious manner. The danger here, bill is you’re gonna send me off on talking. I’m gonna be talking on this for about the next four hours basically. So I’m gonna shut

We’ve got off. So I’m, we’re not working today, so, and I love this stuff so I can geek at it all the time. I, if I go back to your nonprofit example, Colin. If I were the designer, right. I, how I might turn that around and you correct me if I’m off here, but I might say here’s how we’re gonna do this.

Here’s how we drive revenue for the nonprofit, right? Yep. We create right. There’s this thi there’s this bias called, right? It’s an aversion bias. Yeah. So, or, or extreme bites, we’re gonna put 150 pounds on the, on the site. Yeah, no, one’s gonna do that. Yeah, almost nobody. Correct. And by the way, our average donation is only 10 pounds.

Correct, but we want to come in more. So we’re gonna put in two numbers that are lower. Yes. And close enough together where someone will give some people will give us 50. Yes. Most people will give us 20, even though they wanted to give us 10. Yeah. So, no, absolutely. All right. And here’s the math here’s maybe I think what a lot of customer experience people don’t do though, is to say the next step of that is here’s the math.

Here’s how much more in donations we think we’ll get with this design. Yeah. And then

Maybe it should be 75 pounds. So I’m gonna run a normal one, 20 pounds, 30 pounds, 40 pounds. So I’m gonna see what revenue I get from that. And I’m gonna do it. This one, I’m gonna do that. But the point is in going back to your overall point, is it comes through education and understanding. Okay. We had, so interestingly, on the show a few weeks ago, we had two behavioral scientists and this is people that are very educated.

And let me be clear. I’m not saying that, every customer experience professional needs to be a behavioral scientist. Mm. Okay. But they need to understand it at a level where they can start to affect things. So we had a couple of behavioral scientists on the show from fintechs the other other week.

Okay. And I said to them, just chatting about, well, what do they do for a living? And Natalie, they do it and stuff. And I said to them, how many fintechs have behavioral scientists? And they said, oh, all of them, all of them do, because it’s all about, one thing we know. Is that what people say, what customers say and what they do are different.

So the danger is that you listen, and this is ironic because my second book was about customer centricity. The dangers is you listen to your customers. So Disney know when they ask their customers what to eat at a theme. Disney know that people say I’d like to have an option of a salad. Disney also know that people don’t eat salads at things.

and lemme give you one more example. We did some work in a hospital system in Houston and the and that from their customer research, we found that. The sort of daily feedback that patients wanted to spend more time with doctors. Okay. So they were just about to implement a big program to increase the amount of time with doctors, which involved more doctors, which involved, blah, blah, blah, blah, lots of things.

Okay. Now that manifested itself. In saying, I wanna spend more time with my doctor working on the assumption that if I spent more time with my doctor, then they’re actually listen to me. Now you can imagine that if they had actually implemented that and they still felt that the doctor hasn’t listened to them, that would’ve declined customer satisfaction.

Sure. Okay. So the point I’m making is you’ve gotta look underneath the skin of what customer. And employees say, I mean, I’ve never had a survey internally, where salary doesn’t come out as the top motor, theoretically, the top motivator, but it never is. Yeah. Yeah. So you gotta look underneath it is the point I’m trying to make.

And I think part of the reason is teams are too focused on the survey responses and not thinking about other signals or even just going out and observing their customers in the real world, using their products on some level as well, where, where a lot of teams are missing the trick. So for those listen, Get out there in the field, start there, look at people how they’re using their product and what they’re doing and what’s going on around them to, as well as, the behaviors looking at financial data, operational data as well, not just sort of survey data.

Yeah. And for me, it’s not that customer experience is going away. I think that what’s actually happening is there’s a new wave of change. That’s gonna be starting to come along.

So let me point in the picture 20 years ago. 20 years ago, everyone was talking CRM. Everything was about CRM. They were talking at the time about CRM failing and the investments not been worthwhile. And as a wave of change, it was, it was declining now. And, and the important aspect that I’m trying to emphasize here is as a wave of change.

Okay. When I started beyond philosophy, I thought the wave of change would. 10 years. Okay. It’s lasted 20. Yeah. And potentially more. But I think that what’s happening now is there’s this new to use the, the latest phrase. There’s a new variant coming out okay. Of customer experience. And I think that customer experience as a wave of change is declining.

Okay. It’s interesting. The, and I think I, I mentioned this before, but if I looked at the American customer satisfaction index, okay. It’s now a 17 year low. Okay. So lowest point for 17 years now, your listeners may be going, oh, that’s due to the pandemic. Well, undoubtedly, the pandemics had an effect. Sure.

Okay, we’re coming outta the pandemic. We, we’ve now got to refocus, repurpose ourselves. What are we doing? How do we respond to the new environment? Which groups have produced results over the last few years? What investments should we be making in the future? If I was them, I’d be looking at all the teams, including the customer experience team and going, so what have they produced?

Mm-hmm have we, are they part of the, are we part of the one third of organizations that improved our customer experience or are we part of the two third? Remain static or declined. Mm-hmm and therefore, I think there’s a danger therefore, for, for that happening, but I think, sorry, I’m rattling on cuz this is one of favorite subjects at the moment to answer your question.

What is the new variant for me? It’s customer science. Okay. And I was talking to somebody the other day. They labeled it customer intelligence. I couldn’t care less what they call it, to be honest with you. Yeah, but it’s the amalgamation or the fusion between. AI data and behavioral science. So data from different sources.

Yeah, not just within the company, but external sources, AI. So you can start to automatically understand what’s coming through, but looking at it through the lens off. Behavioral science. And this is effectively what these fintechs are doing with the behavioral scientist is that the fusion of those three things are coming together.

And I think that will be as a wave of change. That will be the next wave of change. Now let me stress. That does not mean customer experience is going away. And the analogy that I’ve done I’ve looked at since last I did that webinar with Joe pine, et cetera. It CRM declined as a wave of change as we know.

Okay. But the CRM market grew from something like 16 billion to 69 billion. Over the last 10 years. I think it was a stat that you even gave me. I gave,

And so it’s not that custom experience is gonna die. It’s gonna be absorbed is the word I’m using into business as usual, just like CRM. Was it? It’s now, most organizations have CRM. Yep. Okay. I mean, you can’t really survive

Yeah. Yeah. So

And, I’m actually talking to Ray Gerber, who is the chief product officer for Thunderhead. I’m gonna have him on the show next week. And one of the topics is as consumers. How are we gonna even notice this? We’re probably not gonna notice it, but we’re gonna be kept in that funnel, so to speak. So the business drivers or the business use cases.

Around customer experience, at least in my personal view are really gonna come more to the four where this is gonna be from a CEO’s perspective or a CFO’s perspective. The light bulb for them are gonna start to go off. And sure, I love how you kind of put together those three kind of pillars and how we can leverage technology to be able to drive that, but that automation machine to machine that digital sort of becomes even more sort of, proliferates even more, I think is a really critical part to all this.

The AI is effectively flashing up going, Hey, this customer, we predict that this customer is now feeling frustrated. Yeah. you don’t know that they’re frustrated. Yeah, yeah. Or this customer 20% of these customers typically leave after this type of environment that they’ve had. So we now need to do this yeah.

To make sure that we, we keep them. And, and again, you’re being. Key word proactive, in it, you are doing things before it’s even manifest itself with the, with, with a customer.

Who do you look up? So I’m always, I love asking this question, particularly from folks like you who have just been doing such great work for such a long time in this space, who do you look up to from a business perspective?

And if you haven’t ever read his book, the seven habits of highly effective people. I mean, that was just, that was really, it’s a lifechanging book. Really? Yeah, it was really good. And it really had a profound effect upon me, but I don’t think there, there are enough. I mean, I. The Tim cooks of this world.

I love apple. Okay. I’ve got apple, everything. And your people that listen to the podcast will know that I bang on about it all the time, because I think they, they do a really good job in their customer experience and just doing things before you even recognize that you need them basically. So I think it would be, it’s a limited group of people.

I think that would be a short answer for you. A quick

Yeah. Like I need this product out of the box, right? Like, yeah. But you don’t think that you just you’re like, oh, I gotta get it out.

Yeah. Nobody. All right. Nobody said that they wanted an iPhone. And again, if you took those three areas, I’ve just talked about data science, it was all the things that, that he was dealing with at the time, in terms of G GPS. Touch sense. Those things have been around for a long time decades, but it’s the time had come for those, the fusion of those things to come together.

Yeah. And the same is applying in my view, for this whole area of customer science. But yeah, Steve, Steve jobs, you

It would’ve been stuck in a lab somewhere if it wasn’t for him. No, totally. Et cetera. Where do you go for inspiration? I know we, we talked about fishing, so I get inspiration when I go fishing. By the way, it’s one of my favorite, I’m playing golf this afternoon, right? As part of my wellness day, where do you go for inspiration column?

different. The other way of answering your question as well is, I’ll be totally honest with you. I don’t listen to many. I don’t read very much in the customer experience space. I don’t know. I interest, right? Yeah. I find it an echo chamber now. So I go out to other other areas. I, and here’s a little trick for everybody.

Yeah. But when I’m reading it, I’ve always got in the back of my mind. How does this apply to customer experience? So this isn’t something I’m reading about an unrelated topic to customer experience, but how could I make it apply? Are there some underlying principles here because I’m going back to that bit about this is about human behavior.

So, what’s the human behavior that’s underlying it. So I go to many different sources now. Psychology websites read different reports from everywhere else. It’s not that I, I avoid customer experience stuff. I just don’t find a lot of value in reading it, to be honest with you. Yeah.

There’s some great folks out there who are writing just fantastic material. Yep. don’t get me wrong. But by and large, I feel like it’s, lot of the same theoretical kind of stuff. That’s not gonna really help folks day to day. Yeah. Colin, this has been a wonderful conversation. It’s great to see you again.

Thank you for the gift of your time today.

All right, everybody. Great show for you all. We’ll see you next week. We’re out. All right. Talk to you soon, everyone. Thanks for