It is true that Customer Experience at its core is about human emotions and feelings. Ultimately the goal is to make your customers happy. But as with everything, CX is a little bit more complicated than just ‘making customers happy’.
A good customer experience strategy is developed on the foundation of good research, statistics, and learnings from fields like psychology, sociology, behavioural science or biology. This is the science behind CX.
When you realise this you can dive a lot deeper into your business actions and develop a sturdy foundation that will last any turmoil.
Customer Behaviour
Valentin Radu describes Customer Behaviour as “the study of consumers and the processes they use to choose, use (consume), and dispose of products and services, including consumers’ emotional, mental, and behavioural responses.” When you study customer behaviour you can make better and more informed decisions regarding your customer experience.
Please note, we are not advocating for you to study your customers to use the data against them, while improving your gain. The trick is to use the data you collect to improve your CX strategy so that your customers become loyal advocates of your brand.
Customer Behaviour includes perception, reason and will. While reason and will are a fight between, our self-discipline and our desires, customer perception is created from past experiences and the unconscious. This includes any experiences they may have had – whether it is with a competitor of yours or a business completely not-related to your sector. Perception and expectations can be formed by customers’ attitudes to brands and experiences outside your particular sector. It’s not just past experiences with you or in your own sector where customer perceptions are formed.
Read more: Your Company is Compared to Everyone.
There are many models of Customer Behaviour and how to analyse it correctly, however the key steps include:
- Analysing your customer journey
- Dividing your customers into large groups of similar characteristics
- Analysing and recognising each groups selling points
- Gathering quantitative data
- Qualitative vs quantitative data
- Optimising your CX strategy
Sociology
As explained by UNC, “Sociology is the study of human social relationships and institutions.”.The key here for CX is ‘human social relationships’.
In The CX Academy courses, we use our CX Academy Framework to connect with customers on an emotional level, and to create strong lasting bonds. These bonds are built on 6 factors: I trust you, You know me, You make it easy, You get me, You deliver on your promise and You fix things. All these stages allow you to build relationships and unbreakable bonds with your customers.
Ultimately, you can study sociology to understand how you can build a strong bond with your customers. As well as that general knowledge about different social groups, can help in delivering your CX to different social groups or communities. It can also help you manage safety within your business’s premises.
As well as this, one of the most important parts or goals of a good CX strategy is to ensure that the strong bonds you create with your customers – turns them into loyal advocates, advertising your services and products to their friends, family and colleagues. Studying these ‘referrals’ can give you insight into the quality of these newly acquired customers. In a study documenting the economic post-acquisition effects, referred customers had a higher contribution margin, and a higher retention rate.
This is important because when you realise how your advocates share information about your business, you can influence it.
Psychology
The science of mind and behaviour. A great example of how you can study your customers behaviour and apply psychology to resolve their pain points would be an airport scenario.
At an airport passengers were complaining about the long wait times at the luggage pick-up belt. The airport company hired more staff to speed up the process of getting the luggage out. They reduced waiting times to five minutes, but the complaints kept coming. After analysing the customer journey, they realised that it only takes a minute for them to get to the baggage reclaim. The airport company changed the arrival gate so it now takes them 5 minutes to walk to the baggage reclaim.
The complaints stopped.
What you can learn from this example is that to achieve CX Excellence – you should analyse customer behaviour, sociology and psychology. As just delivering a great experience, may not be enough.
If you would like to learn more about how to achieve CX Excellence, enrol in our Professional Diploma or Certificate today.
