#14 Use emotion to justify CX investments, Zappos and HPE Software interview links

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Newsletter

Welcome to the 14th edition of my customer strategy newsletter. The five topics this week are:

  1. Use emotion to secure investments in customer experience
  2. April is answers month at the Net Promoter® System (NPS) Forum on LinkedIn
  3. Latest blog posts
  4. Notable items from other sites
  5. Printed versions of books are imminent

Use emotion to secure investments in customer experience

I keep on learning more about behavioral economics. Earlier this week I witnessed someone once again using a traditional approach to asking for investment, and failing. Remember Daniel Kahneman’s ‘System 1 and System 2’ explanation of the way our minds function when confronted with new information? The emotion-led System 1 engages first and tries to reach a conclusion. If it succeeds, it is close to impossible to get the rational System 2 to engage at all. Consider the example of a software company that has a nice security software business. The product manager has noticed a number of customer problems and wants to justify the addition of five new Quality Assurance people and five new developers.

She could choose the traditional, fact-based ‘System 2’ approach, concentrating on the number of bugs that are getting to customers, and the number of intrusions that customers are reporting back. She could supply lots of data. If the person who has to approve the proposal has not fallen asleep, they will at least have great difficulty remembering it all. Leading off with a ‘System 1’ emotion-based approach to approval requests is far more effective. Of course you then need to follow it up with the necessary data. What would you think of this? I think it is memorable.

We lost his data

(Image supplied under Creative Commons license)

April is answers month at the Net Promoter® System (NPS) Forum on LinkedIn

Some interesting questions have already been asked and answered so far this month. Even more answers from authoritative sources are on the way. Questions so far have included items like what happens when you move from a five-point to an eleven-point scale, where you can source reliable NPS benchmark research, and on the sample sizes needed for reliable results. You can find the LinkedIn group here.

Our latest blog posts Older posts are of course still available on the blog page.

image ‘Hygiene factors’ and ‘Motivators’ in customer experience – The Bain Anger-Delight MatrixAmerican psychologist Frederick Herzberg invented the ‘Two-factor Theory of Motivation’ in the context of his work on how to motivate employees to perform. The two factors are ‘hygiene factors’ and ‘Motivators’. Here is how they are relevant to customer experience…
image Proof there is no relationship between employee and customer satisfaction
Many will find this surprising. I used publicly-available data to prove the absence of a relationship between employee and customer happiness for 336 large businesses selling to American consumers. Personally, I don’t find this surprising at all. Read on to understand why.
How to calculate the lifetime value of a customer
Calculating the lifetime value of a customer is somewhat like calculating the value of a company you would like to acquire. While you can find many methods of doing the calculation, only one is completely correct. There are also a number of satisfactory approximations…

Notable customer experience items from other sites

Moving NPS beyond ‘just a metric’ – CustomerGauge interview with Dr. James Borderick

A detailed interview with Jamie Borderick, who used to be in my HP Software customer experience team. He shares his experience with NPS implementation, as well as Customer Effort Score. Jamie is responsible for the software competitive loyalty research at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Among other things, he points out that there is no such thing as a good or bad NPS score in isolation. What matters is how your trend compares to that of your main competitors. You can find the interview here.

Customer and employee culture at Zappos – Video interview with Dr. David Vik

Zappos is famous for its customer-centric employee culture. For Europeans, the Zappos business model and culture has largely been emulated by Zalando. Dr. Vik is considered to be ‘the man behind the culture’. As the introductory text says “In this interview, you’ll hear about how to become more profitable by putting your customers first, how to bring about positive cultural change within your organization, and what it takes to become the best in your market by delivering ‘wow’.” The interview is here.

Kindle books available, printed versions imminent

The Kindle versions of our books are available, and print versions are imminent. The Customer Experience Strategy book will be first to appear, at some point in the next few days. The NPS book should follow around the end of next week.

The most helpful thing anyone can now do is to review the books, no matter what you think of them. Reviews will help us to improve. Any resulting eBook updates should be delivered to you automatically, without any further charge. The images above are linked to the US Amazon site. You can find links to the major Amazon stores on our books page, here.

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You can also email me, Maurice FitzGerald, at mfg@customerstrategy.net.

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