Communication

More on CX communication methods, complaints teams, text analytics and developing your CX career. Welcome to the 66th edition of my customer strategy newsletter. The five topics this week are:

1. Communication – The average person is very bad at math
2. What does a complaints team do?
3. Latest blog posts
4. Notable items from other sites – Thematic Analysis, comprehensive CX career guide 
5. Looking forward – Webcast on July 19th

I was re-listening to an old Freakonomics episode about gun safety in the USA a few days ago. Quite a lot of the discussion was about our emotional reactions to various facts, compared to a truly rational reaction. For example, factually, a US child is apparently a hundred times more likely to die from the parents having a swimming pool compared to the parents having a gun. This made me think about what I have written in our book Customer Experience Strategy – Design and Implementation about how to use emotional reactions to your advantage. In short, you should present numbers in one way to have people think they are important, and in another way if you want your audience to pay no attention to them.

Nobel-winner Daniel Kahneman describes this often-repeated experiment in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow:

Participants are given a choice of drawing marbles from one of two urns, in which red marbles win a prize. They are told how many white and red marbles are in each urn:

● Urn A contains 10 marbles, of which is one is red.

● Urn B contains 100 marbles, of which eight are red.

Easy choice, right? Not so easy, apparently. In the various repetitions of the experiment, 30 to 40% of students chose Urn B, despite the lower probability of winning.

As Kahneman says, “…the remarkably foolish choices that people make in this situation have attracted the attention of many researchers.” He uses Paul Slovic’s term ‘denominator neglect’ to describe it. Some of the phenomenon seems to be explained by how vivid the image of something is in our minds. It is easy for us to imagine the eight winning red marbles against a rather indistinct background of white. Our System 1 has acted and found the answer. System 2 continues to take a nap. Perhaps more remarkably, one study showed that people told about a disease that “kills 1,286 people out of every 10,000” believed it to be more dangerous than “a disease that kills 24.14% of the population.” The imagery of the absolute number overwhelms the relatively abstract notion of a percentage.

This matters for how you communicate the results of any study of what customers want. When you want your audience to internalize and act based on your numbers, use absolute numbers, not percentages. You will of course occasionally want people not to pay much attention to some numbers, and the use of percentages will help. Paul Slovic and his colleagues cite an article that states that “approximately 1,000 homicides a year are committed nationwide by seriously mentally ill individuals who are not taking their medication.” That could also accurately be expressed as “the annual likelihood of being killed by such an individual is approximately 0.00036%.” The former grabs your attention on an emotional topic. The latter makes you want to yawn. The version to use depends on what you want to accomplish.

What does a complaints team do?

As many of you know, I manage the Customer Experience Management group over on LinkedIn. We passed the bar of 99,000 members a couple of weeks ago, and will reach 100,000 within about a month, though that is not what I want to write about. A question about how to measure the effectiveness of complaint handling teams came in yesterday, and I would like to say a few words about the subject here.

The way I think about customer complaints is that they are situations where the ‘normal’ company process has failed to deliver the result the customer expected or situations where the customer can’t identify what the normal process is. In 99% of such situations, the best you can do is to prevent the customer leaving you. If they stay, you have succeeded. After all, they should never have had to complain in the first place. I just don’t see how a complaints team can drive revenue growth or bring you new business directly.

This means that the way to measure the effectiveness of a complaints team is by tracking customer loyalty. If you know your historic rate of losing customers each year by business and don’t have a complaints process, try implementing one for a single business, then comparing loyalty numbers after about six months.

Our latest blog posts

Here are the latest posts. Older posts are still available on the blog page.