Podcast Summary

The podcast features Si Elliot, author of "Customer Experience Thinking," who discusses the principles of creating effective customer experiences (CX). He defines CX as the broad perceptions and feelings a person has from all interactions with a brand, extending beyond just digital channels. Elliot explains how his background in marketing led him to behavioural science, emphasising that most customer decisions are subconscious and irrational. He outlines several of his core principles, including the importance of considering every detail, managing expectations, and understanding customer identity. The conversation explores real-world examples, contrasting companies like Apple and Zappos, which excel at CX, with the model of low-cost airlines like Ryanair, which prioritise price over a frictionless experience. Elliot also details specific behavioural biases, such as loss aversion and hyperbolic discounting, and concludes by offering practical tips for businesses to improve their own CX.

 

Key points

  • Customer experience (CX) was defined not just as digital interaction but as the total perception and feeling a person gets from all interactions with a brand, product, or service.
  • Behavioural science was presented as a critical tool for understanding customers, as up to 95% of human thinking is subconscious and intuitive (System 1), rather than rational.
  • Businesses often suffer from the "curse of knowledge," where their expertise prevents them from seeing their products or services from a novice customer's perspective.
  • Focusing on serving the customer and providing value was argued to be the best path to long-term loyalty and commercial success, as opposed to models that try to "hook" customers.
  • The principle of "marginal gains," or making small 1% improvements across all touchpoints, was highlighted as an effective and non-overwhelming way to enhance the overall customer journey.
  • It was important to proactively set and manage customer expectations; otherwise, customers would fill in the gaps with their own, potentially unreasonable, assumptions.
  • Friction in a customer journey is not always bad; it can be necessary for the customer's own good, such as in banking security, provided the reason for it is clearly explained.
  • Brands like Apple succeed by tapping into a customer's identity and what they want to signal to the world.
  • Companies like Zappos and St. Louis City FC were cited as exemplary case studies in delivering outstanding, detail-oriented customer experiences.

 

Podcast Transcript

Transcripts are auto-generated. 

 

Kiran Kapur, Host (00:01):
Hello and welcome. This week we are in the world of customer experience. Aside of marketing, I don't think we discuss enough.

Si Elliott, Author of Customer Experience Thinking (00:08):
Whilst we all like to think we're super rational, at best 5% of our thinking is in the rational brain. When we're thinking marketing, brand, customer experience, we're really focusing on the tasks, whereas the customer's got so much more going on, they may not actually be zoned in on it.

Kiran Kapur, Host (00:21):
I'm very pleased to welcome Si Elliot, who is the founder of Fabricx and the managing director of Diversity and is the author of Customer Experience Thinking, which I have thoroughly enjoyed reading over the weekend. Si, welcome to the podcast. Let's just start with what we mean by customer experience quite often to shorten to CX, which I personally hate.

Si Elliott, Author of Customer Experience Thinking (00:43):
Yeah. Well, firstly, thank you for having me on. Absolute pleasure to be joining you today. Yes, CX, that is an abbreviation I'm not a fan of either, because typically CX takes you down a digital route only. So when people talk to CX, they're thinking about web design or app design and online development. And really it's much more broad-reaching than that from my perspective and my experience. And I've been in marketing quite a while, so I do talk about offline marketing as well as online and I'm sure we'll explore that today. But really for me, customer experience is the perceptions and feelings that a person gets from the interactions and experience they have with you, your product, your service, or your brand or your business. So very broad reaching, and ultimately customer experience is just looking at exactly that. What experiences are people having with your brand?

Kiran Kapur, Host (01:32):
It's funny. It's one of those things that comes around again, again and again. I remember very early in my career talking about walking in the customer's shoes, which is based on the sort of red Indian thing that you don't understand them personally until you've walked a mile in their moccasins and literally doing a walkthrough of what it felt like to be a customer for the investment company I was working for. And this was considered quite a surprising thing to do. And then it became a very standard thing to do and companies have whole departments that do customer journey, but the customer can get lost in the process of doing your customer journey.

Si Elliott, Author of Customer Experience Thinking (02:03):
Absolutely. We find that quite a lot, where we talk about customer journeys now, which is great. When I started out in the world of marketing, a good few years ago now, so 20 odd years ago, customer journey mapping wasn't in the common parlance. It wasn't something we really talked about, but it was certainly something that people that were really customer-focused and brand thinking were tuned into. Nowadays, yes, we talk about it a lot, but fundamentally, in many occasions when we're talking to customers, we're really in a position where we're bringing their customers into that loop as well to help walk in their shoes. So if you run a retail shop, it's quite difficult sometimes because you get used to the information. So think of the curse of knowledge, behavioural bias, which is we expect people to have as much knowledge as we do on a subject matter.

(02:52):
So if you were a decorator, for example, you know everything about emulsion, you know everything about gloss, satinwood, things like that. I used to work with Dulux Paints quite a lot. So know a little bit about the world of decorating, not saying I'm a good decorator, but you're an expert in that space. Think of a DIYer coming to it painting their house for the first time. How are they going to know what these things mean, what these different finishes mean? So you really have to take a step back, and I think it's really good to walk in the customer's shoes. I also find that as a marketeer, quite often it's a marketing task that of looking at customer experience, looking at customer journey mapping. But the most powerful voices that I've heard in that space always or almost always come from the customer service team or the customer experience team or customer excellence team, whatever label we want to give them.

(03:45):
The people actually hear people at the end of the phone going, "I didn't quite understand this or this didn't quite meet my expectation." So pointing the customer at heart is the main thing, and it's a real focus to where I'm trying to look with the book as well, our role in customer experience is to serve you as the customer better and trust that the commercials will follow from that point as well as opposed to putting it the other way around. We've seen in the last week, I don't know if you've seen the government talking about subscriptions and removing the fact that it's easy to get into a subscription, hard to get out, and they think it's going to save 400 million pounds in the UK market just on unwanted subscriptions. Well, that really is there by design because people are trying to hook people and then just squeeze a little bit more money out of them.

(04:35):
Whereas if we focus on what value do I bring to you, how do I serve you better? We can trust that loyalty advocacy and recommendations come, and therefore, the long-term benefit, the long-term brand building comes from there.

Kiran Kapur, Host (04:48):
It is a good point. And when we talk about customer experience, I mean, there is an economic, a business benefit behind it all if this is not pink and fluffy, this is actually really important. I wanted to come back to your painting idea. So where I've worked with companies, you will find that they say, "Oh, well, what customers need to understand is a difference between gloss and emulsion." So we will put an explanation on our website about what gloss is and what emulsion is. But actually as a customer, I don't think in those terms, I think I want a shiny paint or, "Oh, I don't want a shiny paint." There can be a mismatch of, we think we're explaining, but actually we're not explaining what the customer needs to know.

Si Elliott, Author of Customer Experience Thinking (05:25):
And that comes back to that curse of knowledge where we're putting it into, let's say the trade parlance and the terminology would use rather than how someone would describe it. And I work with a great copywriter at Diversity, Lucinda, and she's always challenging because we work across broad range of clients from public sector, financial services, which you can imagine is very much loaded up with a lot of lingo and terminology, construction, but again, construction not only B2B, but then how does it service the consumer market? And she's really good at pulling those marketeers and the brand's brief back to say, "But what does that mean? And what does that mean in layman terms?" And if we think of brands that do that really well, I always pull out Virgin with their tone of voice and how they talk about the legals and they try and soften things even when you're going through for a credit card, legal terminology.

(06:20):
And that's super important is having the customer kind of at the forefront of your mind and allow everything then to build out behind there.

Kiran Kapur, Host (06:28):
Okay. So I know you came into customer experience pretty much through behavioural science. Was that your route in?

Si Elliott, Author of Customer Experience Thinking (06:34):
Yeah actually it was the opposite way around. Behavioural science came a little bit later on in my career. I wish I'd uncovered it before then to be quite frank. So I started out, went through a university, did a business studies degree, which gave me a great grounding. When you run your own business, knowledge across the piece is really good, but marketing was my core topic of interest. So my accountancy and HR grades probably could have told you that marketing was my thing. And coming out of university, I fell into agency world. It was a happy accent. I know a lot of people try, and meticulously plan their career. I'm not the poster child for that at all. But starts out, joined Diversity, which was a brand agency at the time, but you have to remember this back in 2003. So Facebook's or Meta doesn't exist.

(07:23):
Google is only five years old. I was doing a lot of work with Thomas Cook, the travel agent doing window displays, helping with their rebrand across their estate. So a lot of retail based stuff, which was great grounding. Then moved into the world of loyalty programmes, and accreditation and reward programmes as well. So that's where the marketing and let's say the customer-focused customer experience and that customer service element came in. And then about eight years ago, I stumbled across behavioural economics and thought, "Well, this is a really interesting subject matter." And thinking fast and slow, Daniel Kahneman literally was a light bulb moment for me reading that book and going, "Well, gosh, I've now been through probably 15 years of marketing really scratching the surface." And so started to have a look at what behavioural science is and then going down that rabbit hole for a bit.

(08:22):
COVID became, I guess, quite an interesting time for me because it really brought two things together. Firstly, there was less travel, so there was more time to actually sit and research a little bit. But I also found I really missed the human interaction with clients being face-to-face, sitting down in boardrooms, in meeting rooms with teams, going into stores to see what's happening in I'll say the real world, not just the digital world, but that gave me time to really understand and think about behavioural science and how we can start to use it. And I think probably one of the outline stats that I always quote to people is we make about 35,000 decisions a day. And if you've read Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman explains it beautifully for us. We've got system one and system two. So system one being intuition instinct, that is the quick stuff, and then system two is rational thinking.

(09:15):
And whilst we all like to think we're super rational, at best 5% of our thinking is in the rational brain. So when we're thinking marketing, brand, customer experience, we're really focusing on the task, whereas the customer's got so much more going on, they may not actually be zoned in on it. So there's a lot of subconscious processing and it takes us into this world of behavioural biases, which are these things that influence the way that we think, how we react to things and how much we can do in that. Let's call it autopilot that sits behind the scenes.

Kiran Kapur, Host (09:49):
Yes, I love thinking fast and thinking slow. I think it makes you completely rethink how you talk to your customers and what your customer's do, because we do assume particularly in B2B marketing, that everybody is terribly rational. And in fact, we teach it. We say, you lecture as well, I know, we say in B2B, it's very rational in B2C, it isn't. That is not true. B2B can be as irrational. In fact, sometimes more irrational because you've got more people involved in a decision-making process than in B2C. So yes, the thinking fast, thinking slow, appealing to the other side of them. Before we come onto your, you have sort of eight things that we should be considering. I wanted to look a little bit more at some of the other theories behind. You talk a lot about optimism bias.

Si Elliott, Author of Customer Experience Thinking (10:36):
Yeah. So within optimism bias and we have a range of ... So I went through a process of looking at the most commonly used behavioural biases in marketing in our work and what other marketers would use in contents down to framework of eight categories of biases and then really condense it down to 34 that were the most applicable because back to that 35,000 decisions a day, we have to make things simple. And so even within those range of biases, one of the categories is being rightt and optimism bias will sit in there. We're often overly optimistic. For example, they've done some research with drivers where they say, where do you sit? Are you above average? And I think it was 95% of drivers said they're above average.

Kiran Kapur, Host (11:22):
Oh yeah. We're all brilliant at driving. Absolutely.

Si Elliott, Author of Customer Experience Thinking (11:24):
Yeah.

(11:25):
So we have this inbuilt optimism bias in how we see the future, how we see things, but it's not that straightforward because in our first cash, we've also got anxiety biases about fear of missing out and the fact that we worry about things and loss aversion. So humans are these wonderfully complex things where you can look at one bias and go, well, okay, it's optimism bias. So we're always optimistic, but then why do I worry about these things? Well, because there's so many conflicting things going on and that's where you have to almost look at this as a bit of a toolkit and how you pull on one, but you will have others interconnected that relate to it as well. But certainly with optimism bias, we have to be optimistic as humans because if we look at human evolution, it's been quite a battle to get to where we got to.

(12:12):
And if we didn't have optimism, we probably wouldn't have the motivation to leave the caves to go and find the food or to build the fire.

Kiran Kapur, Host (12:20):
Absolutely. Love it. Okay. Let's come down to the eight principles that you've come up with, and we won't necessarily explore all of them, but there are certain ones that I really want to pick up. Your principle one, which I thought was so important was this idea of considering every detail and how they work together.

Si Elliott, Author of Customer Experience Thinking (12:39):
Yeah, this comes back to your point on customer journey mapping and really looking at what all the touchpoints are. As humans, we seek consistency and predictability. Back to mental process and cognitive load, we can reduce it down by making things predictable and simple to follow. So considering every detail, I don't know if you've read James Clear Atomic Habits, The Power of Tiny Gains or Dave Brailsford, maybe the most famous cycling manager in the world and his marginal gains principle, which is if I improve everything by 1%, it all ladders up and creates something greater. And that's something that really I think is empowering for us as marketeers because you and I can go through a customer journey map and go, "We've got hundreds of touchpoints and people will navigate these in a whole host of different directions." Well, it's a bit overwhelming. Where do we start?

(13:35):
Well, we can just start by going, "Let's look at where we can make some little improvements along the way because organizationally as well, that builds momentum in an organisation where you then people start to see these little improvements come in, but you're not asking for something huge. So we're not asking for a multimillion-pound investment in a new retail space or in a new type of technology. We're saying, okay, on the login process we've got eight steps at the moment. Are we able to reduce that down to six? Or in our email flows, we currently explain things across three emails with a lot of text because it's technical. Can we put a short video in there that's just easier for people to absorb?" So the start point is going through and just mapping everything out, but that's where we get all the team together, those great minds from customer experience, customer service, however you phrase it.

(14:28):
We get them together around the table, we plan it out, and if you've got a physical environment, walk through it as a customer. And if you can get a customer advisory group to join you in this process, they'll see things that even as you're walking through as a customer, you thought, "Well, that's really straightforward." And they'll see things that you never thought, you don't see because it's become background noise.

Kiran Kapur, Host (14:49):
One of the things that intrigued me is, and we talk a lot about taking friction out of the system. I've forgotten exactly how you describe it. You cause it minimise effort and stress. And I'm absolutely with you that on the whole, I'm not as a customer wanting a lot of stress and friction, but there are points that actually we have to put the friction back in. You're seeing a lot with banking at the moment where they are deliberately trying to get you to slow down when you make a decision to move money from one account to another or to pay an invoice and that's actually to make you stop and think in case there's a fraudster forcing you to buy something. So I mean, I'm always intrigued by ... It's not always minimising it. Sometimes it's understanding why that stress or friction is there.

Si Elliott, Author of Customer Experience Thinking (15:34):
Yeah. If we were to absolutely and explaining that I think in a lot of cases when we think about gathering data, if I own a shoe store and I know you've got size six feet and you're always buying, I don't know, black shoes for work, but you typically pay for an express delivery. Well, if I know that about you, I will explain why I want to capture that data so I can just message you when they come in stock so I can preempt your needs, not just I'm trying to find load and then sell you more things and kind of coerce you into it. So you're absolutely right. It is about explaining if you are putting friction in why it's there, take that banking example, it's annoying, from a pure what's the best experience for the customer in that moment, it's a frustration, in the same way it's annoying point your seatbelt on in the car, but that intervention's there for your own good.

(16:31):
So what the banking system I have to do is explain that really well to me because I think on my app it's three clicks before I can actually do the payment. But when that comes in, they're explaining it in plain English to me and explaining why and therefore you appreciate that. Whereas if it was just three clicks, it would irritate me without the explanation and you're absolutely right. Sometimes we need to put interventions in for the customer's good that might not actually be, let's say, the most optimal or smoothest experience but is essential.

Kiran Kapur, Host (17:06):
So when you're talking about set, manage and exceed expectations, I'm jumping around your principles because this was principle number two.

Si Elliott, Author of Customer Experience Thinking (17:13):
Please fire away.

Kiran Kapur, Host (17:16):
What do you mean by that? How do you manage my expectations and how do you exceed my expectations? And are there companies that do this well?

Si Elliott, Author of Customer Experience Thinking (17:23):
So I like to think that people are mostly reasonable most of the time. I think you and I would hopefully be mostly reasonable. There will be times where we're not, but that'll be because of moments of stress or something else happening in the world. So when I talk about people's emotional state, if your laptop crashes and it's Tuesday, it's half 10, but you can go make a coffee, it's fine. If it's just before we're recording this, all of a sudden your stress levels, the same incident. In customer experience, a lot of the time people talk about expectation management when something's gone wrong, not upfront. So we have to start thinking about what are people's expectations in this process? And there's two ways we either set them for you, so we explain our process and we explain how that works, or alternatively you fill the gaps and you put what you think's reasonable.

(18:19):
Amazon have done an amazing job of making shopping so frictionless, but back to my shoe store, which you love your size six black shoes from, I'm a family-run business, so I can't get it to you the next day. So therefore I've got to explain to you why. And it might be that they are made with the perfect insoles for your feet, and therefore that takes a couple of days and that we're a small family business and this is Si and my wife, Jem, and this is who's behind the business. So you go, "John, that's fine. I'm not looking for a prime delivery from size shoe shop." So it is in those steps in the process explaining what people can expect next and then exceed. Well, what I'd love to do is tell you it's three days and get it in two. So yeah, okay, I'm not doing it that afternoon or the next day that you might do with a larger retailer, but if I say it's a three, five day delivery and I get it to you in two, you're a bit delighted by that.

(19:16):
And it's being mindful of wherever we leave a gap in telling a customer what to expect next, they're going to fill that gap, and they may be filling with something that might be to them reasonable, but to you, your business process and actually the rest of the world might feel a little bit unreasonable.

Kiran Kapur, Host (19:35):
I think Amazon's quite an interesting example because I think they've made it more friction full recently because so much is where you do do a search on there so much now comes up as sponsored results or these results or that result. It's harder to find the search and I think it's harder to ... I can't search on the things that I want to search on like is it a UK company, for example, if I'm trying to cut down the miles that my product may have travelled. And actually I think what was a very frictionless experience is now becoming quite a cluttered one.

Si Elliott, Author of Customer Experience Thinking (20:09):
It is, but what they've done is they've also changed shopper behaviour. You don't think about buying your shoes from my wonderful shoe store five days in advance, you think the day before I need these tomorrow and then therefore Amazon becomes that answer. And you're absolutely right. I think the world of digital's brought so many great things,s and in the book I explore what Meta, what Google have done in terms of bringing the world's information together. But one of the, I guess the entry points for me in the book is that we're more connected than ever before yet somehow a little bit more lonely and a little bit more disconnected, a little bit more overwhelmed and how do we work towards that? So digital like Amazon has really brought those benefits in, but now you're a much more discerning customer because you're starting to think of the miles of how far those shoes have travelled.

(21:01):
And many of the customers and the younger customers coming now just expect such convenience that they're starting to suddenly wise up to what we've lost in this digital world as well and that idea of local, the concept of, do I really need it this quickly, that convenience, is it worth it for the trade off of it's come, I don't know, halfway across the world. So yeah, I would agree. I think Amazon is always an interesting case study. From a design perspective, any designer I speak to looks at the Amazon science says, "Oh, it should be so much better," but they haven't changed that. And they obviously know what they're doing when it comes to optimization of that. But then how do we make it easy for you where you've got, let's say, different selection criteria. It's not really there, but hopefully that pushes you into the hands of other retailers that can give you that.

Kiran Kapur, Host (21:55):
I think that's a very good point. I mean, one doesn't have to buy from Amazon and if it's not suiting you. And the phrase is endshitification, isn't it? That's the official term for this, which is where I think they are starting to go. I think they're starting to make it quite difficult. Okay. One of the other things I wanted to pick up on was considering the customer's identity and emotions, which is your principle number six, who does that well?

Si Elliott, Author of Customer Experience Thinking (22:22):
Yeah, that's a great question. I'll pick out probably a very recognisable brand for people on this. So take Apple. They massively tap into my identity as being a creative thinker, someone a little bit different. Obviously when Apple came about, you've kind of got the tribe of people that are into PCs and then we want to get the creatives in there and anybody that runs a creative studio, typically you'll see people with a Mac and we look at some of the advertising in the past where it's talking about creative thinkers and bringing in the likes of Einstein, bringing in John Lennon and the likes. So they really tap into that. And fundamentally the products that we buy may partially be for the usefulness to us, but in the majority of cases, it's because of what I want signal to the rest of the world, whether it's the clothing brand or wear, whether it's the car or drive.

(23:16):
So I want to be seen as someone driving a Volvo probably has a different vision of themselves in the world to someone driving a sportsy BMW. Now it's not just about the driving experience, although they will tell you it's about that. We're far more driven by what this signals to other people as well. Yeah, a lot of lifestyle brands will really lean into that and you can look back and go, "Well, what's this say about what the identity is of Si and what he thinks about himself and how he wants to position himself to other people? " Because we're from tribes, we came together over the years, and our chance of survival was so much better because we came together in groups. Well, I want to be accepted in the group, so therefore I'll meet some group norms. So if all of a sudden I'm working with you and you've got Apple products and I'm on maybe Android, maybe more of a chance of everybody in the office on Apple that I might migrate across there to be accepted into the group.

Kiran Kapur, Host (24:15):
Yes. And Apple's a lovely example. I mean, I remember the Apple coming in when at that point PCs were all grey and you had a sucking great box on your desk and it was grey and Apples came in in colours and suddenly every design agency wanted a coloured Apple because they could have them in slightly different colours and they weren't grey. I remember it being quite refreshing and exciting.

Si Elliott, Author of Customer Experience Thinking (24:38):
And the thing is now it's commonplace. It's expectation across the board, but yeah, you're absolutely right. I can picture those old I Mac's with the curved back with the neon colours, and our creative studio has gone through those iterations over the years and certainly they pioneered that and said, "Yeah, I am different. I'm a slightly different thinker and therefore that's what I want you to see." And go into a coffee shop now and you'll see lots of people with their MacBooks, but what they've done is they've taken it to the next level and they've stickered it up and personalised it, and there'll be all different stickers on the back of it that I'm not just a creative thinker, I'm also an individual and these stickers tell you that.

Kiran Kapur, Host (25:18):
So when we talk about customer experience, it doesn't usually take long before some bright spark in the back of the classroom sticks their hands up and goes, "But Ryanair."

Si Elliott, Author of Customer Experience Thinking (25:26):
Absolutely.

Kiran Kapur, Host (25:27):
So shall we explore but Ryanair?

Si Elliott, Author of Customer Experience Thinking (25:30):
Please do. And well, let's just call them low-cost airlines always round. Not great customer experience, but trades on one thing which is price and cheapness and the value and the ability to get places. So you need to be really well versed with Ryanair or EasyJet, or any other low-cost airlines to navigate your way to actually paying the price that they initially tell you. We often use it within choice architecture and behavioural design to almost show the opposite of what you should do, which is, well, I've set the default as the one that nudges you to spend the most amount of money. And I've made it really difficult for you to work out where that checkbox is to take off the insurance because you don't need it. So we look at those things and go, okay, but that's part of their business model and I think consumers are now used to it.

(26:28):
For me, I feel for, let's say, the less digitally savvy members of the community trying to work with the likes of low-cost airlines, especially now they're brought in things like digital boarding passes so there's no way to print it. I'm thinking of my mother and older generations, and actually they kind of prefer something that's a bit simpler and something that they've been doing for the last 30, 40 years of air travel. So we have to look at those, but they're there to serve a purpose. They're there to, if you do want that 19.99 flight term from Barcelona, you can just about achieve it as long as you're taking the smallest iPad in the smallest bag, not expecting liquids, not having anything on the flight, not needing insurance, et cetera, and happy to wait until everybody's got on the plane. So they do open up air travel to a group of people that are willing to make those compromise, but maybe can't afford, let's say, the premium airline experience.

(27:30):
But certainly when I think about digital design, I often pull those out as a way to go and here's almost the opposite of what we want to do if we want to help people make the best decision for them.

Kiran Kapur, Host (27:42):
On the other hand in Ryanair's defence, they do manage expectations. You know what you're getting. They're very clear about that. They are also the fundamentals like the safety, is actually, fundamentally that's the bit I'm probably most worried about going from A to B on an airline. So yes, I might end up at some slightly more obscure airport than perhaps I thought I was going to, but I'm reasonably certain they're going to get me there in safety if perhaps not in the levels of comfort and luxury that some other airline might do.

Si Elliott, Author of Customer Experience Thinking (28:14):
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, ultimately, they're the hygiene factors that the hygiene factor of an airline is I want it to get me from A to B and keep me safe. That's the start point and that's a base that I would measure anybody on. But I'm thinking more on the digital element of the experience. There's a thing called sludge. So nudges, which nudges towards making better decision for you and sludge that makes it harder to get away from a decision that's better. And we think about dark patterns in design, which is, as I say, it's just making those things a bit difficult. As I touched on at the start, the subscription thing, if you're on a free subscription and you can join online but you have to ring a customer service exec and wait for 20 minutes in the working day to unsubscribe. So yeah, they exist for a reason and ultimately they have made the world a more accessible place.

(29:07):
It just, you have to accept it comes a bit of a cost in some elements of the experience, but likewise, the amount of flights I do on low cost airlines around Europe from a business perspective as well, because it's convenient and it's affordable and it means I can get to see someone face to face, I wouldn't have a world without them.

Kiran Kapur, Host (29:28):
It's interesting. I always think it's useful to sort of discuss the ... We get into customer experience and we can assume that everybody wants to make customers experience the best, but there are reasons why companies don't. So the friction of the banks, Ryanair is very clear about what they offer. I'm fascinated by dark patterns. So dark patterns is literally where ... Well, you explain. So a dark pattern is where I make things difficult?

Si Elliott, Author of Customer Experience Thinking (29:52):
Yeah, it's where you use design to make things a little bit more complex. So I'll put something in a menu where you click down and it's not going to be a button to unsubscribe. It's actually just a hyperlink context and things like that where I'm just making it a little bit more frictionful for you to actually find the way to ... And we have to think about this as in enabling the customer to make the best decision for them and putting ourselves in those shoes. So if you slightly obsocate or you make it difficult to find the route to that way of getting out, and as I touched on there, if I could sign up at your website for my subscription online, I should be able to unsubscribe online as well, not have to go through to a customer service exec or something like that.

(30:38):
And it's just something within design that this new UK legislation will look to address, but really we as custodians of brand, marketeers, strategists, business owners, whatever we're doing, we shouldn't really want to rely on them for our business model anyway.

Kiran Kapur, Host (30:56):
You talk about behaviour science and biases and navigating behaviour biases and rather than go through all of them, there's one I wanted to pick out, which was anxiety. Because we are undoubtedly a more anxious society, perhaps perfectly reasonably. And you talk about the way marketers can use that. You talk about loss aversion, scarcity effect. And the one that I didn't know, which was hyperbolic discounting.

Si Elliott, Author of Customer Experience Thinking (31:18):
Ah, yes. Hyperbolic discounting. Absolutely love hyperbolic discounting. So the concept of that and anxiety is such a big play on us. If you look at EEG studies, our brains light up a lot more when they come into contact with negative than positive stimuli. Why is that? Because it keeps us alive. And a lot of these things, we have these prehistoric brains that are slowly adapting to the modern world, but technology in the modern world moves a lot quicker than the adaptation of our brains. So a lot of these things often talk about when we're a caveman and things like this. So when we're a cave person, anxiety, worrying about things keeps us alive because it keeps that animal a little bit further away. So if it starts to run out, mate, I can get out of the way or it means I'm not going to eat that fruit I've never seen before just in case something bad happens to me.

(32:11):
The modern world is slightly less physically dangerous as it used to be, but we've still got all this inbuilt in our minds. So loss aversion is one where we feel the pain of a loss twice as much as that of an equivalent gain. So if you're to measure it, gaining 10 pounds, well, actually if you lose 10 pounds, it feels the equivalent of gaining 20 pounds. So hyperbolic discounting is a lovely one because this explains why we often make bad long-term decisions, but good short-term decisions. So what it relies on, hypquality discounting is me at the gym. So the short-term uncomfortable decision will give me more health longer term, I'll look better on the beach, et cetera, et cetera. But actually hypothy discount means I'll listen to the Netflix done, done, and sit down with some ice cream rather than go to the gym. It's why people don't pay into pensions because, okay, I'd rather have that money now than in 20, 30 years time.

(33:13):
Part of that is because I can relate to SI today, but 65, 70-year-old si, that's not me. I can't really picture that. So that's why when you talk about putting friction into places, that's why we had interventions when it comes to pensions in the UK where actually you get automatically enrolled and it's incentivised by, you save the tax on it, et cetera, et cetera. So hypothetic discounted would suggest that if I offered you 100 pounds today or 200 pounds a year today, you're more likely to take the 100 pounds today. When if you put that in the bank and got your interest, it might be 105 pounds next year, not 200, but we take the immediate gratification rather than the long term. And a lot of digital media really starts to play on those things. And you talk about fear of missing out the classic FOMO and of course, well, Ryanair do that because there's only three seats left at this price so I really need to get that seat if I want it and things like scarcity bias.

(34:15):
A really nice description someone told me about scarcity bias is going back to our caveman roots once again. And if there's a source of food there, we take it now because we don't know when we'll see that again. And we apply that nowadays to if we see something's in scarce supply, well, I have to get it now before it goes. And that creates urgency and decision, which helps with conversion sometimes, but is it always in the customer's best interest if I'm just driving you back to our shoes? And I go, "There's only one pair left." And you're like, "What I better get them." Even though you didn't really need a new pair of shoes for another month and they'll be back in stock within a month. So afterwards, do you then get a little bit of regret on your decision and therefore does that impact the way that you feel about my brand as well because you're like, "I've just bought these shoes and I really needed the money for something else this month."

Kiran Kapur, Host (35:05):
I have to say, it's suggesting that one doesn't need shoes never really works with me. Okay. Can we finish with an example of a company that does this well? Because we've talked about some companies that perhaps don't do things so well. So can you give me a sort of shining example of a company that I should look to for a good customer experience?

Si Elliott, Author of Customer Experience Thinking (35:27):
I've got two I'll give you. So I will start with Zappos, shoe brand based in Las Vegas. And for me, I like to hold these up as an example because quite often when we talk about customer experience, when we talk about these really beautiful details that people are putting into customer experience, it's often boutique businesses. Zapier sold to Amazon for I think about 1.2 billion reportedly. So it goes to show you can scale a business through this, but ultimately their focal point, because I went and spent a bit of time with them was to deliver a wow experience. So they look at commerce, customer service, company culture and community and they've got 10 core values that feed into it, but everybody knows that. And there was a very famous case with them. I spoke to a few of their customer service executives and they quite often would proudly tell me how many hours they've spent on the phone to customers and they've had it where the CEOs brought cups of tea to people while they keep the call going and Rayo I think had had a six hour call with one customer.

(36:38):
But there was a lady, Zaz Lamar who'd bought her mom some shoes who was ill and sadly she passed away so wanted to return the shoes. When Zappos found out what happened, she just asked for how do I return them, what's the address to return them to, Zappos sent prepaid packaging but also bouquet of flowers. Now the interesting thing there is in that business, everybody is enabled and has the autonomy to just do it. So it's not a, "I need to go and see if I can get sign off for this. " They just do it. And Rayo told me about another case where someone had been looking for some shoes for a wedding, got a pair for example, and it wasn't quite the right shade of brown and they didn't have the right shoe. So they actually found another shoe shop that sold the right one and put the customer through to customer service at that online retailer.

(37:35):
How many brands would send someone to their competitor? So they are as a retailer, absolutely incredible and certainly worth their website talks a lot about their culture as well. So it's really worth looking at the website, but say I went and spent a bit of time with them and was genuinely blown away. And the other one is a soccer club. I am based in England, but they are based in the US MLS team, St. Louis City and Matt Sebeck, who is their chief experience officer is an absolute visionary. They're the MLS New Boys. They've been around now for four years, but the design he's put into everything in that stadium experience, the fan experience, they launched the app a year before the team hit the field. And when you go to the stadium, I think 65% of their revenue comes before the game, which is so rare.

(38:31):
They've got a chief flavour officer. I've never heard of that job title before, someone that curates the food stands around the ground. The exhaust fumes from the food stands goes down the concourse because as Matt told me, he wants it to be the best smelling stadium in the world and every element of the experience at St. Louis City is quite incredible. And that just comes down to that level of attention to detail. I feature them actually in a section in the book because I pull it out to go, "This is a brand that takes you through every element and every one of our principles and just shows how it's done." And I think the important thing when I was writing the book as well is a fact, these are principles, not rules. It's guidance, not a set of laws. I'm not the most linear of characters and I wouldn't really deal well with a set of rules.

(39:25):
And it was more, these are just guiding principles that can help you along the way. And that's how I want people to explore it. And I think that's what we have to do as brands as well as explore things. And I can't tell you what the world will be like in three years time with the advent of AI and what technology's going to bring in. But as long as we always try and keep a human experience central to that, I think that's probably going to see brands, businesses, services, organisations really flourish in whatever the world brings us.

Kiran Kapur, Host (39:55):
Fantastic. Just before we go, if somebody's very inspired, do you have a top tip?

Si Elliott, Author of Customer Experience Thinking (40:01):
Firstly, going back to that point, small changes compound, Dave Brailsford, Atomic Habits, the little things don't make it too overwhelming. If you have too big a project to dip your toe into the water off, it's going to feel overwhelming. You'll put it off and you'll do something else. When it comes to research, I observe how people act, not just what they say. Say do gap in research is one that we're very aware of. So things like ethnography, just go and if you've got a store, go and sit and watch what people are doing. Don't make it too creepy, but watch what people are doing and walk in the shoes of the customer. You've touched on that already. Absolutely critical. Get in a customer advisory group wherever you can and think about behavioural science as well because with those 35,000 decisions, at least 95% of our processing happened at subconscious level.

(40:52):
If you're consciously think about it, you're assuming the audiences as well and they won't be, they'll be influenced by so much more. And I think finally, be human, put the human back at the centre of it. I talk customer experience because that's the recognised terminology in our industry, but actually it comes down to human experience.

Kiran Kapur, Host (41:12):
Be a human, have those human connections is just so important. Si Elliot, your book is Customer Experience Thinking. Is it available now?

Si Elliott, Author of Customer Experience Thinking (41:20):
It's coming out on the 21st of May, so it depends when people listen to this. So it comes out the 21st of May and you can also find me on LinkedIn, Si Elliot, that's double double T. I always have to say that when I'm spelling out my name and silet.com as well for more details. But yeah, would love people to explore this and take the work I've done so far and challenge it, take it to the next level.

Kiran Kapur, Host (41:46):
Thank you very much indeed for your time.

Si Elliott, Author of Customer Experience Thinking (41:48):
Absolute pleasure.