The psychology of the customer experience economy

Customer Experience Management (CEM) is the new hype topic. Everything in the IT industry usually starts with hypes. This time it is driven by social media and the fact that social media disruptively has empowered the customers to speak up. This situation forces companies to act and to start thinking (again) about their customers and their experience with products and services. But is this really new?

No – successful companies have always been caring about their customer experiences. And the reason is very simple – because it pays off. But what is the underlying reason? I have been thinking about this a lot and came up with the following simple explanation that is grounded in biology.

How the human brain works

The human brain can be basically broken down into two main areas: The outermost is the newest brain, the homo sapiens brain. It is also called neocortex. The neocortex is responsible for our understanding, so we could call it the ‘What’ level.  The ‘What’ level also holds the capacity for language. The second area is our limbic brain. The limbic brain is responsible for our feelings like trust or loyalty, as well as our long term memory. It is also responsible for all human behavior and decision making. It is important to mention, that the limbic brain has NO capacity for language. Simplified we could call it the ‘Why’ level.

So if we now put this in context of Customer Experience Management, we see the importance of feelings and memorable moments throughout the customer’s decision making process. So it is very important, that our customers have a good ‘gut’ feeling about our products and services.

Trust & loyalty

But you don’t get a good ‘gut’ feeling from vast amounts of product or marketing information because the ‘Why’ level cannot understand this – it has no capacity for language. You need to address the ‘Why’ level differently. In our experience this can be achieved through feedback and engagement channels that make your customers feel cared for. This way you create trust and loyalty, and the marketing and sales messages just rationalize the good ‘gut’ feeling.

To summarize – Customer Experience Management is not a hype – it’s a concept that is grounded in human biology and should to be supported by enterprise class software that seamlessly embeds the customer experience management into the enterprise.