The Intuitive Customer

“The Intuitive Customer,” by Colin Shaw and Ryan Hamilton, applies learnings from the field of Behavioral Economics, which is focused on how unconscious and psychological experiences impact customer behavior and decision making more broadly, to the specific field of experience management. Shaw is a podcast host, frequent speaker, and author of four best-selling books. Hamilton is a professor of marketing at Emory University in the field of consumer psychology and was named one of the “40 under 40” best b-school professors earlier in his tenure. “The Intuitive Customer” builds on the work of others whose books I’ve reviewed, such as “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman, “The Power of Habit” by Charles Duhigg, “How Customers Think” by Gerald Zaltman, “Clued In” by Lou Carbone, and “Linchpin” by Seth Godin. You can find a complete set of my book reviews on my website here, as well as at the end of chapters in my own book, The CX and Culture Connection.

The core thesis of The Intuitive Customer is that organizations hit a plateau in their efforts to improve CX because they focus too much on the rational, conscious side of how customers make decisions, and don’t pay enough attention to the intuitive, unconscious side. This limits the effectiveness of CX programs as most decisions are made unconsciously. The authors show how customer loyalty is a function of not just building habits where we reinforce an unconscious, think fast approach to buying a brand, but by building an emotional attachment to the brand where we recall memories of our experiences and grow to think of a brand like we do our friends and family. Like Godin, Shaw and Hamilton encourage us to think of creating great customer and employee experiences as giving a gift.

The book is organized around 7 imperatives that reinforce the need to pay more attention to the intuitive side of how our brains work. Once you understand the true nature of how unconscious thought shapes customer behavior, you can be more systematic in identifying which emotions are most important to reinforce your brand promise and drive loyalty. The authors share ways you can identify peaks in the customer journey and design the customer experience to reinforce memories with the right emotions. They further call out the importance of engaging your employees and evolving your culture to drive the right behaviors that deliver on your brand promise.

Today, according to the authors’ research, less than one-quarter of companies focus enough on emotion, and most of those that do are only scratching the surface. The book dives into prior study of emotions, and how of the 150+ emotions that have been characterized by psychologists, there are about 20-30 that you can focus on most pragmatically across the customer journey. The intensity of which emotions will resonate most with your target personas will vary across brands, and you need to decide which are the best for you to reinforce your unique brand promise. They discuss a hierarchy of emotions and how they ladder up from destroying value to brand advocacy. The authors introduce what they call an Emotional Signature, as a tool to focus your company’s efforts to reinforce the connection between your CX and brand promise.

This has much in common with the approach Carbone uses to build an emotional motif that aligns to the specific deep metaphors that customers use to organize their memories about your category and brand. Understanding these deeper metaphors allow you to tap into the deeper meaning shaping customers emotions, and then focus on delivering experiences that reinforce the emotions that are most congruent with those metaphors. In my own book, The CX and Culture Connection, I introduce the concept of an Experience Collage, which helps you to design and layer experiences that go beyond the product and reinforce meaning and community around your brand, deepening the customer’s emotional connection with your brand.

Another useful construct that Shaw and Hamilton focus on in their book is the Peak-End theory for understanding what shapes memory of the customer experience. Extensive research has shown that what is most memorable in a customer journey are the peaks (and valleys) across the journey, as well as the end of the journey. This makes it easier for us to store memories and recall them. To make journey mapping most valuable as part of your experience management efforts, you need to pay attention to what is causing a peak emotional experience at different points in the journey and what the customer is feeling, not just doing, at that point in the journey. This allows you to not only be more empathetic in how you engage with the customer, but also to design an experience that delivers this peak more consistently and amplifies the emotional intensity of the peak moment in the journey. Note that reducing pain along the journey is useful as it reduces negative word of mouth and creates more space for a positive emotional peak to form, but it won’t create loyalty on its own. To create true loyalty, you need to deliver peaks, not just reduce valleys.

The authors also place significant emphasis on the linkage between your employee experience and your customer experience, as well as how change management and focusing on culture are key to reinforcing this linkage. In many cases, the peak moment is the result of interactions between your frontline employees and the customer, where your employees engage in behaviors that reinforce the right emotional connection and shape positive memories. You can evolve your approach to organizational change to reinforce this linkage and scale it more effectively. This is a core focus for my own book and podcast, The CX and Culture Connection.

The Intuitive Customer is an excellent book that should be included in anyone’s top list of books to identify pragmatic ways to move their organization’s CX efforts forward. The book goes beyond academic frameworks on the importance of emotion and intuitive decision making, providing useful and actionable ways to shape the behaviors of your employees to impact your customer experience and deliver on your brand promise. I hope you’ll take the time to read the full book and that it sparks some great ideas for you too! Please keep an eye out for video links I’ll share from an upcoming podcast session with Colin Shaw, one of the book’s authors. You can find my full set of podcast episodes here.