CORPORATE ADVICE/ HOW TO NUDGE YOUR CX AND TRANSFORM YOUR BUSINESS

Practically every function across a business can be impacted by behavioural science, including marketing, customer insight, operations, productivity, product development and recruitment. Each department and discipline can benefit from understanding human factors that will improve

by Richard Chataway Director of Behavioural Science Gobeyond Partners

Here’sthe simple truth: if you work for a company, you’re already in the business of behaviour. That’s because if your business is going to prosper, you’re going to need to influence behaviour. Your own, your employees and your customers. Whether it’s choosing a service provider, completing a purchase journey or opting for self-service rather than making a call, customers constantly make choices about how to interact with businesses.

And as the world becomes more digital and remote, your behaviour – and the choices that you and your customers make as a result – become more important than ever.

Most of us make hundreds of decisions every day without consciously thinking about them. Instead our choices are hugely influenced – far more than we might realize – by primal emotions like trust and fear, and social factors like peer pressure.

How we really make decisions

JP Morgan once wrote, ‘A man always has two reasons for doing anything: a good reason and the real reason.’ The good news is that, thanks to behavioural science, we’ve never been closer to understanding those real reasons.

We’ve learned more about behaviour in the last 50 years than the previous 5,000, thanks to huge advances in understanding the drivers (and barriers) of behaviour.

The reality is that all of us think less than we think we do. The groundbreaking work of psychologist Daniel Kahneman into what he calls ‘System 1’ and ‘System 2’ thinking, won him a responses like trust, fear, laziness, even disgust.

Any business that doesn’t take advantage of this understanding of how people actually make decisionsthat we’re often driven by subconscious choices or external factors that we’re not even aware of - risks wasting its money.

How you can use behavioural science to take control of your customer journey

So what if we could influence the decisions your customers make and nudge them into making better choices, for themselves and for your business? After all, we don’t hesitate to optimize the technology and operations that sit behind our businesses.

Why wouldn’t we do the same for behaviour, given the pivotal role it plays in business success? Applying the latest knowledge of how to influence behaviour should be considered every

Nobel Prize in 2002. This melding of psychological and economic thinking about behaviour, which has become known as the discipline of behavioural economics, is the closest thing we have to a unifying theory of decision-making.

We all like to think we make most of our decisions in reflective, rational ways. But behavioural scientists believe that System 1’s instinctive ‘fast thinking’ accounts for 90-95% of our daily behaviour, and that there are over 200 different cognitive shortcuts and biases that can affect all of those decisions we make – without us realising.

Basically, the vast majority of decisions we make (whether they’re about our homes and families, the products and services we buy and the money we spend), are hugely influenced by subconscious human bit as critical as optimizing the technology and operations that deliver it.

For example, the presenting of contact options has a big impact on what method customers choose. For one client we coached contact center agents to say to customers: “You can find the answers to most questions on our website. But if you can’t find what you need there, you can call us back, we are here 24/7.” That was one of several nudges used that resulted in a 14% digital channel shift by the customers of a large financial services outsourcer.

What’s the opportunity for your business?

We know that we can dramatically affect people’s choices by subtly reframing how those choices are presented. Every single choice a brand gives its customer, from website to contact center, digital ad to store layout, is an opportunity to make sure you’re optimizing the way you frame those choices. That means that there are a host of ways to positively influence customers, whether it’s what employees say on the phone or in person, the copy on a website, or the script used by a chatbot. Being able to influence these decisions creates a win-win for a brand and its customers.

The results can be transformational

Whether it’s how to challenge habitual routine decision-making or using social norms to steer customer journeys, we can ‘nudge’ one another to influence decisions, and then test and experiment with those nudges to make sure they work.

We’ve seen how our pioneering Nudge Practice can harness behavioural science to apply insights that optimize how a business communicates with its customers across every touchpoint. By applying these nudges as part of an integrated customer journey solution, a business can optimize CX throughout the user journey to improve satisfaction levels, deliver efficiency savings, enable channel shift and boost overall business performance.

About GoBeyond Partners

Gobeyond Partners is a new type of consulting firm that partners with its clients to solve complex customer journey challenges. By combining deep sector expertise with an awardwinning approach to client service and value, Gobeyond Partners brings its clients’ transformation vision to life.

Part of the Webhelp group, the team at Gobeyond Partners operates globally - understanding what it takes to transform organizations in the face of changing customer behaviours, cost pressures, and legacy systems.

Visit www.gobeyondpartners.com for more