Understanding What They Think, What They Feel, and What Keeps Them Coming Back
Cover Copy
Tap into the secret of connecting with your
customers on an emotional level—and keep them coming back to you again
and again.
?
Advance Praise for All Customers Are
Irrational:
?
"While reading All Customers Are
Irrational, I realized that I really did not have a clue as to what
my customers think, feel, or want. Bill Cusick's groundbreaking insight
into how customers REALLY think and respond was the catalyst for the
paradigm shift I needed to go to the next level and connect with my
customers.?— Rick Roman, Chairman and CEO,
The Signature Room at the 95th, Chicago,
Illinois
"We all want to delight our customers, but how
do we know exactly what they want? Customers often can't articulate what
they are looking for or why they buy. In his terrific new book, Bill
Cusick helps us get inside our customers' brains and gives us a
blueprint for understanding how to deliver the products and services
customers will love.??? — Jackie Huba, co-author of Citizen
Marketers and Creating Customer Evangelists
"After reading All Customers Are
Irrational I find myself unconsciously seeing things from the
customer's perspective…which is probably something I should have been
doing for a long time. Bill Cusick provides real information on things
all business owners need to consider before selling products to their
customers. In this tough economy, understanding the behaviors of the
"irrational? customer will put business owners a step ahead of the
competition.?
— Craig Fichtelberg, President, AmTrav and
CheapAir.com
"This book is a refreshing must-read for anyone
who is a customer, has a customer, or wants a customer.? Bill
Cusick provides a unique perspective on the customer experience. Truly
innovative in his approach to the mindset of customers.? Don't be
"irrational?; run out and buy this book!!!???????? —
Mikki Williams, CSP, professional speaker/serial entrepreneur/sometimes
irrational customer
Back to Top
Jacket Copy
Brace yourself for the latest findings in
neuroscience research: Your customers are almost completely irrational!
In fact, we all are. With 95 percent of the decision-making process
actually occurring in the irrational subconscious, we're not making
clear-headed, logical choices, and we can't predict what we'll do in the
future—which renders many traditional management philosophies obsolete.
?
All Customers Are Irrational will
completely transform the way you think about customer relations, and
help you dispel outdated assumptions and avoid ineffective strategies.
Packed with real-world examples from the author's vast experience
studying customer experiences and clear explanations of new findings in
brain research, this groundbreaking book shows you how your customers
actually perceive the world, process information, and behave. You'll
then be able to use that information to connect with your customers on a
deep emotional (and yes, irrational) level and keep them loyal for
years.
?
Find out how to:
• Determine your company's brand promise— a
little understood but crucially important concept, distinct from goals
and strategies—and craft a new one if yours doesn't appeal on an
emotional level.
• Capture meaningful information about your
customers by analyzing hard data and
observing behavior—far more reliable sources of information than the
usual customer-response questionnaire.
• Walk in your customer's shoes, pinpointing
problem areas along the way—whether it's a
Web interface that is user unfriendly, an overly scripted calling
center, arcane wording on your bills, a poorly designed store layout, or
marketing literature that relies too heavily on features and benefits
and not enough on how your product or service will make your customers
feel.
• Focus on retaining your customers—a far more
profitable option than continually chasing after new customers to make
up for the ones who got away.
The stakes have never been higher for getting
and keeping customers. All Customers Are Irrational will help you
create powerful emotional experiences that tap into the subconscious of
your customers and hook them to your products or services for years to
come.
?
William J. Cusick
is CEO and founder of Vox, Inc., a successful consulting firm in Chicago
that specializes in customer experience. He has worked with many Fortune
500 companies, including Allstate Insurance, Zurich North America, CNA,
and 21st Century, as well as many smaller companies. He lives in Oak Park,
Illinois.
Back to Top
Excerpt
Introduction
First, let me clear something up. We've all seen what we think are truly
irrational customers. It's the guy at the front of the line at the fast
food joint yelling at the teenager working the counter because he asked
for no onions on his sandwich. Or the woman in the shoe store screaming
at a wincing salesperson simply because the size she needs is not in
stock.
That's not what we're talking about in this book.
While stories about crazy, zany customers are entertaining, they
don't make for a particularly useful business book. They don't tell you
how you can improve your own business. Instead, we're discussing all
customers, including you and me, and how we all think about and act in
the world around us. What we've learned over the last few years is that
we are all, in fact, irrational. And irrational isn't all that bad. In
fact, it could be the key to a better business for you.
Based on a wealth of research and some surprising new insights into
how our brains work (and how they don't work),
it's now clear that companies have been approaching customer ser vice
and retention the wrong way. Those who understand this and embrace new
methods of attracting and keeping customers have an opportunity to
create a game-changing customer relationship, one that could have an
exponential impact on their profits.
While companies have traditionally taken a logical approach to
gathering information about their customers, and have made "logical?
assumptions about what their customers want and how they might act—and
then have tried to fulfill those customer expectations—the reality is
that customers don't really know what they want, and cannot predict (or
tell you) what they will do anyway.
I'm a business person (I have a law degree too, but don't hold it
against me). I help companies become more profitable. I do this by
"showing them the light? regarding the value of their customer
relationships and customer experience. For the last twenty-three years
I've been involved, in some capacity, in customer experience issues, and
through that experience I've seen the good, the bad, and the ugly in
terms of how companies attract and manage their customers. One thing
I've found is that, what many companies see as "best practice? regarding
customer research, product design, service, and processes was more the
result of custom or perhaps even ignorance, than insight. And that led
me to move beyond the traditional business disciplines to more
fundamental questions about how the brain works.
So in this book we'll look at recent research, and we'll delve into
neuroscience and behavioral psychology. But, unlike some of the
brilliant authors in this area of inquiry, such as Dan Ariely, Daniel
Dennett, and Timothy Wilson, who are much smarter about these things,
we're not going to focus on simply the idea of an irrational
subconscious, or how we really absorb and process information. It's
interesting stuff, to be sure, and I'm fascinated by it. But my concern
is how these findings relate to your business generally and to your
customer behavior specifically. How do you take this new information
about how your customers think and transform your business research,
products, services, and processes to maximize desired customer behavior?
There was a hot dog place in my hometown called Little Louie's. I'd
stop there as I was biking home, sweaty and sluggish, from my summer job
as a caddy at a local country club. Little Louie's sat, slouched really,
next to the village green in the center of our suburban town, just north
of Chicago. To grab a shake or a hot dog, you would open the squeaky
wooden screen door and stand in the un-air-conditioned heat of the
claustrophobic storefront. Little Louie's was always crowded, hot, and
noisy. A group of anxious customers, jockeying for position in front of
an old wooden counter, faced forward with mouths open and eyebrows up,
trying to catch the attention of either Ed, one of the founders, or
Louie himself. There was no line, but more of a mosh pit; it was up to
you as the customer to compete with others to get noticed.
The walls were hidden under dozens of paper plates, each listing a
scrawled, faded menu item-some still available, some not. Tacked among
the paper plates were assorted autographed black-and-white photos of
unknown vintage, many showing older Chicago sports figures like former
Blackhawks, Cubs, and Bears, smiling with Ed or Louie.
"You!? The shout was always shocking. If you weren't paying
attention, you could get passed over in a micro-second when Louie yelled
and pointed at your gape-jawed, confused, 14-year-old carcass.
"Hot dog, no peppers, and a chocolate shake,? I'd mumble.
"Speak up!? he'd scream over the din. I'd repeat, louder, a nervous
adolescent squeak in my voice. Occasionally, you'd hear a first-timer,
usually a guy in a suit, ask for ketchup on his dog, and the customers
would all shut up and stare, waiting. "Ketchup?? Louie would start.
"What are you talking about? You don't put ketchup on a hot dog!? (Hint:
When in the Chicago area, you traditionally don't put ketchup on a hot
dog. Yellow mustard, a kind of neon green relish, and sweet and/or hot
peppers, maybe some sauerkraut, though that's more for a Polish, but not
ketchup.)
Banging out the screen door toward the shade of the park across the
street, sipping on my shake in its misbranded cup (Louie's never printed
its own cups; they just bought overruns), grasping the crumbled plain
brown bag with the dark grease stain spreading along the bottom (from
the fries dumped inside, which you didn't order, you just got), I was a
happy camper.
I loved that place, and so did a bunch of other folks. (In fact,
there's even a Facebook group sharing memories of experiences at Little
Louie's.) But why? Nothing about the experience I've described was in
line with any traditional guidelines around a quality customer
experience. They weren't particularly nice to their customers, they
didn't appropriately brand their business, the food was a commodity. But
there was something deeper, more emotional at work—something that's hard
to put your finger on.
Compare that to another restaurant in Chicago my wife and I went to
recently for a special anniversary dinner (I won't mention the name).
The price of an entr?e ran about twenty or thirty times the cost of a
meal at Little Louie's. Chairs were held out in synchronized fashion for
us as we sat down. The food was meticulous, strange, and delicious.
Every time I took a sip of water out of my crystal goblet (we'd
requested simple still water), two waitstaff would step forward from
either side of the table, mirrors of each other, and formally fill our
glasses from exotic-looking bottles. I pictured the waiters disappearing
into the kitchen and walking over to an industrial sink to refill the
bottles out of the faucet. For many friends, this restaurant, food, and
service were the ultimate. Why was that? What is it that customers are
really responding to? Did the water, sipped from expensive stemware,
taste better than back home in your kitchen? Is it the product, the
level of service? Certainly that's much of what keeps us all coming back
to certain businesses. But there's more, and it has to do with how we
think, and the power of our "irrational subconscious.?
The truth is, we don't think the way we think we think. The
prevailing wisdom had it that the subconscious handled some of our more
primal processing, with just our most basic motives and fears lurking in
the "subconscious, irrational? shadows, only to be accessed through
various forms of psychotherapy. On the contrary, more recent research
and studies show that the lion's share of our more sophisticated
thinking and reasoning occurs at that deeper, so-called irrational
subconscious level than previously assumed. Among other findings,
research has shown that what we thought were conscious decisions and
actions are, in fact, processed in the subconscious, with the small (5
percent) conscious portion of our brains often being notified after the
decision has been made. Given that, the reasons we act the way we do are
much less clear than some might assume. It can even be opaque to us.
The stakes in this effort have never been higher for you. A better
understanding of how your irrational customers think can help you
reshape how you do business regarding customer acquisition and
retention. Every customer you keep has a powerful impact on your bottom
line: Retaining a customer typically costs as little as one-tenth or
less of the cost to acquire a customer. That translates into a
significantly higher profit. Further, there is the surprising cumulative
positive effect of keeping more of your customers. By bumping your
retention up just slightly, you create a "compounding interest? for
growing your customer base. In short, by increasing retention, you
significantly reduce your marketing and sales costs while dramatically
increasing overall profitability. Isn't it, then, worth the effort to
better understand exactly how your customers perceive the world, process
information, and behave?
Achieving that "irrational? connection with customers is the key to
business success, and the answers lie within this fantastic puzzle box
of our subconscious. And that's what this book is about.
'
Excerpted from ALL CUSTOMERS ARE IRRATIONAL by William J. Cusick.
Copyright © 2009 by William J. Cusick. Published by AMACOM Books, a
division of American Management Association, New York, NY. Used with
permission. All rights reserved. http://www.amacombooks.org.
Back to Top
Table of Contents
CONTENTS
Introduction
PART I
A NEW WORLD: THE ECONOMICS AND MECHANICS OF IRRATIONAL CUSTOMERS
Chapter 1:??The Bottom Line: Why Customer Experience Really Matters
Chapter 2:??Your Irrational Customers: A Look at How Our Brains Work
(and Don't Work)
PART II
A FRESH APPROACH: STRATEGIES AND TACTICS FOR KEEPING YOUR IRRATIONAL
CUSTOMERS
Chapter 3:??Brand Promises: Who or What Are You, Metaphorically Speaking?
Chapter 4:??Customer Research: Just What Are Your Customers Thinking?
Chapter 5:??Prime Time: How Framing and Context Shape a Customer's
Experience
Chapter 6:??Irrational Ain't Stupid: The Emotional Component of High-End
Purchases
Chapter 7:??A Web of Issues: Online Users Know What They Like, but They
Can't Tell You
Chapter 8:??Phoning It In: Transform Your Phone Interactions into
Powerful Moments of Truth
Chapter 9:??Form or Function: The Power of Emotional Design
Chapter 10:??Irrational Employees: Hire for Emotion; Train for Skills
Chapter 11:??Process This: Tying It All Together
Chapter 12:??Getting Started: Three Action Steps You Need to Take First
Step One: Create a Customer Experience Scorecard: Understand Your Numbers
Step Two: Conduct a Customer Experience Audit: Discover the Customer's
Perspective
Step Three: Start Small: The Secret Is Incremental Improvement
Notes
Index
About the Author
Back to Top
