Understanding Customer Experience

Last week I was a member of a jury selecting the salesperson of the year in an exhibition for Young Entrepreneurs, Junior Achievement (Ung Företagsamhet in Swedish). First, the jury visited the exhibition stand incogninto, asking about their products and observing their sales pitches. In the exhibition the entrepreneurs need to make quick contact, build fast relations and go for the sale in just a couple of minutes. While competing with 180 other stands! After a few rounds on the exhibition floor, the jury picked four finalists to make a sales pitch in the jury room about a product that had been presented to the sales persons   just 10 minutes earlier. We were utterly impressed by these young entrepreneurs’ drive and creativity! Listening to the sales pitches, I was reflecting to Cialdini’s six principles of influence: reciprocation, commitment & consistency, social proof, liking, authority and scarcity. The winner came into the jury room with a smile on ...

I'm looking forward to diving into the theories and examples about influence. Having read Cialdini's book: Influence: Science and practice I'm awed at how we are suckers for easy tricks! Flattery, social approval, copying others or wanting what we can't have are all easy and often transparent ways of influencing, yet we fall for it almost every time. My least favourite example is telephone salespeople: I simply hate it when someone calls me on the phone, interrupts me at my work or at home, tells me about a product or a service I'm not interested and I don't want. Still, too many times I end up saying yes to buying one, or signing up to a subscription! After the phone call I always curse to myself for being a sucker and not having learnt to say no! So this module I suppose will include a lot of soul searching, and hopefully I will learn some tool to you so that I want fall into the same trick again, at least not every time.... I'm also looking forward ...

Lars E Olson: describes how positive emotions lead to: purchase decisions, loyalty and well—being. When we feel positive about the customer experience, it is easier for us to make the choice of purchase, further we feel loyal to the brand or product and stay loyal to it. Finally, we experience higher well-being.     Olson presents as the determinants of subjective wellbeing : ·          45% consist of personal characteristics (personality, genes) ·          45% how we spend our time (activities, behaviour, everyday life, goal process) ·          10% social & economic factors (gender, age, cohabiting. children, income, employment, education) In this perspective, it would be more useful to focus on understanding the customer’s personality and time-spending activities than social and economic factors, which are often more in focus when ana...

I’m surprised to find that the subject of psychology of quality and expectations is so complex. Tore Pedersen explains regarding quality & expectations: If the expectations are high the quality is valued higher. But if expectations are low, the quality is valued lower. If the expectations are low it requires a lot of effort to overturn our experienced quality. The sense of quality is built over time. It takes a lot of effort for our restaurant to build up high expectations and high experienced value for our menu. We could try and learn to understand our guests by asking our guests about their expectations and feelings. According to Professor Margareta Friman we can ask our guests before their visit or after their visit. Asking before their visit will be based on affect forecasts: how do you think you will feel when visiting our venue? Or we can ask after the visit: How did you feel? There are different ways for us to build up expectations before the visit. The...