Richard B-Blog

Customer Experience : Empower your data and technology with Behavioral Science and empathy


Customer experience is all about customer’s life, feelings, and behaviors. And customer’s insight is the knowledge that should help brands improve journeys toward trial and loyalty. However, all too often, customer experience is mistaken with touchpoint metrics, cookies, DMP… And Customer insight is assimilated with CRM data. It is even more the case now that technology and data-science can help enrich CRM with social data or real-time feed-back (NPS, C-sat).

This technology centric approach definitely helps identify conversion issues, detect business opportunities, or optimize marketing strategies. But a “customer” cannot just be defined as a CRM data-set. To better serve your customers, surprise them, and show how much you care – not just sell them more stuff- you need to “know” them at a more emotional level. And this is where Behavioral Science and empathy come into play.

The raise of UX and empathetic design has recently demonstrated the value of adding human knowledge to rethink interfaces for seamless experiences. And today the value of Behavioral knowledge can be applied across a broader range of CX journeys : both on-line and off-line. Combined with technology, Behavioral insights can help improve transactional and relational dimensions, facilitate co-creation of new products or services, or accelerate new usage adoption.

Behavioral knowledge is all about human observation and science based insights : at BVA we combine inspiration from behavioral economics, social psychology, and neuroscience… It is not just about logs, clicks, and data-science. And to develop empathy, we jointly use ethnography and gameplays to help brand owners “experience” user-centric journeys : “impersonating” the prospect, or “becoming” the user in a real life context. We do this because just listening to customers or tracking their digital traces is way too insufficient to discover what they live when in contact with companies’ employees and processes.

Thanks to Behavioral sciences brands can now decode how choices are made and how they are influenced by context. They can detect what truly drives customer behaviors beyond their mere touchpoint journey description. Behavioral insights have become essential to customer centric organizations as they also help :

•Decipher and focus on customer goals (implicit and explicit) during journey, and not brand objectives

•Define prospects spontaneous set of alternatives (channel, service, usage competition), prior to brand considerations

•Spot the moments of truth, and critical sequences that puts people on or off-track (even when no trace is left)

•Understand situational triggers and barriers (time, place, context, emotions) that touch-point-centric data misses

•Identify individuals standards, perceptual biases, and long held beliefs that distorts true meaning of declared feed-back (NPS)

Whatever your brand challenge is (In Store purchase, new services usage etc…), Behavioral science provides a typical sequence toward a desired behavior. We use a proprietary behavioral change framework © BVA to structure brand thinking for improving CX. Addressing each step with a behavioral insight, you can nudge your customer’s to move to the next one.

1.preparing the field

2.Engaging without effort

3.facilitating the choice

4.encouraging nicely

5.At every moment of truth

For each phase, we provide brands with examples from various sectors on how to solve the series of micro-challenges that make the wheel turn. Combined with in-bound Marketing, or Omni-channel commerce strategies, these behavioral insights have demonstrated measurable impact on behaviors. This framework has also proven efficient to solve a broader range of challenges : increase attraction, simplify choice, facilitate transaction, surprise customers above and beyond, or engage CX employees … and this for a simple reason : it mirrors human behavior.

In the end, behavioral knowledge provides meaning to Customer Big Data: it helps managing customer driven marketing, with data to inform it, and not data-driven marketing lacking authentic Customer knowledge. Because to truly “know your customers”, two eyes are better than one : combining Data-science and technology with Behavioral science and empathy is what delivers the best results.