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So far Anastasia Pryanikova has created 130 blog entries.

Lucky charms for enchanting customer experience

Lucky charmsSome time ago I watched a TED presentation by Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of “Eat, Pray, Love” on nurturing creativity.  Talking about the pressures of creative work, felt especially strongly after a hugely successful book, Elizabeth Gilbert described how writers and poets had relied for centuries on their creative genius, or muse, to keep them inspired and prolific.  They developed special relationships with their mystical helpers, often incorporating elaborate rituals into the writing process.  They attributed their success to the power of their creative genius and their misfortunes to the loss of the mystical support.

If you have a muse or a lucky charm, you are in good company.  It turns out that not only artists rely on their mystical supporters.  Athletes invite them too, usually with the help of performance jewelry, lucky charms and rituals to help them focus, calm down and perform better.

Rituals and symbols captivate our brains, which are wired to look for patterns and make predictions even where none exists.  Wearing a bracelet may not really cause you to perform better but if your brain sees the connection and you believe in it, the power of suggestion makes the brain respond as if it were true, triggering a placebo effect.  It’s the power of belief anchored in a symbolic object that can cause you to perform better.  Rituals serve a similar function.  A ritual is a set of actions that has a special symbolic meaning.   Rituals give a signal to your brain to prepare for something or shift focus, depending on the meaning and purpose of your ritual.

Both rituals and symbols set expectations, and, perhaps, brands can use them too as tools to create unique customer experiences that go beyond the function of the logos.

For example, in my daughter’s kindergarten, each day of the week has its alternative name that incorporates the type of food that the kids help to prepare that day.  Monday is the rice day, Tuesday is the bread day, etc.  Every Tuesday morning when we step through the school doors, we are welcomed by the wonderful aroma of the home-made bread baked in the oven.  We all have come to expect it on Tuesdays, and it’s a part of the school experience.

How can you get your customers in the mood to expect something wonderful?  There is a small toy store in my town, which has to compete with all those big chains around. When you have a five-year-old kid, you have numerous birthday parties to attend, and you need gifts.  We choose to shop in this independent toy store not only because of the nice inventory of toys and the friendliness of the store employees who are ready to assist you in choosing the right product. There are some unique thoughtful features in that shop that boost their customer experience.  For example, they provide a few tables with complimentary gift wrapping paper and bows so that the customers could wrap their gifts and kids could take part in the action.  You can also choose a free birthday card with your purchase.  This little gift-prep ritual makes a difference.  And when we are in a rush to get that last minute present, we know we can get it all done in one place without crowds of people and much waiting.

Either it’s the holiday season that makes me think of freshly-baked bread and pies or I am just hungry and my brain needs glucose, but my next example also involves a culinary tradition.  It comes from The Grossman Group, a consultancy that specializes in strategic leadership, internal communication and delicious Grandma Elsie’s Famous Pumpkin Chiffon pies, which The Grossman Group makes for their in-town clients every Thanksgiving as a sweet way to say “Thank you.”  Their out-of-town clients get the ingredients and the recipe in the mail to make their own pies.  And all other lovers of pies and communication can get the famous recipe on The Grossman Group website.  Now, that’s a treat and treatment that customers can appreciate.

How can your brand find a lucky charm or creative inspiration that can set it apart from competition?  Do you have a lucky charm or tradition that you want to share?

By | 2013-03-27T19:42:30+00:00 December 8th, 2010|Communication, Peak Performance|1 Comment
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Friendly conversations make you smarter

ConversationIf you need to boost your brain power for an important task that demands working memory, self-monitoring, and the ability to suppress external and internal distractions, you now have an excuse to procrastinate by engaging in a pleasant chat with friends.  A recent University of Michigan study indicates that friendly conversations boost executive function while competitive interactions don’t.

Psychologist Oscar Ybarra, a researcher at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR) and the lead author of the study, tested 192 undergraduates to determine which types of social interactions helped the brain power – and which didn’t.  After brief, 10-minute conversations in which participants were simply instructed to get to know another person, the subjects improved their performance on a variety of cognitive tasks.  Conversations that were more competitive in nature didn’t result in similar performance boosts.  Ybarra  explained:

“We believe that performance boosts come about because some social interactions induce people to try to read others’ minds and take their perspectives on things.  And we also find that when we structure even competitive interactions to have an element of taking the other person’s perspective, or trying to put yourself in the other person’s shoes, there is a boost in executive functioning as a result.”

It sounds like trying to understand other people boosts brain power, and empathy may even give your executive function a competitive edge.

By | 2010-11-11T16:47:16+00:00 November 11th, 2010|Peak Performance|1 Comment
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To keep your personal brand relevant, encourage engagement, not agreement

ConversationMuch discussion around personal brands focuses on the story and messages we want to communicate to our audience.  Such intentional strategy is important and necessary, but it is equally important to accept that it’s not your intentions that form your personal brand, it’s the perceptions you create in the minds of others.   These perceptions are formed in part by what you say and how you act, but also by how people experience you and how you make them feel.   Do you feel like your brand supporters are part of your tribe?  Do you take time to get to know and understand them better?

A recent study on how the brain processes social interactions indicates that the brain responds stronger to close friends than to strangers who share our interests, views and beliefs.   Study participants who were asked to make judgments about themselves and their friends experienced increased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, a brain area associated with the perception of value and the regulation of social behavior, regardless of whether the friends shared similar views as the participants.  Judgments about unfamiliar others with common interests did not result in the same brain activation pattern.  In other words, social closeness trumps similarity when it comes to evaluating people and assessing personal relevancy of social interactions.

Your personal brand is relevant as long as others perceive you as socially and personally relevant.  The implication from the study is that if you want to strengthen your personal brand, perhaps, you are better off if you focus on nurturing the closeness of your human connections than on the perfection of your message.  It sounds contrary to the traditional wisdom but may be more in tune with how the brain evaluates social relevance.

What do you think?

By | 2010-11-07T16:52:17+00:00 November 7th, 2010|Communication, Perception|1 Comment
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Customer sentiment: How to deal with angry customers

“To listen closely and reply well is the highest perfection we are able to attain in the art of conversation.”
~ Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Customer serviceEvery business wants to know the minds of their customers. But when your customers speak their minds, do you know how to listen?  There are several layers of listening to your client feedback.  You can focus on just what’s being said or you can pay attention to the sentiment of what’s being said – the emotions, the undisclosed assumptions, the unvoiced desires.  The latter is more difficult to do, but careful tuning into customer sentiment can be the key to improving customer service.

A recent study on customer conflict, for example, revealed two fundamental behavior patterns of angry customers.  Some anger is transactional, or task-based, in nature.  For instance, you go to a grocery store, buy a bag of potatoes, bring it home, and open it only to discover that several potatoes are rotten. You may get angry, but it’s unlikely that you treat this incident as a personal affront.  If you go back, complain and get a new bag of good potatoes, you will probably be quite satisfied with the resolution of your complaint.  The study confirmed that transactional anger can be diminished by compensating the customer for the poor service.

There is, however, another anger pattern among customers.  That’s when they take the situation personally.  The study revealed that these angry customers often thought that they had been misled by the company’s marketing messages and felt betrayed.  Such consumers interviewed in the study used highly emotive language to describe the service provider, including ‘hatred’ and ‘vengeance’.  In such situations, it’s not enough for the customer service to compensate the customer for the bad experience.  In fact, offering to exchange the defective product or refund the money may lead to more angry outbursts.  Instead, customers want an acceptance of responsibility and a personal apology.  Perhaps, they want their customer representatives feel their frustration, connect to the source of their pain, and empathize with them.

This makes sense from the brain’s perspective because the second pattern likely triggers the brain’s preference for fairness. Fair treatment is a reward to the brain that activates dopamine cells while unfair treatment is perceived as a threat and processed in the anterior insula, the part of the brain also associated with the feeling of contempt [PDF] The perception of unfairness can lead to emotional and sometimes even violent outbursts.

According to Golnaz Tabibnia, an Assistant Professor in Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Melon University, fairness may be even more important to us than money as the ultimatum game experiments demonstrate.  In the ultimatum game experiments, two people need to split a pot of money.  One person makes an offer, and the other person needs to decide whether to accept or reject it.  If the offer is rejected, nobody gets any money.  It turns out that people are willing to sacrifice their personal gain if they think that the offer unfairly benefits the other person.  When the offer is fair, the reward system in the brain becomes more active than when it’s unfair. Other studies show that people report higher levels of trust and cooperation when they experience fair exchanges.  Interestingly, the sense of fairness increases the levels of dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin, making people more open and willing to connect with others.

In summary, businesses that want to nurture customer loyalty should pay attention to the perceptions of fairness when listening to customer sentiment and analyzing conversation patterns.  Strong emotive language may indicate that customers take the conflict personally as a breach of trust and seek justice and empathy, rather than refunds and compensation.

By | 2010-10-14T20:26:24+00:00 October 14th, 2010|Communication, Conflict Management, Perception|0 Comments
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