Tag Archive for: communication

5 Customer Types every Business should Understand

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Customers are the lifeblood of every business. Businesses exist purely based on the sales and services they provide their customers. Understanding customers,  why they do what they do – and buy what they buy! – starts with understanding a few basic customer types. While putting people into strict categories is difficult, and often inadvisable, getting to know a couple of stereotypes will help establish strategies to deal with them as well.

5 General Customer Types:

The Regular

Every store has at least one regular – whether it’s a cafe, supermarket, or retail shop. Regular customers are the ones who return to the store on a consistent basis. In the hospitality industry – cafes, restaurants, etc. – these customers tend to have a standard order, a favourite place to sit, and make it a habit to swing by at the same time each week. They’re predictable, and value predictability – they’re also a business’ bread and butter clientele. They’re most likely to recommend your business to others, and bring their friends and acquaintances to your establishment.

The Hands-off Customer

These customer types are often considered the easiest to service. They come to a store because they’re looking for something specific; they know what they want, what it should cost, and have come to a particular place looking for it. In sales speak, these customers are 90% through the buyer’s journey and don’t necessarily require any hands-on customer service. Asking if they require any assistance or if they’re interested in specials is usually met with a polite “No, thank you.”

The Unpleasable Customer

Everyone who has worked in any customer-facing position knows these customers. These are the eternal complainers, the ones who are simply impossible to please. Even if your business has exactly what they want they will find something that does not meet their standards or expectations. They require extra – often exclusive – attention, and often ask for the supervisor or manager. Truth be told, the only way to manage these customers is to do the best you can, and be forever courteous. Careful handling of this type of customer may not lead to sterling recommendations or any customer advocacy, but it can stop them from complaining to their friends and family – one wrong step with this stereotype and your business could suffer a negative hit of publicity!

The Window Shopper

“Were you after anything particular today?”
“No, thank you. I’m just browsing.”

This little conversation is a common occurrence in most retail outlets, and even in the occasional cafe or restaurant. The Window Shopper comes in two general categories:

    • The Researcher: looking for something but isn’t entirely sure what it is yet – or if your business is the right place to get it.
    • The Browser: literally just looking without any intention to buy anything.

Neither type is a waste of time in any regard and should be considered as a potential customer – maybe not today or tomorrow, but eventually.

The Unicorn

The unicorn of all customers: the one who comes in regularly, gushes positivity about your establishment, and just won’t shut up about how amazing your business is when they’re talking with their friends. This perfect, ideal customer fits your dream client exactly; they’re the sort of person you hope will walk in through the door, they’re the one you strive to reach. For example, if you sell minivans, your unicorn might be a soccer mom with a big budget and six kids – oh, and the reason why she’s buying a van is because she’s carpooling with the other mothers at school, to whom she will avidly recommend your van. In marketing terms, she is the ideal customer persona. Unicorns are mythical – they don’t really exist; no matter what industry you are in – but it’s important to understand that they are a dream, a target, however impossible to strive for. The purpose of knowing what your unicorn looks like is to strive to turn every single one of your customers into your ideal customer through great customer service.

By understanding customers, businesses can learn to grow in the right direction to meet their customer expectations, train their customer service representatives, and develop better communication tactics to deal with particular elements of their customer base. While this list generalizes customer types, it’s important to realize that there are certain elements of each stereotype at play in each individual customer.

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[Intern Insight] Imagine the Future: Influencing Customer Behaviour: Lizard, Monkey, or Rookie

Understanding how people think, and why, can directly influence what they do and how they react to things. As a result of this, it’s important for businesses to learn to understand what influences customer behaviour, why, and how they can tap into it.

The Mechanics of Human Brain

An obsessive-compulsive lizard, an emotional monkey and a design-oriented rookie enter a clothing store during a winter storm.
The lizard says: ‘A warm coat.’
The monkey says ‘No. A fluffy coat.’
The rookie says: ‘A long sleeved, doubled layered coat, with a hoodie.’
The employee says: ‘We have all these features in this coat!’
The lizard, monkey, and rookie say: ‘BINGO!’

I bet you have no clue what I am talking about! It sounds like a really bad joke. Bear with me.

In previous articles, I discussed how I envisioned the retail industry to look like in the near and not so near future. In all these entries, the one challenge I always took into account was the fact that our environment was in constant motion, evolving.

Somehow, when we speak about the environment we always associate it with the external surroundings. However, we have another environment, a micro one, that changes at a very slow pace. But when it changes, humankind can only experience one thing… revolution.

I am talking about the human brain. It represents only 2% (Live Science, 2016) of our body mass, but consumes about 20% of our energy (Neuroscience Marketing, 2015). It is arguably the most complex system on Earth and the reason we are alive. So, how does it work? The brain is actually divided into three distinct parts:

  • The first part or the outer layer is called the neocortex (the new brain) or the ‘rookie’ in our case. It is in charge of designing our body according to the prototype code provided by our DNA. It starts from a common structure – after all, at conception all complex living creatures first look like a fish embryo (yes, even humans) – and then it adds specific functionalities (opposable thumbs, anyone?).
  • The second one is called the mammalian brain (the visceral brain) or the ‘monkey’. It is in charge of our basic functions such as thirst, hunger and regulates our emotional behaviour. It first developed in mammals around 150 million years ago, hence the name.
  • The third one and the core of our brain is the reptilian brain (R-complex in humans) or the ‘lizard’. It strongly resembles the brain structure of reptiles and it’s in charge of keeping us alive. It keeps us breathing, regulates our body temperature and controls our aggressive behaviour (flight or fight reflex) (Brain and Behaviour, 2017).

So, let’s try this again:

A customer enters a clothing store during a winter storm.
His survival brain says: ‘A warm coat.’
His emotional brain says ‘No. A fluffy coat.’
His higher-function brain says: ‘A long sleeved, doubled layered coat, with a hoodie.’
The employee says: ‘We have all these features in this coat!’
The customer says: ‘BINGO!’

Neuromarketing

Why did I go through the trouble of explaining that? It’s something to do with neuromarketing.

Neuromarketing is the point where human brain science meets marketing. If marketers tap into the secrets of human behaviour, which are regulated by the mechanics of the brain, new and wondrous things happen (Neuromarketing World Forum, 2016).

All this neuromarketing hype has brought to my attention that we are trying to find any kind of explanation of how customers behave. That includes the underlying pattern, and how to mimic the desired traits to trigger the purchasing action. So obviously, we have to look at who is in charge in our heads right now and who will take control in the future according to human evolution. Many specialists focus on the ‘lizard’. Why? Because the ‘lizard’ makes the vital decisions and we want our products and services to be vital for customers. And as the ‘lizard’ communicates the best through visual receptors, we bombard people with well-designed adds and splashes of colours to attract attention and create visual stimuli.

Of course, the ‘monkey’ and the ‘rookie’ also have their parts to play. Whatever we buy must serve a purpose (outside our own survival) and must encompass the necessary traits to fulfil this purpose – for business, for pleasure, for family, for work, etc.

Now, the ‘lizard’ is here to stay. Therefore, we must attract its attention first and foremost. That is the role of marketing. However, the purchasing decision is filtered through all three brains and I must say, the ‘rookie’ is in charge of this one. Let me make it visual for you.

When customers enter a store, and see the available selection of products – most of them would be a warm coat. So, if you have a warm coat for $50 and one for $500, the ‘lizard’ says: ‘Well, I am satisfied. What do you want monkey?’. Now, as we are such complex creatures we do seek the fulfilment of our emotional desires. If the coat is fluffy and offers comfort through its texture, the monkey will want it! But is this enough to buy it? What if both are warm and fluffy? Then the ‘rookie’ intervenes: ‘I have to pay bills, book a ticket for my holidays, buy a present for my mom, pay my school…”. (Honestly, at this point, my ‘monkey’ would say: ‘But it’s soooo fluffy!’ And it would have plausible chances of winning). It is quite simple.

The ‘lizard’ sees it.
The ‘monkey’ wants it.
The ‘rookie’ chooses it.

 

The Future of Customer Behaviour

The future retail industry must have a nice chit-chat with our ‘rookie’ brains and design their in-store processes to make this decision-making mechanism as easy as possible.

The hard part is already done. From all the multiple retailers offering the same range of products the customer entered in your store. So right now, all you need to do is to make the features, advantages and benefits of your products obvious enough in order for the consumer brain to have no doubts about the decision he is making.

Learning the secrets of customer behaviour gives an added advantage. It provides the path to one of the most desirable traits in customer service: personalization of the experience. And it’s so easy to do! Why? Because both your employees and customers are just people with brains. A company’s perspective is usually quite rigid when it comes to the human element, as people are more than people, they are resources.

Customers are divided into segments represented by personas Employees? Not really. They are almost faceless entities that must follow clear procedures. Ultimately, the real experience is that you have a ‘lizard’ brain talking to another ‘lizard’ brain. A ‘monkey’ brain feeling as intense as the other ‘monkey’ brain. A ‘rookie’ that analyses and provides logical information just like any other ‘rookie’. Brain to brain, customer and employees could have a wonderful interaction, provided they follow the same brainwave patterns.
Cognitive retailing is the future (Economic Times, 2016). It means that you are talking to the consumer on a higher level and not responding just to his basic needs. I think customers will appreciate that. To be able to do that you would need the insights that Big Data gathering can provide you but the funnel through which it has to go would still be human in origin for a long time to come. At the same time, this is what makes humans irreplaceable in the service context. Machines would not have the advantage of knowing how to engage the brain of customers. At the very least you would have a very distressed ‘monkey’ in that case.

This post is brought to you by one of AQ’s Undergraduates, Laura Susnea. As part of our internship programs, undergraduates and classic interns are encouraged to take part in company culture. Laura’s primary project focusses on training programs and eLearning and how best to adapt this to industries under pressure. 

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Human Decency and the Customer Experience

This morning on the way into work, I was confronted with human decency.

After a rough start to the day – starting with my oversleeping – all I wanted was to buy my morning caffeine hit from the little coffee place where I get my wake-up call every morning.

I auto-piloted off the train and out of the station and headed towards caffeine. As I waited in line, coffee in hand, the gentleman in front of me glanced back and then told the cashier that he’d get my drink as well. I didn’t think I looked that tired, but maybe I did; it was one of those days.

Now. As a female, alone, and in public, there are several things that go through my head when something like this happens. My brain processes go roughly like this:

Brain: Wait what?
Voice: You don’t have to!…Are you sure?
Brain: What’s the catch?/I’m not going out with you./There has to be a catch, no one does stuff like this./Do I really look that tired?/Do I come across as being unable to afford my own coffee?/I’m offended/I’m flattered/I’m late! I don’t have time to be nicer!
Voice: Thank you!
Brain: Darn, I hope I expressed my thanks properly./Oh, he’s gone with no further queries or conversation./Now I feel guilty for doubting his motives, I hope he understands that I’m grateful./Faith in humanity restored.

Maybe it’s a sign of the times, or possibly of my inner cynic revealing herself because it’s too early in the morning and my collective consciousness has had a rough start. Truth is, I am grateful. Not just for the coffee, but for the fact that there are still people out there who believe in doing right.

Part of the problem with the world is that we’ve lost sight of each other as individual people. We’re all so caught up in our personal issues that we forget that we’re all part of the same world and we could all use a bit of human decency.

“Pay it forward,” the gentleman from this morning said to me. And I will.

Something else this experience highlighted was that one of the best customer service pointers you can have in your toolbox is simple human decency.

Empathy is one of those things we talk about a lot, but rarely practice. How much do we actually care that the customer who just came in had trouble parking? Or ran into an old friend just down the street? Be honest: we don’t actually care at all – we may listen, and nod and smile, but as soon as the customer’s out the door we’ll forget about their little experience. That’s just how humanity works.

I’m not suggesting that we take everyone’s stories home with us – that’s not healthy, but really listening to someone’s story gives you a deeper connection with that customer, and customer service is all about connections. Human decency is about how well we develop those connections and under what motives we form them.

The gentleman from this morning had nothing material to gain from buying my coffee for me – he wasn’t even the one doing the selling – but what he did prove was that a simple gesture of human decency completely changed my day. Apply that to customer service and you get a winning recipe. Showing people a personal touch, paying a little more attention to their needs, can make all the difference.

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[Intern Insights] How many languages can you speak?

Language (noun): “A language is a system of communication which consists of a set of sounds and written symbols which are used by the people of a particular country or region for talking or writing.” There are several definitions for the term: “language”, however, this one, I found the most complete.

Did you know that 7099 languages are spoken globally today?! 7099… that’s insane if you ask me. Although, this number would probably already be different tomorrow since we learn more about the languages of the world every day. Also, the number of languages themselves differ regularly. As most of these languages are spoken by tribes who live in isolated societies away from modern civilisation. Due to our rapidly changing world, some of these languages are now endangered. As roughly a third are indigenous, this means that less than a 1000 individual tongues speak it.

The population of Papua New Guinea speaks the most languages, 840 to be precise. That’s crazy as only 7 million people live there and this number of languages is more than twice the number of spoken languages across the whole of Europe! The country has very thick rainforests and tough terrain which results in groups of people living in significant isolation, preserving their unique languages.

How do we learn a language?

For it to be effective it should happen very early in life and the person should have a normal functioning brain (is this really necessary?) with a good hearing system. Particularly the hearing process seems to be important in the development of learning a new language. Since children who lose some of their hearing capacity will most likely have difficulties in learning a language. As they cannot hear themselves and will not get direct essential auditory feedback from parents for example.

Next, to this, recent studies found that infants have a very flexible brain, which allows them to obtain virtually any language they are exposed to. Also, scientist state that until the age of seven or eight, children can learn and speak a second language fluently without any accent. Further, it is also possible to start already exposing children to different languages during pregnancy. For example, when the parents speak two languages, the unborn baby can already hear the variety of sounds and this prepares the baby to learn two languages easier, once it is born.

The best way to learn a new language is to do it like a baby. I know this sounds very weird, but if you do it this way correctly with the differences between child and adult learning in mind, it is the most efficient way. You must understand these difference, as that can assist you in learning a language like your younger self.
Now you’re probably wondering what these differences are? Well let me elaborate further on those:

1. Adults can speak at least one language fluently already.

Now you might think that this is an advantage since you already have some language skills. However, the fall here is that we as adults are already so good at our mother tongue, that it confuses us easily with any other language. Also, how you’ve learnt your first language has an immense impact on the learning development of any other language that follows.

2. Adults react to social sanctioning.

Once you’re an adult you get “embarrassed” more easily and are more afraid to make mistakes. Since children don’t care if it takes them two or thirty times to get a grammar rule right, they keep trying until they understand it. Adults, however, are embarrassed quicker. We are afraid to look stupid in front of others. This results in protecting ourselves by only speaking the language we know or only use the new language conservatively.

3. Adults communicate in equal relationships.

The main conversations of a baby are with their parents and other adults who automatically adapt their speech to the level of the baby, which is most likely less advanced. But when we look at adults they usually communicate as equals. So, it forces you to engage on the same level of language as a native speaker in thus for you, a different language. As it would be kind of strange as that native speaker suddenly starts speaking like a baby to you. While this is actually better in the process of learning a new language.

4. Other things demand our attention.

Babies are not bothered yet with full-time jobs, cooking, cleaning the house and visiting friends and family. Which results in that they have absolutely all the time in the world for learning their first language. For adults, on the other, it is slightly different. Between our jobs, relationships and other things we need to do in a day, learning a new language don’t always fit.

5. Adults must try.

This is most likely the biggest and most difficult difference to overcome. A baby only needs to hang around for a couple of years not doing too much and their linguistically amazing brain takes care of the learning automatically. However, for adults, their brain is less flexible, which means that they must push themselves in learning a new language.

To conclude, in core the learning process for adults and children are the same. We observe native speakers, identify and recognise patterns in the language and then test them via interacting with others. Then the direct feedback we receive during interactions is used to improve ourselves. Basically, it is a combination between statistical learning and social learning.

This post is brought to you by one of AQ’s Undergraduates, Paula van Staalduinen. As part of our internship programs undergraduates and classic interns are encouraged to take part in company culture. Paula’s primary project focuses on training programs and eLearning and how best to adapt this to industries under pressure.

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[Intern Insight] Just Google It

Just “Google” it

Honestly, I think everybody said this, or it has been said to them at one point in their lives. I mean, every time you quickly want to know something, you go to Google, right? It’s the easiest way.

Have you ever actually counted how many times you “google” something per day? Yeah, I put it quotation marks, as “google” is actually a recognised verb now, since it’s used so often. Crazy how this verb really became part of our society.

Truth is, I don’t think we want to admit it but WE CANNOT LIVE WITHOUT GOOGLE. Google saves my life at least several times a day.

I can hear you thinking: “Well how many times is Google used then in our daily lives?”

Google now processes an average of over 63,000 search queries every second , which is about 3.8 million per minute. This translates into over 5.5 billion searches per day and about 2 trillion searches per year globally. WOW. Yeah, I googled that. Ironic, isn’t it?

Let’s think about our parents for a second, they didn’t have Google. Can you imagine high school without Google? I couldn’t. How else would you write your reports? I mean, they did it all with books and – depending on how old you are – with the worldwide web – yes, Gen Z, that is was WWW stands for. They actually had to really, really search for the content for their reports, in analogue libraries. Using these things called ‘card catalogues’. Don’t ask me, I don’t know how they work either.. Amazing.

Google was founded 18 years ago, by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, while they were Ph.D. students at Stanford University. I bet these guys were just really tired of continuously looking through the “World Wide Web” or those card catalogue things for information. You have to admit, it is quite an extradentary thing to have set up – Google, I mean, not the card catalogues.

Last time, I wrote about videos that give a more meaningful, immersive and better learning experience. Now I am wondering what influence Google plays when it comes to the way we learn. Does it actually support the learning process or does this overload of information only distract our brains?

Again, lots of research is done on this. And well, shocker, the results are divided.

Some researchers have argued that the easy access to information actually really stimulates our brains, giving us the opportunity to focus on other skills. Steve Pinker, a Harvard Psychology professor, reaffirmed this by stating that the Internet and technological advancement are truly the only solutions that keeps us human beings smart. Would you agree on that? Personally, I’m not so sure…

On the other side, you also have those that argue if instant access to information via search engines has a negative effect. Research from Kaspersky Labs has even found that we are increasingly forgetting information, because it’s all stored in external memory – like our smartphones. For example, do you know all the birthdays of your closest friends by heart? If you do, great. I often hear people saying things like: “If not for Facebook, I would have forgotten it was her birthday today.”. This is called ‘digital amnesia’ and it’s rising. A little over a decade ago, people could remember each other’s phone numbers – now? It’s once again stored in our phones. People are ready to forget important information because they know that they can retrieve it from a digital device with internet.

What we can conclude from this is that we have learned to rely on Google rather than on our own memory, particularly when it comes to storing long-term knowledge. The fact that we are able to access information wherever we like, has a negative impact on our motivation to actually memorize information for later on. I mean, why would we? We can find it again in a split second. People with iPhones don’t even have to type anymore, they can just ask SIRI. And now Android isn’t too far behind with that either!

Truth is, Google makes our lives easier, there’s no denying that, but it has also changed the way we think and remember. Without realizing it, we’ve become Google-dependent. It has replaced our need to memorize details. These new habits, using Google for almost everything, interfere in the development of our deep and conceptual knowledge. That aside, I don’t think I have to tell you this, but the internet is full of incorrect information. So, you are never completely certain if what you actually googled is the truth? Maybe we should just go back to card catalogues after all…. Nah, just kidding.

Secretly, I think we are all a little troubled with digital amnesia, also known as the Google Effect…

This post is brought to you by one of AQ’s Undergraduates, Paula van Staalduinen. As part of our internship programs undergraduates and classic interns are encouraged to take part in company culture. Paula’s primary project focuses on training programs and eLearning and how best to adapt this to industries under pressure.

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