Colin Shaw

The psychology of waiting in lines bears interesting fruit. As a manager, even if you take logical steps to reduce customer wait time—it may not matter. So if practical, objective measures to reduce wait time don’t matter, then what does? How the wait is experienced.

Life is about the journey, not the destination…but what if you can only remember two components of an experience? Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman has argued this point, using what he calls the “Peak End Rule,” stating that we remember the peak ( pleasure or pain) and the conclusion of an experience (and nothing else).  

When we apply Kahneman’s findings to waiting in lines we learn critical components to retail experience design. Waiting in line, an experience I discuss more in my last book, is a unique situation because it can offer an extremely positive peak or an extremely negative peak.

Some of applications of Kahneman’s point highlight the truths of “common sense.” The saying “a watched...

Empathy is the ability to understand the feelings, thoughts and experiences of another person, and it is a common research topic because of its importance in human interaction. In his popular blog “The Squeaky Wheel,” Dr. Guy Winch observes a tendency among clinical psychologists to over-focus on a relative presence or absence of empathy. Dr. Winch writes that, “what matters is not whether we have empathy, but whether we know how to have empathy.” Hence the key concern of research should be the ability to access feelings of empathy as an effective interpersonal behavior.

In the past decade, empathy has gained acceptance as an important feature of business communication. Marie Miyashiro’s book, The Empathy Factor, brilliantly articulates the value of bringing empathy to the workplace by adopting specific communication strategies. Dr. Winch shares Miyashiro’s belief...

American journalist Katie Couric is known as “America’s Sweetheart,” thanks to the co-anchor role she served for 15 years on The Today Show. Yet even Ms. Couric, a woman known for her warm, affable personality admits that “you can’t please everyone, and you can’t make everyone like you.”

We are the first to recognize that even the best organizations in the world have the occasional flop. Fortunately, when it comes to a poor customer experience, there is room to mend by offering a sincere apology. However, apologizing is more art than science. While a sincere apology has the chance to actually strengthen the customer relationship, an apology that comes across fake or superficial has the potential to inflame an already sore relationship and destroy customer loyalty. So what’s the fine art of a meaningful apology?

Since the early 1990s, e-commerce has skyrocketed. The success of digital retailers like Amazon and eBay has proven that virtually any product or service is “sellable” online. The soaring popularity of “Cyber Monday,” the digital counterpart of “Black Friday,” is a case in point. In fact, in 2010 Cyber Monday sales totaled more than a billion dollars – the first-ever online shopping day to break through the billion-dollar ceiling.

Once a far-off dream of science fiction, today it is common to purchase airline tickets, conduct banking activities, and even check medical lab results on the internet. Accordingly, the customer experience just as important online as it is in face-to-face interaction. Google’s service aimed at online marketers, Google Analytics, generates statistical profiles of website visitor behavior. Recently, Google debuted an advertisement about the most common...