Colin Shaw

For ten years Beyond Philosophy has been advocating that emotions account for over half of a Customer Experience. We are very pleased that this seems to becoming more accepted. I am often asked how an emotion is evoked. This is quite complex but I thought I would try and outline some headlines here. I recently came across this video by Antonio Damasio one of the world’s leading authorities on the subject on emotions.

Over millennia, humans have developed a complex set of emotions to help us deal with our environment. For example, have you ever had the feeling that something is wrong as you walk down a darkly lit street? This is your subconscious mind gathering many signals such as - it’s late at night, the area is rough, you heard something behind you, or maybe you recall a news item of a mugging in a similar area. Our subconscious mind gathers these facts and the emotion of ‘fear’ is generated. As you ‘feel’ this...

I bear the scars. In my last role in corporate life, some ten years ago, I was asked by the CEO to ‘Improve the Customer Experience at least cost’. I thought of it as a great honour and a challenge I relished. Only one problem -I was given responsibility without authority. All too often I see this happening with Customer Experience professionals and it can be a recipe for disaster if you go about this in the wrong way. I was very aware that after my ‘honeymoon period’ I would be blamed for any poor performance despite the fact I did not have control over the levers to make the changes I knew were necessary. These levers laid in my colleagues operational teams and they were reluctant to make changes for a number of reasons. Sound familiar? I quickly learnt that everyone is happy with this type of job until you ask them to do something.

There is never any point in complaining, this was the role I accepted and I needed to make it work. I therefore devised some strategies to...

We recently conducted global research of over 40 telecoms companies globally and one question proved to be the ‘killer’ question. We asked Customer Experience professionals in these companies ‘Which Telecoms company do you most admire for delivering a good Customer Experience? ‘The silence was deafening. They couldn’t name one Telecoms company doing Customer Experience well.

In our research ‘Seven key ingredients for a successful Customer Experience program in Telecoms’ we reveal the state of Customer Experience initiatives in Telecoms and offer recommendations.

The first recommendation is a simple one, but very important. If you wish to improve your Customer Loyalty and Customer retention the solution does not lie in the Telecoms industry. DO NOT look to other Telecoms companies for best practice. It doesn’t exist...

Recently I received a call I was dreading. My daughter called us in our home in Sarasota, FL, to say that our pet dog of fourteen years, Blaze was dying in England. Our immediate response was to fly back to England to be with Blaze and my daughter for our pet’s last few hours. For those of you who have a dog you will know how upsetting the loss of a much loved member of the family can be.

What has this to do with Customer Experience? Well clearly the rest of the world didn’t know of our distressed state as we encountered different people on our sad journey home. People were being pleasant as we went through various interactions. I remember a security guard at the airport asking me ‘Have you had a good day’. Clearly I hadn’t, but I found the words coming out of my lips were ‘yes, great thanks’. The same happened a few times with other people. It was an automatic...