CX leader authors book that links human psychology to strategy
For Mark Levy, it was what psychologists call a moment of cognitive dissonance: that discomforting feeling of experience of holding two opposing beliefs at once. He had ordered a camera off Amazon, but upon opening the nondescript white box, the instructions were set in the tiniest script he had ever seen. He knew they were important, but they also appeared laughably insignificant.
“I actually had to take a picture of the instructions so that I could blow them up and see it,” he said. “For me, it created an issue of trust.”
How we think, feel and behave has always been a core part of customer experience (CX) design, but Levy has decided to dig deeper into behavioral science with his new book, The Psychology of CX 101. Among his arguments is the notion that customers are “cognitive misers” who only think when they truly need to. That’s why brands build loyalty by minimizing the effort required to enjoy experiences.
Levy’s book stands out in part because he is not a working with a CX vendor or as a consultant but on the front lines of enhancing customer centricity.
“I’m a practitioner, I’m an executive today in a company that that is constantly looking at the customer experience in looking at data and dashboards and seeing what’s going on,” Levy, who currently works as head of consumer product and customer experience at Frontier Internet, told 360 Magazine. “I always have the question, ‘Why is that happening?’ and I wanted to see if there was more we could do to answer that and do something about it based on human psychology.”
Despite its subject matter, The Psychology of CX 101 doesn’t read like an academic textbook. Instead, he takes concepts like cognitive bias and the “false consensus effect” and applies them to typical customer-facing scenarios. These are sketched out as “quick wins” where customers will more readily understand a landing page, for instance, or successfully get answers from an AI chatbot.
“It’s about taking those things that may seem common sense, but clearly not everybody is doing them,” he said.
It’s not just customers that strain over a high cognitive load. Levy writes about the impact on employees who are forced to remember and regurgitate large amounts of information, which then makes it difficult to serve customers effectively.
“I find that the trainings are mostly focused on the information. They’re not focused on de escalation,” he said. “Humans respond in pretty predictable ways, and I think there needs to be more training on understanding humans. It’s the realization that this customer isn’t calling to yell at you, the employee. They’re yelling at us, based something we did or didn’t do.”
This is where AI should be woven into the experience, Levy suggested, pulling policies and other information from disparate knowledge bases so employees can resolve customer issues quicker and easier. Technology may be one of the only ways to stay ahead of human psychology and its impact.
“People are making decisions subconsciously or consciously at every moment about your product, about your brand, about the experience that they’re having,” he said. “That’s all based on their own filters, their own experiences in life, and those can have a positive or negative effect on your business. I think (psychology) is like a hidden layer in all that, and it really needs to be elevated up in the business.”
