Customer Experience: Understanding the Human Condition with Joey Coleman, Chief Experience Composer at Design Symphony

This is a summary of our latest podcast episode, Retain: The Customer Retention Podcast, you can listen to the full episode here!

We Prefer The Pursuit Over The Catch

Before we built our many civilizations - or as Jean-Jaques Rousseau would call it, ‘fences’ - we were, out of necessity, hunters. We didn’t have much of a choice. We had no real verbal language to communicate with each other or even any solid systems put in place to help guide us through the complexities of life and the heavy burden of sentience. And one thing was for certain: we had no customers or businesses to think about retaining or marketing to.

When we hunted, the thrill of the pursuit, the idea of actually catching the wild animal we wanted to eat was an exhilarating one and rushed our adrenaline to no end. Eventually we would manage to hunt it, and we would be more than satisfied with ourselves. But time would go on, we would evolve and become more intelligent, and that thrill of hunting our dinner just wasn’t enough for us anymore - perhaps it was too easy, we don’t know, but in time we built civilizations and more mercantile approaches to survival. 

But still, the simple act of just trading with each other wasn’t quite enough, so we once again had to develop new ways of approaching our business. We appealed to the imaginations of those wishing to buy in order to convince them - known now as marketing. This involved interacting with people and customers in ways that would keep them coming back. 

Here’s the problem though: that primal feeling of the pursuit and the chase, no matter how much our businesses, marketing departments and managers try, they can’t escape it. They want to keep chasing that new customer, to keep trying to appeal to as many people as they possibly can rather than doing the one thing that will keep business going: retention.

If you can start to understand the way in which humans think and why they do what they do, why they behave in certain ways, you can start to pin down and win their loyalty as a brand and keep them coming back. All too often, organizations fail in this aspect of business, because they’re so hung up on the chase rather than slowing down to keep what they have.

The Eight Phases of The Customer Experience

In his book, Never Lose a Customer Again, Joey Coleman outlines the eight phases of the customer experience so that businesses can understand and, hopefully, keep their customers. So, we’re going to briefly explain what those eight phases are right here, right now:

1. Assess: In this phase, the potential customer is merely weighing up their options, trying to decide if they want to have any sort of relationship with a business they’ve discovered.
   
2. Admit: At this point, the customer is ready to admit they have a problem with something or a need that the business they’ve been assessing can solve. As a result, they buy your product.
   
3. Affirm: This is most commonly known as ‘buyer’s remorse’. The customer may end up doubting if they’ve made the right decision, and it’s then up to the business to make them feel safe in their decision. Unfortunately, not a lot of businesses put much effort into doing this.
   
4. Activate: This is essentially when the relationship between both the customer and the business begins to form and the business starts to deliver some of the promises they’ve made.
   
5. Acclimate: Now the customer will learn and become comfortable with how the business runs. Have they been successful with the other hundreds, if not thousands, of customers they’ve serviced?
   
6. Accomplish: This is one of the most important ones, when the customer achieves the result they were looking for from the beginning. From here, if done right, it may be quite smooth sailing.
   
7. Adopt: The customer should now take ownership of the relationship and will show support and appreciation for the brand.
   
8. Advocate: This is when the customer decides to advocate for the business online, to push and share their products and experiences with others who may not have heard of them. The absolute ideal for a customer to be.

Listen to the Full Episode Below!

On the eighteenth episode of Retain: The Customer Retention Podcast episode, Lauren DeSouza speaks with Joey Coleman, Chief Experience Composer at Design Symphony. They talk all about how the human condition inherently defines the customer experience, the eight phases of customer emotions, and why businesses aren’t paying enough attention to retention!

Joey is the Chief Experience Composer at Design Symphony, a customer experience design consultancy that helps companies create memorable and lasting experiences for their customers. He is the author of the best-selling book Never Lose a Customer Again, which provides practical tips and strategies for creating long-lasting customer relationships, and a sought-after keynote speaker, delivering presentations at conferences and events around the world.

One of his past colleagues said that Joey “brings a depth of knowledge around multiple areas of business, branding, consumer engagement, and employee retention.”

Listen to this episode of Retain: The Customer Retention Podcast here!