CX & the Changing Hats Phenomenon
In the last ten days or so we got to experience first-hand a quite inexplicable phenomenon Hidai likes to call "The Changing Hat Phenomenon".
It's when people, who in their "customer hat", get annoyed by bad customer experience (bad service, greedy invoices, annoying popups, asking for too much data, mistakes without responsibility, etc. I mean - annoying things we all experience and hate), go to the office, put on their "boss hat" and do the exact same thing to their customers.
It is one of the biggest pitfalls for all businesses, large and small.
It is also one of the most perplexing things – if we’re all customers, and if we all know what’s bloody infuriating, then how come this phenomenon is still happening?
Our last couple of weeks have been quite frustrating to be honest. We had a few instances of shockingly bad customer-experience experiences where the ramifications go well beyond mild annoyance, and it is one of the (very rare) occasions where I don’t have any jokes, and where there is no amount of chocolate that can help (trust me on that, I checked).
That’s why it was actually quite funny (though I am not sure it was funny ha-ha) that the wonderful Yael Wagner invited us to talk to her MBA students at Hult International Business School about Good Customer Experience…
True, it did give us a chance to "visit" San Francisco (Yael keeps inviting us to pop over after all), and a proper university, even if we were still on Zoom 😊 (and really well done to Hult for the impeccable technical setup)
But it also gave us a chance to talk to them about how rubbish most shipping companies are, which is a nugget of wisdom no one should live without.
Since this has turned out to be one of the most “professional” posts I’ve ever written, I will say that good customer experience looks at the end-to-end journey of the customer, from when they become aware of us all the way to them becoming loyal customers (including every small step & detail along the way).
In every session we do on the subject (and to be honest we try to squeeze this into every talk/workshop/course we give period) we say that though customer experience is a challenge, it is also an opportunity to stand out and where businesses (big & small) can win the battle.
As long as we keep our “customer hat” on and do it right.
1 comment
I can’t thank Orli and Hidai enough for honoring my class with their presence and presentations, enriching the student and the class with insights and knowledge packaged and delivered in a way that the students can digest, embrace and immediately put to use.
Further, I can’t count the number of times I used the term The Changing Hat Syndrome since Hidai mentioned it for the first time. It makes it so easy to explain user-delight even to the most anti-UX engineer.
Thank you!