CCW- Call Center World Berlin is the meeting place that’s been helping to shape customer experience for more than two decades. It’s heading to Berlin at the end of February, and we will be there introducing Gobeyond Partners’ (part of the Webhelp Group) brand new Nudge Practice at the conference. In this blog, I want to give you a glimpse of how your organization can optimize its customer experience (CX) with the power of pioneering behavioral science.

Is your business using behavioral science?

Here’s the deal: if you work for a company, you’re already in the business of behavior. That’s because if your business is going to prosper, you’re going to need to influence behavior. Your own, your people… and your customers’. 

Whether it’s choosing a service provider, completing a purchase journey or opting for self-service rather than making a call, customers constantly make choices about how to interact with businesses. And as the world becomes more digital and remote, your behavior – and the choices that your customers make as a result – become more important than ever. 

Most of us make hundreds of decisions every day without consciously thinking about them. Instead our choices are hugely influenced – far more than we might realize – by primal emotions like trust and fear, and social factors like peer pressure. 

Take control and optimize your customer journey

What if – instead – you could influence those decisions and nudge your customers into making better choices, for them and for your business? After all, we don’t hesitate to optimize the technology and operations that sit behind our businesses. Why wouldn’t we do the same for behavior, given what a pivotal role it plays in business success?

Applying the latest knowledge of how to influence behavior should therefore be considered every bit as critical as optimizing the technology and operations that deliver it. Which is where Gobeyond’s new Nudge Practice comes in…

Here’s the opportunity to nudge your customers

We’ve learned more about behavior in the last 50 years than the previous 5,000, thanks to huge advances in understanding the drivers (and barriers) of behavior. 

Any business that doesn’t take advantage of this understanding of how people actually make decisions - that we’re often driven by subconscious choices or external factors that we’re not even aware of - risks wasting its money.

JP Morgan once wrote, ‘A man always has two reasons for doing anything: a good reason and the real reason.’ The good news is that, thanks to behavioral science, we’ve never been closer to understanding those real reasons. 

We know that we can dramatically affect people’s choices by subtly reframing how those choices are presented. Every single choice a brand gives its customer, from website to call center, digital ad to store layout, is an opportunity to make sure you’re optimizing the way you frame those choices.

For example, the presenting of contact options has a big impact on what method customers choose. For one client we coached contact center agents to say to customers: “You can find the answers to most questions on our website. But if you can’t find what you need there, you can call us back, we are here 24/7.” This was one of several nudges used that resulted in a 14% overall digital channel shift.

Using behavioral science to influence your customers

There are a host of ways to positively influence customers, whether it’s what employees say on the phone or in person, the copy on a website, or the script used by a chatbot. Being able to influence these decisions creates a win-win for a brand and its customers. 

As you’d imagine, this means that practically every function across a business can be impacted, including; marketing, customer insight, operations, productivity, product development and recruitment. Each department and discipline can benefit from understanding human factors to improve performance.

Whether it’s how to challenge habitual routine decision-making or using social norms, we can ‘nudge’ one another to influence decisions, and then test and experiment with those nudges to make sure they work. 

Nudging your customers - why the results can be transformational

Our pioneering new Nudge Practice harnesses behavioral science to apply insights that optimize the way a business communicates with its customers across every touchpoint. 

Our scientifically-validated COGNITION framework is rooted in proven behavioral science that works. We use it to audit a business and identify the most effective way to nudge customer behavior, depending on the messages you want to give along the customer journey. 

We then apply behavioral science nudges as part of an integrated customer journey solution, optimizing customer experience throughout the user journey across multiple touchpoints, testing, learning and adapting constantly.

We’ll be at CCW talking about all this in much more detail, and releasing a mini-white paper you’ll be able to download. But for now, let’s look at some top-level ways a business can harness behavioral science in its customer experience operations to create better business outcomes.

Raising customer and employee satisfaction levels

Behavioral science can help explain how customers and employees feel about their experiences, as well as supply the tools needed to improve satisfaction levels.

Optimizing customer journeys and conversions

Nudges can relieve points of friction in customer journeys and help customers to make the right choices and complete difficult or daunting steps. Behavioral science can also be used to understand why customers drop out of sales journeys, using nudges to reduce drop-outs and increase sales conversion.

Effortless channel shifting

Behavioral science is a key component of a digital strategy, with nudges applied across all customer communications to encourage customers to adopt new channels and help shape great experiences, so that digital becomes a channel of choice.

Cost and efficiency savings

Incorporating behavioral ‘nudges’ into the conversations and structures used by customer service representatives can reduce handling time (AHT) and tackle root causes of failure demand. Changing physical elements of the customer journey can drive use of self-service and free employees for higher-value interactions.

We’ll be making a mini white paper available to download  that will explain in more detail – through best practice and case studies – the huge impact that small changes can make to a business and its customers.

If you’re going to be at the conference in Berlin make sure you come and say hello and watch us present. Otherwise keep an eye out for our mini white paper and get in touch if you’d like to find out more about how our Nudge Practice could transform your business.