In our second blog post on cognitive bias, we’re going to look at 3 more traits that will help you shape your customer service experience and prevent knee-jerk changes to the business based on single pieces of feedback.
Before we dive in, let’s have a quick recap of the types of bias we explored in our last post:
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The Decoy Effect. Customers will usually change their preference between two choices when a third is introduced. Decoys make something originally deemed unreasonable, reasonable.
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Confirmation bias. We only tend to listen to information that confirms our preconceptions. We hear what we want to hear, and phrasing a question differently can significantly change the answers we receive.
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Hyperbolic discounting. Humans have a widespread desire to want immediate payoff rather than wait for a larger gain later on. It’s the old ‘eat, drink and be merry’ rule.
Without further ado, let’s look at 3 more types of cognitive bias that all CX experts need to know about:
Accessibility Bias
Our heads are full of information, and if there’s one memory or fact we can retrieve more quickly than the deeper stuff, it’ll usually dominate our thoughts.
For example, if you asked one group of managers to list the 20 things that make them a good leader and another group to list 5, the former will almost certainly score lower. That’s because the task of finding 20 is harder than picking just 5 and therefore suggests they must be less good as a leader; it creates a bias.
Another form of accessibility bias is called ‘picture superiority’. Humans are hardwired to gaze at imagery, hence the phrase ‘a picture tells a thousand words’. In particular, we like looking at faces, which is why so many successful CX divisions post headshots of staff on the company website. Doing so creates a near instant human connection with any passing customer.
Availability Bias
People tend to overestimate the importance and statistical scalability of information made available to them. In customer service, this means that the voice of just one customer can become very powerful.
Individuals pieces of feedback - whether they be rants or raves - will often prompt CX executives to project that view across the entire customer base. As a result, wholesale changes to either the service, product or business in general may be made unnecessarily.
You can liken this to the reaction often seen on social media or around the water cooler whenever a ‘media storm’ takes place. Due to the way in which such events are highly publicised, their relevancy gets skewed (“wow, this happens all the time”) and cognitive bias takes over. Thus, our response is often out of all proportion to what is, actually, a rare event.
Observational Selection Bias
If you’ve ever bought a new car only to find yourself wondering why so many people seem to have chosen the exact same model as you, your in-built observational selection bias is to blame.
As humans, we’re adept at noticing things we didn’t notice before and assuming that the frequency of those things has increased. This is why, in customers service, it is so important to be careful when capturing feedback from individual customers.
One complaint may tempt you to look for multiple instances that relate. Cognitive bias means you’ll find them, too, and because we’re preprogrammed to see what we want to see, you’ll start to believe the complaint is more common than it actually is.
Your customers may not always be thinking what you think they’re thinking. Simon Hill, Director of Insight & Decision Science at Sky PLC summed up the importance of cognitive bias in customer service neatly during his talk at the Year of Emotion event.
“Learn from your customers and use your understanding of their cognitive processes to demonstrate that you understand them,” he said. “People don’t buy from us because they understand what we do, they buy from us because we understand what they do.”
A great CX doesn't end with cognitive bias, there's a variety of areas which require reviewing such as company culture, employee engagement and CX philosophy. Our most recent ebook titled 'The Anatomy of a Great Customer Experience' contains best practice tips on how to build the customer experience with memories in mind and the importance of your touchpoints. Follow the link below to help turn your ranters into true ravers...
