Our ‘Two Selves’ Shape the Customer Experience

By Wendy Eichenbaum

Back in the 1990’s, colonoscopies were very painful. Researchers wanted to understand the pain during this procedure, so patients were asked to report their pain every 60 seconds during this procedure. Group A received the standard procedure. Group B received the same procedure, but doctors took twice as long to administer the procedure. These patients experienced more moments of pain because the procedure was longer.

After the sessions, researchers asked the two groups how much they had suffered during the procedure. The results were surprising. Group A reported a higher level of suffering. Why? It was the timing of the peak pain. Group A experienced peak pain at the end of the procedure, while Group B experience peak pain mid-way through the procedure. Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, psychologist and founder of Behavioral Economics, attributed this phenomenon to our Two Selves.

There is the Experiencing self. This self lives continuously, where the psychological present is about 3 seconds long. Most of these experiences don’t leave a trace. And there is the Remembering self, which makes sense of our experiences and forms a story. Kahneman said, “What defines a story are changes, significant moments and endings. Endings are very, very important and, in this case, the ending dominated.”

This choice of memories has huge implications for the customer experience. Imagine that you develop billing software. You roll out a new version that changes the invoice task flow. As a result, many customers cannot find the invoice statement at the end of the task. They call tech support, and get a quick answer: the system placed the statement in a new folder. The problem is solved.

However, the next time you revise the software, what will your customers remember? The quick support call or the trouble after the last release? Kahneman said, “We actually don’t choose between experiences. We choose between memories of experiences…We think of our future as anticipated memories.”

There is no clear answer as to what they’ll remember or anticipate. If the customers call an agent immediately, and receive the answer in a few minutes, perhaps they’ll remember the support. But if they search your website and the Internet fruitlessly for hours before calling you, they’ll likely remember the pain of the search.

The good news is that you can identify and shape the critical experiences in your products and services. One of the best ways to do this is to map the customer journey to anticipate potential pain points during a process. Then create a strategy to address each potential pain.

Where possible, it’s best to redesign the task to remove the problem. In the cases where you can’t redesign, consider how you educate customers regarding the changes. Let them know through emails, website posts, and messages during the revised task flow.

When you release new products, monitor your tech support calls and third party sites (forums, reviews, and social media) to see what others are saying about the changes. When you see a trend, alert customers immediately. Offer extended help.

The Two Selves paradigm is relevant to all customer interactions, not just software design. Consider a customer who regularly calls a limo service for a ride to the airport. All went well until the last appointment. The limo showed up late, and the customer almost missed the flight. When planning the next trip, will the customer remember the dozen uneventful rides, or the last ride that caused so much stress? Or will you shape the customer support experience to encourage another try?

Maya Angelou famously wrote, “At the end of the, day, people won’t remember what you said or did, they will remember how you made them feel.” As a business, we can shape the changes, significant moments, and endings, to optimize how people feel when they interact with us. We can research the customer journey to minimize the painful points, and design successful experiences that will delight our customers.

About the Author

Wendy Eichenbaum has been a UX professional since the early-1990’s. She began her career as a technical writer. She then earned a Master of Arts in Professional Writing at Carnegie Mellon University, studying both writing and UI design. Over the years, she has worked across verticals, from start-ups to multi-national firms, in many areas of UX including research & strategy, Information Architecture, usability testing, and focus groups. She started her own UX consulting firm in 2008, Ucentric Design. And she is an adjunct professor at Cal State University, Fullerton. There she teaches a class that she created, User-Centered Design for Web and Mobile Interfaces.

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wendy@ucentricdesign.com

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