What You Think You Know About Your Customers

Your brain is trying to protect you but it's also, unfortunately, making things up about your customers.

In this solo episode, Nikki takes a therapy homework assignment (yes, really) and turns it into one of the most practical frameworks she's found for explaining why client experience design goes wrong at the thinking level, not the execution level. 

Before you can design a better client experience, you have to notice the stories your brain is generating about your customers. And some of those stories? They are not the truth.

What you'll hear in this episode:

• Why fortune-telling feels like prudence but is actually just a fancy way of avoiding experiments (and the one-star review analogy that will stick with you)
• The moment Nikki's therapist handed her a worksheet and she had a slightly horrifying realization about her business
• Why the loudest complaint in your inbox is almost never the thing that actually needs to change
• What mind-reading looks like in a team meeting, and what happens when you actually go talk to five customers instead
• The replacement behaviour for each trap, because noticing the pattern is not the finish line

If your business keeps wondering why things aren't clicking, this episode is probably the conversation you needed to have.

Connect with Nikki on Instagram: instagram.com/iamnikkimck 

The Would Recommend Standard is a free guide to the five principles behind businesses people can't stop talking about. 

Grab it here: theopsshop.biz/wouldrecommend-standard 

A Spark Session is a 90-minute strategy session where you and Nikki dig into your client experience and figure out exactly where it's working and where it isn't. 

Book yours here: theopsshop.biz/sparksession 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

This is the one I was telling you about. It is the You will not believe this play so that I just found literally a big link to literally everyone I know. Their biggest cheaper. Tell them my senses is my biggest. Girl. 10 out of 10 would recommend. I have this superpower. And honestly, it sounds impressive to say it until I actually tell you what that superpower is. I have the ability to rationalize absolutely anything. If something weird happens, I'm going to explain it. Something frustrating happens, I can explain it. Something mildly upsetting happens, give me about 30 seconds, and I can build you a tidy little narrative about why it makes sense, what the lesson probably is, and why we can all just like move along now. My brain, it's like, this is efficient. But it's also, as my therapist has so gently and lovingly pointed out, a way of skipping the part where you actually sit with something long enough to figure out what's going on underneath it. A couple months back, my therapist handed me this worksheet called Thinking Traps. And the idea here is simple. Our brains generate stories all day long, but some of those stories are actually shortcuts. They feel logical, they feel responsible, they feel like good judgment, but they're actually patterns. And these patterns distort what's really happening. And that is why they're a trap. And the moment I started going through the list, I had a slightly horrifying realization. Not only was I falling victim to every single one of those traps, but our businesses do these things too. So hey, welcome back. You're listening to Would Recommend, the show about the businesses that people can't stop talking about. I'm Nikki McKnight, customer experience strategist and founder of the Ops Shop. And I'm glad you're here today. This is a little bit of a, a little bit of a brain teaser of an episode, I'll say. And it's one that I've been sitting on for a little bit while because it it honestly did start as therapy homework. But my brain thinks in frameworks, and this eventually became a really clear and useful framework for explaining why things go wrong, not necessarily at an execution level, but at the thinking level. And that is why we're going to be talking about thinking traps. And specifically, we're talking about what happens when these traps show up in your business in how they interpret what your customers are doing. All right, let us get into some traps here. Customer experience design is essentially one long lesson, one long exercise in interpreting behavior. Why did someone abandon checkout? Why didn't they finish onboarding? Why did one group of people love the program while another group quietly disappeared after week two? These are questions, these are valuable questions, but if we're not careful, we're going to end up answering them using the exact same mental shortcuts that are showing up on my therapy worksheets, which is going to lead to some very confident conclusions that might not always be correct. And the thing about thinking traps is that they feel like good judgment. That's what makes them traps. They don't announce themselves. They're not going to show up wearing like a sandwich board sign that says, this is a cognitive distortion, or insert your best Admiral Akbar impression here. They are going to sound like experience, they're going to sound like expertise, and it's going to sound like the voice of someone who's been around long enough to know how this goes. So I have picked out for you today, for your audio listening enjoyment, five thinking traps. Because once you see them, it's going to be really hard to ignore them. The first trap is called fortune telling. Fortune telling is when we predict the future and then we treat that prediction like it's a fact. Instead of testing something, we assume we already know what's going to happen. So in a business context, this can sound like, well, we can't change the process. Customers are going to be confused. Or, and this one I've heard a lot, if we shorten the application form, we're going to attract the wrong people. Right. And it's in these scenarios that no one's really running an experiment. We're not faffoing here big time. We're not really looking for the data. It just feels certain about how a customer will react. So the system stays exactly the same for years and sometimes forever. And the trap here is that fortune telling feels like prudence. It sounds like someone who's been around the block, but really it's just a fancy way of avoiding experiments. It's a one-star review you gave before you actually read the book. And how many of us have done it? Well, you know, I'm going to do it, and then they're not going to do what I need them to do. Or I'm going to put in all this time, money, and effort, and it's not going to change anything, right? Fortune telling. Which segues really nicely into the next thinking trap, which is mind reading. Mind reading is when we assume we know what customers are thinking without asking them. And you're going to see this when teams say things like, our customers don't care about that part. Or people just want this to go faster. People aren't going to read their emails. They're never going to want to do this by themselves. And then you actually interview five customers and you discover the opposite, right? They didn't abandon checkout because it was slow. They abandoned it because they weren't confident the product could help them solve their problem. Or they didn't go through with the sale because they weren't sure what option to choose. Or the confirmation email made them feel like they'd made a mistake. So mind reading is where guesses turn into a strategy. Customer research is going to take behavior and produce evidence. And mind reading is ultimately going to produce a business that keeps wondering why things aren't clicking, that keeps getting stuck, that maybe you're constantly redoing things, burning things down, trying again. Whereas if you can really focus on customer research, diving deep into voice of customer, going out literally or figuratively, feet on the street, asking questions to get actual evidence. That's where you move out of mind reading and into actual customer research. So the third thinking trap I want to talk to you about, and this is one that is, I was gonna say near and dear to my heart, but it is not in any way near and dear. It's just something I do. I fall into this all the time, and that is black and white thinking. Black and white thinking is where you treat every single outcome as a total success or a complete failure. There is no middle ground. This is going to show up a lot in launches, in product development. For me, it shows up in like bike riding and fitness type behaviors. You know, a new feature rolls out and something happens, and maybe the results are mixed, and the conclusion comes, well, that didn't work. But consumer behavior is rarely that clean. Maybe the feature is going to work beautifully for existing customers, but new ones got confused. Maybe the idea actually was super strong, but the instructions were unclear. Maybe the actual problem wasn't the thing itself, but it was the timing or the sequence or who saw it first. So when we treat every outcome as a pass or as a fail, we miss the middle ground. And that middle ground is actually where the most useful information lives. So this is not the matter of throwing everything out, burning everything down, and feeling like, well, this one thing didn't work, then the whole thing failed and I learned nothing. It's how do we find and how do we live a little bit more in that middle? The fourth thinking drop I want to talk about is filtering. And filtering is what happens when we focus on one negative signal and we ignore everything else. I especially fall victim to this with like social media comments, right? You could give me 10, 15, 20 good comments or good reviews, but if there's one negative one, of course, that is the only one that I'm going to focus on and use that one negative one to completely rethink what I'm doing. So picture this: you've got a membership program with hundreds of happy users. Most people are engaging, they're moving through the experience exactly as intended, they're posting, they're completing, their emails and messages are full of gratitude. This is awesome. But then one person sends a strongly worded message about the login process, and suddenly the entire team is convinced the onboarding process is broken. We must change platforms, we have to change service providers, we have to do our checkout process completely differently. That one complaint becomes the lens through which the whole experience gets evaluated. Feedback matters. Of course it does. Feedback is a gift, but customer experience work requires looking at patterns, not just the loudest moment or the loudest voice in the room. One complaint's a data point, but multiple data points create signals, and knowing the difference is a big part of my job and a big part of what we all do. And the fifth thinking trap I want to talk about, and this is always a really hard one for me to say, catastrophizing, making it a catastrophe, catastrophizing. Catastrophizing, every time I say it, I feel like I'm gonna trip up, is when we jump straight to the worst possible outcome and treat it like the most likely or only result. And this shows up in businesses whenever someone proposes a change to a key process or a key part of an experience. What if we simplify the onboarding and people get confused? Well, what if we remove that step and customers start asking a million questions? Well, what if we change the pricing at our conversions tank and all of a sudden we have to build all these new things? So instead of testing small adjustments, the conversation jumps immediately to the version where everything breaks, the business collapses, the world is ending, the clients revolt, the reviews go sideways. Catastrophizing can feel like being responsible. It can feel like doing diligence, your due diligence. It can feel like stewardship, like someone who's tried to protect the ecosystem and be like, no, no, no, it could all go wrong. And isn't this working so well right now? But most of the time, catastrophizing is just keeping the business stuck with processes that everyone knows could be better. But no one wants to risk imagined disaster. Imagined, not actual ones. That hasn't happened yet, but it probably won't if you stick with catastrophizing in these other four. A lesson, if you will, that took me the longest to learn or the longest to understand about this worksheet from my therapist, and the part that I actually want you to take with you today is that just noticing the trap is not the finish line. I really wish it was. Therapy would be so simple. I would get a gold star in therapy. The real question becomes if this is a trap, what is the behavior that is replacing it? Because naming the pattern, to my everlasting chagrin, doesn't automatically change the pattern. You have to know what we're running towards and not just running away from. So here's here's how I think about a little adjustment change for each of these traps. So going back to number one, instead of fortune telling, run experiments, run small ones, ones where the downside is limited. Change one email, test one step, move one element on the page, and let the evidence do what your predictions can't. Instead of mind reading, go talk to a customer. Not a survey with 100 questions at a progress bar, but an actual conversation, 20 minutes, five questions, genuine curiosity about why they did what they did. And the information I have found that comes out of a real conversation is almost never what you expected to find. Instead of black and white thinking, let's isolate a variable. When something doesn't land the way you hoped, the question shouldn't be did it work? The question is which part for whom under what conditions? And that specificity is the difference between learning and then just repeating the experiment and hoping for different results. Number four is filtering. So instead of filtering, look at patterns across time. One bad moment, one bad day is not a verdict. It takes two um pieces of data, it takes two things to make a pattern. So one bad moment, not a pattern, not a verdict, but also is neither is one great moment. A pattern requires you to actually look at the data and not just the loudest thing for good or for ill. Look at patterns across time and then start playing around with how big that time span is. Maybe it's not a day, maybe it's a week, maybe it's a month, maybe it's a quarter, maybe it's year over year. See what changes when you zoom in and zoom out. And lastly, my favorite word, catastrophizing. Uh, instead of doing that, let's make the test small enough that the disaster scenario is completely off the table. If the change is small enough, the the potential downside there's guardrails around it. You're protected. You don't have to bet the whole business to find out if your hypothesis is right. You just gotta faffo a wee bit and run the experiment. So here's the here's the good thing. Here's a thing. The thing about all of this is our brains are really, really good at creating simple, coherent stories, which is a feature, not a bug, most of the time. The world is complicated to say the least, and the brain's ability to compress it into something navigable, navigatable. I'm having a real trouble with words, y'all, today. So the brain's ability to compress things is genuinely useful. And there's always an ant, not a but. In customer experience work, the simple story is often the one that just lets us off the hook. Customers just aren't ready for this, people don't care about this. We've tried this before and it didn't work. And the stories can feel like wisdom. They can feel like you are coming at it from a voice of experienced and wizened old sage, being like, No, my child, we've done this before and it didn't work. Let's not spend the time, money, energy, and resources. And these stories can often actually be armor. The real work, whether it is therapy or running a business, and often they're the same thing, is learning to pause long enough to ask, is that actually true? Or is there something more interesting going on underneath it? Because there usually is. And the businesses and the founders that go looking for it, the ones that run the experiment instead of predicting the outcome, the ones that talk to the customer instead of reading their mind, the ones that look at a pattern instead of just the loudest complaint, those are the businesses that keep getting better. Those are the businesses that people can't stop talking about. Those are the businesses that end up on this show. Thank you so much. For listening to this little solo Nikki Talks episode of Would Recommend Today. If you'd like to support the show, the most impactful way you can do that is to rate review and subscribe on your podcast provider of choice. Send this to a business bestie. Talk about the traps that you might be falling into and what you can do for each other to keep yourself out of those traps and not go Admiral Akbar. All great things. If this episode had you recognizing some of those patterns in your own business, I would love to dig into that with you. A Spark session is 90 minutes, just you and me, designed for exactly this kind of thinking work. And you can book one at the link in the show notes. Next week, I'm back with yet another business worth talking about. And today I leave you in therapy, homework, and five star experiences. I will see you next week. Bye.