Stacy Sherman interviews CX Pioneer & 7-time author Colin Shaw, about leveraging behavioral science to advance employee engagement & long-lasting happy customers.
During the episode, you’ll learn:
- What does employee engagement really mean?
- How do you motivate others to deliver customer excellence?
- Should you tie NPS & customer satisfaction results to employee bonuses?
- What are best practices to create loyal employees who go up and beyond to create great customer experiences and service?
Customer Experience Questions & Answers To Boost Business Results
Q: What does employee engagement actually mean, and what do leaders need to understand about what drives it?
A: Employee engagement describes the state where an employee is motivated to contribute to their work and committed to the organization they work for. The practical challenge for leaders is that engagement is a result, not a starting point. What produces that result varies from individual to individual, because motivation operates on two levels. The first level is conscious: salary, benefits, and clearly defined goals that employees can see and measure. The second level is subconscious: whether the work feels meaningful, whether the organization’s values align with the employee’s, and whether the employee believes their contributions are important to leadership. Leaders who address only the visible, financial motivators and ignore the subconscious layer will find that engagement scores reflect the surface conditions but do not explain why some employees perform at a higher level than others.
Q: Should customer experience scores be tied to employee compensation, and what does the evidence show?
A: Tying customer experience scores to compensation across the full organization, not only frontline roles, produces measurable results when implemented correctly. The episode evidence includes Ricoh, a printer manufacturer, which improved its Net Promoter Score by 34 points over 30 months and recorded a 10% increase in printer sales. The company’s CEO stated that the single change he would have made earlier was implementing measurement and compensation tied to that measurement for the entire organization two years before he actually did. The key condition is that the targets must be pursued through genuine service improvement, not by managing survey responses. Leaders introducing this approach should set the targets in advance and give teams a defined period, Colin Shaw recommends approximately one year, to adjust their practices before compensation consequences take effect.
Q: How do the words a company’s employees use during a customer interaction affect customer behavior after the call ends?
A: The words employees use during an interaction leave a subconscious impression that continues to influence the customer’s behavior after the call ends. The Colin Shaw episode includes a documented example from a large UK auto insurance company. Agents were closing policy calls by telling customers their documents “should” arrive within five working days. That single word planted uncertainty in the customer’s mind, and 76% of those customers called back within three days to ask where their documents were, even though no problem had occurred. When agents replaced “should” with “will,” the callback rate dropped from 76% to 6% within three weeks, across millions of calls. Customers who called back could not identify the word as the cause of their uncertainty. They described feeling uneasy without being able to say why. This result demonstrates that subconscious language cues shape customer behavior in ways that customers themselves cannot observe or report directly.
Q: What is an emotional bank account, and how does it affect the way customers respond when something goes wrong?
A: An emotional bank account is the accumulated positive history a customer holds with a company based on prior experiences that met or exceeded their expectations. Each positive interaction adds to that account. When a service failure occurs, it draws from the balance. If the company has built a strong balance through consistent, reliable service, a single failure reduces the account balance but does not bring it to zero, which means the customer remains willing to continue the relationship while the company resolves the issue. If the company then resolves the problem quickly and effectively, the balance recovers and often increases above its previous level because the recovery itself becomes a positive experience. Companies with a thin balance sheet going into a service failure have less room to absorb the impact, and customers who have not built a positive history with that company are more likely to stop doing business after the failure.
Q: Why do many companies fail to invest in customer experience despite evidence that it drives revenue, and what should leaders do differently?
A: Many companies apply different standards of financial scrutiny to customer experience investments than they apply to other spending categories. A leadership team will approve a significant budget for office renovations or leadership training without requiring a projected return on investment, but will ask for detailed financial justification before approving a customer experience initiative of equivalent cost. Colin Shaw identifies this as mental accounting, a behavioral pattern where people assign money to separate categories and apply different decision rules to each. The practical consequence is that customer experience programs are held to a higher proof standard than other spending, which slows adoption and reduces the organization’s ability to build loyalty before competitors do. The advice from the episode is direct: customer experience investment produces measurable value, and leaders who require complete financial certainty before acting will consistently act later than those who take a calculated position and build evidence as they go.
Want more of Stacy and Colin?
Check out “Is Customer Experience the new marketing.”
Read a summary and listen to a fun debate on Colin’s podcast: “the Intuitive Customer”.
About Colin Shaw
Shortly after founding Beyond Philosophy, Colin wrote one of the world’s first books on Customer Experience, ‘Building Great Customer Experiences’ Palgrave MacMillan, 2002. This book created worldwide interest and the demand for Beyond Philosophy’s services enjoyed rapid growth.
Since 2002, Colin has:
- Earned recognition by Linkedin as one of the ‘World’s Top 150 Business Influencers’
- Selected by the Financial Times, who selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years
- Been voted one of the “Top 50 Marketing Thought Leaders Over 50 for the past two years by Brand Quarterly readers
- Been invited to commentate on CNN, BBC TV, NPR, LBC and other media outlets
- Published seven bestselling books on customer-driven growth
- Co-hosted the highly successful Intuitive Customer podcast.
Colin’s background is in operational line management. He has held many senior exec positions in corporate life. In his last senior role, he led 3,500 people in call centers globally for British Telecom.
Under Colin’s leadership, Beyond Philosophy has helped many of the world’s most prestigious organizations improve their customer experiences, including American Express, FedEx, and Caterpillar. One client, Maersk Line, the world’s largest container shipping company, improved their Net Promoter Score®* by 40 points in 30 months using Beyond Philosophy’s methodology, which gave a 10% rise in shipping volumes.
About Stacy Sherman: Founder of Doing CX Right℠
An award-winning certified marketing and customer experience (CX) corporate executive, speaker, author, and podcaster, known for Doing CX Right℠. She created a Heart & Science℠ framework that accelerates customer loyalty, referrals, and revenue, fueled by engaged employees and customer service representatives. Stacy’s been in the trenches improving experiences as a brand differentiator for 20+ years, working at companies of all sizes and industries, like Liveops, Schindler elevator, Verizon, Martha Steward Craft, AT&T++. Stacy is on a mission to help people DOING, not just TALKING about CX, so real human connections & happiness exist. Continue reading bio >here.
