Why experience design & storytelling need emotional messages

Albert Mehrabian might be the most misquoted researcher in history. People have used his findings to argue that most communication is nonverbal, which is clearly (and provably) nonsense.

His research showed that we like people if what they say about their feelings matches non-verbal cues such as tone of voice and body language.

If there isn’t a match we tend to trust the non-verbal cues more. In other words, if you say “Oh, how fascinating, do go on.” while looking around and shuffling your feet, I’ll conclude that you’re not that interested in what I’m saying.

This principle of matching, or congruence, is really important for customer experience design and storytelling.

What’s beneath the surface?

That’s the key question. Strip away the words, and what do the non-verbal cues and signals say to the customer? “Your call is very important to us.”…yeah, right.

Gerald Zaltman’s classic book “How Customers Think” is a great starting point for thinking about the unconscious cues that can have a big influence on the customer experience.

Say what you mean, mean what you say

Authenticity is a much abused word. “How do you do authenticity?” a drinks company executive apparently once asked Innocent Drinks. Authenticity is not something you do, it’s something you are.

That doesn’t mean you have to wash all your dirty linen in public, but it does mean you have to tell the truth, and you have to keep your promises (explicit and implicit). Making sure there’s good congruence between what you say and what you do ties directly back to Mehrabian’s work.

Show, don’t tell

Maybe I’m unusually cynical, but I instinctively assume the opposite of any adjectives that people or organisations apply to themselves. Don’t tell me you’re reliable, show me by consistently delivering.

Beyond your behaviour, it’s more powerful to embed messages about yourself in implicit claims through branding than it is to claim them in words. Don’t tell me you’re innovative, show me through your design choices. We’re usually less cynical about messages that appeal to our unconscious mind (try watching an emotional film without the music track and you’ll be amazed how little impact it has on you).

 

Tell the whole story

Turn to advertising to learn how to tell stories that communicate at the verbal and non-verbal levels simultaneously. Notice how they put the factual messages in the verbal channel, and emotional persuasion in the visuals, music, metaphor, etc.

Take cleaning products as an example. If you transcribe the advert all you’d see is factual claims (“kills 99.9% of germs fast”), but the power of these ads is in the emotional triggers around disgust and fear (the image of a mother wiping her child’s highchair with a raw chicken breast.

Good storytelling uses the respective strengths of verbal and non-verbal channels to multiply impact with rational and emotional messages that support each other.

User stories & customer journey mapping

A big mistake that many organisations make when they try to map the customer journey is that they stick too close to their own perspective.

The result may be a customer view of their process map, but it’s not a true customer journey map.

Why not? The tell-tale problems are:

• Too much detail
• Ignoring context in customer’s life
• Focused on products, processes & touchpoints
• Starting too late in the journey
• Finishing too early in the journey

How can we overcome this tendency to let the inside-out view dominate? The best way is to use qualitative research and allow customers to lead the creation of the journey map.

User stories are a really useful tool to make sure you approach the journey with the right mindset. They’re normally written in the form

As a__________ I want to__________in order to__________.

Doing this will allow you to stretch your view of the journey, so that you start when the customer became aware of their need, not when they first got in touch with you. This more accurately reflects the customer experience, and opens up opportunities for innovation.

It also puts the customer’s goal (not your product) front and centre. This helps you to make sure that the experience you design is addressing the right problem, and opens you up to the possibility of solving it in new ways.

“People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole.”

—Theodore Levitt

The importance of risk in service innovation

Rock climbing is different to many sports because it is a little bit dangerous. The psychology of a successful (long-lived) climber cannot simply be “go for it”. Business is much the same—we know we need to take some risks in order to succeed, but which ones are reasonable?

Yes-fail and No-fail

The sports psychologist and climbing coach Arno Ilgner has a useful approach: climbers should consciously evaluate objective danger before deciding whether they want to attempt a move. He calls this judgement “yes-fall” versus “no-fall”.

Separating out judgements of difficulty and danger enables us to be both safer (we don’t get lulled into danger by easy climbing) and bolder (we can risk failing on a hard move if we assessed it as safe to fall before starting). If we never risked a fall, we’d never reach our full potential. I think there’s a clear parallel here with innovation, and particularly with service innovation.

Jeffrey Baumgartner writes about an innovation process he calls ACT or Anti Conventional Thinking. One of the most powerful ideas in his approach is that the risk-averse part of our brain he labels the “mental bureaucrat” is merely silenced in a traditional brainstorm.

That’s why brainstorming produces stacks of mediocre, conventional, ideas. Not bad ideas, necessarily, but almost never creative ones. Being anti conventional means not just silencing the mental bureaucrat, but actively opposing them.

The mental bureaucrat is the organisational equivalent of self-preservation. Unless we actively judge that we’re in a “yes-fail” zone (like Ilgner’s “yes-fall” zone), we’ll always tend to play it safe.

It’s easy to think of “no-fail” situations. When we’re dealing with a customer that has already been let down we cannot risk any sort of failure, so now is not the time to try something new.

But what about the rest of the time? When do we put ourselves in a “yes-fail” situation. How often to we deliberately separate out the act of thinking about customer experience versus the day to day of doing it? Do we prototype creative new experiences to see how they might make people feel?

Givens and delighters

There are aspects of the customer experience which do not lend themselves to creativity. We tend to call those “givens” or “satisfaction maintainers” – things with a high cost of failure and low reward for success. But to create a really great customer experience, I believe you have to be prepared to accept some risks.

The most important, and it really does set the best apart from the rest, is trusting your staff. Humans have an amazing ability to react flexibly to the customer in front of them and anticipate their needs. Perhaps one day computers will be as good, AI is a topic for another post, but they’re nowhere near there yet.

That creates huge opportunities to delight customers, if your staff feel empowered to act on their instincts. It requires a culture that supports them…in other words a culture that will accept appropriate risks in order to achieve its objectives.