Forbes: How Cognitive Biases Can Create a Negative Customer Experience
This article was written for Forbes by Greg Kihlström
Cognitive biases are errors that affect an individual’s judgment based on unconscious factors like recency, preconceived notions and other factors. So what do they have to do with customer experience?
Customer experience is, after all, an individual’s perception of their overall experience with a brand, not a quantifiable metric of success or failure. In other words, a person can successfully complete a purchase online, but their feelings about the process could be terrible, thus adding up to a negative perception about their experience with the company.
In my work in both customer experience and employee experience, I have had the opportunity to work with behavioral scientists, organizational psychologists and anthropologists, and many others who have helped to shape my understanding and practice of applying behavioral economics principles such as cognitive bias to the work I do with clients.
In this article, I’m going to explore three ways in which cognitive biases can affect the customer experience. Keep in mind that there are many more biases than these three (as many as 188!) and not all work in the same ways with every individual. It is important, however, to understand the effect that each can have.