Jeofrey Bean on Customer Experience Design, Understanding Economic & Emotional Consumer Behavior

Pursuing Results

Customer experience has become an important part of the decision making process in brand marketing and operations. How do you understand your ideal client and understand the decisions they make, so that you can tailor an experience that isn’t just transactional? We talk to author, professor and customer experience speaker Jeofrey Bean and discuss Class: A Guide Through the American Status System by Paul Fussell.

https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/pursuingresults/JeofreyBean.mp3

If you want people to advocate for you, you’re going to have to offer more than a quick transaction. -Jeofrey Bean

On this week’s episode of Pursuing Results we discussed Paul Fussell’s book Class: A Guide for the American Status System, with our guest Jeofrey Bean. He shared his background and how got started in customer experience design. He was interested in how people make the decisions and choices they make and why they buy what they buy. His interest in the companies that were excelling at customer experience drove him to start working on an article which evolved into a book.

Jeofrey explained that companies like Apple and Netflix want to understand the consumer in an insightful way so they make better business decisions. These companies ask, watch, listen, anticipate and innovate and they’re already plugged into changes in society and clued in on the technology that’s coming.

Takeaways + Tactics

• Understanding people in an insightful way helps you make better business decisions.
• Healthy growth isn’t necessarily linear growth.
• Successful brands understand behavior, emotion and economics – sometimes better than the customers themselves.

We went onto talk about the book, which Jeofrey first encountered in 1983. Jeofrey was interested in the way Fussell worked to understand the motivations behind the decision to buy something. When people buy different car models, what lies behind these decisions is information that brands can use to better understand customer needs. We went onto discuss ideal strategic investors, stressful innovation and how the customer experience changed the smartphone market.

Customer and user experience revolutionized the smartphone market and illuminated the value of thinking above and beyond transactions. It’s important to ask the economical and emotional “do fors” that drive customers to become advocates. It comes down to providing a value that customers can perceive clearly. If value isn’t perceived, it isn’t received. Value in customer experience is created by asking, watching, listening, anticipating and innovating.

Guest Bio

Jeofrey Bean is the author of the books Customer Experience Rules! and best-selling The Customer Experience Revolution – How Companies like Apple, Amazon, and Starbucks Have Changed Business Forever, with Sean Van Tyne. He is a leading customer experience and internet marketing expert and excels at helping companies determine, develop and deliver extraordinary customer experience along the entire customer experience continuum. Jeofrey is also the part-time Professor of Business Management and Marketing at UC San Diego Extension. To buy Jeofrey’s books visit his author page on Amazon.