Understanding Basic Drives and Experiential Temperament

In many ways, we are the product of the behaviors that worked for a long line of our ancestors.  When faced with a life threatening situation, say happening upon a saber tooth tiger, our ancestors were the ones that ran first and asked questions later.  Their friends that naively felt driven to go take a closer look weren’t so lucky.  Based on situation after situation like this, we are the descendants of the people that were driven to:  form and cooperate with others in reciprocal relationships, intuitively understand other peoples motives in order to be able to anticipate what they’d do; learn more about the way the world works in order to develop effective predictions and plans; and acquire the resources they needed to survive and that enhanced their status within the social hierarchy.

At the deepest level, our experiences today influenced by the same set of basic survival drives that were adaptive for our ancestors in the situations they faced.  While evolution does not pull our experiential strings directly, it has determined the design of how our brains process and act on experiences.   How we react to threats, strive to connect with others, seek to understand the ways of the world, and acquire resources are consistent with the mechanisms that contributed to the survival of those that came before us.

In the book, Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Our Choices, Paul Laurence and Nitin Nohria, two Harvard University professors, conclude that we are hardwired with four basic drives that can be used to explain a wide range of individual and collective behavior.  These four basic drives are to:  ACQUIRE (obtain essential resources as well as, intangibles that improve our social status), BOND (develop relationships with individuals and groups that provide security and pleasure), LEARN (acquire experiences and beliefs that help us make the world more predictable), and DEFEND (protect against threats to ourselves, as well as, our resources, relationships, and beliefs).

As different as we all appear to be on the surface, these four basic drives provide a common framework that apply across individuals and across cultures.   The degree to which they are satisfied directly affects our emotions and, by extension, our behavior.   As we will see, individual temperamental differences have an effect on the relative strength of these drives and how they’re expressed.

ACQUIRE:  The drive to obtain essential resources as well as, intangibles that improve our social status.  We are motivated to acquire goods that increase our sense of well-being.  We experience satisfaction when this drive is fulfilled and frustration when it is not. Our drive to ACQUIRE applies to essential resources like food, clothing, shelter, and money.  It also applies to collecting objects, symbols, and experiences that signal or improve our status relative to others.

Beyond our basic survival needs, the drive to ACQUIRE is relative rather than absolute; we tend to compare what we have to what others have.  Observers of the human condition have consistently pointed out that people are happy when they feel better off than other people they know, unhappy when they feel worse off.

In addition, the drive to ACQUIRE is often insatiable beyond any physical need.  We often want more even when there is little or no incremental benefit from having more.

BOND:  The drive to develop relationships with individuals and groups that provide security and pleasure.  There is obvious survival value to forming reciprocal relationships with others, as well as, to be part of a group that provides safety, support, and identity.  Most people experience positive emotions when they are associated with others and negative emotions when they are isolated.

The drive to BOND also leads to emergence of cooperation.  In order to stay positively connected to the group, an individual must naturally keep track of their indebtedness to others and reciprocate in a way that maintains the relationship.  It also becomes very adaptive to sacrifice on personal gain in order to contribute to the greater good of the group.  One of the other implications of the drive to BOND is the emergence of both a dominance hierarchy and attention to social justice.  (See:   Cognitive Ergonomics: How Customers’ React to Violations of Justice).

LEARN:  The drive to acquire knowledge and beliefs that help us navigate successfully in the world.   There is strong survival value in our ability to make sense of the world around us and produce theories that help us: explain what has happened, predict what will happen, and develop reasonable courses of action.   We get frustrated when things seem senseless and we feel satisfied when we can understand about how and why things happen the way they do.  While the drive to acquire is materially driven, the drive to LEARN can be considered intellectual foraging.

DEFEND:  The drive to protect against threats to ourselves, as well as, our resources, relationships, and beliefs.   This drive is rooted in the most basic fight or flight response that is common to most animals.  We all naturally defend ourselves, our possessions, our family and friends against physical harm.  By extension, we also DEFEND our ideas, beliefs, and accomplishments against psychological harm that would undermine our understanding of the world, our self-esteem, or our social status.  When we successfully fulfill our drive to DEFEND, it leads to feelings of confidence and security.  When we are faced with situations that are unpredictable and seemingly out of our control, we react with feelings of fear and resentment.

Laurence and Nohria observe that these drives are independent in that they can neither be ordered hierarchically nor substituted for each other.   This is important since it provides flexibility in our behavioral responses to the situations we face.  This is particularly important since, in many cases, these drives are competing.  We often can’t satisfy each of the four drives in every situation leading to psychological and moral dilemmas.  For example, the drive to LEARN is often in conflict with the drive to DEFEND and the drive to BOND (cooperate) is often at odds with the drive to ACQUIRE.

While these four drives are present in every effectively functioning human being, you know from personal experience that not everyone expresses the drive to BOND or LEARN or ACQUIRE or DEFEND in the same ways.  For example, people vary in the both the magnitude and the direction associated with their drive to LEARN.

Recognizing differences in the strength and expression of each of these drives is a very important part of understanding how different people have experiences… and in knowing what can be done to enable people to have more engaging experiences.  We describe these differences in terms of Experiential Temperament.  The first layer of the Experience Personae Model thus starts with a description of the how individuals differ in the way they express the four drives.

“In one way or another, all our experiences are chemically conditioned, and if we imagine that some of them are purely “spiritual,” purely “intellectual,” or purely “aesthetic;” it is merely because we have never troubled to investigate the internal chemical environment at the moment of the occurrence.”  Aldous Huxley

An individuals’ experience takes place in a biochemical environment in the brain that influences the experiences they will find compelling, engaging, and comfortable.   Different people react to experiences differently based on variations in the neuromodulation processes that influence their activity level and emotional state.

Note:  A neuromodulation process involves neurotransmitters (the chemicals that communicate across synapses in the brain) that are not reabsorbed by the neuron or broken down.  These neuromodulators end up influencing the chemical makeup of an individual’s cerebrospinal fluid (the chemical environment of the brain) and, as a result, influencing (or modulating) the overall activity level of the brain.

An individual’s unique expression of the drives we discussed above has a lot to do with variations in neuromodulation from one individual to another.   In essence, neuromodulators act like the volume and tone controls that influence magnitude and nature of our reactions to experiences.

In our work, we consider four Experiential Temperaments that influence the fundamental ways people engage with different types of experiences:  Novelty Seeking, Harm Avoidance, Social Orientation, and Persistence.  This perspective builds on work originally done by Dr. C. Robert Cloninger, a psychiatrist at Washington University School of Medicine.

Novelty Seeking is the level to which a person is comfortable with,drawn to, and exhilarated by new experiences. While everyone wants some excitement occasionally, people that express high levels of Novelty Seeking seem to live for new experiences and new ways of looking at things. High Novelty Seeking people tend to be curious, exploratory, easily bored, impulsive, quick tempered, extravagant, enthusiastic, and disorderly. On the other hand, low Novelty Seeking people tend to be more indifferent to unfamiliar experiences. They also tend to be more reflective, frugal, orderly, and regimented.

Novelty Seeking describes an individuals’ expression of the common underlying drive to LEARN.  Novelty Seeking behavior contributes to an individual’s practical and theoretical understanding of the way the world works.

In the brain, Novelty Seeking behavior is motivated and regulated by dopamine.  High Novelty Seeking people appear to have low base levels of dopamine and, as a result, experience an increased sensitivity to dopamine releases.  This gives Novelty Seekers an enhanced euphoric rush from novel stimulation that is either physical or intellectual.

Harm Avoidance is the level to which customers strive to escape from unfamiliar, uncertain, potentially dangerous, or unpleasant experiences. People that are high in Harm Avoidance tend to be cautious, apprehensive, and pessimistic in experiences that don’t worry others. They also tend to be insecure in social situations and often need reassurance and encouragement with new experiences. They tend to be critical of themselves if things don’t go smoothly. On the other hand, people that are low in Harm Avoidance are generally confident despite the unknown aspects of an experience, even those experiences that would worry other people. Overall, low Harm Avoidance individuals tend to be relaxed, courageous, carefree, and optimistic.

Harm Avoidance is an important way that different individuals express the drive to DEFEND.  While everyone has the drive to protect themselves, high Harm Avoidant individuals take this to an extreme by avoiding behavior that would lead to punishment, danger, or embarrassment.

Harm Avoidance appears to be regulated by serotonin.  Harm Avoidant individuals are more prone to the frequent release of serotonin when presented with uncertain or potentially threatening situations.  This frequent release of serotonin leads to a decrease in serotonin sensitivity and a resulting increase in cortisol which is associated with the feeling of stress.

Social Orientation is the level to which people seek to bond with and gain approval from others. Individuals with high Social Orientation are warm, dedicated, and dependent. They tend to seek communication and social contact and are sensitive to social cues which facilitate their understanding of and reciprocity with others. People that are low on Social Orientation tend to be self-absorbed, practical, cold, and more socially insensitive. They often don’t mind being alone and, in general, don’t feel a strong need to gain approval from others

Social Orientation is an expression of the underlying drive to BOND.  High Social Orientation individuals have an amplified need to BOND and tend to be effective in forming and maintaining strong reciprocal relationships.

Social Orientation appears to be related to levels of oxytocin (strong bonding with mates and family) and vasopressin, the only known hormones released by the posterior pituitary gland that act at a distance.  Studies have reported that higher levels of oxytocin enhance an individual’s ability to read others’ emotions based on eye cues.  In addition, a 2005 study in reported in Nature magazine found that people sprayed with oxytocin were more trusting in cooperation situations.  Subjects whose oxytocin levels were mildly increased could infer significantly better what a target person was thinking about, based only on eye cues.  The effect was more pronounced for emotions harder to read through eye cues.

Persistence is the level to which a person feels the drive towards behavioral inhibition (put it off) versus behavioral activation (just do it!). High Persistence individuals are eager to initiative experiences, tend to see roadblocks as personal challenges, and intensify their efforts in response to anticipated rewards. Low Persistence individuals require the deliberate removal of barriers to action and more powerful encouragement to engage in experiences.

Persistence can be considered an amplifier or modulator of the drive to ACQUIRE resources, experiences, relationships, etc…   Persistence appears to be connected with the complex interaction of neurotransmitters including dopamine (motivation based on reward-prediction), and serotonin.

So what does this all mean?  The ability to understand and rigorously describe the Experiential Temperament of a person has a profound impact on designing products, services, interactions, etc… that fit with and influence the way people think.   Designing high Novelty Seeking experiences for low Novelty Seeking customers is not ideal.  Not taking into account the high Harm Avoidant temperament of some customers can lead to experiences that make people feel uncomfortable.

For example, we are currently helping a leading healthcare organization design an integrated patient-physician experience that is sensitive to the fact that people have fundamentally different mental models for their health and the consumption of health-related services.  Some customers will be high novelty seeking “naturalists;” some customers will be low persistence “avoiders;” others will be more high harm avoidant “active consumers,” etc…   The experience that works for each of the personae involves different ways of communicating, prescribing courses of treatment, reinforcing behaviors like wellness programs, etc…

Another client is a leading retail chain expressed a desire to “Disneyize” their experience.  What they hadn’t taken into account in developing that vision is that the current customer experience could be described as:  low novelty seeking; moderately high harm avoidant; and high social orientation.  Some of the ideas this company had for improving the experience were brilliant.  However, many of those “improvements” would have led to an unintended shift in the temperament of the overall experience; one that would have created tension for existing customers.

The most effective experiences either match the temperament of the target ideal individual or avoid stressing people by providing a “temperament neutral experience.”

Novelty Seeking and the Design of Differentiated Experiences

Over millions of years of human development, our ability to predict has translated into our ability to survive.  We live in an inherently unpredictable world.  As a result, we have evolved a strong motivation to learn in a way that improves our predictions.  Not only does this motivation lead to a clear survival advantage, but, in a social setting, learning how to better predict other people’s behavior leads to small group cooperation and to attracting the fittest members of the opposite sex.  Our drive to predict leads to an overarching behavior – novelty seeking.

Brains want novelty.  This was first observed by Wilhelm Wundt, one of the founding fathers of the field of psychology, in the 19^thcentury.  Wundt observed that the more complicated an experience is, the more a person will be stimulated by it.  Up to a certain level; at which point the experience starts to get overwhelming.  He described this diagrammatically as a bell-shaped curve, called the Wundt Curve, showing the state of arousal increasing as experiential complexity increases up to a point at which arousal starts to decrease as complexity continues to increase.

This explains why experiences with intermediate levels of complexity are generally the most pleasurable.  Why a movie whose plot is unpredictable, but not too unpredictable.  Why it’s pleasurable to listen to music that strikes a balance between predictability and novelty.  Why humor that helps us see things differently is inherently engaging.

Novelty seeking is actually hard-wired into the way your brain works.  Novelty seeking is stimulated by the neurotransmitter dopamine.  In a way, dopamine is the driver of all experience.  It works like a key for unlocking one of the most critical parts of your brain:  the striatum, which contains the highest concentration of dopamine receptors.  This is well described in two outstanding books: Greg Berns‘ Satisfaction:  Sensation Seeking, Novelty, and the Science of Finding True Fulfillment and Read Montague‘s Why Choose this Book?  How We Make Decisions.

The striatum is where the interaction between you as an individual and the environment happens.  It works like a switching station with many inputs from other parts of your brain but limited capacity.  As a result, only a few signals can get through at any point in time.  What makes it through has to do with dopamine.  Dopamine is a chemical “reward” predictor that encourages your striatum to pay particular attention to novel input signals.  This interaction commits your motor system to a course of action, selected from the many different possibilities.  It produces your ability to decide what you want to do.

Doing something just past the edge of your predictability zone releases dopamine.  As a result, novel information flows through your striatum.  This, in turn, forces you to act on the information and, subsequently, reinforces the motivational system.

However, too much novel information creates an overload and a lack of attention.  The point at which too much information becomes… too much information… is related to the capacity of working memory.  It’s been demonstrated that people can maintain no more than 7+/- 2 chunks of information in working memory at any point in time.  By the way, this is why AT&T originally determined that telephone numbers should have 7 digits.

What are the implications for designing customer experiences?  For the past several years, we’ve been focusing our clients on the development of a small set of “Signature Experience Elements” that customers will perceive as a “difference in kind” and that fit with the overarching purpose of the organization.  Typically we design to no more than 5-7 Signature Elements that are aligned with the purpose or story the experience is trying to tell.  Sticking to this relatively small set of highly novel elements, it’s possible to create experiences that are closer to the optimum point of the Wundt Curve… (aka,  wundt-erful experiences).  The natural tendency for many organizations are to invest too heavily in a large number of incremental improvements that don’t stimulate the customers’ desire for novelty seeking.

For example, Whole Foods Market has a small number of signature experience elements that reinforce their “Whole Foods, Whole People, Whole Planet” positioning and are perceived by customers’ as a difference in kind.  These include:  organic food, artful food presentation, local growers, educational signage, novelty seeking selection, and premium pricing.

Another client example is a major jewelry store chain, whose brand story is “The Perfect Gift, Guaranteed.”  This company’s signature elements included:  a distinctive welcome, creative and consultative gift advice, coaching the customer on how to romance the gift, and a wow process for returns.  Each of these signature elements was designed to get the customers attention and contribute to them really internalizing the desired brand story.

In addition, predictable experiences lead to habituation.  Changes in happiness or satisfaction are driven by relative changes from our recent past.  This is why, as we adjust to any positive change in our circumstances, satisfaction or happiness fades.  Social psychologist Philip Brickman describes this as the hedonic treadmill; we need to seek higher levels of reward in order to maintain the same level of satisfaction.

Some sensations habituate more quickly than others.  For example, we tend to quickly get used to changes in their financial status.  A positive improvement in financial fortunes leads to a short term increase in the feeling of satisfaction followed quickly by a return to indifference.

This may be one of the reasons why structured loyalty or rewards programs tend to drive rational repeat purchase behavior but not necessarily higher levels of satisfaction.  People habituate to rewards quickly when the rewards are relatively predictable.  However, I’ve observed that people respond more positively to rewards when the rewards are novel, unexpected, and authentic.

Personal relationships tend to habituate more slowly.  The balance of predictability and novelty is an issue in long-term relationships.  After a long time together, two people get too good at predicting each others responses.  And they also become more certain that they “know” the other person’s underlying intentions.  This can be both comforting and highly constraining.   As people get to know each other, they may lose their sense of novel individuality.  People tend to believe that relationship harmony depends on stability and constancy.  This is an issue.  While novelty in a relationship may be inherently destabilizing, it is essential to the maintenance of any long-term relationship.  This is as true for business relationships and collegial relationships, as it is for married relationships.

In future posts, I’ll describe the implications of other neuromodulated processes (Harm Avoidance, Reward Dependence, and Persistence) that influence how people experience the world, as well as, provide guidance for the design of the most compelling customer experiences.

Adaptive Customer Profiling: Integrating Quantitative and Qualitative Customer Analytics

Most business leaders now recognize that organic growth is a direct result of their ability to deliver a differentiated, compelling, and increasingly personalized customer experience.  Effectively delivering such an experience is dependent on the organization’s ability to understand what attracts customers’ attention and what drives customers’ behavior.

As you know, recent advances have lowered the investment threshold for consolidating and analyzing the massive amount of data that most organizations’ have about their customers.  Predictive modeling can then be used to make increasingly effective and individualized decisions about the treatment of customers.  For example, these approaches can be used to leverage customers’ past behavior to predict: the value of each customer, how likely that customer is to respond to specific offers, that customer’s price sensitivity, or how likely that customer is to attrite, as well as, what retention actions are likely to be effective.  (See:  Using Predictive Modeling to Optimize Customer Relationships)

Despite the enormous potential, purely quantitative approaches are insufficient.  In particular, quantitative customer analysis has natural limitations, including:

• Trying to predict the future based on information about the past
• Data gathered at a limited number of customer touch-points rather than an end-to-end understanding of the customers’ experience, including the more important non-touch-points
• Surface level behaviors rather than a deeper perspective on customers’ motives, goals, plans, as well as, how they think and feel about their experiences

Trying to understand the customer based purely on quantitative analysis can feel a little like trying to determine how the furniture upstairs is arranged…  by tapping on the ceiling! Obviously, you’d get a much clearer picture if you just went and took a look… rather than trying to infer what’s going on through indirect and limited data sources.

In addition, inferences drawn from purely quantitative approaches are prone to interpretation errors.  Without an adequate qualitative context for understanding the data, we’ve seen too many organizations draw conclusions akin to “Our customers in South Florida are born Hispanic and die Jewish.”

The most powerful results come from the synergy between qualitative insight and quantitative analytics.

• Qualitative Insight: Leveraging knowledge from in-depth research, observation, elicitation, as well as, listening to the conversations that take place between customers in emerging social networks.  This qualitative insight is used to frame and guide quantitative analysis.
• Quantitative Analytics: Leveraging patterns in demographic and transactional customer data in order to predict, classify, and optimize elements of the customer experience. This quantitative analysis is to validate, refine, and populate the context created via qualitative insight.

In practice, organizations and the functional departments within them tend to have a strong bias for one of these modes.  More “left brained” organizations or functions emphasize the quantitative approach and feel uncomfortable with going out to actually observe what’s happening with customers.  More “right brained” organizations or functions emphasize the qualitative approach, are out living with their customers, but also tend to make decisions that aren’t supported by sufficient analytical rigor.  As a result, it’s difficult for organizations to put together the pieces in a way that generates a holistic perspective on the customer.

In our customer experience work with clients we are beginning to create Adaptive Customer Profiles that can be used to integrate quantitative and qualitative knowledge about the customer.

An Adaptive Customer Profile is…

… a formal knowledge representation structure used to capture the customer intelligence necessary to effectively customize communications, effectively assign service resources, optimize the presentation of high probability offers, and adapt pricing to customers’ price sensitivity.

Adaptive Customer Profiles for a given business situation generally include:

• Descriptive Information: Identifiers, demographic characteristics, etc…
• Potential and Current Value: The expected and current value of this customer.
• Customer Network Information: The customers’ role and placement in an influence network of customer relationships.
• Personae Classification: The degree to which the customer demonstrates an affinity for one or more personae classes that exist in the marketplace.  These personae classes are an extension of psychographic segments that define the predominant “mental models” in the marketplace.  These personae are characterized by shared customer goals and preferences, goal-directed behavioral patterns, cognitive schema, and temperamental characteristics.  These temperamental characteristics include the customers’ orientation towards novelty seeking, harm avoidance, reward dependence, and persistence.  (See Cognitive Ergonomics:  Designing Experiences that Fit the Customers’ Mental Model)
• Relationship State: The level of attachment this customer feels towards our business as evidenced by their transactional and interactional behavior.
• Context Sensitive Behavioral History: key behavioral indicators derived from inquiry and order history, service records, etc…

Adaptive Customer Profiles are derived through an integrated set of qualitative and quantitative activities.  Qualitative work includes customer observation and elicitation (See:  Observation and Elicitation:  We Like to Watch!) in order to uncover insight that is used to develop an effective personae classification scheme.  Quantitative work involves predictive modeling focused on the leading indicators of customer behavior and measuring the affinity that customers demonstrate for one or more personae.

For example, we are working with a leading healthcare organization to design an integrated patient-physician experience that can adapt to the fact that different patients have fundamentally different mental models associated with their health and the consumption of health related services.  Some customers will be high novelty seeking naturalists; some will be low persistence avoiders; some will be more high harm avoidant active consumers, etc…  The experience design integrates an Adaptive Customer Profiling module that identifies the extent to which each customer fits one or more of the common personae that exist in the marketplace.  Based on that Adaptive Customer Profile, we can then customize patient communications, instructions on courses of treatment, the presentation of wellness programs, etc…

We are also developing a similar personae classification scheme focused on Mass Affluent consumers of financial services.  Almost every financial services company is currently targeting this valuable “segment.”  The issue is that, by its’ very nature, the “Mass Affluent” segment is an exceptionally diverse group of individuals that only share the fact that they have assets and/or income above a certain level.  Companies that attack this market with a mass market mentality will almost certainly lose.  However, financial institutions that can target meaningful sub-segments of this market with a highly differentiated offer can create an experience that is attractive and differentiated with a substantial group of these customers.  You might imagine a hip and differentiated “I Hate to Plan” themed experience for the sub-segment of Mass Affluent customers that are Avoiders… or a more conservative, goal-driven experience customized to the customers that are Achievers.   A financial institution that embeds an Adaptive Customer Profiling process in their interactions with customers could more effectively customize the experience to the customers’ goals, behavior, mental model, and temperament.

Personae-Driven Customer Experience Design

A persona is a fictitious person created for the purpose of helping designers and decision makers understand how people actually experience their interactions with a product, service, or organization.  The use of personae was popularized by Alan Cooper in the book “The Inmates are Running the Asylum.”  In this critique of the software development industry, Cooper recommends the use of personae to help developers get a practical, visceral feel for the ways users think and behave. Since that time, the use of personae has become very popular in a wide variety of product and user interface design applications.  Personae are given a name (Bob, Sue, etc…) and a set of richly described characteristics, situations, goals, pain points, and behaviors that are relevant to the design.  For any given application, there are usually a relatively small set of personae that characterize the range of users or customers.  Cooper has suggested that one persona is usually sufficient.

The  benefits of personae in understanding and designing distinctive customer experiences are substantial.  Typically executive leaders and functional managers do not have a clear and concrete understanding of how their customers experience the world and, more specifically, their interactions with the client’s organization.   Personae are powerful because they put a specific human face on often abstract customer information.  In this way, they are fundamentally different than customer or market segments, which are generally shared characteristics of categories of customers.  This “human face” makes it easier to make decisions and design tradeoffs with an understanding of how what you do either fits or doesn’t fit for the customer.

One of the best examples of using personae for customer experience design is Best Buy, who made substantial changes to their store design, merchandise assortment, training, etc… based on the definition four customer personae.  In particular, they started to shift elements of  the experience design to work for the persona they called Jill.   Jill is a soccer mom that does most of the shopping for her family but is intimidated by electronics stores.

Unfortunately, the way most organizations develop personae appears to be very loose; more of an art than a science.  The generally accepted best practice is that personae should be based on solid ethnographic research with customers.  However, sometimes persona are just made up based on what the team thinks they know about customers (because they know so much about them already!).  Assuming research is done, the process of turning research findings into personae is also very loose.  Typically, common themes across customers are identified and clustered in a creative process that generates a plausible enough set of personae.   In addition, details are usually added to these personae in a way that “rounds them out” and makes them more believable.

Over the past couple of years, we’ve been trying to address the lack of rigor in personae development.  Our starting place for this was our emphasis on designing from “mental model of the customer” rather than the “mental model of the company.”  Not only does this perspective address the same basic objective as customer personae but the idea of defining personae precisely based on elements of a mental model is appealing.  It also provides a means of deciding how many personae are needed since the only reason to have different personae would be because there were relevant and substantial differences in the mental models of two different types of customer.

Our working definition of Cognitive Customer Personae include models that capture:  what the customer is trying to accomplish; the end-to-end behaviors the customer typically performs to accomplish those things; a structure of beliefs and temperamental characteristics that drive their rational and emotional reactions to their experience.  Each one of these personae is described by four models that are described in more detail with a few examples in the post titled:   Cognitive Ergonomics:  Designing Customer Experiences that Fit with Customers’ Mental Model.

Designing Experiences that Fit with the Mental Model of the Experiencer

In a previous post (Cognitive Ergonomics:  What is a Customer Experience Anyway?), I discussed the fact that a customer experience exists only in the mind of the customer.  We define a customer experience to be… how the customer reacts both rationally and emotionally… across their end-to-end process… of accomplishing one or more things that are important to them.

For years, we’ve been helping organizations enable their customers to have better experiences by designing what they do from “mental model of the customer” rather than the “mental model of the company.”  In virtually every case we’ve seen, these two perspectives are fundamentally different.  In fact, we’ve told our clients, “You’ve got to be out of your mind to design a great customer experience.”  We don’t mean going insane; we do mean that you need to set aside the internal, organizational mental model in favor of adopting the customers’ way of thinking.  In most cases, people inside the organization know too much about all the intricacies of what’s involved in producing the product or service.  This makes it very difficult to get their head around the customers’ often flawed, simplistic, irrational, and biased way of looking at how that product or service fits their needs and makes them feel.

If you agree that it’s a good thing to design from the “mental model of the customer,” the next logical question is, “What the #($*&# is a mental model?”  Over the past several years, my colleagues and I have been evolving a rigorous way to efficiently describe the customers’ mental model; a way that allows you to use that model in designs that influence the way customers’ experience what you do.

In order to accomplish this, we’ve been formalizing models that define a set of Customer Cognitive Personae that describe the way different types of customers experience things.  Generally there are several Personae that must be described based on the fundamentally different customer mental models that exist within the target customer population.  Each Personae is defined by a unique instance of four models:

1. Customer Goal Model: What is the customers’ understanding of what they are trying to accomplish?  Very often the customers’ understanding of their goals are fuzzy and ill-defined.  Although these goals may include a desire for rationally considered benefits, very often the customer has strong latent goals that involve desired emotional states and a means of self-expression and social acceptability.  Customers’ do not buy products; they buy desired states!  Obviously, you can’t design effective products, services, or customer-facing processes that work for the customer without a clear understanding of the customers’ desired state.
2. Customer Lifecycle Model: What is the end-to-end set of activities a customer would naturally follow to realize their goals and achieve the desired state described above?  As mentioned in a previous post (The Customer Experience Does Not Happen at Your Touchpoints), the customer does a lot outside their touchpoints with your organization.  Understanding what they do is the key to understanding where you might help them have a better experience.  Although this may include improvements in the existing touchpoints, more often, it involves the creation of new touchpoints.  It’s important to acknowledge that, in the real world, every customer follows a somewhat different set of activities.  However, we’ve found there are typically a small number of common customer lifecycles that capture the essence of the natural behaviors for that different types of customer.
3. Cognitive Schema: As mentioned earlier, a customer’s experience is that customer’s rational and emotional reactions.  In order to understand these reactions, it’s necessary to understand the way customers’ brains process customers’ experiences.  Schemaare a way of doing that.  A schema is a knowledge structure used to describe an individual’s memories and beliefs about a category of experiences.  For example, customers’ schema for the experience they have in a casual dining restaurant allows them to have that experience without having to “figure it out” each time they go out to dinner.   Understanding the customers’ schema for that category of experience is critical for understanding how to design things that really work for the customer.   The knowledge captured in an individual’s schema allows that individual to:
   • Easily identify how current sensory information is similar to or different than what they’ve sensed in past experiences.  Identification knowledge supports a pattern matching process that helps customers recognize what is familiar or unusual about the situation.
   • Quickly elaborate or fill in additional knowledge of the essential characteristics of similar experiences in order to predict what will happen and interpret what does happen.  Elaboration knowledge is related to how an individual recalls past experiences and uses that information to make predictions about what will happen this time.  Elaboration includes the customers conscious and subconscious expectations.
   • Draw inferences, make estimates, create goals and plan one or more alternative actions.  The customers’ Planning Knowledge includes not only what the customer consciously believes is an appropriate set of actions but also includes the triggers for automatic behavioral scripts that make it efficient for customers to act in an experience while consciously attending to other matters.
   • Act utilizing learned skills, rules, procedures, or automatic behaviors that appear relevant to the current situation or problem.  Action Knowledge includes the routines that customers are comfortable following.  The most ergonomic experiences don’t require customers to act in ways that are uncomfortable for them.
4. Temperamental Profile: On top of the cognitive structure described above, the customers’ subconscious emotional reactions take place in a biochemical environment that defines what experiences different types of customers will find compelling, engaging, and comfortable.   This profile builds on work done by Dr. C. Robert Cloninger, a psychiatrist at Washington University School of Medicine.   Different customer personae will react to experiences differently based on variations in neuromodulator processes that influence their emotional state.  The most effective experiences either match the temperament of the target customer or avoid stressing the customer by providing a “temperament neutral experience.”  A simplified explanation of each of these Temperamental Profiles is:
   • Novelty Seeking is the level to which the customer is both comfortable with, drawn to, and exhilarated by new experiences.  Novelty seeking is regulated by dopamine.  Novelty seeking customers appear to have low base levels of dopamine and, as a result, experience an increased sensitivity to dopamine releases.  This gives Novelty Seekers an enhanced euphoric rush from novel stimulation.
   • Harm Avoidance is the level to which customers desire to escape from unfamiliar, uncertain, or potentially unpleasant experiences.  Harm Avoidance is regulated by serotonin.  Harm Avoidant customers are more prone to the frequent release of serotonin when presented with uncertain or potentially threatening situations.  This frequent release of serotonin leads to a decrease in serotonin sensitivity and a resulting increase in cortisol which is associated with stress.
   • Reward Dependence is the level to which customers seek approval from others.  Reward Dependence is related to norepinephrine.   Reward Dependent customer are warm, dedicated, and dependent people that seek and are comfortable with experiences that involve social contact and communication.
   • Persistence is the level to which customers have behavioral inhibition (put it off) versus behavioral activation (just do it!).  Persistence appears to be connected with prolactin.  High persistance customers are eager to initiative experiences, tend to see roadblocks as personal challenges, and intensify their efforts in response to anticpated rewards.  Low persistence customers require deliberate removal of barriers to action and more subtle encouragement to engage in the experience.

The ability to rigorously describe the “mental model of the customer” has had a profound impact on designing products, services, interactions, etc… that fit with what customers are trying to accomplish; how they go about accomplishing those things; how they percieve, interpret, and evaluate what you do for them; what they feel comfortable with, stimulated by, etc…

For example, we are currently working with a leading healthcare organization to design an integrated patient-physician experience that is sensitive to the fact that people have fundamentally different mental models for their health and the consumption of health related services.  Some customers will be high novelty seeking naturalists; some will be low persistence avoiders; some will be more high harm avoidant active consumers, etc…   The experience that works for each of the personae involve different ways of communicating, prescribing courses of treatment, reinforcing behaviors like wellness programs, etc…

Another client that is aleading quick serve restaurant chain express a desire to “Disneyizing” their experience.  What they hadn’t taken into account in developing that vision is that the current customer experience could be described as:  low novelty seeking; moderately high harm avoidant; and high reward dependent.  Some of the ideas this company had for improving the experience were brilliant.  However, many of those “improvements” would have led to an unintended shift in the temperament of the overall experience; one that would have created tension for existing customers.

Well this post has gone on for a while and, as always, we’ve just scratched the surface.  I’m happy to provide more perspective to readers with an interest in more detail.  In addition, there will an opportunity to expand and illustrate several of these points in future posts.