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David Kavanagh

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What can neuroscience tell us about customer experience (CX)?

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Ask anybody who sell anything — hotdogs, financial services, clothing — and they will say that the CX or customer experience is important.

Customer experience or CX has replaced customer relationship management as the newest buzz term. Some have written the idea off as a fad, but — not so fast! As you’ll know from your own experience as a customer, your shopping experience changes your perception of a brand. After a good experience, you’ll feel positive about a brand and recommend it to a friend. A negative experience has the opposite effect.

Why CX is so important online

CX is particularly important to anyone offering services or products online. An unhappy customer in your store can be dealt with there and then. They explain the problem, you listen and take steps to rectify it. If the customer feels heard and believes you regret the problem, it is possible to turn what could have been a negative experience into a positive one. 

You don’t always know what the online CX experience is like for your customers. Psychology researcher Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi found that when we perform sequence-based activities we have a more positive experience if everything works seamlessly. Csíkszentmihályi calls this flow. Think of building a flatpack chest of draws. Imagine the instructions are easy to follow, the components are clearly marked and everything fits together. How do you feel? Like a flatpack genius! You’ll probably also think that the furniture company is a well-run outfit with quality products. But if you struggle, you’ll be annoyed with yourself and resent the company. 

The same applies to online shopping. If a website is slow, difficult to navigate, we generally close the page and look for a  “better” site. That’s a site that has been optimized so that everything works seamlessly. They’ll get the business, while the first company will never even know that they lost a customer by not paying attention to CX.

You could perhaps think that the customer was simply difficult, impatient and impossible to please. Sure, we have all met people like that, but there has been a significant amount of research on what happens to customers on a neurological level when they deal with a slow or interrupted sales process. If you fail to take into account that the design of an online sales platform will impact the perception of your brand, then you’ll lose customers. It’s that simple.

Speed results in a positive CX

The average online shopper expects a page to load within 4 seconds; just under half expects a page to load within 2 seconds; and 18 percent of us want webpages to load instantly. I’m one of those 18 percenters myself! If your website is fast and easy to use, customers are more likely to follow “calls to action” such as signing up for a newsletter or registering as a member. If a website does not meet their expectations for speed, they spend less time on it, click on fewer pages or items, and are less satisfied overall. What’s worse — they’ll tell their friends and social media followers.

CX is a serious business. Anyone selling online should optimize their site to meet customer expectations. Granted, many companies have not budgeted for this, but if a significant portion of your sales are online, it is worth investing in. If you don’t, your customers flock elsewhere.

Neuromagic: Why we are fooled by our own minds

Neuromagic: Why we are fooled by our own minds

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We all know the mind can play tricks on us. But how? Australian magician Nicholas J. Johnson’s new show Deceptology explores what’s known as neuromagic — a field of study that explores why our brains are fooled by magic tricks.

Johnson’s interest in neuroscience dates back to 2009 when he was hospitalised with a chronic tic disorder. He lost control of his expressions and movements, unable to prevent himself from grimacing, screwing up his face and clicking his mouth uncontrollably. His doctors took some time to find the problem, testing Johnson for a brain tumour, epilepsy and several other potential problems.

“I spent a fortnight being subjected to CT, MRI and electroencephalogram scans”, Johnson explained in an interview with Australia’s Daily Review. “I met with psychologists, psychiatrists, neurologists and neuropsychiatrists before finally I was diagnosed with what turned out to be a minor form of Tourette’s syndrome.”

“Throughout the entire ordeal, I never lost my ability to perform sleight of hand. I could barely form a sentence but I could still roll a coin across my knuckles and perfectly palm a playing card. It was as if by providing my brain with something familiar to do, something it knew how to do almost instinctively after years of practice, I was able to distract the part of my brain responsible for the tics.”

To research his show Nicholas spoke with two high regarded American neuroscientists Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde, who founded the discipline of neuromagic. In their book, Sleight of Mind, Macknik and Martinez-Conde convinced some of the world’s greatest magicians to allow scientists to study their techniques for tricking the brain. They were able to offer Johnson insight into why our brains can be tricked.

“Their research is extraordinary. We magicians tend to be a little hyperbolic in our explanations of our skills. We’re performers and we don’t mind stretching the truth in pursuit of entertainment. You’ll often see TED talks with magicians rabbiting on about pseudo-psychology without any real evidence.”

“Susana and Stephen, meanwhile, have focussed on everything that magicians took for granted and provided a solid scientific explanation for why it works. Their research explains how the human brain is hardwired in such a way as to make it hackable by magicians.”

During what is known as cross modal perception, the human brain takes information from one sense and uses it to provide information to another. “This is the reason why we are so completely fooled by ventriloquists”, says Johnson.

“Our ears can only hear that a voice is coming from somewhere in front of us. However, since our eyes can see the puppet’s mouth moving while the ventriloquist’s is not, our thalamus combines the information and tells our cerebral cortex the puppet is speaking.”

Something similar happens at the cinema. Although the speakers are rarely beside the screen, we “hear” the performers’ voices coming from there.

Since researching neuromagic Johnson says he has become more aware of its prevalence in our daily lives.

“After a while, you begin to see neuromagic everywhere. Every time I can’t find my car keys even though they were right in front of me the whole time I think to myself, ah, that’s inattentional blindness, which is often caused by excessive cognitive workload.”

“Everything has to have a neurological explanation. After a while I don’t even notice I’m doing it – which is another type of inattentional blindness.”

The neuroscience of habits

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We all have habits — some good, some bad and some we don’t notice at all. Whether you are a grandparent or a teenager, many of daily actions are habits. Showering every day is a habit… but so is chewing your nails. However, research suggests that those of us who can’t switch from acting habitually to acting in a deliberately may be at greater risk of addiction and obsessive compulsive disorders.

A new study by an international team of researchers was led by Christina Gremel of the University of California San Diego. According to Gremel, habits can act as a brake on goal-directed action, essentially hijacking behaviour — and all of this can be seen in the brain.

All humans — and mammals — naturally produce endocannabinoids. These are neurochemicals, and we have receptors for these throughout the body and brain. Endocannabinoids reduce the activity of neurons. The team wanted to see whether or not endocannabinoids reduces activity in the orbitofrontal cortex. The orbitofrontal cortex, or OFC, is the decision-making area of the brain.

The team used mice trained to press a lever to get food. However they deleted a articular endocannabinoid receptor, called cannabinoid type 1, or CB1, in some of the mice. These mice did not develop habits. This means that neurochemicals are crucial in the formation of habits.

Of course, we all need habits. If you had to spend a huge amount of mental energy figuring out how to do everyday tasks, such as brushing your teeth or catching a train, it would be an inefficient use of your time and brainpower. We need habits — but we also need to be able to switch them off.

“We need a balance between habitual and goal-directed actions. For everyday function, we need to be able to make routine actions quickly and efficiently, and habits serve this purpose,” explains Gremel. “However, we also encounter changing circumstances, and need the capacity to ‘break habits’ and perform a goal-directed action based on updated information. When we can’t, there can be devastating consequences.”

Gremel and the team of researchers believe that although further research is needed, their work may suggest new ways of treating people who suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder or addictions. It may be possible to help people stop relying on habits and shift to deliberate behaviour by treating brain’s endocannabinoid system.

Can stress cause psychosis?

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Sometimes a stressful day can make you feel like you are going crazy. Maybe you’re not wrong to feel that way…

The hormone cortisol is released in response to stress, and researchers at James Cook University in Australia have found a link between levels of cortisol and psychosis.

Zoltan Sarnyai, an associate professor at JCU, explained that this was the first meta-analysis study comparing levels of cortisol with schizophrenia. The team reviewed a total of 11 studies. Levels of cortisol were measured when patients were awake.

Sarnyai explained that they hoped that these findings will help identify people who have the greatest risk of developing full-blown psychosis.

“Only some 20 to 30 per cent of individuals who are at high-risk of developing psychosis due to their clinical presentation or family history actually do so. Identifying those people early is where the cortisol measurement comes in. Biomarkers are very few and far between in psychiatry, so even though a huge amount of work is still needed, this could become a valuable technique,” said Dr Sarnyai.

Scientists have long suspected that cortisol plays a role in psychotic disorders, but until now the results were inconclusive.The JCU team found that patients have different levels of the stress hormone after awakening (Cortisol Awakening Response, CAR) relative to healthy people. The team also found evidence that people with a high risk of developing psychosis have changes in cortisol before they become ill.

“We were able to show that patients with psychosis fail to produce cortisol after they wake up in the morning. We found this even in patients with recent onset of the illness,” said JCU’s Dr Maximus Berger, who co-authored the study.

In case you were wondering… no, stress itself doesn’t cause psychosis. It is the inability to produce cortisol in response to stress after waking that may make some people more susceptible schizophrenia. Whether or not you are at risk, it is always wise to use healthy coping mechanisms to deal with stress.

Mindfulness can help prevent depression

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depression mindfulness treatment

Mindfulness has its critics. Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, or MBCT was first developed by  Dr Jon Kabat-Zinn from the University of Massachusetts Medical School. MBCT has been embraced by hundreds of thousands of people around the world, but some people are unconvinced. However, a new study published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry found that MBCT can help people manage depression and prevent relapses. The team, led by the University of Oxford, conducted the largest meta-analysis on the impact of mindfulness on depression.

MBCT is used to help people suffering from depression repel the thoughts and feelings they associate with the illness. This treatment generally includes guided mindfulness practices, group discussion and cognitive behavioural exercises.

Using anonymous data from nine trials involving 1,258 participants, researchers found that 38 percent of those who received MBCT experienced a depressive relapse. However, nearly half — 49 percent — of patients who didn’t receive MBCT relapsed. Age, sex and level of education had no significant influence on the therapy’s performance.

Mindfulness can work alongside medication

The researchers also looked at how MBCT worked in conjunction with anti-depressants. They wanted to know if using mindfulness alongside medication was more successful than medication alone. They found that patients who received MBCT along with anti-depressants were less likely to experience a depressive relapse than those who were only receiving medication.

Lead author of the study, Willem Kuyken, a professor of clinical psychology at the Oxford Mindfulness Centre, commented: “While MBCT is not a panacea, it does clearly offer those with a substantial history of depression a new approach to learning skills to stay well in the long-term. It offers people a safe and empowering treatment choice alongside other mainstay approaches such as cognitive-behavioural therapy and maintenance antidepressants. We need to do more research, however, to get recovery rates closer to 100 per cent and to help prevent the first onset of depression, earlier in life. These are programmes of work we are pursuing at the University of Oxford and with our collaborators around the world.”

“I’ll do it later…” Why we procrastinate

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If you have a tendency to put things off, you’re not alone. It has been estimated that around 20 percent of adults procrastinate, and around half of all students do. Unfortunately procrastination has negative effects. These include poorer performance and increased stress, as well as mental and physical health impacts.

People procrastinate for different reasons. Here we look at the most common ones, and what you can do to correct your behaviour.

Lack of self-compassion

People who lack self-compassion tend to be more stressed when they are performing tasks. If this is you, try being kinder to yourself. Accept that you are human, with regular human flaws. Try to be optimistic about your success instead of pessimistic that you’ll fail.

Bad influence

If your parents, siblings or role models were procrastinators, chances are you’ll be one too. You can ameliorate this by reminding yourself of the negative consequences of putting things off. Try and find a new role model — ideally someone who is a go-getter type.

Fear of failure

If you think you don’t know how to do something, or worry you’ll do it badly, you’ll put it off. If help is available, you should ask for it. If not, remind yourself that you can learn as you go and that it is better to try and see what happens; you defeat yourself by not trying at all.

Bias

Certain things you just don’t like doing. Maybe you think you’re bad at a certain task, or you’ve seen other people struggling to perform it. Remind yourself that this is bias and that doing the task is an opportunity to challenge yourself and overcome you bias.

Time management

If you tend to underestimate how long something will take you to do, it can knock your feelings of competency. Make a habit of starting tasks early and giving yourself more time than you think you need. This will compensate for time management issues — and if you finish early, reward yourself!

Short term thinking

If you are focused on immediate gains, instead of long-term ones, you may display what’s known as “short range hedonism.” Focusing on short term rewards means you are less likely to persevere when things get tough. Try reminding yourself of future goals and gains, and tell yourself not to place so much emphasis on the frustrations of the present. Don’t forget to use the three-minute breathing technique to calm and centre yourself.

Perfectionism

Sometimes you let perfection be the enemy of the good. A perfectionist attitude may keep you from getting started because in your mind, if you haven’t done something yet, you haven’t messed it up either. Try to emphasis the importance of completing tasks in a timely fashion. Task completion is almost always going to be more helpful to you than perfectionism.

Depression or anxiety

Depression, anxiety and other mental health conditions can cause you to delay getting started. If you have mental health problems, or suspect that you do, see a therapist for proper treatment.

Discomfort

Most of us try and avoid discomfort, so if you don’t feel comfortable doing something, you’ll put it off. Like doing your taxes, let’s say. Try challenging your beliefs about tolerating discomfort. Focus on the long-term rewards instead. Remind yourself that getting out of your comfort zone is an opportunity for growth, and reward yourself for completing each uncomfortable task.

Will more sex make your relationship happier?

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You would think having lots of sex would make couples happier. After all that seems like common sense. If your relationship is going well, you’re more inclined to have sex; and if you are having plenty of sex, well then, your relationship must be going well.

Interesting enough, newlyweds who have a lot of sex don’t report being more satisfied than those who have sex less often. But the key word here is “report.” New research published in Psychological Science has found that their automatic behavioural responses don’t align with this.

According to Lindsey L. Hicks of Florida State University who lead the research, plenty of sex does affect how partners feel about each other.

“We found that the frequency with which couples have sex has no influence on whether or not they report being happy with their relationship, but their sexual frequency does influence their more spontaneous, automatic, gut-level feelings about their partners,” Hicks explains.

“This is important in light of research from my colleagues demonstrating that these automatic attitudes ultimately predict whether couples end up becoming dissatisfied with their relationship.”

Frequent sex offers many benefits from an evolutionary perspective. It makes it more likely that children will be conceived and it helps bond partners, which is certainly ideal for child-rearing. However, when scientists ask couples about their sex lives and relationship satisfaction, they generally don’t find a correlation between the two. It may well be because people are often uncomfortable discussing their sex lives — particularly with curious researchers!

“We thought these inconsistencies may stem from the influence of deliberate reasoning and biased beliefs regarding the sometimes taboo topic of sex,” says Hicks.

Obviously our gut-level reactions don’t require deliberation — that’s why they are called gut feelings. Hicks and her team hypothesised that gut feelings may be influenced by implicit perceptions and associations that we’re not consciously aware of. To test this, they decided to assess relationship satisfaction using self-reporting surveys and automatic behavioural measures.

In their study, a total of 216 newlyweds completed a questionnaire about their relationship; the extent they agreed with statements such as “we have a good marriage”; and their overall feelings towards their partner and their marriage. The researchers also asked couples to estimate how many times they had had sex in the previous four months.

After that they completed a computer classification task. Participants looked a computer screen, words appeared, and they had to decide whether the word was positive or negative. However, before a word appeared, a picture of their partner flashed onscreen for 300 milliseconds.

The thinking behind this was that participants’ response times would indicate how strongly the word and partner were associated at an automatic level — the faster the response time, the stronger the association between the word and the partner. If the participants took more time to respond to negative words than positive words, it would suggest that the partner’s picture was associated with implicit positive feelings.

Like other researchers before them, Hicks and her team found no association between how often a couple had sex and their self-reported levels of happiness. However, the automatic behavioural responses told a different story. Frequency of sex was correlated with positive implicit gut feelings about their partners. The more sex a couple had, the more strongly they associated their partners with positive attributes. And what’s more, it was the same for men and women.

“Our findings suggest that we’re capturing different types of evaluations when we measure explicit and automatic evaluations of a partner or relationship,” says Hicks. “Deep down, some people feel unhappy with their partner but they don’t readily admit it to us, or perhaps even themselves.”

Of course, as Hicks and her team noted, asking couples to remember who often they have sex is an imprecise measure, and it is not yet clear if the findings are applicable to all couples or just newlyweds like the couples they studied. However, the findings are certainly interesting.

“These studies illustrate that some of our experiences, which can be either positive or negative, affect our relationship evaluations whether we know it or not,” Hicks concludes.