A lively and entertaining session, from Colin Shaw, CEO of Beyond Philosophy, kicking off with a 'spot the gorilla' film clip - the issue being we spend so much time obsessing over detail that we can miss the big things. That's when the silly things can creep in, in times like this, and before you know here you are..charging 'bad profits'!

He also told the story of the racing driver, who when interviewed, was asked 'when you saw the accident, did you slow down?' To which he replied, no i didn't, I knew everyone else would slow down so I speeded up!

He asked, what is the experience we are trying to deliver? Most companies don't know! We need to step back and recognise that customers are human beings, and driven by emotions, and are not transactions to be processed!

So, what are the emotions we are trying to evoke in our customers? Most customer experiences today are NOT deliberate or thought through, they are consequences of many decisions the organsation has taken, So, they can come about by accident. So, is our customer experience deliberate?

Colin told a story about something my own company, Aviva, did, in the General Insurance field, a couple of years ago. There are lots of subconscious signals that companies give to customers but if you ask them to articulate them, they may not be able to do so but which do have an impact on the customers. Like pens on chains in banks!

So, we need to find ways to surface the subconscious, In the case study, a car was crashed, and then Colin's team had to go through the whole claims process. Little things then started to happen..... the first question the contact centre asked was, what is your policy number, and of course they did not know, as he was not at home! When the recovery vehicle arrived, the customer was told, we have to take you home, but the customer said I would rather be taken 5 miles down the road to my office than 100 miles to my home, but told, no we can't do that, we need to take you home, thats what the policy says!

The point is, there is an emotional journey that customers go through as well as a 'process' or physical or rational thing.

We then switched to audience voting, based on how we felt during a story Colin told us about his airline experience at the airport, involving coaches to different airports, fighting for places on the coach, having to load own luggage into coach, being counted in "there are 31 of THEM", queuing, only to be told you are in the wrong queue.

So, a very entertaining presentation, that also illustrated to me the power of stories - I guess quite a few of us will remember Colin's terrible airport experience for some time, and who knows, even tell others about it!

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