eBusiness Weekly
Robert Gonye
The last year has changed many habits during the pandemic, from how we have business meetings to how to go grocery shopping and I am not the only one who has changed — many have altered so many routines.
History has a way to teach humans, and we can learn from the pandemic the rulebooks for changing your customer habits because the majority of customer behaviour is routine.
So . . . what is a habit?
In its most general terms, a habit is a learned predisposition to react in a certain way based on a particular set of cues.
Habits dwell in this distinction between our involuntary, instinctive mind and our planned, rational mind. The instinctive part of your brain is continually looking for ways to help, to make things easier.
When you engage in repetitive behaviour, then that automatic part of your brain starts to recognise it.
When the system recognises that you are engaging in an activity where that repetitive behaviour occurs, it will automatically pull up memories and routines to make it easy for you to do what you have in the past.
Once you repeat this cycle a couple of times, you have a habit.
Taking a shower in the morning, jogging after work to choosing the same brand of toothpaste while grocery shopping are all habits formed physically and subconsciously.
Likewise with bad habits often form subconsciously. Once at my former employment which was next to a kiosk store, every day at 3 pm I would go and purchase the vending machine and buy a cookie.
It didn’t take long either; the intuitive part of our brain responds quickly to sugar. Virtuous habits, like the early morning jog, may not provide any automatic rewards to our intuitive minds and therefore are harder to form and easier to break.
Sugar, as you might already know, is easy to start and hard to break.
He rules for changing customer habits
When you manage customer behaviour in a Customer Experience, customer buying habits are essential to understand, from the reasons they engage in habitual behaviour to the rewards they receive.
This understanding is crucial if you need to change customer habits.
Rule #1: Understand your customer habits
There is a trigger or Cue first, and then a behaviour occurs in Response, followed by a Reward. The Cue was arriving at 3 pm. The Response was to buy a candy bar from the kiosk. The Reward was the sugar rush goodness, and the reported “pick me up” he felt for the rest of the afternoon.
2: Understanding customer triggers
Ideally, the purpose of this article newsletter is to get customers to form habits to purchase your products and services.
To change habits, you should understand the trigger. Before we checked into flights on our phones 24 hours before the flight, we queued up in the airport check-in lines.
One day, when I was queuing up, I saw a self-check-in service. I ignored them and got in line. However, Air France had employees combing the queue, and one of them convinced me to walk over with him and try self-check-in.
I did, and then I never lined up in the check-in line again.
They changed my habit. My trigger was entering the airport and going to the line. However, Air France physically disrupted my motivation by walking me to the self-service and trying self-check-in to help form a new behaviour and reward.
It is vital to determine what those triggers are when you want to change habits. The pandemic has already started the disruption.
We had a wave of stimulus resets when the pandemic started. We’re going to have another one as we come out of it and form new routines.
Organisations might assume that everyone’s going to go back to their old habits. But they won’t, and this moment is a massive opportunity for us to install a new pattern or continue with a routine we want our customers to have.
So, think about triggers because they are your entry point and where you have the opportunity.
My advice for identifying triggers is to think about the environment that causes automatic behaviour. Where they are and what are they doing? Those are all the things that could serve as triggers.
Then, consider what you want customers to do. How could the environment activate that behaviour, and what things in the atmosphere could you change?
3: Distract your customer from their existing habit
If you’re changing a customer’s habit, you’ve got to distract them. You’ve got to get in there somehow and change it.
When people change lifestyles for some reason — like getting married or having a baby, or going on vacation — there is an opportunity to change habits.
Now, if you want them to keep doing what they are doing, you need to get their attention in the new pattern and insert yourself in there to keep them coming back to you.
However, if you want to change their behaviour, to keep them from habitually buying from the competition, you might be able to use this time to change their habit to purchase from you instead.
One of the methods you see in grocery stores is free samples. The representative can distract customers from their usual patterns, disrupt triggers, and get customers’ attention by giving them a taste.
Organisations need to determine how they can interrupt the habit from the customer’s perspective.
4: Reinforce new habits with rewards
Habitual rewards work best when they are in-built, automatic rewards. When you do something that is appealing to your untaught system, then that reward reinforces the behaviour.
If it’s an abstract reward, like retirement savings, where the reward is off in the distant future, that is difficult to form because there is no intuitive reward for that.
When getting customers to form habits, determine what automatic reward you can use to reinforce the new behaviour.
5: Measure the difference
There’s no point in doing all this stuff unless you’re going to get the results you want.
The only way you’re going to know what your results are is by measurement. Ensure that you measure customer habits before the changes, too, so you can check the difference.
Like everything else in behavioural science, changing customer habits cannot be a one-and-done solution. It requires measurement, refinement, and knowing what’s going on in as close to real-time as you can manage.
As powerful as these ideas are and as enthusiastic as we are about them, people should remember that habits are not the appropriate framework for understanding all customer behaviours.
We can all get excited about some theory and try to force-fit it onto every customer situation, however, it won’t fit in every case.
Disclaimer: The views given herein are intended solely for information purposes, they are guidelines and suggestions but are in no way guaranteed.
Robert Gonye is a business growth expert and influencer. He writes in his personal capacity.
