54. The secret behavioural prompts brands use to influence your choices | Raphy March

31:01Because you spilt this water, you think? Because I'd spilt this water. The pratfall was the trick. Pratfall, yes. There were a range of other techniques and unusual requests from me. She was absolutely wonderful. And we did actually have a conversation with her afterwards to explain what we'd been doing. But she got high marks for customer attentiveness. She was absolutely incredible. I hope a good tip. Yes, absolutely. So one of your other pieces of advice was how to get a pay rise. I'm often asked to sort of opine on that what's your take on how to get a pay rise so I think one of the key well there's a couple of things that you can do I guess in the in the preparation and build up to the conversation and then during the conversation itself so one of the things I feel like all of my references around coffee perhaps but when you meet someone new or when you are talking with someone that you've, I guess, known for a long time, if you have a warm drink in your hands, you actually feel more positively towards the person that you're talking to.

32:06So you attribute the warmth of that drink to the warmth of the other person. So you bring your boss a coffee, do you? Yes. That's clever, isn't it? You kick off that meeting with a drink for the other person. Alarm, alarm bell, yeah. Never bring me a coffee normally. What's going to happen next? Then go on, then what do you do? So one of the other things that you can do, I guess, is instead of talking about all of the things that you have done to justify your reason for a pay rise, you can, again, use the physical attributes of other things to demonstrate it. So one of the things that I did is I brought in the new brochures that I had just created and a heavy stack of them so that when they hit the table, you could almost hear the weight and effort that had gone into them that subconsciously communicated.

32:57Physical manifestation of all the work you had done. Your contribution was there right in front of them. It's actually something that I did for the first time when I was at university, where my dissertation, when I printed it out, I printed it out on a thicker paper. So it had a heavier GSM. And what that says is this is higher quality because it's thicker. And I also used a very specific font that when you use that type of font, people judge the writing to be more intelligent. But this was your behavioural science, your degree in psychology. Yes. I mean, surely the examiner knows these tricks.

33:38Did it work? Did it work? It did work. Did you get a first-class degree? I definitely got a first for that piece of work. So anyone listening, paper, print and type. Have a dig around. What sort of font should we be looking out for? To look intelligent. It was a particular, I think it was one of the Baskerville fonts. Interestingly, though, one of the things that can be most useful is to sometimes use a more simple font. So you might use a serif font for your title that taps into this idea of intelligence. But then if you use a some serif font where it's not got all the legs and feet, because it's easier to read, people think that you are communicating better.

34:25so it can work both ways well you are i mean practically yeah so that's very so if you're in in a sales job and you want to be successful you're meeting customers are there any sort of tips from this behavioral science world that you would give a salesperson yes so why don't i can bring it to life maybe in a client example so um we do a lot of work with sky and um one of the areas that we work in most is within their contact centers and they have a wonderful team of people who almost act as their last line of defense so if a customer has decided that they don't want Sky anymore then they can call up and say please cancel this for me yes obviously it's in Sky's best interest to try and have a quality conversation with the customer at that point to understand why they might be cancelling so that they can perhaps offer them something that might be more suitable for the customer what's really interesting is we've got um martin lewis uh obviously you know sharing all this really high quality advice yes well-known martin lewis well-known good advice yeah and i i love martin lewis i think he's fantastic but one of the i guess pieces of advice he'd given to sky customers was um keep calling up because you'll always get a better offer and that's not actually the case that's not necessarily what's happening on the on the other Oh, so he'd been sort of giving a few tips to people.

35:53Yes. So these customers were calling up. So you were getting a lot of calls at this point. Lots and lots of calls and lots of unhappy customers because the mechanics that he'd suggested weren't necessarily aligned with what was going on on the other side of the call. What often happens is because the customer is calling up trying to get a discount, that's what they're really focused on. And Sky's advisors fell into this trap of always just trying to find the best discount, but they are limited in the number that they have that they can give customers. So they have to make a call on what type of discount they're giving to what customer.

36:28Because they're so focused on discounts, they're not actually listening to what the customer needs. So they're just scrolling through their screen, passively listening to that customer instead of actually taking in what they're saying. So what we did is, again, we listened to thousands of different calls from these customers to identify what are the points of psychological friction. One of the points that came up time and time again is that there was this missed opportunity to communicate the value of Sky. And it could be their broadband, it could be mobile, it could be TV. But it's because they were really focused on discounts.

37:04So we created a playbook for the advisors to use. And I can show a couple of examples of the techniques that we put in. But this was accompanied by some behavioral science training, because what we wanted to do It wasn't just say, go and say this to the customer. We wanted them to understand the why that sits behind it and the science that is underpinning what their customers are thinking and why they're making those decisions. So it was about equipping them with this toolkit and knowledge of behavioural biases instead. So one of the things we hear time and time again in phone conversations, what we typically hear is you might call up and the advisor will say, hello, you're through to Rafi at Reid.

37:46how can I help you? And that customer will launch straight into whatever their problem is. And at some point, the advisor will have to reel them back in, ask them security information so they can actually help them. By that point, they might have forgotten what the problem is, and they go around in this circle. And if the advisor is talking to a customer who might be quite irate or emotionally charged, then they've missed this opportunity to share any sort of cues of authority at the start of the call. So one of the things we know psychologically that's important is there are these subconscious cues of authority that can change our perceptions.

38:25So for example, if you speak to a doctor that is wearing a lab coat and a stethoscope, we trust them more than a doctor that isn't wearing that. Or if a lawyer has certificates on the wall behind them, we trust them more than a lawyer that doesn't have certificates. So when we call up businesses like Sky, we are looking for these cues of authority that we are through to a person that can help us and what we changed the start of that conversation to instead was hello you're through to rafi i'm a customer loyalty specialist here at sky and may i start by taking your name please and then the customer would share that and they would go on to say how they can help them that they're in a specialist team and so on so what we did instead is we would highlight the title and that would be a cue of authority but we would also introduce this positive pause moment where instead of the customer launching into their issue, we would give them the opportunity to share their name.

39:17But that customer is getting less and less emotionally charged as we're slowly building authority. So the shift in dynamic changes on the call. And we know that by just using that one introduction that builds the authority of the advisor, the likelihood of retaining that customer is increased by 13%. So it's a small thing. That's a big difference. Small thing, because they're more likely to trust your recommendations later on in the call. And it just improves everyone's experience. Exactly. That is what it's all about. And they're less angry and the person working there has less aggro. Yes. Yeah.

39:51It's really important, especially in conversations, that we're not just necessarily thinking about the customer, but we're also thinking about the advisor as well, because they're going to have a very different experience. And that has a knock-on impact on the customer. And that's improved sales as a result. Yes, it has for Sky. And customer service and sales. Customer service and sales. So the NPS has increased and I believe the ROI for Sky is£12 million return for the investment. So that was worth calling Cowery for. It was. It was. So these cues of authority, I'm interested in them, are there others that you might share with us?

40:31Yeah, absolutely. It's been interesting for all of us to learn who are in business or in services. Yes. So it might be if you were sending out a letter or perhaps improving your website, it would be about displaying visual cues such as awards that you may have won. Let me try and think of some other good examples of cues of authority. So these would be sort of on the brand side of things. Yes. So that's more for brand. I think there are different types of cues that we can share with customers. Some of them might be more based around words and years of experience. So for example, since 2002, or it could be in the visual cues.

41:16So length of experience is considered psychologically quite good, isn't it? Yes. Yes. Showing that you've been doing it for a long time and you've been doing it well. So it might be trust pilot ratings or star ratings, for example. So those are worth sort of focusing on a bit. Yeah, absolutely. Right. And I think that if you can communicate it visually, as opposed to just saying it verbally or through a big block of text, that's even better because 50 % of our cortex is dedicated to visual processing so although what we're saying is important what we see is equally important and our brain finds it much much easier to process images than words so if you were to read a sentence it would take you 300 milliseconds to read it 400 milliseconds to understand it whereas it's just 13 milliseconds to understand an image so if you've got these visual cues or trust pilot or fascinating much easier so what a picture in a thousand words was the old saying wasn't it it's it's exactly that so it is yeah so using visual cues and visual signs of authority is really clever if you can build it into your brand yes do you do brand work for clients we do um so uh some of the things that we we do for our clients are around changing perceptions of brands.

42:36So it might be helping them to understand how do customers see their brand and is it aligned with what they want their brand essence to be. Yeah. What are people saying about this sort of thing? Yes, exactly. Or thinking about us. Yes. So how do you dig into that? So we use another one of our slightly unique testing methodologies to get there. So I don't know if you've, have you heard of an implicit response test before? No, go on. So this is, it's a test that has previously been used to measure things like subconscious bias. So it was developed by the amazing brainy people at Harvard. But essentially what they do is they get you to sort different phrases, words, images against different factors in a very short space of time.

43:21So what you might see is the brand logo appear in the center of the screen and you have to sort it against like or dislike. expensive value and that person must sort it within less than half a second and the reason for that is because if we wait longer our brain starts to justify the reason that we're doing it and we lose more of these subconscious responses so they have to respond in a short space of time and what we're looking for isn't necessarily just whether they agree or disagree it's how quickly they agree or disagree. So this is timed on a machine? Yes. So you call it the implicit response test?

44:02Implicit response test, yes. And so you use that to evaluate what people feel about brands, I suppose, is it? Yes. So we can see what their associations are. We can also test to see what might motivate them to use the brand or what might become a barrier. So has this surprised your clients when you've come back with the results? There's definitely... Or do people tend to have a good idea? I think that there are some unexpected responses sometimes, mainly because businesses have traditionally, I guess, lots of businesses have done research and they will interview their customers. They will survey customers.

44:41We've got data coming out of our ears in terms of what their customers are thinking and feeling and what they want. but because we're not tapping into more of these subconscious responses we're often hearing what people think they should be saying or think are important so I often talk about this value communication struggle where we ask customers what they think they will tell us typically one of three things it might be ease it might be convenience it might be cost but these are all really functional factors so what brands do is they focus on those things but then customers still don't see value so we go around the loop again and we have to ask customers what the implicit response test does is it allows us to see um what people are maybe thinking more explicitly so those functional factors are still important but actually there's these more emotional factors that are better indicators of value and loyalty.

45:39So it might be things like hair or magic moments. It might be around how easy we've made a process for them to do. So once we start to combine these two things, then actually you get a much richer picture of how people perceive that brand and what would make them engage. So any big surprises come out of this for any customers? You had to sort of tell them to sit down and... prepare for some feedback. I'm trying to think of some good ones. One of the ones that I don't think surprised me, but probably wasn't what the client wanted to hear, was a piece of work that we did for Tesco around uncovering what value meant for their customers.

46:24And we used all of these techniques to help us uncover what was important to their customers. And we mapped it against their current experience. and as you'll know with Tesco, they focused incredibly hard on all of their club card pricing and discounts. So tapping into these functional factors around how can I get the best deal, but there was a glaring hole on the other side of it that were these more emotional factors that meant people were less likely to use club card and made it easier for them to compare a Tesco with a Sainsbury's or an Aldi, for example. So it was really useful to identify the opportunities that they could use to differentiate themselves.

47:09So what did you do with that information? How did they follow that up? So we created a framework for Tesco, which is built on probably about 100 different principles of behavioral science that they can then apply across their digital space, across their comms, the physical in-store, but also their conversations. So it's this toolkit that is used across Tesco as a business to try and close the gap between just having the functional factors that make the day-to-day experience and actually elevate it into this more emotional space. So Rafi, you've now got AI to play with in this space as well. Have you started using that and in what way have you have?

48:01We have. So AI, I think, I mean, it's growing incredibly quickly. And we have seen an impact on our business in the last year, just in terms of the ways that people are using it. And I guess, perhaps a misalignment with where maybe more of the behavioral principles come into play. So we are currently in the process of going through a repositioning. We're launching the new branding in a couple of weeks' time, which is very exciting. But we are... A new branding for your business? A new branding for Cowrie, yes. Still going to be called Cowrie, though, is it? Still Cowrie. All right. Still a consultancy.

48:44But we are focusing more on how we can create behavioral intelligence for our clients. So I mentioned that we work a lot in contact centers. So you're moving from behavioral science to behavioral intelligence? Yes. We are still human-centered, but now powered by AI. So we are helping clients in two ways. One is we are where they're already using AI. We're helping them to make sure that it is based on humans and how humans make decisions. but we are also incorporating AI into our services and products to help. Behavioural science is excellent at understanding how people think and make decisions, but what AI and data allows us to do is start to predict and look forward at what people will do and do that at scale.

49:33So I'm really excited about AI and the impact that it's going to have on, well, everything, but especially the behavioural science space. when you were talking about people's expressions and faces i mean ai can read that too can't it yes yes it can what do you think about that is that being applied or do you think it should be or it it is being applied and um yes definitely i think a couple of years ago um we we had looked into using ai for this already because our our team are amazing at what they do with facial expression analysis, but it is a very manual process and it is timely. Back then, the algorithms weren't as accurate yet.

50:17So it was very difficult to just rely on AI to help us using that as a research technique. It has progressed immensely since that point. So very fast then? Very quickly and to a much greater degree of accuracy. So we are now using that to complement the tools that we have as well. So complimenting, not replacing. Not replacing, no. And so what do you think about the use of that in some interview situations? I think it can be brilliant. So there are so many different ways that we can use AI in interviews. We can use it, again, to compliment a human interviewer and we can use it to measure facial expressions.

51:00We can also use it to create prompts that delve deeper into certain topics. So based on the live conversation that's happening, we can create the right questions that allow us to access even more information. So AI is kind of listening and then things, ask this. So I could have this as an assistant right now. You wouldn't have to think of any questions. No, it's a bit complimenting though. Yes. But I worry about it replacing. Yes, I agree. I've seen rejecting someone because of an algorithm that said their facial expression was unsympathetic. Exactly. And I feel like that's probably quite topical from a recruitment perspective.

51:46I think it is, yeah. Yeah. It's becoming more and more topical, I hear it, more and more that people have to do computerized interviews and then are not progressed, which makes me anxious. It does. But I think there's a time and a place for AI-led interviews. Say, for example, to go back to one of the topics I mentioned earlier, if we're talking about something within health that might be an uncomfortable topic for people to express, it's often easier to talk to a machine. Sure, that's a good application. So there are positive examples, but I also think that it needs to be mediated by people and also trained by people to get there.

52:24So what have you learned about sort of, I mean, you're obviously using AI and you're excited by it, which I think is good because it's going to be around. So that's what I'll be making the most of it. How do you see it sort of fitting? It's obviously very scalable alongside sort of human empathy. How do you make the two sort of marry? I think that behavioral science and human influence has a massive role to play in the way that we use AI going forward. And I think AI has, as you said, it has progressed incredibly quickly, but I don't think that the human element has been considered enough at this point.

53:06And in the past few weeks, we've seen lots of big AI businesses starting to recruit quite quickly for more behavioural scientists or people that can help inform it. And I personally think they've realized that this is a bit of a I think I think Achilles heel. Yes. Well, there's there's been the stuff in the news recently around, you know, chat GPT acting as a therapist or, you know, acting as a person in a relationship for for another human. And at this point, with the data that it's trained on, I don't think that that's ethical, an ethical use of it. And it's leading some really negative consequences.

53:47So I don't think that businesses have necessarily come to this conclusion by themselves and seen the importance. I think that things have unfortunately happened that have led to this need for it. And I think that we can't just be having one behavioural scientist in an AI company. I think there needs to be a whole team of people who can help train and understand the way that people are making decisions and feed that in. So any young people listening, becoming a behavioural scientist could be a good job for the future. Yes. Because all of these AI applications, it sounds like, will need some of this input.

54:23Absolutely. I mean, we've got behavioural data scientists in our team that are, I guess, the perfect intersection of the two. So they've got an understanding of behaviour and they're using data science to understand that at scale. So I think it's an excellent area to get involved in. So this is a practical step that businesses using AI should be taking. Yes. They're taking their business forward. So I'm interested, as we get towards the end of our conversation, where you see your business going, Kauri, how you hope to develop and grow it? It's a good question. And I guess off the back of all the work that we're doing at the moment, I hope that Kauri helps influence the AI space.

55:05And I hope that we help our clients use AI in a more responsible way. But ultimately, I think what will happen is we're going to be able to use behavioural science to reach a much larger population of people and to influence behaviour at a much greater scale to these much larger transformation programmes as opposed to the nudges that we saw in behavioural science. Looking around, you know, both sort of public life and business challenges, what sort of issues would you really like to get stuck into? Oh my gosh, well, there's the brands every day that just drive me insane. Who would you like to ring you up and say, please come and give us a hand?

55:50Or why not? Share, share. And then maybe you get a call. I mean, I'm interested because you obviously have quite a lot of, you're obviously thinking about this a lot and you think, well, I could change that. Or we could change that with a few interventions. What sort of, you strike me as someone who might feel frustrated by things not working so well. I do have a little bit of that. And I think once you understand behavioral science or you're open to behavioral science, you start to see it. That's what I'm wondering, you know, once you know about it. I think for me, it's the large tech companies that probably would benefit from it most.

56:28It's the people that are playing with AI tools that are most in need of it that I would like to fix. But saying that, I mean, it's everything from the way kitchens are designed. It's the handles on doors that you think they're a push and they're a pull. There are so many daily things in people's lives that could be easily improved. I think the people that have maybe been doing it for the longest that are unaware of it are the people that are within advertising because they're trying to tap into these more emotional responses. But I also think that there is so much further that they could potentially push things to tap into more of these subconscious biases that we have.

57:08So more behaviourally intelligent advertising, I think, would be fascinating. Well, that sounds like an interesting niche. More behaviourally intelligent advertising. So that would be advertising that makes people feel more strongly about things, is it? A lot of the players within the distinctiveness space are focused on more around how your brand might stand out against other brands. What our tool looks at are three different levers. One is how distinct it is and how different. One is how memorable it is. But the other one is the different types of emotions that it's driving. and you need all three to make sure that you are standing out against competitors and you're front of mind when it comes to choices.

57:55And what sort of emotions do you want to be driving? Lots of people think that it is exclusively happy emotions, but that's interestingly not the case. What you actually want is a more complex set of emotions where you can use happy emotions like humour to place people in a relaxed state, but then there might be some more complicated emotions. like guilt or shame or disgust that when used abstractly like that probably don't seem that positive but actually it gets people to question themselves and what they're doing and it allows them to explore things that they maybe wouldn't have before so I think the more complex emotional set you can get the more memorable things become and then the more it stands out against other brands.

58:42So it's an important factor to consider. And that's where you see yourself helping in terms of that formulation. So we can measure how people score across those factors. And then we've got the world's largest team of neuro designers who can create new experiences based on how our brain processes sensory information. So we can then redesign it to score higher across those different factors so do you do you work alongside advertising professionals then to do that or is it yes yes so um we'll often partner with vccp to do that um or we might partner with um our clients uh preferred agency that they're they're using at that time but what we will do is we will create conceptual designs of how the behavioral science comes to life and we will explain the science that sits behind it, that why factor, and then we can partner with them to actually embed it and bring it to life.

59:41Because in previous conversations on the podcast, we've talked about marketing and people having strong feelings about brands. And it's often because they've had a bad experience in the past. So how do you turn that around? So when people have tried a brand... Yeah, something's not gone well. Something's not gone well. Or had a bad experience. there seems to be a love-hate thing going on. Yes. Is it possible to convert hate to love, I suppose, in that situation? It is. And actually, I was doing some research around this the other day, because I think it aligns really closely with trust of a brand.

1:00:18And when something goes wrong, there's often a tendency for businesses to want to sweep it under the carpet. So say, for example, they've had a data leak, and they might not want to address it publicly. but actually one of the best opportunities to build trust is when something has gone wrong and you handle that situation well and that's how to get people back on side so there's a lot of psychology around constructing the perfect apology and when to apologize perfect apology perfect apology there is such a thing as a perfect apology that would be very useful for everyone to know what is a perfect apology it's um it's it's constructed of lots of different things but one is around having a genuine apology where you acknowledge the thing that you have done and saying sorry for it i think sorry gets missed off a lot there's a tendency well that's kind of key in apology isn't it it's the it's the core part of the apology but you'd be surprised so you have to mean it it's genuine it has to say sorry it does and uh what we often talk about is not necessarily um we try and shift conversations from being more empathetic to being more compassionate where we're not necessarily placing ourselves in the customer's shoes and taking on their emotional burden what we're trying to do instead is acknowledge the emotional response that we might have caused and then signposting them to the things that we can directly do to resolve it for them so there's this three-step process where it's a genuine apology an acknowledgement of the emotions and the impact and then what you're doing to to rectify that in that moment and And that's essentially what leads to the best, most felt apology.

1:02:05But you have to do something about it, ultimately. You can't just sweep it under the carpet. It doesn't work to just brush it under. No. I mean, I've often thought when something goes wrong, it's an opportunity to build a relationship, although it might be painful. Yes. I mean, I've seen that in my own career. We've had things go wrong and ultimately got to know the customer better when we've sought to fix it. Yeah. It's better to be perceived as trustworthy rather than just be completely opaque and to have no transparency around what might have happened. Right. Oh, that's really useful to know.

1:02:39Are there any other sort of tools like that that you would be? Well, within the trust space, one of the things we often talk about is something known as the trust equation. Right. Where if you, when you speak to a customer for the first time, or say if you were even speaking to a recruiter for the first time, you want people to trust you. But during that first interaction, it's very rare that that person would say, I trust them. It's more likely they'd say they seem trustworthy. So there are different factors that can influence how trustworthy you might seem. so um some of the things are around um credibility and having those cues of authority that we talked about um one is consistency so are you doing what you said you were going to do are you um doing it time and time again um and the other one is rely reliability um but all of that is underpinned by your uh ego so um if you are um if you are perceived to be doing things for yourself as opposed to others, then actually it dramatically decreases your perceived trustworthiness.

1:03:48So if you think about, I won't delve into it in too much detail, but if you think about the world of politicians, there are some people that will come across as more trustworthy than others because they've built up their credibility as a politician. They're consistent in the things that they're saying and actually they are doing it for the people. Whereas there are other politicians, without mentioning any names, who might have quite large egos and are very much doing things for themselves. So it dramatically affects the way they're perceived. I wonder if people listening are thinking of the same people.

1:04:21It depends on your politics, I guess. I'm not touching that. It's not a group that you necessarily gravitate towards for trustworthiness. But I see what you mean. Yes. But I mean, it all plays into the AI again. so um ai obviously is is still learning and um we might be there was something i typed in the other day and uh it was i was almost testing it to see what it said and it gave me a completely ludicrous answer and i tried to correct it and say well no it's this and it was like oh of course thank you for for correcting me but that was a good apology it was a lovely apology i felt seen i felt heard but I still was slightly concerned that it got it wrong.

1:05:07Yeah. So this is a whole new world we're navigating, isn't it? It is. With these new technologies. But you seem fairly optimistic. Is that fair? I am. I mean, I always think that there is a healthy level of fear that comes with new technology and growth, but I also think that there is a world of opportunity and I like to be optimistic in my view of humanity and there are so many negative ways that this new technology could be used, but there are also so many positive ways and it's already being applied and I think it's really wonderful and exciting. Well, that's fantastic. I think that's a really good place to conclude our conversation.

1:05:48Thanks so much, Rafi, for coming in to talk to you. I always end with two questions. They're the same two questions for everybody. And the first question is, what gets you up on a Monday morning? On a Monday morning, apart from the coffee, I actually like to think it's the research that we do. I love uncovering something new that might be slightly counterintuitive or we like to call it uncommon sense a lot of the time. But being able to apply those in real world situations that genuinely improve people's lives and experiences, that's for me. I love my job. That's very good. I'm very pleased to hear that.

1:06:32So it seems like a sort of curiosity that gets you up. It is. Uncommon sense. Uncommon sense. Learning new things. That's what drives me. Fantastic. And my last question is, where do you see yourself in five years' time? Five years' time, I would love for – I'd love to still be at Cowrie. I would love for us to be leading globally. we're already I think the leading behavioral science consultancy in the private sector in the UK but I would love for us to be global and continuing to be powered by AI to get there so I think it's an exploration of the things that we're just starting out on now and I would like to see them fully formed and thriving well I wish you every success with that I'd like to see that too and maybe you'll come back and talk to me I would love that thank you thanks so much for coming in to talk to you.

1:07:25Thank you. Thank you, Rafi, for joining me on All About Business. I'm your host, James Reid, Chairman and CEO of Reid, a family-run recruitment and philanthropy company. If you'd like to find out more about Reid, Rafi, and Kauri Consulting, all links are in the show notes. See you next time.