Mind Games: Using Psychology to Boost Customer Success

Speaker A: Hey, cs, uh, psychos. Rachel Provan here. And on today's episode, I'm actually going to be going over parts of a workshop that I did recently on Invisible Influence, how to Use Psychology and Behavioral Science in Customer Success. So I did that at the Zero in conference, which is the Churn Zero conference. I highly recommend it. It's always really cool content and this session was very popular, went over really well. Brag, brag, brag. But I wanted to make sure you got a chance to hear it even if you weren't able to be there live. This won't have all the exercises and group things that we did there, but I think the information is still really fun and really useful. So we're going to be going into how people make decisions, why those decisions aren't logical, and how you can use that information to, you know, to kind of use it to your advantage in an ethical way. That's all coming up next, right here on Psychology of Customer Success. Stay tuned. Humans don't think or behave like computers. You can't just run a command and get them to do what you want them to do. So why are you still basing your CS strategy based solely on logic? I'm Rachel Provan, CS leadership coach, award winning CS strategist and, um, certified psych nerd. I teach CS leaders how to build and scale world class CS departments using a combination of strategy, leadership and mindset using my secret weapon, psychology. Come join me every Wednesday for Psychology of Customer Success where we'll dive into why people do the things they do, what motivates them, and the effect that has on your CS strategy, team dynamics and executive presence. Make sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts and make sure to share it with your CS bestie. Talk soon. M. And here's to your success. Okay, welcome back. So, interestingly, a little Easter egg for you. Invisible Influence was the original name of this podcast because I knew it was going to be about using psychology and customer success and how that was going to involve influence, cognitive biases, everything I'm going to talk about today. But I was worried people wouldn't be able to find it when they were looking up customer success podcasts. So I decided to go a little more obvious with it. But this presentation was called An Invisible Influence Using Psychology and Customer Success. And that was the general idea of why I started this podcast, what really interested me. So the point of it today will be to understand why people don't make decisions logically, understand how they do make decisions, and uh, develop strategies to ethically influence customer behavior. As I've talked about on other episodes, one of the biggest issues with customer success and getting buy in for it is that people don't really understand what we do. It seems like it should be simple. The customer wanted the product, they bought the product, we showed them how to use the product success. Right? Like, shouldn't that just do it? Well, no, that doesn't do it because you're dealing with humans, not computers. And if this sounds like the opening to this, all these thoughts are where that was based on, we're going to be digging deeper into them. Let's look a little more into how humans don't work like computers. Computers are logical, right? Everything is based on yes or no ones and zeros, binary code. It is predictable. If you print one page, one document, you're going to get that same document out the same time. If you do a command in a computer, it's always going to result in the same thing. Not the case with humans. Computers are also completely fact based. They don't have opinions. Humans, on the other hand, are pretty much completely unpredictable. We don't even fully understand how the brain works. Maybe we know 10%, and I'm giving you the 10% we do know because this is what we have to work with. There's so much that goes on in terms of hormones that influence our thoughts and behaviors, things that we've learned from our past nature, nurture. There's just so much that goes into it that makes us completely unpredictable. We all have hidden motivations. Computers thankfully do not. Even if it seems like it, even if Mercury is in retrograde or whatever you want to say, they don't have hidden motivations. We do. Whether we realize it or not. We're often operating out of a fear base because that's how we've survived this long. It's evolutionary psychology. And everything is filtered first through a lens, unconsciously, uh, of. Is what I'm about to do going to kill me? Do I know that for sure? Hidden motivations, emotional factors all come from that. And that makes us a lot less of a known quantity. Just because we want something and we've been shown how to do it once, that doesn't mean it's anywhere in our brain or that we are ever going to touch it again. We also have cognitive biases which we're going to be digging into and I always find really fascinating. It's important to understand something about human perception to get all of this. There are something called schemas, which are the building blocks of how we perceive the world. You go past a tree, you know it's a tree because you've been past a tree a lot of times. You don't have to think every time you go past it, oh, there's a tree. Because you already know what it is. You already know what it's about. It's not going to pose a threat. You see it, but you don't necessarily register it. Our whole way of perceiving the world is built on these building blocks so that we can create shortcuts and only focus on the things that we need to focus on. Because the human brain processes 11 million bits per second of information, while the conscious mind can only process 40 to 50 bits per second, which is just mind boggling to me to think about the fact that there are all sorts of things like whizzing around that I'm completely unconscious of. And I'll show you some examples of this in a little bit. But if you think about it, 11 million bits are flying around and we're seeing 40 to 50, and we're aware of 40 to 50. That's so crazy to me, but it's the truth. In order for us to be able to function in the world, working with these 40 to 50 bits of information per second, our brain has learned how to make shortcuts through those schemas. And, and those shortcuts are called heuristics. Just a fun little word if you ever hear it. It makes you sound smart to talk about it. But heuristics are just mental shortcuts. They're great. They allow us to function in the world, they make sense of everything for us. But as with anything, if you make shortcuts, it's not going to come out perfectly. And cognitive biases are sort of the predictable mistakes that happen because of all these shortcuts. People have found over time that most brains make these same mistakes because of the shortcuts that it has to make in order to make sense of the world and operate in it. Something that I've used to demonstrate this in the past is if you take a route that you take every day and drive past or walk past a house that you see every day, but it's not on your street, you go past it, but it's not on your street, you know it, it's there, but you haven't really paid attention to the details, unless you're someone with a photographic memory or you're highly visual. If I ask you right now, okay, what was the door of the House, three houses back that we drove past. You're probably not going to know. And you were just there. You go past it every day. You saw it, you didn't drive into it, right? But your brain saw it, processed it, and didn't make you aware of it because it's not necessary. It already knows what it is. It already knows it's not a threat. And that's how humans have existed this long in evolutionary psychology. It's the reason we don't like change, why people are resistant, why any new thing is always gonna be just a teeny bit scary to our brains. Cause it's like, uh, oh, haven't seen this before. Don't know that it won't kill me. And that is how our brains set us up for survival. It doesn't really understand that we're not still living in a situation where a lion's going to come around the corner so it can overreact a little bit. But because we know that house with that door was not relevant to our everyday experience, it's registered and then immediately dumped out of our brain because we don't need that information. It's not relevant. Your brain's just trying to give you the relevant information, but you can try that on yourself. It's kind of fun. So we're going to be talking a little bit about the triad of behavioral science. And what that is, is behavioral psychology, which we're going to start with next. You know, how do people behave and why? Behavioral economics, which is how this behavioral psychology applies to economics, to how people spend money, to how they value things. Little relevant for us, and then the principles of influence. So that's how you can change what someone does, change someone's decision making. And again, it's important to use your ethics in this, because there's a real difference between influence and manipulation. Both are really hard. So I'm not that worried that you're going to go off and start immediately manipulating people. But we'll get into the ethics of all of it. We're going to start with behavioral psychology again. Heuristics are mental shortcuts. These shortcuts create cognitive biases. So I'm going to jump into what a few of those cognitive biases are that we run into all the time. There's a lot of them. There's like over a hundred. But confirmation bias is one that you may have heard before. It's where we unconsciously, we seek out information that we agree with that backs up our worldview. If we see something outside of that one of two things will happen. We either won't register it at all. That happens all the time. There are plenty of things that you are not registering, but. Or we'll see it and we'll either think like, how can anybody think that way? That's fake. That's just completely made up. And you can definitely see this in just how divided people are in their political parties. Watch 10 minutes of MSNBC and watch 10 minutes of Fox News and you can see people are living in two entirely different worlds. Who really knows where that middle ground is? Humans don't deal in facts. There are facts, and then we make assumptions based on those facts and have opinions about them. But essentially we're just making up stories in our heads about everything and then believing them and acting as if they are true most of the time. You, me, everyone, because of these shortcuts. That's confirmation bias. Availability heuristic is something where you overestimate the likelihood of events with greater availability and memory. Like you hear about it more often. So, for example, do you think there that more people are killed each year in America by shark attacks or by falling airplane parts? Stay with us. We'll be right back. If you're listening to this, thinking, okay, but how do I actually do this in my company? That's exactly why I created the CS Leadership Academy. This podcast gives you the psychology, the academy gives you the frameworks, the how tos and um, community of CS leaders figuring this out together. Plus, you get direct coaching from me. If you're tired of figuring it out alone and want a real system for nailing your role as a CS leader, go to provansuccess.com csla and see if it's a fit for you. Hope, uh, to see you there. I'll give you a second to think about it. Maybe because we're having this, this conversation, you might realize that it's not going to be what you would immediately think, which would probably be shark attacks. But you're actually 33 times more likely to be killed by a falling airplane part than you are in a shark attack. Now, maybe that's because most of America is landlocked, I don't know. But we certainly are more aware of shark attacks than we are these deaths by falling airplane parts. Uh, maybe I don't watch enough local news, I don't know. But other than the show Dead Like Me, excellent show if you've never seen it. By the way, other than that show, I have never heard of that being an issue, but apparently things are flying left and right. From the sky. Watch yourself. Uh, so that's the availability heuristic. Finally, the sunk cost fallacy is another one that most people are familiar with. So if you've ever stayed in either a job that you hate or a relationship that is just not going the way you want it to, and you're thinking to yourself, but I've already invested four years thinking that way and thinking you don't want to start over again. That's because that's usually why people don't want to make a change. Like, I don't want to start over again. I, uh, put all this time into it. If something is not working, that's probably not going to change. You can try different things, but if you keep doing the same thing and expecting a different result, as the quote says, that's the definition of insanity. But it's also the definition of the sunk cost fallacy and how our brains tend to work. Because we hope, right? If we've invested in something, we really want it to work. Because starting over is exhausting. But it doesn't really work. If you've ever tried it out and gotten out of those situations, you often wonder, why didn't I do this three years ago, two years ago, when I knew it wasn't working in the beginning, like, it was never going to work since it wasn't then, basically that's continuing a behavior due to previously invested resources. And this is something we can kind of leverage to our advantage in customer success. Because really our customers don't want to leave. Especially if your product is quote unquote sticky like that. It's integrated into their processes and their everyday lives. That's why that's really important to do in onboarding and adoption. People have put in time, they put in energy, they've learned the system. They really don't want to have to start from scratch and do it again. Uh, I wouldn't take that as I don't have to do my job, but just understand that people aren't starting from a place of, oh, this is garbage. Like, I want to get rid of any software I can. Really. No, really, they want to stay with what they have. That is a benefit to us and we can lean into that in conversations a little bit. Like, you've come so far with us. You know, I know how hard you've worked to get this in place and get this worked into your systems. Little things like that do play on the sunk cost fallacy in conversations. As we're going through these, feel free to pause, write down situations where you Think, oh, here's how I could use that in my role today. Here's a conversation I could use that in and practice. Write out the sentence that you could use it in. Have a few of them have a cheat sheet. Challenge yourself to use it in a conversation that day. Maybe not this specific cognitive bias, but just as you work through these, look for opportunities to leverage them and give it a go. Just try weaving one of them into a conversation. It's subtle. Using one is not going to make a big difference. But it's just something that as you get used to them and incorporate it over time, you become a much more compelling and influential person. I talk about this next thing all the time. Humans being resistant to change. Again, we don't want to die, so try something different, might die. That's our amygdala at work. It is very sensitive and it's got a hair trigger. It works on things that make absolutely no sense. And you can consciously want to change something. Like our customers want to succeed with our product, but wanting it and actually doing the work to get the result is a very different thing. We've discussed the gym analogy. You can buy a gym membership and know that you want a six pack. You probably do initially go for the novelty. Yeah, this is the new me. And the new me is going to be healthy and fit and this and that. Maybe you go twice the first week, three times, and you're like, yes, I'm doing it. It's the new me. And maybe once or twice the second week and by the third week it's like, well, it's leading out. You know, sleep is really important for your health too. We start to rationalize it's work. We don't like it, it's different, it's not part of our routine. And nobody really likes putting in the work. You have to be really motivated to change something. And you also have to use habit formation to actually get somebody to change something. That's why it's really not useful to teach someone everything about your product all at once, to show them all the bells and whistles, because they're, they're not going to retain it all. And truly, they probably don't care about it all. They want to achieve the one outcome that they got your product for. Teach them that. Make it simple, easy, quick and rewarding. And they are much more likely to adopt than if you just say, oh, here are these wonderful things. That is because of our lack of motivation, not wanting to try new things, that resistance to change. I'm going to go into other cognitive biases and a lot of cool, nerdy things. But I do want to give you my big secret. Anyone who has taken Customer Success Leadership Academy, who's gone through that, they know I hammer this home in every conversation. It's the thing I'll ask them first. The question is, what's in it for me? Not me personally, but like, whenever you're having a conversation where you want to influence someone, you want them to do something, you want a result. And whether that's you want a customer to start using a new feature or you want sales to fill out the sales CS handoff form before turning the customer over to you, you can't just think about what's in it for you or why this is causing a problem for you. You need to give them the what's in it for me first. Uh, I think we can get this perception that, like, I'm telling you, you're causing me a problem and yet you're not fixing it. It's not that they're trying to be an asshole, okay? No one's trying to ruin your day. It's not like they wake up and they're like, ha, ha ha, I'm really going to screw over Rachel today. I'm not going to fill out this form. No. People are just really busy. And if it doesn't affect their KPIs, if it doesn't affect how they are measured in their job and, uh, the money they make, it's probably not going to be their priority. That's not something that makes them a bad person. It just means if you really want somebody to do something differently, you have to tell them what's in it for them. Before you go into any conversation with where you need someone to change their behavior, you always want to ask as, uh, if they're standing in front of you literally saying, what's in it for me? Why should I care? Have an answer to that question. And when you have the conversation, start with the answer to that question. Say, you know, I've been thinking about how we can make sure that customers, let's say this is the sales CS handoff. I've been thinking about how we can get customers to, to upsell more and be more open to those conversations. If I have this material, I can get them up and going and achieving their results as quickly as possible, and we'll be able to shift it over to expansion that much faster and more effectively. You know, this percentage of our customers will be more open to expansion more quickly. If I'm framing it that way it's going to be a lot more compelling for a salesperson than, hey, if you don't do this, then I can't onboard them properly. It makes us look bad, it makes us look like we don't talk to each other. Yeah, all that's true, but that's a lot less compelling because when you're asking someone these things to do something different, you also have to think about what you're competing against. They've also got 27 unread emails. They've got an assignment from their boss, they've got 32 unread saved slacks. They have actions that impact their KPIs. Now, which of those things is going to keep them safe, is going to keep them in their job? A roof over their head? Food on the table? Because your brain interprets your employment as survival, it does consider it like food, air, water, because it knows on some level that this is how you're getting food and shelter and protecting your family is by having a job and having money. It's always going to quote, unquote, try and protect you and protect that first. If you go in and you don't have something that is more compelling than, than what is currently keeping them safe and employed, why should what you want be their priority? It just won't. You have to understand that that is what you're up against and have a different tactic going forward. I really recommend planning these conversations beforehand. Just little notes. You don't have to come in with a note card, but just thinking about it rather than going in and spouting off about what you want, because that's what we all do and it's just not effective. The other thing about customer success and thinking about people's priorities, it makes me laugh that people think CS is simple because if we take the situation of trying to get people to do things that they may perfectly well be happy to do, but just have other priorities. All right, here's all the people we have to do that for because we have multiple, uh, customer WIFMs. You know what's in it for me? We have the executive sponsor, we have whatever key stakeholders there are and we have the end users. And guess what? They all have different things that are their priorities and what is going to keep them safe and what they most care about. So to get all of those people to do what they need to do to succeed with the software, we have to know what they care about, what's in it for them and, and be able to tailor our messaging to those different needs. Now I'm not gonna say that this is what you should do at, uh, like a seed stage company or a Series A or something, but understand that it's something to work towards because that is what's going to make you the most effective at, uh, influencing their behavior. If you're a CS leader, not only are you dealing with having to think about the multiple customer withams, and you now also get to think about the internal WIFMs of your boss, your direct reports, and the C suite and maybe the board. You are having to juggle a whole lot of different people's needs and priorities and think about them in addition to your own, which is the only perspective we naturally take. If you're wondering why you're so tired all the time, this could be a clue balancing all of that. But an interesting question that sometimes comes up after I talk about this is, but what if they don't know what they want? I have good news for you here, because there's a pretty easy way to find out. Businesses basically come down to three outcomes. Does it save money, does it make money, or does it increase efficiency? Which, hint, hint, saves money? So what you need to be able to do is, you know what your product does. Align product usage with business outcomes. So when they use this product, we can see them using it here, we can see them interacting with this product here. They need to do that to achieve this business outcome. So knowing when they use X feature, it saves them Y hours. And then you can make a calculation based on that. We saved you this many employee work hours. Those employees make an average, uh, of 50 bucks an hour. We saved you that much money just by using our product. You don't have to dig too deeply into that right now, but just understanding that if the customer's not sure, you can just always say, all right, well, tell me, are any of these three things being talked about at all hands? Because if you sneak into a boardroom, that's what they're talking about. How are your margins? Are you making money? Are you saving money? Are you increasing efficiency? If you can make an impact on your company in one of those three ways, doesn't even have to be all three. If you can affect one of them, that is going to make you look really good, it's going to make your boss look really good. It's going to make whoever goes up to the C suite, them going to the board saying, hey, we reduced spend or we increased revenue, that makes everybody look good. So if you can find a way to tie your product to that and you probably can. Um, if you think about it enough, that's how you get buy in. Show your customers how, hey, if you do this right, this can get you promoted because it's going to show how you're thinking about the business profitability and how you leverage this tool to get that. Now that's something that is going to be really exciting for your customer and really helpful for retention and growth for you. And this is what I mean about doing it ethically, right? We're not saying things that are going to be harmful to them. If they are able to show how they are helping the company save money or make money, that is going to be good for their career. I did an exercise with people during this workshop where I talked about whatever your product is, think about it in terms of your executive sponsor, your key stakeholder, and your end users, what are important to each of those Personas and write it down. And then just think about one piece of messaging, one sentence you could say to each of them that mentions something relevant to them. If you want to do that with your team, if that's an exercise you want to take to your team, and this could just be on like one use case. Try that, try that in your weekly team meeting. It really is eye opening because messaging matters. It makes all the difference. Once you've got that motivation from the customer, then we still have to build those habits because that's the key to change management is habit formation. You need a cue, which means they need to know when to perform the action. They need to know what the action is that they need to perform, and you need to make that action rewarding. They need to know when to do it, it needs to feel good, and you need to make it easy. Now, I'm not saying that every single bit of your product needs to give them a star or, I don't know, give them some sort of bonus material. But let's say they complete a module in your onboarding, or let's say they do part of the onboarding that's kind of a pain in the ass. Have something either in app or, or an email that sends like a burst of confetti. I know it sounds geeky and like who the health cares about confetti? But it's been studied. Things like that actually do release a small hit of dopamine. And dopamine is addictive. And if your product can be addictive, that's a very useful thing for retention. And if you doubt that dopamine is addictive, just check how far away you are from Your phone right now, because your phone is all about dopamine. And trust me, me too. Use that. We know this works. These little rewards, these little badges, they keep people coming back. So cue action, reward and make it easy. The best places for this in CS are onboarding and product adoption. You just want to create immediate wins, even if it's a small thing to say, like, hey, you're doing it. You got it. The customers are going to feel more positively towards your product if they're like, oh, hey, this is easy. I got this, I'm doing well. And those little good job messages with the confetti, again, don't overdo it. But we don't get nearly enough gold stars in life. We don't get credit for a lot, and we're all doing too much at all times or trying to. We very rarely get a, uh, thank you or a good job. We're starved for that. It costs you nothing. And it means so much to people. I would say, as a leader as well, or even not, I believe you can lead from where you are. Thank people for doing their jobs. If they've done a good job at something, don't just be like, well, that's their job. Just say like, hey, that presentation you did, that was really cool. I learned a lot costs you nothing. Make someone's day. It is the difference between work being fulfilling and just feeling like you're a cog in a machine. Moving on to behavioral economics. These are some of the key concepts here. Once you know about these, you'll start seeing them. But the funny thing is, they'll still work on you. It won't matter. It happens to me all the time. One that you'll see a lot, especially when people are trying to sell you things, is anchoring. We rely heavily on the first piece of information we were given about a topic. You'll see this in pricing. You ever see how something has a higher price and it's crossed out and there's a lower price beneath it? That is someone using anchoring. Because you see that higher price first, your brain is immediately going to think, oh, that's the real value of it. I'm getting a deal on this because I'm not having to pay full price. Well, guess what? Full price was probably the second number anyway. They just put the higher one up there to anchor you. Higher still. Works on me. I know what they're doing. Can't help it. It's a cognitive bias. I have a picture of a cartoon here where a man is looking at a car and it says 30k and he says, too expensive. And then it shows him coming upon the same car that has the car labeled as 60k, has it crossed out and has 30k underneath. And he says, this is a great deal now. Same car, same 30k, valued differently. The thing we're going to learn a lot about is that money is very contextual. Value is very contextual. Another key concept in behavioral economics is choice architecture. Setting things up so that the easiest choice to make is the one you want them to make. You can often see this in supermarkets. They'll put the most expensive brands at eye level. They will put the generic brands all the way on the bottom where you're unlikely to see them because they're the least expensive. And they will put the kids stuff like the candy and everything at a child's eye level. And that just makes it so much more likely that the kids are going to swipe something into the basket that they want and have a tantrum if you don't give it to them. You're going to grab the most expensive thing on the shelf because it's right in front of you, because you're on autopilot. And this is something that we can use in customer success. It's just subtle cues that influence behavior without restricting choices. Basically, people are going to be lazy. Set the default settings to what you want them to be. Having things like progress bars, timely reminders that are just little nudges make a big difference. People's minds are not going to stick there again, thinking about other things. So having the default settings built in, people are more likely to leave it alone. Even if you have auto renew. I'm a huge fan of auto renew. I think it should be on, but I think you should also tell your customers that they will be renewing, that it's coming up. But you do want that on. Because there are plenty of times. I don't know about you, but there are plenty of times where I've seen something has renewed that I didn't really mean to renew. I'm like, ah, screw it, it's only 60. I guess, like I'll just cancel before next year. I'm not going to go through the pain in the butt of having to deal with these people to cancel it. Like, I don't have time for it. So yeah, you do end up with more revenue that way. And I think I've honestly forgotten to do that year after year with certain software. Obviously you want people to value your software, but things add up and things like progress bars and timely Reminders, those are really more the right messaging at the right time. If you know that people's engagement tends to drop off after two weeks, that's the right time to send a reminder. If you know that there's a place that they drop off in training, having a progress bar and having the very next rung up from that being like, you've almost made it get to this rung and that percentage of our customers have great success. These are all ways with behavioral economics that you can influence this. One of the most important things that I think was the biggest aha moment I found in customer success is mental accounting and specifically something called hyperbolic discounting. This is the enemy of cs. So this is a cognitive bias that causes people to choose immediate rewards over future rewards, even if that future reward is more valuable. If, um, you want to see examples of this, most people don't contribute to their 401k, even though it's basically free money. That is going to compound. People use credit cards where they want the thing now, pay for the thing now, but it's going to cost them more later. And in customer success, people don't want to pay for more right now. They discount what they already have. They take it for granted and they are not thinking about what's going to happen in the future if I don't have it. And even more importantly, internally in customer success, we're like, this is the key to long term growth. Most of the time an executive team is going to say, uh, yeah, we get that, but we need current growth. We can't think about long term right now because we need to think about current growth. Not understanding that the current growth is going to shoot them in the foot if they do it the wrong way, but because it's slower, they don't like it. It's just very hard to hold out for that long term reward. A few examples of this are, let's say I am offering this to you right now. We're in a room together. I will offer you $50 right now, or give me your Venmo, I will give you $200 in two years. What are you going to choose? If you're like most people, you're going to choose the $50 now. You don't know what's going to happen in two years. I could get hit by a bus. I could be lying. You don't know. Get it now. Even if it's that much less, all right, I'm still willing to give you $50, but now I'm only willing to give it to you in three months. I'll give you $50 in three months or I'll give you $100 in six. Which are you going to pick? Now? Most people in this case would pick the $100 and six because I could ghost you either way. Might as well go for the longer term. But still, this is relative. These are not facts. We're not just looking at $50 in 50 is less than 100 in all situations or less than 200 in all situations. We're having opinions and predictions about what could happen. And, um, finally, all right, I'll give you $50 now, but I'll take two years from 200 from you in two years. Most people are like, hell no. But that is exactly what you get with credit cards, with student loans. A lot of us need student loans, but we're not saying hell no to that. But logically, when we think about absolutely not, because we have something called loss aversion, that's one of the strongest cognitive biases there is. And we have to remember that as CS people, that people would rather keep what they have than get more. The pain of loss is greater than the joy of getting more of something. If you lose $100 out of your wallet, you're probably gonna be pretty upset. If you find $100 on the ground, you, yeah, that's cool. Great. Maybe I'll go out to dinner. It's a nice little surprise. Great. But it's not life changing. Whereas if you lose $100 out of your wallet, it's like, hey, I had plans for that. That was earmarked for something. Now this screws everything up. Same $100, same value, very different emotional tie to it. So that's loss aversion. How do we think that might impact renewal? When someone is thinking about whether they're going to renew or not, there can be a big difference in saying, look, here's all the benefits you're going to get. We're adding this, we're doing that versus framing it as loss aversion. Like, I completely understand. Times are tight. Everybody's consolidating. Do you know what you're going to do without this feature? Do you have people to work on that? What are you not going to be able to work on now that people are working on that, you will lose access to this, you will lose access to that. Framing it that way is much more powerful. The same way with, uh, with customer success saying like, look, I absolutely understand that we need the cash flow now, but are we willing to sacrifice 25% of our revenue. You want to cut customer success. Okay, you are cutting 25% of your revenue not today, but within the next year. Because that's how it works. Customer success consequences come within the year. We're only focused on now. It only feels like what's important now will always be what's important. We're not great at, uh, being able to see that things are going to be different a year from now, that our actions now have consequences then. And most people, if you frame it as, you will lose 25% of your revenue because that's about how many customers who will not be able to achieve their goals without assistance. Yeah, that will happen. I highly encourage you for your next renewal conversation, just take a few notes and then try a negative frame and just think about which feels more impactful. Try it out. If you have a particularly tricky renewal, try out the loss version. Try out the this is what you'll be losing now. There are some situations in which you don't want to use this. You don't necessarily want to use it all the time, because then you get to be known as, oh, my God, this person bums me out so much. They're always just about, here's the consequences, here's what you're going to lose. You also want to make sure that you're not creating unnecessary anxiety because that can create a negative association with you. This is something to use judiciously. Use it when you need it. Don't just throw it around for every single conversation. Finally, a couple of the principles of influence. Robert Cialdini wrote the kind of definitive work on influence called Influence. This is a really cool experiment. Reciprocity is one of the big cognitive biases that you can leverage in terms of influence. They did an experiment. I'm trying to remember who it was. I will link it in the show notes because it was a reputable, uh, university, and this is published in all sorts of psychological journals. In this experiment, they did an experiment with mints and waiters at a restaurant. They wanted to see if giving a mint a little present made a difference in terms of tipping. I want you to think of those little, like, Starlight mints, the red and white circles wrapped in plastic. They're not good. So that's what we're using here. To me, I'm like, uh, that is not making a difference. I hate those things. They're garbage. But in the study, and I'm sure people would have said, like, no, I can't be influenced by a mint. Are you kidding me? But it can make a difference. It can make a pretty big difference. In the study, giving diners a mint at the end of their meal along with the bill increased tips by 3%, which is significant when you think about the fact that it's something that people don't particularly care about or want and didn't ask for. So cool. Like, why not? Can't hurt. Interestingly, if the gift is doubled and two mints are provided, tips don't double. The percentage increase doesn't go from 3 to 6%. It goes from 3 to 14%. So it more than quadruples if two are given. But the most interesting thing of all is that when the waiter drops one mint with the check, starts to walk away, pauses, turns back and says, you know what? For you nice people, here's an extra mint. Tips go through the roof. There's a 23% increase in tip and what they left for the tip. So that kind of shows you it's not about what was given, but it's how it was given. If people are made to feel like they are special, that makes a big difference. And you may be thinking, do they really care if their CSM thinks they're special? Yes, they do. Everybody has an ego. Everybody wants to know that they are liked, that they are seen as not just like everybody else, that there is something special about them. So do consider maybe not a mint, but having some sort of little token that you give with renewal and let people know beforehand because we were not in a tipping society, but just like, hey, you also get this, I don't know, mug with our logo on it. I've never understood. But again, people love these things and it does make a significant difference. It could also be like a coupon for some sort of service that you provide. Like a small thing. It's a gesture. Let them know that, like, we don't do this for everyone and maybe don't do it for your worst customers. I don't know. But you want to make sure that they're being made to feel special. Another principle of influence is social proof. This is why we want people to leave reviews on G2. Things like that their buying decisions are really not solely based on the conversation they had with the salesperson. They're based on what they've been looking at. Online. People were pack animals. Being part of a group is very important to us. Again, survival instincts. If you're separated from the group, much more likely to die in caveman times. But it still has an effect on us. You know, if you go on Amazon and you see two products and they seem kind of the same, but one has 15,000 four and a half star reviews and one has 11 five star reviews. I don't know about you, but I'm going with the 15,000 because that is a bigger sample size. Three quarters of them are probably fake. I'm aware of this. But still that's what I'm going for because it seems like the best option. So understanding, uh, that having that social proof is very important. Also understanding the fact that people will buy something more if it has four and a half stars than if it has five. There's something called the blemishing effect that makes people believe the reviews are real because no one gets all five star reviews. So if you have one stinker on G2 or wherever who's like, they're the worst, I hate them. That's actually not going to hurt you as much as you think it is, so long as it's not a consistent trend. Those are kind of the key principles of behavioral, uh, science and how you can use them within customer success. There's a lot more you can do. There's a lot of different conversations we can have about their various applications. And if you guys like this one, I'm happy to bring up more cognitive biases because there are a lot. And you can learn more about how we can leverage them. Write in and let me know if that's something you like. But I do want you to consider the ethics of influence. And where is the line between influence and manipulation? To me there is a very clear hard line, and that is it's influence if it benefits the other person. If it only benefits you, it's manipulation. But if it benefits the other person, if it's a net positive for them, then it's influence and it's a positive thing. And it's okay if you benefit too something where it's not equally weighted and you benefit a lot more than them. And for them it is either even or a deficit. That's manipulation. Don't do it. It will come back to bite you in the ass. That's really all I have for you today on Psychology of Customer Success. Thank you for sitting with me and diving into one of my favorite topics. If, uh, you want to nerd out with me more on it, you can find me on LinkedIn. We talk about a lot of the stuff in Psychology of Customer Success, how to apply it internally with teams, with other departments, with your direct reports, and of course with customers. So make sure to get on the wait list for CSLA if you haven't, that's, uh, probandsuccess.com CSLA and until next time, take care of yourself, get some rest, and make sure to share this with your CS bestie. Talk soon. And here's to your success.