In this Greatest  Hits episode of Getting to Aha!, Darshan Mehta is joined by Diane Magers, Founder & Chief Experience Officer at Experience Catalysts. They discuss Diane’s aha! journey; the psychology of customer and employee behavior; why the customer’s comfort always trumps the logic of an expert; the over-rotation of metrics and data; and why it’s important to form solid, sustainable relationships with your customers.

With over twenty-five years of experience, Diane has proven her unparalleled ability to identify opportunities in customer interactions, resulting in her being known as an “innovative and creative strategist” among her peers. As the Founder and Chief Experience Officer of Experience Catalysts, she consults with a myriad of companies to support and educate them as they build their customer experience practices, as well as speaking at Customer Experience events.

👉Having started her career as a clinical psychologist, Diane has always been interested in human behavior, putting her in a particularly advantageous position when realizing she was in the “business of people”. In fact, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone in customer experience that doesn’t believe they are in the business of people; customer experience and insights are all about understanding how people behave and react to your business.

👉The definition of what an insight truly is can differ wildly from others. But Diane says she encourages people to think about what an insight is and lock the definition down in their heads. She defines an insight as "that moment where you’ve created an association between pieces of information and the interpretation of what the need is, and how making the association between two things creates that ‘oh my gosh, I never thought of that before’”. In other words, an insight is the very ‘Aha!’ moment we’re all searching for.

👉Communication is key. Oftentimes, an expert in a particular field will favor what is tactical over what is comfortable or best for the customer. This is where customer insights come in; by listening to customers and figuring out what they like and are comfortable with, businesses can best cater to them rather than giving in to what they deem to be tactical.

👉What really represents a customer isn’t what data and metrics say about them but rather what we do with that data and the questions we ask. Emotion drives human behavior, not data and metrics, so it’s important to put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Diane says, “It’s what we do which drives emotion, which drives behavior, which impacts your business results”.

👉Over the last couple of years, ever since the pandemic, businesses and brands have had to shift their approach to customer experience. People needed them when it mattered most, and that same level of demand is still prevalent today.

👉 Not only do you need to connect with your customers, but you need to connect with your employees too. Again, we are all humans driven by emotion; putting a script on employees and customers doesn’t work. Humans and their behaviors are the very lifeblood of a business, so we have to start making connections rather than viewing them as pure data and numbers.