TLF Gems Newsletter March 2025

Your monthly CX and insight newsletter from TLF Research

Language is never a coincidence.

Jenny Erpenbeck

What should you do to improve the customer experience?

Obviously the answer is "it depends," otherwise I'd be out of a job; but even having identified an area that needs to change (we call them "priorities for improvement") organisations often struggle to know what to do.

My advice is to look at five things:

- Outbound communication (Does the customer know what you know?)

- Inbound communication (Can they get hold of you when they need to?)

- Ease (Can you take work away from the customer?)

- Emotions (How do you want to make them feel?)

- Details (What subtle cues - like tone of voice or design choices - are shaping their experience?)

All of these shift your perspective from an "inside-out" process focus to an "outside-in" view led by the customer.

Thanks for reading,

Stephen

Here are 6 things we think are worth your time this month

Handwritten Digital Stamps

I learned today that in Ireland, and in some other countries, you can buy a digital stamp that is applied just by writing the code on an envelope. What a clever example of using technology in a way that is easy for customers! "Buy a digital stamp in the An Post App. Write it on your mail item. Drop your mail in any postbox or post office."

Read: Handwritten Digital Stamps

Step Back & Slow Down

Tom Goodwin's newsletter is essential reading. I especially like his passionate plea for a calmer approach to news reporting in the fractious times we live in: "The big thing to worry about is that the media environment makes it hard to know what’s actually important. It’s hard to distinguish the impossible from the likely, the trivial from the existential, the silly from the sinister, and the mistakes from the misdirections."

Read: Step Back & Slow Down

The Bernoulli Principle

Great post from Dave Trott about the Bernoulli principle as an analogy for advertising. It's incredibly relevant for customer experience as well - it's not enough to argue that the decisions you've made work, you need to think about whether customers are attracted to what you (and they) are doing. "...attraction really is more powerful than constant pressure, enjoyment is preferable to misery, pleasure is better than pain, liking is better than disliking, fun is better than nagging."

Read: The Bernoulli Principle

Vending Machines: The Future of Shopping?

We tend to assume that self-service retail is a new phenomenon, but vending machines have been around since at least the nineteenth century. This interesting article looks at the history of the vending machine, and raises some interesting questions about the part they may play in the future retail landscape. "It also exemplifies a larger societal shift toward contactless shopping experiences, a trend already evident in retail and poised to become even more widespread in the years to come."

Read: Vending Machines - The Future of Shopping?

Understanding Variation

A bit heavy going, and unfortunately you'll need to pay for access (or ask someone kind to send you a PDF), but this is an important article to know about. It argues that the reason many behavioural science studies fail to replicate is that researchers haven't taken enough account of the ways in which people and situations vary. Hopefully the implications for customer research are obvious! "When studied systematically, heterogeneity can be leveraged to build more complete theories of causal mechanism that could inform nuanced and dependable guidance to policymakers."

Read: Understanding Variation

What I'm Reading: Happy is Up, Sad is Down

Metaphors are baked into the ways we communicate - so much so that you may not even have noticed the one I just used. Thinking hard about this can help us communicate (this is mainly a book for designers) but also help us understand other people, and that's why understanding metaphorical thinking is crucial for customer research as well. "Besides being a figure of speech, metaphoric language offers a window into how we think." [And yes, there's another one!]

What I'm Reading: Happy is Up, Sad is Down

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