TLF Gems Newsletter October 2024

Your monthly CX and insight newsletter from TLF Research

This is how we steer organisational change—not with the hammer of the law, but with the lever of insight. It's not about enforcing new rules; it's about understanding and influencing the unwritten ones that are already there.

Steve Simpson & Stef du Plessis

One of the things I talked about at our conference this year is the false consensus effect. This is the psychological bias which means that we tend to assume other people know what we know, think what we think, and do what we do. It's why we shout at the TV when contestants on game shows fail to answer "easy" questions.

All of us are more unusual than we think we are.

That matters when it comes to the customer experience. The false consensus effect can lead us to create journeys based on assumptions that customers think like we do, and it's a really good example of why knowing a bit of psychology can go a long way to helping you design better journeys for customers. But only if you do the work to understand how they tick, which is where insight comes in!

Thanks for reading,

Stephen

Here are 7 things we think are worth your time this month

Why Agile & UX Don't Get Along

A long read, but a good one, on why agile can sometimes trap people into a focus on churning out feature requests rather than really trying to understand people and help them get things done. "For UX, then, the only form of agility that matters is the ability to alter the behavioral outcome being produced, and this does not hinge on what business stakeholders happen to request as much as the manifesto seems to assume."

Read: Why Agile & UX Don't Get Along

Pride In Britain Falling

Lots of interesting stuff in the British Social Attitudes survey. One thing that grabbed some headlines is declining levels of pride in the country's history, but there's a general decline in people's faith in our democracy and institutions that is important context for understanding the relationship between organisations and customers. "Over the last decade, people have become less likely to take pride in the country’s achievements and less likely to feel Britain is better than elsewhere."

Read: Pride In Britain Falling

GPT For Text Analysis

Some interesting research on the potential of LLM tools like GPT when it comes to analysing text responses for psychology research, in particular noting the strength of GPT at dealing with multiple languages and not needing training data. "GPT may have a number of benefits over existing text analysis methods, such as dictionary-based methods and fine-tuned machine learning models. It shows reasonable accuracy across languages and contexts, requires no training data, and is easy to use with little code and simple prompts."

Read: GPT For Text Analysis

Inventing New Context

I see branding as a kind of sibling to customer experience, and not enough people (in my view) understand the powerful links between the two. This is a great example of how good advertising can invent a new context for your product to be consumed, change consumer behaviour, and immediately drive a huge sales benefit. I'd love to know the back story for this - what insight did they use? Whose call was it? "Aperol has long been thought of as an aperitif, ideal for hot summer days...In 2023, the brand started associating itself with a new usage context - winter apres ski."

Read: Inventing New Context

Group Dynamics & The Overstory

Fascinating interview between Malcom Gladwell and David Epstein, discussing some points from Gladwell's new book. If we want to understand people (including customers) we have to understand the context and environment that shapes their behaviour, what Gladwell calls the "overstory". "...let’s use the tools that we have to make sure our interventions are as targeted and have the lightest touch possible."

Read: Group Dynamics & The Overstory

How To Think In Frameworks

David Hieatt is a great source of ideas on communication, and I really liked this post about the power of frameworks. There's something quite profound in this, I think. It's not just about giving people a pithy headline, it's about giving them a lens to see the world and an identity to adopt. "They get attention because they make you different from all the others."

Read: How To Think In Frameworks

What I'm Reading: Good Services

Service design is something everyone talks about, but there can be a bit of mystery about what it actually involves. This book by Lou Downe outlines principles for creating accessible, efficient, and consistent services, focusing on understanding user needs and reducing complexity. Essential reading (if you can fight your way past the atrocious typography in the book!). "By not designing our services, we're accepting that they will simply evolve to meet the conditions around them, regardless of whether or not that means a service meets user needs, is financially sustainable or achieves a certain outcome."

What I'm Reading: Good Services

You may also be interested in

Search the CX insights hub

Newsletter sign up

Subscribe to our newsletter & receive regular updates from the CX Insights Hub. You'll also receive TLF Gems - a monthly collection of interesting articles & opinion pieces from the world CX & customer research.

Customer research

We are TLF, a customer experience research company that has been designing tailored customer experience and market research programmes for over 20 years.

Customer Insight Magazine

Created and published in house, Customer Insight magazine is a home for longer features, case studies, and latest thinking on customer experience and insight. All designed to inform, stimulate, and sometimes to provoke. We hope you enjoy reading it as much as we do creating it!

Book Review