I'm a bad loser

Once again we have had a great summer of British sporting success-Andy Murray wins Wimbledon, the first Scottish British to win there while playing in long trousers; Justin Rose wins the US Open (golf); the British Lions, albeit with a lot of Welsh help, win the series against Australia; Chris Froome wins the Tour de France, the second Brit (well nearly!) in succession; and England have retained the Ashes. And there will no doubt be more success to come.

Following on from last year’s Olympics our sporting triumphs are beginning to spoil us. Just as well because we all hate losing. No matter how much the British are admired for their long track record of plucky failure, there is no doubt about it all of us are bad losers. Indeed you could say we hate losing more than we like winning.

We might say that we all hate a bad loser but the way our brain works means we are most definitely not a good loser.

Consider this simple experiment-half a class of students were given a mug and the other half a large bar of chocolate. The costs of each were the same and beforehand the students were as likely to choose one as the other. Yet when offered the opportunity to switch from a mug to the chocolate bar and vice versa, only one in ten switched.

There are plenty more experiments like this providing a large body of evidence that people, and that means you and me, really are loss averse and will put more effort in avoiding a loss than they will to realise a gain.

And this can be a source of great customer dissatisfaction too-people are more likely to get more grumpy and dissatisfied when they think something they are legitimately entitled to is taken away from them than they feel satisfied and pleased when they are given something. George Osborne knows a lot about this.

This means that brands have to think and take these feelings into account when thinking about and designing the customer experience and the customer journey.

Last week I was informed by a hotel loyalty membership programme that as I hadn’t used the service enough in the past 12 months, in other words I wasn’t making as much money for them as previously, that I would no longer be entitled to certain privileges and benefits. I was however assured that should I ‘restore my usage to the levels seen previously over the coming year my privileges would be restored’.

Remember I am a bad loser.

Immediately my opinion of this brand plummeted; I now wanted to use them less not more and move on; and I wanted to tell the world about how I was being treated.

A common mistake made by brands is that they think people behave and think rationally. In this instance they believed that I would think it sensible and rational that because I wasn’t using their services to the same extent as previously that I would accept that I wasn’t entitled to certain privileges and benefits. But that is not how I think. It is not how people think.

People also think and behave emotionally.

And that is why brands when thinking about the customer experience and the customer journey must think of it as far more than a rational process. It is an emotional journey too and this must be taken into account. It is therefore important that when designing the ideal customer experience brands must think about how the customer might be feeling and want to feel and must incorporate psychological thinking and learning from behavioural economics.

Perhaps if my hotel brand had considered these factors they would have done a far better job of explaining my changing status and in helping me come to terms with my loss.

Instead of just telling me that my privileges were being with withdrawn perhaps they might have allowed me to pay a fee to retain them; or let me know that they had changed their approach to benefits for someone like me; or that as I wasn’t using my privileges and benefits they would like my input on how they might better serve me going forward.

In other words don’t blame me for the loss; help me to come to terms with the loss; and help me to change the way I thought about the loss. That would be the emotional way to design the experience.

We all like a good loser. And we all hate to be seen as a bad one. But the reality is we are all bad losers. And given this we can and should design an experience that recognises this and which takes these feelings and emotions into account to demonstrate that we are not really losing.

Do you think about this when you design your customer experience?