KQ Article

The best thing about studying people is that you never run out of fresh content. The moment we nail down an observation or trend, a new one emerges to take its place.

For years, we were encouraged to fi gure consumers out by placing them in groups. The questions we asked ourselves were all in plural form. What drives them? What do they like? These are no longer the right questions to be asking, because behavior has changed. And there’s nothing collective about it.

Over the last several decades, humans have been motivated by a desire to appear consistent in their behavior. Such consistency meant you were established and in control. We knew who we were supposed to be and were acting in accordance with our pre-determined fate. We had solved the mystery.

This desire for consistency made it easy for service providers to figure us out, because it only had to be done once. Once labeled, you were understandable.

Today, people have been trained to assume that all of their interactions will be customized to their individual preferences. Consumers make decisions based not on some pre-determined behavioral template, but on the whims of the situation at hand. The current social media craze further diminishes the cultural value of consistency, by making it acceptable to create several versions of ourselves. This comfort with inconsistency will become even more prevalent as our children grow up to become the primary purchasers.

Not only is each person unique, each situation is unique. Everybody walking into your bank or credit union must be treated as the fi rst customer in a completely new category, even if you’ve assisted that person many times before. This makes it absolutely critical for front-line employees to be superior listeners, so that they can assist each customer or member on a case-by-case basis. Any collective profi ling or decisions based on previous encounters will leave you ill equipped to serve the individual standing before you.

_{© 2012 Deluxe Enterprise Operations, Inc.}