Video: Find the Magic in Your Customer's Weirdness

Video: Find the Magic in Your Customer's Weirdness

By

Liliana Osorio

Last Updated:

June 25, 2025

Reading time:

28

minutes

To really take advantage of CX, companies will have to make data-based decisions. But looking for the expected won’t be enough - you will have to be willing to embrace the surprises in feedback to become customer-centric.

At our 2024 Experience-Led Growth Summit, Rory Sutherland gave a keynote on how to “Find the Magic in Your Customer’s Weirdness.” He challenged the belief that customers know what they want and can say in advance what a good quality experience is. He argued that the greatest wins for businesses are in the things that customers aren’t expecting.

Here are the key takeaways:

Watch the full recording to hear the full keynote.

There’s not enough focus on CX

Rory LI 1

I think it's actually economically important in that I would argue that we don't have nearly enough focus on customer experience, and that's why we don't have really much economic growth. I genuinely think that when you talk about Experience-Led Growth, you're onto something here.

I think the reason why we don't have economic growth in large sectors of the economy is simply because the way we're defining experience is in a really narrow and kind of mechanistic way. It's to do with things like have we met our service level agreement? It's to do with lazy metrics on time and speed and effectively performing things according to some set kind of predefined range of what is customer satisfaction. It's all predicated really on the idea that consumers know what they want, that they can stipulate in advance precisely what a good quality experience means, and that all you have to do is deliver that at the lowest price possible, and you're off to the races and everybody's happy.

The three attributes of CX are table stakes, performance, and delight

Rory LI 2

One way to make a bit of progress here is to understand a very interesting Japanese theory on customer experience. It was originally applied to product design, but it applies very well to CX. And that's Kano theory, by a man called Kano, who is a professor at the University of Tokyo, who did a lot of work in terms of the Japanese consumer electronics industry.

And Kano theory divides product attributes into three.

There are basic table stakes. In other words, does it do the job it claims to without disaster? If you sell someone a piece of electronic equipment and it bursts into flames or it simply doesn't work, you're not in the game, you're not at the table, forget about it, you're out. Those are what you might call the basic attributes, basic hygiene attributes.

Then there's a second component, which companies do tend to measure and try to optimize, which are performance attributes. Now in a product, it might be, if you're selling something like a cassette deck or a music player, it might be, for example, battery life. It might be sound quality. It might be volume and pitch wattage or whatever. And those things, they correlate with consumer satisfaction. And they're not worth ignoring by any means, but it's a kind of linear relationship and one that probably declines beyond a certain point. Once you've reached a certain point of excellence, nobody really cares. In customer experience terms that might be answering the phone quickly, for instance.

Then there's this third category of qualities, which Kano calls delight attributes. And they're really fascinating because they're hard to quantify. Consumers generally don't ask for them in advance. Indeed they're precisely valued because they're unexpected and unrequested, but they contribute disproportionately, supralinearly with the actual effect it has on customer experience, customer evaluation, and hence customer loyalty.

CX doesn’t follow any predetermined rules

Rory LI 3

I think that's often true in customer service that what actually happens in customer experience is that it's the things we do that they weren't expecting us to do - the things that are pleasant and positive surprises - which really stick in the memory.

Now, there's a wonderful CX experience finding, which has often been kind of treated as an example of consumer irrationality. That's the finding that if you have a problem, but the problem is very well resolved by the company you're subsequently more loyal to that company than you were before the problem occurred. So if you have a car, for instance, and something goes wrong with the car, but you're very, very impressed by the experience you have at the dealership, you're now more loyal to that dealership than if your car hadn't gone wrong.

Customers are “predictably irrational”

Rory LI 4

I was talking at lunch to Dan Ariely. Many of you will have read his book called Predictably Irrational. He argues that one of the best ways to actually sell to a consumer is to engender trust by not trying to sell them the most expensive thing you can, but by selling them the thing that's most appropriate to their needs.

And there's a great example of this kind of customer experience in, one of Jay Leno's videos The video is entitled why I don't own any Ferraris. Leno just says, if you want to buy the rarer Ferraris, he has a multimillion dollar collection, no Ferraris in it. He says, I'm not prepared to play the games they make me go through in order to buy the rarer cars. In other words, they'll only put me on the waiting list. If I hand them a brown envelope full of cash and also buy six or ten uninteresting Ferraris first on which they can make their margin. He said, I just don't want to play those games and he contrasts that with the experience of buying a McLaren.

Consumers don’t trust businesses

Rory LI 5

It is actually proof that you care beyond the initial transaction. Now this, I think, has an enormous bearing on why companies aren't growing, and it's because companies aren't growing because people don't trust them. Fundamentally, what happens, and this is true of most retail, is they're absolutely wonderful when they're trying to sell you things.

The second anything goes wrong, the problem is dumped on you. That even applies to really good practitioners. John Lewis, for example. I ordered a Dyson through John Lewis. It went missing. It never even reached the Waitrose store where I was supposed to collect it from.

Most businesses optimize for immediate sales, not for long-term experience

Rory LI 6

So we've optimized for the immediate transaction at the expense of the long-term experience. And we've also optimized for that because the immediate transaction is exactly that. It's immediate. It delivers its results very, very quickly. Whereas investment in CX delivers, I would argue, greater, more effective results.

But it does so more slowly and either people don't have the patience to wait or it's simply harder because so much time has passed to disentangle the effect of the experience investment from all the other things that might have happened in the interim period.

Exceptional CX is about testing

Rory LI 7

It was only a few weeks ago that I realized why there's such an extraordinary kind of benign loop that feeds between creativity and testing. And it's not a loop that's been properly closed, by the way, in things like performance marketing at all. No one's closed the loop. Effectively, media and targeting testing goes on in separation from not very imaginative creative testing in my experience.

Go beyond logic to improve CX

Rory LI 8

They go beyond the immediate surface logic of an answer. This may make perfect sense and they go a little bit further and then it occurred to me that most creativity - indeed most scientific progress if you want to get into Viagra or penicillin or vaccination or anything like that - nearly all scientific progress starts with someone noticing something.

CX potential lies in the anomalies

Rory LI 9

It lies in the anomalies. Maybe only 5 percent of people giving customer feedback on customer experience will say something quite unusual. That thing may be the thing that those people say, which is felt by the other 95% but never spoken.

Test the weird stuff

Rory LI 10

Actually, it's the other stuff. It's the outlandish stuff, which often contains a huge amount of the emotional freight in any exchange. I think this is really, really important to understand, by the way.

Be inquisitive, not rational

Rory LI 11

I don't want artificial intelligence. I want artificial inquisitiveness. And the problem with rationality is twofold. Okay. Sometimes it sets the bar too high. You can only test something if it makes sense in advance. If you do that, you're not testing enough.

CX can’t be an afterthought

Rory LI 12

I think it's something else. I think there's a total difference between 30 percent off and 30 percent off for three days only. I think these things are all over the place. What my friend calls the real why. There's an official why, which makes sense and makes you look intelligent in the boardroom.

Look for three things in CX: Unmet needs, unasked for needs, and proof of value

Rory LI 13

So there are two things I think you can look for in customer experience, which is there were three things. Unmet needs. And in unmet needs, I include unasked for needs. Things that people would actually love, but which they're never going to ask for. And to prove the value of those, you have to experiment, because you'll never win the case any other way.