Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Si Elliott: We judge an experience by the emotional peak in it and the final point.
So in the open day, even if you just took that moment, how do you make sure there's a real emotional high? I'm going to remember some wow, some magic, and at the end of it, give me a chocolate bar to get on my way. And the last bit as I walk out the doors is a real high point so that you're cementing your institution in my mind as a happier experience and a more optimal experience.
[00:00:35] Jeff Dillon: Welcome to another episode of the Signal.
I've spent over 20 years inside higher Ed watching institutions buy technology to solve problems that were never really technology problems to begin with. So when I found today's guest someone who spent two decades studying why people actually make the decisions they make, and who teaches at three universities on top of running two businesses, I wanted to get him on the show.
Cy Elliott is the founder of Fabrics, a customer experience consultancy that applies behavioral science to how organizations design experiences and relationships. He's also managing director and co owner of Diversity, a creative agency in Nottingham, England, where he has worked with brands like Boots Deluxe, Velux, WD40 and the NHS.
TSAI is an award winning guest lecturer at the University of Nottingham, Nottingham Trent University and the Communication University of China, and he sits on employer advisory boards in both business and psychology. His first book, Customer Experience Thinking, came out this past May and turns eight customer experience principles and 34 behavioral biases into something teams can actually use. He also hosts the Customer Experience Lab podcast.
Welcome to the Signal. Sigh. It is great to have you today.
[00:02:01] Si Elliott: Absolutely delighted to be joining you today.
[00:02:03] Jeff Dillon: Well, I want to start by asking you to think about the last time you were on the receiving end of an experience that either really excited you or made you want to throw your phone out the window. What comes to mind first? What happened?
[00:02:18] Si Elliott: I think as with anybody, when asked about experiences, we probably usually dive straight into ones that have irritated us the most.
So I'll give you a bit of an example where maybe tech didn't quite sing true for this experience.
Last year, Heathrow Airport was closed. I mean, it's a very rare event Heathrow Airport gets closed. I was stuck in Copenhagen flying with a great airline. You know, an airline I've flown with a lot of. And obviously this is something that's extreme. It's not just one flight delay. There's a lot going on, so you have to be a bit patient with brands in those scenarios, however, it was impossible for 72 hours for me to be able to actually get in touch with the brand. So I kept getting automated messages saying, you booked on this next flight. I'm watching the news at the hotel.
And Heathrow airport's expected to open the day after.
So we keep getting these things. And I was there with three other work colleagues, so had to try and organize how that was going to work across the bookings. There was no one to talk about how to get a new hotel because our hotel ran out, had to go and source a new hotel. And even then it took a week before I could speak to someone on the line to actually sort out, right, how do we claim back for certain things.
And for me that's a case of, obviously it's difficult for the brand, but it's extremely stressful for someone who is stranded.
You know, there's family commitments for myself and colleagues. And so that one was, was one of real frustration. And the way they even handled it on return, even after the event was just not quite right. Just didn't really meet the needs. And for that type of airline as well, you know, they're a premium carrier.
You would expect if you're an air cost airline, sometimes we low cost airlines, sometimes we accept that there's some trade offs. I went to St. Louis last year and it's my first time ever flying on Southwest and that amazed me because I was being a Brit, I was looking to try and work out what my seat number was, not knowing the whole system. But with low cost airlines you expect these things. That was a real point of frustration. That's where I think the technology really worked against it. And I think that's where brands and organizations have to pull out all the stops in those moments and get everybody on the phone.
[00:04:47] Jeff Dillon: I love the airline example. And just so you know, Southwest just changed their boarding procedure this year, so now they're all kind of the same.
[00:04:54] Si Elliott: But maybe there'll be a few podcasts confused about it.
[00:04:59] Jeff Dillon: Once you start asking someone why someone ignored a message or they abandoned a process or made a, a seemingly irrational decision, you're really talking about human behavior, not marketing tactics. So I'm curious what sent you down that path? You know, looking for the psychology instead of just better, better marketing tactics?
[00:05:19] Si Elliott: Well, for me, psychology is better marketing. The line of work I've been in has not been niched into one area, such as search engine optimization, for example. So I'm looking across the piece and often looking with a longer term mindset. So this isn't just about persuasion. A lot of people think, oh, marketing is just about good persuasion, but really we need to understand people better, to be able to serve them better. For me, that's the important bit and is not a version of marketing where we're looking just to find a target and then convert them. So I think the marketing industry has a real job to do and brands have a real job to do to maybe start to have a bit of a longer term lens as well in a more digital. And we're going to talk about tech a bit more digital and tech world because we have so many things we can measure. We measure the easy things, but the lagging indicators, things like loyalty, advocacy, they will show themselves over several years as opposed to in the moment. Very easy on a dashboard to go. This is what we're seeing this week. What's the lagging indicates they're the ones that really interest me. And fundamentally, psychology allows us to get a little bit nosy and understand what makes people tick and then find out how can we serve you better. And there's a big ethical question in this as well. And it's an ethical question that's really been brought to the party thanks to a lot of large tech companies. A lot of platforms now using choice architecture, using behavioral science in design, maybe not always for the customer's best benefit.
So we always start from how do we just make it as easy as possible for Jeff to make the best decision? For Jeff, we know if that's not us, that's fine because he'll recommend us on someone else that we're better for. But this isn't about tricking, nudging, putting sludge in there, using psychology to trick and trap people. If anything, we want to use behavioral science to just make life a little bit easier. We make more than 35,000 decisions a day, so our brains are on overload at all times. So we look for simplicity.
Well, how do we as a brand and an experience design that in? It's very tough in the space we're going to be talking about today because it's a really complex beast is academia, higher education.
So that is a real present challenge in this space. But psychology just allows us to dip into what makes people tap and how we make that work.
[00:07:51] Jeff Dillon: You have an unusual vantage point here because you're moving back and forth between these worlds all the time. And I always thought, I thought higher ed is interesting because we use words like student experience and student journey. But the institution is also dealing with structures and policies and constraints that most companies simply don't have. So what stands out to you when you compare the two? You lecture at Three universities. You sit on two employer advisory boards.
When you walk into a university and then walk into one of these corporate clients, what feels different about how those two worlds treat the people they serve?
[00:08:31] Si Elliott: Yeah, great question. Because of course across industry you go right the way down to SMEs and startups and therefore they can be very agile, they have less regulatory pressures upon them. But then you can also go up to things like mortgage brokers, finance. You know, we work with a finance company or a company that works in the finance space and what you can and can't say is very particular in that space.
I think that what I find fascinating, and certainly over here in the uk, in higher education, is we're having to become a lot more customer centric now. And actually I think we're seeing a much closer relationship between industry and academia. Previously we've kind of had a lot of academics maybe walk in the halls, not necessarily always thinking about what happens after university, because it's about that academic pursuit.
And now I think it's coming much closer together and we've got to find real world outcomes for students.
But of course, even in the, you know, and I'm a guest lecturer, so I help with designing some course material, bringing my expertise fit, but I certainly don't think about how to structure a course. And when I start to see behind the curtain on that, it fascinates me how complex it is and understandably so. So of course you can say in the commercial sector there are certain spaces that are very heavy on regulation and what you can and can't say, and some a lot more agile and nimble also then have to understand that students are people that are interacting with brands and they almost apply their branded logic onto higher education.
I expect them to act like Apple or like Nike would, and it's hard for university to square that circle. But certainly I think some of the more established institutions are now finding this real balance of prestige versus being client focused. And previously maybe they just opened the doors and people would come. Now it might not be the case as much. There's a lot more pressure on that. We're seeing, as I say, the UK market, we're seeing a lot of pressure in terms of people questioning the value of university versus other routes. Whereas for the last 20, 30 years, university was the prestige route that you would go there.
So we now within higher education have to go, this is the value we're going to give you as a customer, as a student, and really understand what that value is in the eye of the students as well. As what we're supposed to be delivering.
[00:11:19] Jeff Dillon: Yeah, that evolution of perspective of like university is not the be all, end all anymore is in the US too. It's really, it's really hitting universities hard. And this is where your perspective, I think really connects.
What I've seen in higher ed for years that institutions are very good at buying systems to manage the student journey. But managing a journey isn't the same as understanding the person that's in the journey. A prospective student isn't moving neatly through this funnel. There are emotions and biases and family influences and fears and all kinds of factors that don't show up in the CRM. So from a behavioral science perspective, from where you sit, what do institutions consistently get wrong about how a prospective student actually makes a decision?
[00:12:05] Si Elliott: Well, often we'll just assume that it's a rational, logical decision. You just hit the nail on the head there. This is about emotion. And of course when we think about the technology we're putting in to aid that experience for a student prior to coming at university and then beyond as well, that helps with efficiency. But what's the emotion that sits behind it? I think, you know, when a 17 year old is trying to figure out what university to go to, you could just think, well it's about league tables, it's about employment outcomes at the back end of it. But actually when they arrive at the university, there's probably something a lot more deep rooted that is just, can I see myself fitting in here?
Does this feel like a place for me?
Hard one for us to track, of course, and very hard in the CRM to go. How do we put the feelings box in here? But that's where remarksing we have this beautiful blend of the art and the science, you know, and the art does sit more in that emotive side and then the science with the technology and with what we're doing with CRM systems, what we're tracking in terms of data brings that in. But university, we have to remember as well this is a kinetic world. It's, it's where I'm going to build my network, where I'm going to meet people. So it's not even just about who my lecturers are going to be, what I'm going to be learning, what the environment is, the people that are going to be in there as well. And that's so important when we think about such a digital world.
Am I going to get on a flight, go to a new city, invest all the money to be there? I have to feel it.
[00:13:39] Jeff Dillon: Yeah, yeah. And this is where I think behavioral science can become immediately useful for higher ed. Marketing teams have endless data on opens and clicks and applications and conversions. But those numbers don't necessarily explain the human behavior behind it. 34 biases is a lot to bring into a meeting.
So in your book you break down these 34 behavioral biases. If an enrollment or marketing team at a university could only learn three of them, which three would change the most about how they, how they communicate?
[00:14:17] Si Elliott: Well, to try and keep it easy in the book as well, I elevated it into eight categories.
And maybe that's the way we start thinking about this. I'd probably elevate it up to simplicity, social and memory.
So as I touched on 34,000 decisions, you know, per day we're making a lot of decisions. A lot happens in the subconscious brain. There's a lot ticking away back there. So even when a student's coming to an open day, the subconscious is plowing through 95, 99% of the decisions. So how do we make it easy and think of maybe, I don't know. The curse of knowledge is one of these within simplicity. And the curse of knowledge is just when we know a lot on a subject matter, we overestimate how much other people will know. University in higher education has got its own language, it's got its own structure and systems and we know it because we're working in it. So we talk the language very freely and sometimes we need to just decouple it and go, does that make sense to the 17 year old or to the parents? The 17 year old who's looking at this and will they really understand this? So, so it's then just going, well, we look at that and from a social perspective, social proof. We're social creatures, we heard together. And that's my point on do I feel like I belong here? Will I fit in here at this university?
So how can we evidence that social connection that they're going to get there? And memorability is really important as well. We live our life in three second blocks of time. That's our experiencing self, our remembering self then tells us the story. So even when I've been to an open day, by the end of the open day, it's all just a story that's in the back of my head. So what stands out? And peak end rules are really good. One where we judge an experience by the emotional peak in it and the final point.
So in the open day, even if you just took that moment, how do you make sure there's a Real emotional high. I'm going to remember some wow, some magic and at the end of it, give me a chocolate bar to get on my way. And the, the last bit as I walk out the doors is a real high point so that you're cementing your institution in my mind as a happier experience and a, a more optimal experience.
[00:16:38] Jeff Dillon: I've spent 20 plus years watching higher ed go through cycle after cycle of, of new tech. And it, it's sometimes, sometimes the technology absolutely solves a problem. But I've also many times seen institutions buy a new platform when the real issue was a broken process or unclear ownership or just not enough understanding about students, what students actually need. So I'd love to have you make the case to people who are responsible for buying these tools. What is the honest answer to a campus problem? Like, don't buy anything.
[00:17:14] Si Elliott: Yeah, it's interesting because obviously I talk a lot about the human experience, how important that is, and sometimes people will then go, oh, so you're not into tech and you're a bit of a luddite and that's not the case. Technology ultimately amplifies what we've got, good or bad. So the systems and processes that are already there, if you then apply a piece of technology, it's going to amplify it one way or another. And good technology makes life better. Look, we're having this conversation that 30 years ago we wouldn't have been having or I'd have had to fly a long way across the world and even then other people wouldn't have been able to watch this. So take this piece of technology. It's fantastic. But as with any technology that comes in, we also need to be really cognizant of are there any drawbacks? Do we need to design around those drawbacks?
So I regularly talk about social media, conceptually fantastic piece of technology for the world. It helps us connect.
But we've seen all the drawbacks and we're seeing them in the news at the moment. A lot of the drawbacks. So just whenever we're bringing technology in somewhere, we've just got to think about how's it working?
Have we got something that's already good, that this is, then layer on top and make it great.
And is it serving the people we want to serve as well? So is the technology just purely there for our efficiency? So, or is it helping the student? Is it helping even if it's the lecturer, you know, to be delivering, is it helping on that experience? So absolutely is not. Don't do anything with tech. Because ultimately every other institution is going to race ahead of you. And you might look a little bit back in the stone Ages, but certainly it's interrogating it before putting it in.
And I think we all have this thing, let's face facts, where we always feel we're behind the curve on technology. We see someone else put something on LinkedIn. I've now implemented this in my workflow and we. I've got to run to that.
I think it's about speaking to people external to your organization as well and finding out what industry best practices, getting their advice, and always having a critical voice in the room because we can get overexcited on tech. I do it in marketing all the time and my finance and ops director is a very good anchoring point to say, hang on a minute, let's just see how this sweets in with everything else and is it doing what we're doing? So even I fall into that trap.
[00:19:39] Jeff Dillon: Yeah, yeah. This is one of those areas. I think higher ed has learned to tolerate complexity that would almost be unimaginable in other industries. We know why a lot of it exists, you know, different systems, different offices, regulations, legacy processes. But the student doesn't care about any of that. They just experience the friction. So if you came in without all of that institutional context and looked at the experience purely through their eyes, you know, financial aid forms and transfer credit evaluations, registration holds. If you were running a customer experience audit on a university, where would you start?
[00:20:18] Si Elliott: It's really interesting one because it is a very complex, multifaceted space. I would look at that balance of efficiency and emotion.
So whenever you're doing an audit, the first thing is just to take a step back and map the whole journey can sound overwhelming. So you can do it in component parts. You could do it as the exploration stage, open day offer, you know, and beyond that, and then into the student experience. But just map it out and then look at those points where this specific friction or this specific high levels of emotion. I'd pull out an open day. It's a very emotional day. People can be quite anxious going there, a bit nervous about it, or come away very excited. So that's a real emotional high point. Then doing all the paperwork. Not quite such a high point. But I've done work with a mortgage broker client and ultimately the experience of getting a mortgage is very similar. You go through the initial excitement. I want to buy a house. You find out how much money you can borrow. Very exciting. You go and start to build the dream. And then they Go right now, we want to see all your bank statements, your credit cards, we want to see all your pay slips, and all of a sudden just drops off. And that's the point. We have to work harder to help the customer. And it'll be the same in this process. You'll see the points where you go, that bit's looking after itself right now, but this is really tricky. And then you just pick that out and go, where's high on emotion that we can work with? Or where's high on friction that we can just help out a little bit? And we can't remove all of the friction because going to university, there is documentation that needs providing. There are processes that need to go through. But trying to make that as easy as possible or at least as supported as possible is really important.
[00:22:08] Jeff Dillon: Yeah. What comes to mind for me too is the application process.
It's a bit antiquated at so many schools still all over the world. And I think of, you know, when you first apply to a college, it takes so long to get through that first process. And there's a company, maybe, maybe more than one, but there's companies out there working on that now. Like, all we really need when you very first start is your name and your email address. Okay, save that then. Next. What do we need next? You know, it's not like that, though. But a company called Mutara is reinventing the application process.
[00:22:41] Si Elliott: Yeah. And that's. That's really important as well, because one of the things talk about in the book is beyond behavioral science. We talk about customer experience principles, and that's very much in the corporate world.
Learn and build the relationship over time. So don't ask me for 40 questions in the very first form.
Build that and go. Right. Get the first couple. That gives you enough to be able to process my application and then we'll get there over time.
[00:23:08] Jeff Dillon: Yeah. It makes so much sense when you hear someone explain the way it should work. We're so used to this process, and it's a perspective. I think a lot of higher ed leaders, they don't get to hear enough. We constantly talk about how AI is changing institutions and jobs, but you're actually standing in front of students and watching their expectations change in real, real time. And I imagine it's not just changing how they complete assignments, it's changing what they expect a professor to be there for in the first place. You're in front of a lot of students regularly, right?
[00:23:40] Si Elliott: Yeah.
[00:23:41] Jeff Dillon: How has AI changed what they expect from you as a lecturer and what you feel you have to teach them now that you, that you didn't maybe three years ago.
[00:23:50] Si Elliott: I think they're more interested now in personality stories and examples rather than framework and textbooks. And that's where I tend to come in. So my role will be, okay, I'll talk them through how we apply frameworks. But ultimately you can grab the frameworks very easily from a workplace. I think now what's important within our thinking about what we are training and educating our students to go out and be successful in later life is people skills.
Can they interact with people? Can they have a conversation? Can they make eye contact? Can they present their thoughts and realize whether someone's understood them and reframe them if they haven't? Critical evaluative thinking.
When you leave university and even during university now you're going to be using AI. You're going to be marking the homework of it.
So you need to be able to evaluate what you're being told by it and not just blindly believe it.
And I think there's something that I always talk to students about the value of the toil, the learning comes from, maybe not getting it straight away, but don't take that AI shortcut, work your way through it, because then you truly understand that subject matter and then you can apply it to context because that's what we do. We're not competing with large language models on processing anymore. We're competing on context, nuance, creativity, and that human touch and empathy. And that's really important students. So yes, a lot of it will be about the fundamentals, but actually the most important bit actually is the color that we put behind it, the stories that we're telling, the case studies. And that's what students want to hear is, I know this framework, but how's it work in practice and where doesn't it work in practice? And that's really important.
[00:25:40] Jeff Dillon: Yeah, I always find cross cultural comparisons very interesting because they expose assumptions we don't even realize we're making.
You're teaching the same generation of students, but they're growing up in a different, in very different digital ecosystems with different platforms, expectations and relationships with brands. You've been teaching at the Communication University of China recently. What did you notice about how students there relate to digital experiences and brands compared to your students in the uk?
[00:26:13] Si Elliott: Yeah, there's a bit of a difference. It's not chalk and cheese, it's not completely different. But I would say that the Chinese students are a little bit more culturally AI enabled. They're encouraged at the institutions to use AI a Lot more. Their skills within AI were very advanced. When I was asking them to create presentations, what they're doing visually in a very quick turnaround was extremely impressive. When you go, you think, will the language barrier be a great challenge? And it's, it really isn't. And also technology helps that because some of the students that if I'm talking a bit quick, will still have a translation app on there.
I noticed the students in China were very committed. So a prime example, I had a lecture on a Sunday morning, nine till one o', clock, so four hour lecture on a Sunday and the turnout was 90 plus percent which is very impressive. Say my UK students might not had such a stellar turnout. I'm in Beijing, so it is more Westernized, there's more western brands there and they have a real thirst for knowledge about western brands and how things are working as well. And their digital experiences, a lot of it's knitted together a lot more because you have the bigger platforms over there like WeChat, like Alipay, that do so much.
So they are extremely digitally native, but they're also really fascinated about how things work in Europe, how things work in the States and understanding where those nuances and those differences are.
[00:27:47] Jeff Dillon: Most institutions can't hire a customer experience consultancy. Picture a two person marketing office at a regional public university with no budget website they don't control.
What can they do to start that would actually make a difference?
[00:28:02] Si Elliott: Pose a question, how human are we being? So really easy? Just look at your emails. Do they feel like they're written from a person or do they feel they're written from this big corporate behemoth? Think about bits in the experience that they're managing and go, where's the bit of friction that they would find frustrating? How can they fix that and have a wonder? Chat to students, listen to what they've got to say. It's amazing how much you'll pick up from them. You don't need to. Of course. I would advocate bringing in a great customer experience consultant that can help you with it. But the reality is as well, a lot of this can be done just by stopping and having a think. And how warm is the experience would be a question I asked myself. And how easy does that feel to do? So think simplicity and think warmth and go from there.
[00:28:53] Jeff Dillon: I think the common thread is that it's very easy to design around the needs of the institution instead of the experience of the person. So I want to finish by kind of going down to this one priority. If a president or a CIO Listening to this today changed one thing in the next 12 months. What would you want it to be?
[00:29:12] Si Elliott: Change their shoes. So be your own student. Walk the corridors, go and actually see how they experience it.
And if you are going to struggle because you're too institutionalized with the oh, we do this because of that. Get a student alongside you. Go and buy a handful of students a coffee, don't tell them who you are and just listen to what they're chatting about.
Attend the open days and again, try and do this. It's like the CEO of a corporate going back to the shop floor. That's really important because that's how you'll feel it. And speak to your lecturers because they also have a good pulse on, you know, how happy students are. We think about, we track engagement rates at certain points, but a lot of this comes down to fail. And I just changed my shoes. I'd put on a pair of trainers, pair of jeans and a hoodie and just go wander around campus as anonymously as I can.
[00:30:07] Jeff Dillon: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:30:08] Si Elliott: And seeing what I see and hearing what I hear and, and observing, you know, watch the students and what's their body language like? How are they interacting in the corridors? And you'll get a good feel for that.
[00:30:21] Jeff Dillon: Sai, this has been a really interesting conversation. I appreciate you bringing an outside perspective to higher ed and reminding us that sometimes improving the experience has less to do with adding technology and more to do with understanding the people on the other side of it. Thanks for joining me on the Signal. I will put links to size, organizations, fabrics and diversity in the show notes. And thanks everyone for listening. Thanks, Sai.
[00:30:45] Si Elliott: Thank you.
[00:30:48] Jeff Dillon: That's a wrap of this episode of the Signal. If today's conversation sparked a new idea or challenged your thinking, that's exactly the point. This show is about cutting through the noise and helping you see what's actually shaping higher ed right now. Please subscribe so you never miss an episode. And if you found this valuable, leave us a quick review. It helps more higher ed leaders find the Signal. For deeper edtech insights, news and trends delivered monthly, subscribe to the Signal monthly newsletter at edtechconnect. Com.
Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.
