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The Hidden 'Curse' That Undermines Customer Service And The Customer Experience

This article is more than 8 years old.

When you get lost way out in the boondocks, the worst person to ask for directions is someone who knows the area really well. You'll get something along the lines of those old “Bert and I” routines: “Turn left where the old barn used to be, make a right where Ol’ Sanders was thinking of building a gas station but ended up deciding against it, go two miles, and there you are. Don’t worry—you can’t miss it.”

The reason such directions are inscrutable is they assume the listener has the same familiarity with the landscape as the person giving directions. They suffer, in other words, from what’s called “the curse of knowledge," a cognitive bias that can spring up whenever there's an asymmetry of information.

The curse of knowledge isn’t just a problem when you’re lost on a rural road with a spotty GPS connection. The curse of knowledge is also a barrier to connecting with customers in the disciplines of customer service, sales, and the customer experience (CX). And it’s a major factor in why the user experience (UX) so often suffers from catastrophic mis-designs.

Let’s look each of these areas and how the curse of knowledge manifests itself.

User Experience (UX)

The curse of knowledge can sabotage a designer’s ability to build a user experience that makes sense to first-time visitors, a phenomenon you see in, for example, e-commerce website designs that make sense to the designers (who know everything about their business) but are mystifying to anyone who visits the site without such knowledge.

Customer Experience (CX)

In the customer experience, the curse of knowledge prevents the professional from recognizing the pitfalls a customer encounters. In a physical environment, for example, while you already know where the fitting rooms are, the exits, the cash registers, it’s not necessarily obvious to the customers (the only customer who’s never gotten lost at IKEA, is the customer who’s never been to IKEA). Also, the curse of knowledge turns us all into too-easy apologists for things that aren’t up to snuff, because we know when the scheduled maintenance is to happen, why the store is temporarily understaffed, and so forth.

Customer Service

In customer service, the curse of knowledge can foster a lack of empathy for what a customer is going through.  Because employees have seen similar situations (delayed shipments, broken components) every day of the year, they have trouble making the leap to what the customer may be feeling when it happens, for the first time, to them. “Hey,” the employees think to themselves, “other customers ended up surviving this ordeal, and this customer will too. Why are they making such a fuss about it?”

More subtly, the curse of knowledge can lead to not really listening to customers who complain, because they feel that they’ve heard identical complaints before. So they jump to interrupt a customer before she’s done with her exposition, and end up misdiagnosing their problem and presenting a solution that may not be what the customer’s looking for at all.

The Patient Experience in Healthcare

In healthcare, where the stakes are extremely high, the patient experience and patient satisfaction often suffer from devastating manifestations of the curse of knowledge.  It can lead healthcare workers to deal poorly with the distress experienced by patients for two opposing reasons:

— because they’ve seen a similar non-life threatening situation (say, a broken ankle) so many times before and it always turned out all right that they discount the pain and fear experienced by someone for whom this is happening now.

because the jaded chemo nurses and oncology docs have seen a similar, deadly situation (say, Stage IV cancer) so many times and know that it doesn't by and large end o.k. that they dismiss the hopes and aspirations of the patient and their loved ones to whom this is happening now, for their first and only time.

(Or, consider how healthcare workers tend to dismiss the case of the birth plans that are popular with expectant parents. Invariably, parents’ birth plans are idealistic: “we’ll only use limited pain medication” and so forth, and frequently get trumped realities of the situation that come to bear: unforeseen difficulties, their chosen doctor being off duty, and on and on.  Still, it’s disheartening how nurses and doctors discount such plans ahead of time with a “honey, you don’t know what it’s like” attitude.)

Sales and Marketing

In sales to existing as well as new customers, the curse of knowledge can lead to overestimating prospective customers’ familiarity with your company’s backstory and its selling points.   Or, it can lead you to underestimate the power of your brand, and the attachment that customers bring to it: Even when a brand exists as a true category of one in its customers’ eyes, salespeople will assume, during the sales process, that everyone who walks into the showroom is entirely well versed on the competition and its offerings, and they end up responding to imaginary competitive pressure and complicating what should have been a simple and amicable process. The reason this happens, of course, is that salespeople live and breathe their industry day in and day out, so they’re cursed with nearly complete knowledge of every little thing that their competitors are up to.

The curse of knowledge can also lead marketers to design overly complex offers and to create offers that solve problems that loom large for insiders in the industry but that customers aren’t even concerned about. 

So what’s the solution?

The curse of knowledge is a toughie, because, to a large extent, it’s impossible to un-ring a bell. You’re always going to know what you already know, and there’s no magic technique that allows you to un-know it entirely. 

But awareness of your inability to un-ring the knowledge bell is actually a key step first.  If you can spread this awareness, getting leaders, managers, and employees to acknowledge the inevitable mismatch of company and customer perspectives and the reality that the customer’s view will never be the same as yours, you’ve got the essential prerequisite for action. Take the case of the jaded nurses pooh-poohing an expectant couple’s birth plan.  Until they recognize the importance of integrating the couple’s outlook with their own, they can’t take any meaningful steps to improving the situation.

Micah Solomon is a Seattle-based customer experience consultant, customer service consultant, keynote speaker, trainer, and bestselling author.