Cognitive Design

 One question I get about cognitive design is what emotions or mental states should we design for? Should we create service experiences and products that generate pleasure, humor, pride or what?  Of course the answer depends up your goal. Are you designing for customer retention, premium pricing, brand extension or some other impact? Same thing on the employee side – are you designing for retention, improved productivity or quality, increased risk-taking or some other impact? Unfortunately, there is not a lot of research that links mental states to improved business outcomes. There is however some sweet pockets of it, especially in the area of emotional satisfaction.  Check out the work of the folks at Gallup on a concept they call Human Sigma.

They advocate using six sigma principles (systematic data oriented approach to improving the performance of a given metric) to measuring and managing the interaction between employees and customers. They have found that “emotionally satisfied” customers are what counts and to get that you need to engage both employees and customers. They measure (numerically) this combination of customer and employee engagement in what is called the Human Sigma score.  

For example, on the customer side they have isolated the following elements that describe the “emotional nature of the customer’s commitment”  

Confidence – Are the people competent, does the company deliver on its promises?

Integrity – Am I treated the way I should be? If something goes wrong is it fixed?

Pride – positive identification with the company

Passion – is this a company I cannot live with out, is it the perfect fit for me? 

Organizations that score in the upper 20% of customer engagement get a 23% premium in wallet share, profitability and revenue.

This is a huge advantage and gives the cognitive designer strong guidance on what kind of mental states to focus on.

If you combine employee engagement with customer engagement you get business units that are 3.4 times more financially effective (as measured by total sales and revenue; performance to target and year-over-year gain in sales and revenue). 

Being a six-sigma black belt and cognitive designer I am very interested in learning more about Human Sigma.  I will blog my findings but in the meantime you can get free access to an HBR article on Human Sigma, visit the Gallup Management Journal or buy the book.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 8th, 2008 at 4:24 pm and is filed under Related Fields, Service Innovation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.