Meaningful Motivation Principle 1: Start with Understanding
We’ve spent years interviewing and observing thousands of people to understand what motivates them meaningfully. In this eight-part series we will share the eight key design principles for Meaningful Motivation that can be used to inform experience strategies. Whether you're working in financial services, health systems, spiritual or religious systems, family dynamics, wellbeing, education, employee experience or travel, if your job is to support customers in achieving a goal, then you need to understand meaningful motivation.
A meaningful experience must be both valuable and impactful. That means that your customer must believe that the time they spend with you and the data they give to you is time well invested. It also means that it must pay off in results that move them in the direction of their goals.? In future principles, we’ll get into the why and how of measuring and creating change, but before all of that, you’ve got to design your experiences to demonstrate understanding.?
People who are looking for motivation and support want understanding. Many companies believe it’s enough for them to understand the customer needs their segmentation research identifies. But, customers, increasingly, tell us that they expect companies to understand their individual, personal goals.?
Principle 1: Start with understanding
While data science can tell us what is effective for most people, it isn’t as good at telling us what matters to most people. When we ask for, and more importantly, listen to, what really matters to our customers we give ourselves a powerful dataset that can be used to effectively support and guide them through change.?
There are three key skills we can use to demonstrate that we are actively listening to our customers.?
Acknowledge what matters to them
One of the most powerful ways that we can demonstrate genuine concern and interest is by demonstrating that we are listening to our customers. When we acknowledge what our customers have shared, we let them know that we were listening. The easiest way to do this accurately is to mirror or paraphrase what has been shared.?
Customer: I want to start saving money, so that I can move my family to a neighborhood with better schools.
Acknowledgement: It sounds like having access to better schools is going to be a powerful motivator for you.?
Validate their perspective
We all have feelings, and many people feel guilty for having them. That guilt can hold people back from honestly and openly sharing truthful data with you. By normalizing or validating your customer’s feelings, you let them know that they have a right to feel whatever they’re feeling, and that you will be a nonjudgmental and trustworthy guide. Here are a few ways you can validate and normalize what your customers are sharing with you:
Use data to demonstrate listening
In recent focus groups with participants who are receiving support with mental health, they told us that the most important thing we had to do was remember what they’d told us and that the biggest risk to trust was forgetting or ignoring key facts. Trust is built from listening. Relationships and customer retention are built from trust.
How to use this to inform your experience strategy
We all know that collecting data is important. But, many companies forget that how they use that data is what really matters to their customers. Whether you’re scaling motivational tools for millions or just a few, acknowledging and validating needs and feelings, and using the data you’ve collected to demonstrate that you’ve listened, will deepen and extend the value of the relationships and support you’re providing by letting your customer feel heard and understood.?
Stay tuned for our next article where we will explore the “why” of a compelling “why”.