The fallacy of Bill Gates' path and how anecdotes affect the customer experience.

Every month, I devote several hours of my time career counseling high schoolers and college graduates - and every once in a while I will get a question like this: "I'm thinking of dropping out - I mean Bill Gates dropped out and look what he accomplished".

I empathize college can be hard but explain that out of 675 million people in the US that enrolled in college since Bill Gates dropped out, about 30% of them did indeed drop out - equating to about 200 million dropouts, and less than 0.00001% of them became billionaire company founders. I layer on that college dropouts over the age of 25 are more than 70% more likely to be unemployed, and four times more likely to default on their student loans. On average, members of this group earn 32 percent less than their contemporaries with college degrees.

So where does this perception keep coming from? The problem is "Survivorship Bias" based on anecdotes and not data. People have a tendency to make emotional decisions and rationalize them. Everyone loves a good survivor story. That's why lottery tickets keep selling - and how could it not? The news keeps reporting about the feel-good story of the unemployed mother of 3 that bought a ticket a the local gas station to become a millionaire.

And the same fallacy transcends into the world of Customer Experience. Instead of really asking ourselves what customers want, instead of really asking ourselves what our customer service professionals need, we focus on the anecdotes. You know, the handwritten card from the retiree who took the time to write about the amazing care she got from Mabel - the 20-year tenured customer service rep who just happened to have the time and information on hand to solve the issue - and determine our answer is "Let's train more Mabels". While we're busy trying and failing to recreate more Mabels, hoping for more magical handwritten cards and survey responses, 10X the number of customers fall into the 'silent attrition' bucket. They never even called. They didn't even bother sending you a complaint. They don't even fill out surveys. They just stop using your product. They quietly cancel their subscription.

The problem is exacerbated by an entire industry that has created a myriad of tools and consultancies to sell them. They make a hammer, so every problem must be a nail - and armed with just enough feel-good data points to help rationalize the emotional sale - chasing incremental gains without really solving the underlying problem. Take surveys for example - when you ask leading questions with multiple choices, the respondent is forced to answer the question at hand, instead of telling you what their real issue is. Take for example a survey that asks - "You must choose one response":

• Who was the better President: (a) George Bush or (b) Ronald Reagan or (c) Bill Clinton
• What affects your customer experience the most: (a) Responsiveness of the customer service rep or (b) The politeness of the customer service rep (c) The accent of the customer service rep

The respondent may dislike all of the choices, but now has to force rank them, and if enough people choose one response over the others, the answer becomes "Bill Clinton is the most popular President according to 63% of the respondents" or "Responsiveness of the customer service rep must be our focus". Now imagine the survey asks:

• Who in your opinion is the best living President in the 20th Century and why?
• What Customer Experience would make you recommend us to a friend?

You'd get a dramatically different set of answers if the respondents could answer in free-form text. Too many people conflate Customer Experience with Customer Service. Customer Service is a component of Customer Experience. Too often, we as an industry reflexively kick the can down the road and patch the pothole of poor experience with band-aids - most often in the form of shiny UI, or just adding more people and resources to the same broken process. We never ask the hard question of asking "What is the ideal journey that makes for an amazing customer experience?"

To demystify this, I analyzed the survey responses from 633 US-based consumers, who classify themselves as the head of household, with annual incomes above $75,000, and asked them to respond with free-form text responses. Some very bright grad students then analyzed the text clouds with AI to create summarizations of the consumer responses and this is what we found: (Rank ordered in importance):

The next set of questions confirmed their responses.

Notice the common theme between the top names in each of these categories? Would love to get your thoughts on the common thread of the leaders, and why there were no clear leader brands in banking, healthcare, and telco/media.

And I can hear the refrain from established industry leaders now: "But those new guys aren't encumbered with legacy systems and models". Yes - I know, so what are you going to do - just let them keep growing unbounded with their modern approach and modern tech stack? At some point all the superbowl ads in the world won't be enough for you to keep them at bay. At some point, they'll pass you by.

As an industry - we have to do better. We have to stop kicking the can down the road, stop window dressing broken processes, and start really embracing what customers want. They don't just want better customer service. They want a better experience.