CHAPTER 12
Give the Perception of Control
In the late 1970s, Richard Mills, a University of Southern California psychology student, conducted an unusual experiment to test theories around the emerging concept of “perceived control”—the idea, posited by other academics, that the more control people exert over their surroundings, the happier they are.1
Mills approached the local American Red Cross blood donation center and enlisted their help in a study. For one group of people, the Red Cross phlebotomist asked the donors to choose from which arm they wanted blood to be drawn. The other group was given no such choice; the nurse merely advised that blood would be drawn from the donor’s nondominant arm.
The donors who were given the opportunity to select an arm for the phlebotomy reported feeling significantly less discomfort from the procedure, as compared to those who were given no such choice. That’s right—simply allowing people to choose which arm blood was taken from had a meaningful influence on their perception of the experience. But wait, it gets even more interesting.
Mills tested a different set of donors with another type of experimental intervention. Instead of giving the donors in this group the choice of arm, they were given information about the procedure—a two-minute recording that described, step-by-step, how the blood would be drawn and what physiological and psychological sensations the donor might experience. Just like the donors who were able to choose an arm, the donors who heard the detailed explanation of the procedure reported feeling less discomfort than those who received no such information.
Mills’s study had indeed added to the growing body of evidence that when people are able to exert control over various aspects of their life, they feel better, physically and psychologically.2 We as a species are, for lack of a better term, control freaks. We like to have our “hands on the steering wheel,” wielding control over our lives and what goes on around us.
The problem is, in many circumstances, we simply can’t have our hands on the steering wheel; we can’t truly control what’s happening to us. Instead, we have to delegate that control to another party—to the nurse, for example, who draws our blood. Or to the mechanic who fixes our car. Or to the financial advisor who manages our investments. The fact is, in the real world, we can’t control every experience we go through, because sometimes those experiences have to be delivered to us by others, based on some special expertise or knowledge they possess.
The risk in customer experience, though, is that the moment we delegate control to another party—that nurse, that mechanic, that financial advisor, or some other entity—it’s quite likely that we’ll feel less good about the encounter. In essence, a loss of control sows the seeds for customer dissatisfaction.
The good news, however, is that Mills’s research, and the many studies that followed it, pointed to a highly effective proxy for giving customers direct control of an experience, and that is giving them the perception of control. That’s really what the blood donors in Mills’s study had. They certainly didn’t have direct control of the experience, because after all, they were letting a complete stranger stick a sharp object in their arm and draw blood.
However, the mere act of choosing which arm they wanted to use for the draw actually gave the donors the sense that they had some control over the procedure. In objective terms, that small decision—which arm to use—really doesn’t translate into the donor exerting control over the experience. Left arm or right arm, it’s still a stranger coming at you with a needle. But from a cognitive standpoint, it makes a big difference. That small choice, even though applied to a seemingly minor facet of the blood donation procedure, makes donors feel meaningfully better about the experience.
It turns out, though, that there’s more than one way to give people the perception that they have control of an experience. One approach, as we saw with blood donors’ arm choice, is to help people influence the experience, so the experience conforms to their thoughts (e.g., “I want to use my left arm for this procedure”).
But another equally effective approach is to help people influence their thoughts, so their thoughts conform to the experience (e.g., “I understand how this donation procedure works”).3 Or to put it more simply, it’s about managing expectations. That’s essentially what Mills did with the test subjects who were given a detailed explanation of the blood draw procedure before they went through it. By sharing that information up front, donors felt more in control and had a better experience, merely because they knew what to expect. The removal of uncertainty and ambiguity is inherently pleasing, because it helps us feel more in control of our destiny.
What’s astonishing about this approach (technically referred to as “secondary control”) is that it can fundamentally improve people’s impressions of an experience—even if the underlying experience isn’t changed at all. The Perception of Control principle is almost magical in that way, as we’ll see in the next example.
The Magical Power of Expectation-Setting
There are people who spend their entire lives studying the science of line queuing. While it’s an arcane area of study, it has yielded some fascinating insights, including one which provides a perfect illustration of the Perception of Control principle.
Imagine you have two people who step into two separate lines at exactly the same moment. The two lines (let’s call them Line A and Line B) move forward at exactly the same pace, and the two people reach the front of their respective lines at exactly the same moment.
There is one difference, however. When the person in Line A first steps into the queue, you inform them that the approximate wait time from where they’re standing is five minutes. As for the person in Line B, you don’t say anything to them.
When the two people reach the front of their respective lines, assume you ask them each a couple of questions, independently: (1) Approximately how long do you think you waited? and (2) How did you feel about the experience of waiting?
As queuing research has shown, the person in Line A will tend to estimate their wait as being shorter than the person in Line B, even though their wait times were actually identical. In addition, the person in Line A will also tend to rate the experience of waiting as better than the person in Line B even though, again, their waits were exactly the same.4, 5
The only thing that could possibly account for the discrepancy between these responses is that the person in Line A was told up front approximately how long their wait would be. Yet that actually makes all the difference.
Consider this experience from the perspective of the person in Line B. They get into line, and nobody looks at them or says anything to them. They are wallowing in ambiguity. They have no idea how long this wait will be, and as a result, they feel like they have no control over their circumstances, so the experience feels unpleasant as a result.
The person in Line A, however, has a very different perspective. When they step into line, an expectation is set for them—“approximately five minutes from where you’re standing.” That declaration allows the person in Line A to start wrapping their head around the idea of a five-minute wait, conforming their thoughts to the experience. They have a clearer understanding of what’s on the horizon, what’s coming around the corner. That makes them feel more in control of what’s going on around them, which translates into a better experience overall.
In truth, you’ve not only given the person in Line A the perception of control, you’ve given them actual control, because if they don’t like the idea of a five-minute wait, then they can just step out of line and come back another time.
The power of setting expectations in customer experience cannot be overstated. In the world of queuing, it means known waits feel better than unknown waits. It means the experience of standing in line can be made more palatable even without making the line any shorter—hence the “magical” nature of this principle.
The technique, however, can be applied to most any type of experience. When you set expectations for customers—whether about wait times, or product features, or how a process will unfold—you are reducing ambiguity and uncertainty for them. That helps convey a sense of control to the customer. It serves to lessen their anxieties and make them feel better about the experience you’re delivering, even if you don’t change anything about the underlying mechanics of the experience.
Keep Customers Informed
Brian Ferris, a University of Washington (UW) graduate student, had spent too many late nights wondering if the Route 44 would ever arrive. The 44 was a notoriously unreliable bus in the Seattle public transit system, triggering the ire of Ferris and many of his fellow Seattleites, who often found themselves waiting in the rain for a bus that never seemed to come. Ferris, who was studying computer science and engineering at UW, resolved to do something about it.6
In 2008, he paired up with a fellow engineering graduate student, Kari Watkins, and built a real-time tracking system for Seattle area bus riders. Dubbed “OneBusAway,” it was a mobile app that capitalized on existing vehicle-tracking technology that Seattle’s King Country Metro department was using for internal traffic management purposes.7 OneBusAway slapped a user-friendly interface onto that data and essentially enabled transit riders to answer that eternal question: Where is my bus? On-demand and in real time, travelers could find out when their bus was scheduled to arrive and track it on a map as it approached their point of pickup. (While this might sound unremarkable today, keep in mind that OneBusAway launched two years before Uber even existed as a commercial ride-hailing service.) OneBusAway was a big hit, earning numerous Seattle-area technology awards and garnering a user base that exceeded 100,000 individuals across multiple US cities.8, 9
Building the app, however, was just one part of Ferris and Watkins’ work. The duo also sought to understand how the app influenced customer perceptions of the Seattle public transit experience. They surveyed transit customers and discovered that those who used OneBusAway had a lower perceived wait time than riders who didn’t use the app. In addition, OneBusAway users were simply happier with the whole transit experience, with 92 percent of them reporting increased satisfaction with the public transportation system.10
OneBusAway was giving transit users the perception of control, but in a slightly different way than we saw with Mills’s blood donation study. Yes, an expectation was being set for these transit riders; they could go to the app and see an estimated arrival time for their bus. In addition, however, they were able to monitor the bus’s progress toward their stop—visually on a map or just by refreshing the estimated “minutes to arrival” shown on their smartphone screen.
Those real-time updates illustrate another effective tactic for giving customers the perception of control: keep them informed. It’s one thing to set expectations for people, but if the experience they’re going through has inherent variability (e.g., a bus that could get delayed en route), then expectation-setting alone will not remove ambiguity and anxiety from their minds. They’ll keep wondering, “Where’s the bus now? Is it still going to arrive when you said it would?” When kept informed as they progress through an experience, customers again feel more in control of what’s happening around them. Information gives them agency, and that makes them feel better about the experience as a result.
As Watkins observed in an interview for a UW Innovation Exhibit, “The impact that information can have on people is amazing.”11 Her research revealed that transit customers have such a thirst for information updates that they’d “rather have real-time [data] than more frequent [bus] service.”12 It is yet another illustration of the almost magical impact that perceived control has on the customer experience. It means businesses can deliver a better experience without actually delivering a better experience (i.e., more frequent buses, in the public transit example).
It’s a technique that companies from Amazon (with its user-friendly tools for tracking order status) to Domino’s Pizza (with its online Pizza Tracker, for monitoring the progress of an order from submission to delivery) have used to improve customer perceptions, even if the packages and pizzas aren’t being delivered any faster.
And it’s a technique that you can use, as well, particularly with customer experiences that may extend over a period of time and involve numerous steps. Just keep your customer informed and updated, whether through real-time mobile apps or just an old-fashioned phone call. The perceived control customers gain as a result will be invaluable to your business.
PUTTING THE PRINCIPLES INTO PRACTICE
How to “Give the Perception of Control”
Consider, in your business, what is the analogue to waiting in line? What are episodes where your customer might enter the experience (i.e., the “line”) and then feel uncertainty, perhaps even anxiety, while they wait for the experience to unfold and eventually conclude (i.e., reaching the front of the line). Just like waiting in a queue, those are precisely the types of episodes where customers may feel a loss of control, and where the techniques described in this chapter could be applied to improve the experience.
• Set expectations. Always set clear expectations with customers and employees. (The one exception to this rule is when the element of surprise is a key ingredient in the experience, something we’ll cover in Chapter 17.) Set expectations for timeliness, for example, by clearly articulating product/service delivery windows or project completion dates. Set expectations for the steps that you’ll navigate people through to help them accomplish their objectives. Set expectations for the sentiment people might feel, physically or psychologically, as they go through the experience, by previewing that for them up front.
• Be specific. To be effective, expectation-setting must be specific. You gain little, for example, by telling someone that you’ll be in touch “shortly” or “very soon.” Those terms mean different things to different people. Rather than remove ambiguity for the customer, those words create more.
• Affix time frame expectations to the written word. Be it with forms that you ask customers to complete, or informational content that you send to them, provide the courtesy of telling them up front how long the task will take. Print the typical completion time at the top of the form. Display the typical reading time at the top of an article. These are subtle enhancements, but they do remove ambiguity from the customer’s life (“How long will this take?”) and give them real control since they can choose to defer the task until they have the requisite time available.
• Offer options. People feel more in control if they have the opportunity to make choices—even on small, seemingly insignificant matters, like from which arm to draw blood. Of course, don’t overload customers with options (remember how we learned in Chapter 10 that decision complexity can be a drag on the customer experience). However, do look for opportunities to help them feel like they’re exerting influence over their circumstances, such as by giving them a limited choice of appointment times or product configurations, allowing them to customize an offering in some way or providing options for resolving a problem. The key is to make people feel like they’re not being boxed into a single outcome.
• Let customers choose privacy over personalization. As companies aim to deliver more personalized customer experiences (something we’ll learn more about in Chapter 16), they are capturing and using a wide variety of information from customers, such as personal data, location, browsing, and purchase histories. When customers feel like they can’t control or monitor the collection and use of such data, it detracts from the experience and undermines their trust in the business.13 Be transparent with customers about personal data collection, and give them the ability to control what data is captured and how it is used.
• Prepare customers for what’s next. Help people understand what’s around the bend by clearly explaining transitions from one part of the experience to another. If they’ve taken an action that will trigger something else—a revised bill, a call from a colleague, a change in pricing—advise them of such so they will expect it and have a complete understanding of how things will unfold going forward. Note that this will also help make the experience more effortless, because without these signals about what’s to come, customers may end up reaching back out to you for explanation.
• Use visuals to show progress. Help customers understand where they are in a multiepisode process by providing them with a visual representation of the procedural steps. Be it on a website (such as with transaction progress bars), or in print (such as with customer onboarding communications), visual maps of multistep experiences help customers feel more in control, because they understand clearly where they’ve been and what’s yet to come.
• Be proactive in keeping customers informed. When customers are in the dark, it increases their anxiety. Setting expectations is but half the battle. It’s also important to communicate status updates—per an agreed upon time frame—and even if there’s no new information to share. Yes, it’s better to contact the customer and tell them you don’t yet have an update, instead of leaving them hanging when they thought they’d be hearing from you.
• Leverage mobile technologies for status updates. Mobile devices, because they accompany us practically everywhere, provide a unique platform for keeping customers informed and in control. Text messages, notifications, and GPS-enabled apps are all examples of technologies that can be used to communicate real-time status updates to customers, wherever and whenever.
• Provide clear points of contact. One factor that can diminish customers’ perceived control is if they don’t know whom to contact if they have a question or a problem. Absent that information, they may feel lost, abandoned, helpless—and most certainly not in control. Never hide contact information in an effort to reduce the volume of customer inquiries. Prominently display it on websites, billing statements, and correspondence. And in one-on-one interactions, make it abundantly clear to the customer whom they can contact (and how) should they need further assistance.
• Greet and acknowledge customers upon arrival. When a customer enters a store seeking assistance, and no one even acknowledges their arrival, it’s just like they’ve stepped into a queue without receiving any expectation of how long the wait will be. Just the mere act of greeting customers when they arrive, even if no employee is available to assist them, helps soften the uncertainty a bit. It sends a signal: “Hey, we know you’re here, we know you’re waiting, and we’ll be with you as soon as we can.”
CHAPTER 12 KEY TAKEAWAYS
• It’s human nature that people like to be in control of their lives and what’s going on around them. When we don’t have that sense of control, it creates uncertainty and anxiety, which makes whatever experience we’re going through feel less pleasant.
• For many businesses, it’s not feasible to give customers direct control of the experience. You can make your own sundae at an ice cream shop, but you can’t repair your own automobile at the car shop. The risk is, when customers delegate a task to another entity, they’ll feel less in control and therefore won’t enjoy the experience as much.
• Fortunately, there is a good proxy for giving customers direct control of the experience, and that is to give them the perception of control. That can be accomplished in two ways.
• The first approach is to give customers the power of choice so they can exert influence (however superficial) over isolated parts of the experience—such as choosing which arm a phlebotomist uses to draw blood. This essentially allows the customer to conform part of the experience to their personal wishes, thereby fostering a sense of control.
• The second approach is to help customers conform their thoughts to align with the experience. That can be accomplished by setting clear expectations and keeping customers informed—for example, by posting approximate wait times throughout a queue or proactively providing status updates on an in-process request. This helps remove ambiguity and uncertainty from the experience, which in turn makes the customer feel more in control of what’s happening and leaves them with a much better impression.