Designing Your "Customer Experience" With The 8 Kinds of Smart (a.k.a. "multiple intelligences")

By David Lazear

This is the first of eight articles following up my article on "Is Your Customer Experience Hurting Or Helping Your Customer Retention?". Not everyone learns, understands, and processes information best in the traditional ways. Most people need to learn and process information several different ways for the information to really stick. Respecting this difference in your customers is key to relationship marketing startegies.

• Some people are more visual in how they learn. • Some need to discuss things with other people. • Some need a very logical presentation of the material to be learned. • Some need lots of written material to read. • Some love lectures and learning via the spoken word. • Others just need time to “go inside” and think about it, or meditate on it.

• Others need some kind of physical activity – acting something out, or something that gets them up out of their chair.

• For some, music helps them learn – put what you're teaching into a song and they'll get it instantly (remember how you learned the alphabet years ago?).

I know you've experienced this in your business when you're mentoring, coaching, or training your customers and business partners. However, it's not just true in a training situation. It's also important for your customer experience – even the customer experience on your website!

If we're concerned to really reach everyone with the mentoring, coaching and training we’re providing, it's got to be “multi-modal”. Multi-modal simply means that any information you're trying to get across to your customers (or potential customers!) must be delivered in a variety of ways, because not everyone learns, understands, and procresses information the same way.

Let’s look at a simple, yet profound system that will help you incorporate multi-modal teaching and learning into your customer experience!

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Designing Your "Customer Experience"
with The 8 Kinds of Smart!
(a.k.a. “multiple intelligences”)

WordSmart leads to the production of language and all the complex possibilities that follow, including poetry, humor, grammar, metaphors, similes, abstract reasoning, symbolic thinking, and of course, the written word. LogicSmart is most often associated with what we call “scientific thinking”, problem-solving, working with numbers, calculation, and discerning logical connections between different kinds and pieces of information. ImageSmart involves such activities as painting, drawing, and sculpture; navigation, mapmaking and architecture; and the ability to create images and pictures in the mind. BodySmart is the ability to use the body to express emotion, to play a game, to mime, to dance, to box, to communicate with others using "body language", or to create a new product.

SoundSmart includes such capacities as the recognition and use of rhythmic and tonal patterns, and sensitivity to sounds from the environment, the human voice, and musical instruments.

PeopleSmart involves the ability to work cooperatively in a group as well as the ability to communicate, verbally and non-verbally, with other people, including recognizing contrasts in moods, temperament, motivations, and feelings.

SelfSmart involves knowledge of the internal aspects of the self such as one's own feelings, the range of emotional responses, thinking processes, self-reflection, self-identity, and the ability to transcend the self.

NatureSmart is related to our recognition, appreciation, and understanding of the natural world around us, including species discernment, the ability to recognize and classify various flora and fauna, and our knowledge of and communion with the natural world.

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In this article, and the seven to follow, I will take each of The 8 Kinds of Smart and show you how to recognize them in your customers and then provide a set of "CustomerSmart Strategies" to help you design the customer experience to address their learning style and their unique way of processing information.

Recognizing ImageSmart In Your Customers

ImageSmart involves such activities as painting, drawing, and sculpture; navigation, map-making and architecture, and games such as chess (which requires the ability to visualize objects from different perspectives and angles). The key sensory base of this intelligence, obviously, is the sense of sight, but also the ability to form images and pictures in the mind. Our childhood daydreaming, when we pretended we could fly or that we were magical beings, or maybe that we were heroes-heroines in fabulous adventure stories used this intelligence to the hilt!

Key ImageSmart Question To Ask Yourself:

What do my customers SEE, actually, or in their "mind’s eyes"?

Key Intelligence Characteristics

Customers who are strong in this intelligence learn, process information, and think in images, pictures, patterns, textures, designs, and colors.

• They are likely very aware of objects, shapes, colors, textures, and patterns in the environment around them. • They may like to draw, paint, make interesting designs and patterns, and work with clay, colored markers, construction paper, and fabric. • Many who are strong in ImageSmart love to work jigsaw puzzles, read maps, and find their way around new places. • They have definite opinions about colors that go together well, textures that are appropriate and pleasing, and how a room should be decorated. • They excellent at performing tasks that require seeing with the mind’s eyes, such as visualizing, pretending, imagining, and forming mental images.

Tips For Designing Your Customer Experience With the ImageSmart Customer In Mind

Clues to HOW Your Customers Are Smart Notice your customer’s environment: Are things carefully placed? Are there decorative objects? Does your customer use “visual” language? For example: “Look at it this way,” “I see what you mean,” “Let’s focus on this” “I’m having difficulty picturing what you’re saying.” How does your customer dress? Often they’ll wear exciting patterns and combine interesting colors. Do they seem to understand better when you show them something to look at? Do they often look up or off into the distance as if trying to glimpse something before speaking? Do they gesture at things they’re talking about, even when the actual “thing” isn’t there? Do they express themselves by drawing images, diagrams, or pictures? Do they doodle while you’re talking with them? Do they close their eyes when trying to remember something?

CustomerSmart™ Strategies • Look at your physical space through the eyes of your most visual customer, what needs to change? How pleasing is your product literature to the eye? Is your web site visually stimulating and interesting? Always have something to show, even though it might not seem necessary to you. Look at everything that is sent or given to customers: how visually appealing is it? (Even if it’s just words – layout counts!) Ask your customers to visualize themselves using your products or solving a problem? Use visual language when you try to assist them, for example “Let me show you what I mean.” “Let me know when you have a clear picture of it.” “Can you see what I’m talking about?” If they’re having difficulty expressing something, ask them to get a picture in their head first then describe what they’re seeing.

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About the author:

David Lazear is a mentor and coach for mentors, coaches, and trainers. He is an associate of Mike Klingler and Ann Sieg at the Renegade University and Renegade Professional where he is a superguide, coach, and trainer.

David has written some 15 books and created numerous resources for small business entrepreneurs, coaches, and trainers. His expertise is training others in how to assess and address the “learning profile” of other people using the research on “multiple intelligences” (a.k.a. The 8 Kinds of Smart). Learn more about this on his blog
@ Small-Business-Mentor-Training.com

David Lazear teaches how to turbo-charge any mentoring, coaching, and training you provide so you Reach Everyone, Everytime – Guaranteed!

Contact information for David Lazear

Phone: 773-525-6650
E-mail: David@Home-Business-Smarts.net
Blog: Small-Business-

Comments

[Dotty]

Hi David
I really learned this lesson while teaching beginning Karate to new students. Before starting that job I had no experience in defining how people learned. It quickly became apparent to me that most people learn differently than I do - when I got that blank stare I knew I needed to come up with a different explanation for the technique. What I later discovered and still treasure is the deeper understanding that I gained by being able to teach the same thing many different ways. Someone that gets skilled in this will learn more about the topic than they ever thought possible.