The "BodySmart" Customer – Designing Your Customer Experience With The 8 Kinds of Smart

By David Lazear

This is the second of eight articles following up my original article "Is Your Customer Experience Hurting Or Helping Your Customer Retention?". As I mentioned in the first article in this series, "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."

This is so important when you're working with your customers, whether they're brand new or long-time customers. Taking the time to really understand how they process information and how they learn best will make all the difference in the world to effective customer communication.

In this article I discuss the BodySmart customer, how to identify them and a set of "CustomerSmart Strategies" to help you design the customer experience to address their learning style and their unique way of processing information. If you missed the first article in this series, "Designing Your Customer Experience With The 8 Kinds of Smart" check it out.  It provides some helpful background for what I'm discussing in this article.

Recognizing BodySmart In Your Customers

BodySmart is the ability to use the body to express emotion (as in dance and body language), to play a game (as in sports), or to create a new product (as in devising an invention). Our bodies are very wise. They know things our conscious minds don't and can't know in any other way. For example, if I gave you a piece of paper and asked you to lay out the keyboard of a computer without moving your fingers, could you do it? Probably not. But your fingers know the keyboard without even pausing.

Key BodySmart Question To Ask Yourself:

How do people feel about our products or services? What do they do with them?

Key Intelligence Characteristics

Customers who are strong in this intelligence learn, process information, and think through physical movement and action.

• They like physical movement—dancing, making and inventing with their hands, and role-playing. • They probably communicate well through body language and other physical gestures, facial expressions, and postures. • They can often perform a task much better after seeing someone else do it first and then mimicking those actions. • They want to experience a product or service to see for themselves how it works before they buy. • They like to demonstrate how to do something for someone else. • They learn best in through “hands on” activities and through performance of skills being taught. • They may find it difficult to sit still for long periods of time and are easily bored or distracted if they are not actively involved in what is going on around you

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

Clues to HOW Your              Customers Are Smart Is your customer athletic and physically active? Is it hard for them to sit still for very long? Do they think better when they’re moving? Do they use “kinesthetic language”? “I don’t like the feel of that,” “I can’t quite get a handle on it,” “My sense of this is . . .” Does your customer dress more for comfort than style? Do they need to take time to check out how they feel about things? Do they use hand gestures often in the mid-body region and as if holding or touching a 3-dimensional object? Do they use their body to express themselves, such as gestures, facial expressions, shrugs, postures, and other forms of “body language”? Are they more involved and excited when you and they are moving or trying things out.

CustomerSmart™                        Strategies Whenever possible, offer a demonstration or simulation of what you’re selling. Get them moving: “Let’s go for a walk and talk about this more so I can get a better feel for the situation.” Put something in their hands – give them something to touch, hold, play with, use. Make sure you meet in a large enough space where they have room to move around. Figure out how to make any abstract concepts as concrete as possible by using movement, physical objects, space, and touch. Use “kinesthetic language”: “You’ve got a pretty good grip on this, eh?” “What’s your sense of this so far?” “Thanks for putting your touch our conversation.” Have them dramatize, act out, or physically show you a problem or issue they are experiencing.

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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-Mentor-Training.com