Customer Experiences That Flow

How often do your customers have an easy time flowing with you?

One of my positions with an organization I volunteer in allows me to create and promote incentives and competitions for members to be recognized.

We were have a hard time deciding how the points should add up for one promotion. One opinion was to count all things equally while another said more difficult items should get more subjective credit.

The point I was making was that we had to make it fair or people wouldn’t do it. We ended up deciding to keep the judging subjective. Several experienced members would subjectively weigh all the criteria against each other and pick a relative winner.

Flow experiences are where skills and challenges intersect. If your skills are high and the challenge is low, you get bored. If your skills are low and the challenge is high, you get anxious. Flow is the happy medium between the two extremes where high skill and high challenge meet.

Establishing the rules so they’re easy enough for people to navigate gives an opportunity for flow. If you think about any sporting event, that’s what allows it to be appreciated as a challenge. Otherwise it’s just a bunch of guys fighting over a ball without a point. Without knowing the rules, it just wouldn’t make sense.

The reason I mentioned the member promotion example is that the rules have to not only be clear but they have to be fair. No one is going to play a game where their reasonable efforts won’t be fairly recognized. It’s difficult to get into a flow state that way because the challenge isn’t well defined.

An application is that your message will be most effective when it helps create a flow experience for your prospect. Your ideal customers will be the ones for whom you’re creating a solution that helps them flow better.

Helping people to flow creates value and therefore more customers.