Wi-Ai and the powerful need to feel “understood”
If you’re a director or senior manager at a financial services company business, you’ll be familiar with the barrage of factual information that (rightly) needs to be sent to clients – and the consequent frustration of having insufficient capacity to hear and understand customers’ hopes and fears. At best, this is a missed opportunity to strengthen a relationship. At worst, this leads to resentment and dissatisfaction, with poor client outcomes.
When you know you have your clients’ best interests at heart, it’s easy to assume that your customers feel confident their needs have been understood. However, feeling understood is a more deep-rooted issue – one that affects us right down to a neural level.
The need to feel understood is intrinsic to our human nature. As social psychologist Sylvia Morelli explains in a 2014 study, feeling understood activates neural regions associated with reward and social connection, while feeling misunderstood activates neural regions associated with negative affect.
In other words, giving customers opportunities to feel understood is not only a chance to receive useful feedback, but actively engages clients on a positive, neural level. If we don’t listen, we risk harming those relationships.
Wi-Ai’s products appeal to customers’ human need to feel understood. We need only look at the popularity of tools like the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator to see that our human desire to know “what makes me tick” means that clients value and enjoy tools which allow them to feel seen and heard.
By enabling customers to understand and take ownership of their behavioural biases, Wi-Ai products help large financial services providers to achieve more harmonious and profitable business relationships for you and your customers. While every human being is susceptible to bias, Wi-Ai’s tools allow customers to identify and challenge biases, and feel listened to and understood in the process.
In essence, human nature is human nature. As Kris Kristofferson once said, “You don’t paddle against the current, you paddle with it. And if you get good at it, you throw away the oars.”
For more information on Wi-Ai and client engagement, please contact us: [email protected]