Your AI Is Engineering The Perfect Forgettable Experience; Was That The Plan?

In this episode of The Intuitive Customer, Colin Shaw and Professor Ryan Hamilton continue their deep dive into memory — arguably the most underused idea in customer experience. Because here's the uncomfortable truth: customers don't act on the experience you give them. They act on the memory of it.

Ryan introduces a brilliant analogy: memory works like a fishing net. Pull up one memory and you drag a whole network of related memories with it. Colin and Ryan then walk through the major types of memory — explicit, implicit, episodic, and the one that matters most for CX, evaluative — before landing on Professor Daniel Kahneman's peak-end rule and why it should sit at the heart of how you design every experience.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why memory behaves like a fishing net — and what that means for the moments you'd never think to design

• The difference between explicit, implicit, episodic, and evaluative memory (and why the last one runs the show)

• How habits live inside procedural memory

• The peak-end rule explained: why customers remember the most intense moment and the final moment, and almost nothing else

• Why a great recovery from a problem can build more loyalty than a flawless experience

Memorable moment: "You don't pull up one knot in the net. You drag the whole thing with it." — on why a single bad moment activates every adjacent memory a customer has of your category. Professor Ryan Hamilton

Resources:

• Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

• Qualtrics XM Institute on the financial value of emotion: https://www.qualtrics.com/articles/customer-experience/capture-financial-value-customer-emotions/

• Beyond Philosophy's Memory Maker Training: https://beyondphilosophy.com/contact

About the Hosts:

Colin Shaw is a LinkedIn 'Top Voice' with a massive 286,000 followers and 87,000 subscribers to his 'Why Customers Buy' newsletter. Shaw is named one of the world's 'Top 150 Business Influencers' by LinkedIn. His company, Beyond Philosophy LLC, has been selected four times by the Financial Times as a top management consultancy. Shaw is co-host of the top 1.5% podcast 'The Intuitive Customer'—with over 600,000 downloads—and author of eight best-sellers on customer experience. Shaw is a sought-after keynote speaker. Follow Col