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The Cartoon and Clip of the Week for April 22, 2015
Daily we read, see and hear more and more about how advanced technologies such as auto-classification and predictive coding can impact the disciplines of information governance and electronic discovery. However, for individuals and organizations to understand and accept these technologies, they must first hear about them and be convinced of their viability.
“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?“
This week our cartoon and clip provides one look at how fleeting the relevance of new technologies can be (cartoon) and also provides a communications model for gaining and maintaining client acceptance of new technologies (clip).
Influencing Client Behavior: A Simple Communications Model
In order to influence a client, it is prudent to first become familiar with the components of client behavior. There are both emotional and logical elements to client decisions –– and the impact of these elements changes over time. One simple communications model for changing and maintaining change in client behavior is graphically depicted (Figure 1) and explained below:
Changing and Maintaining Changes in Client Behavior
• Initially a potential client is stimulated through emotion to consider a change in behavior.
This emotion, resulting from a high motivation to consider change, progresses toward the need to justify the considered change with logic over time.
Example of Need for Emotional Stimulus: I am using legacy software for eDiscovery and my company wishes to improve its eDiscovery capability. A new offering looks promising, and if I can implement an offering that increases the corporation’s eDiscovery capability while saving money, my General Counsel will be impressed.
• At some point during the consideration of change, the client begins to have to justify the emotional desire for change with a logical reason for considering the change.
Example of Need for Logical Stimulus: I want to impress the General Counsel by providing better eDiscovery at lower costs, therefore I need to recognize and work through specific return on investment examples.
• Once both the emotional and logical stimuli for change have been presented, the individual being influenced (audience) typically makes a decision to change or maintain his or her behavior.
Example of Behavioral Change: It seems I can help the firm increase capability and save money. The new offering is compelling, and the return on investment numbers support its adoption, so I am going to purchase the new offering.
If, at this point, there is not a decision to change behavior, then the communicator’s message (both emotional and logical stimulus components) may need to be refined.
• Once behavior has been changed, the next major challenge is maintaining the desired client behavior. This can be accomplished by continuing to send messages to the client with logical reasons for maintaining his/ her behavior along with ensuring that emotion-targeted messaging is not neglected. This combination serves to prevent competitive emotional and logical messaging from grabbing the attention of the client and resulting in a non desired change of behavior.
Example of Maintaining Behavioral Change: The change appears to be saving the corporation time and money, and the return-on-investment case studies shared by the vendor seem to show that this is the best offering to use to continue use to achieve the objective of helping the corporation and impressing the General Counsel.
By understanding this simple communications model and applying it when communicating with clients and potential clients, individuals and organizations can increase their chances for successful behavioral change outcomes.
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