Customers, employees, citizens, and organisational leaders frequently deviate from making optimal decisions. For example, customers don’t pay debts even when they can afford to; employees are slow to adopt new technologies which would save them time; citizens waste water when it is in short supply, and leaders often sign contracts that leave their business worse off. People tend to make these adverse decisions because they rely on instinct to make decisions, which is influenced by the way choices are framed, timed and socialised.
PwC’s behavioural economics team works with organisations to help customers, employees, citizens, and firms improve decision-making in line with organisational goals. Our solutions are win-win: individuals retain choice but are not led astray by behavioural biases; organisations increase revenues or decrease costs. Our solutions are rapidly scalable because they typically involve small but powerful tweaks to the way in which choices are presented. Moreover, we use experiments to demonstrate the impact of our solutions and scale the most successful interventions in a rapid and evidence-based way.
Our 5 step approach diagnoses the behavioural biases affecting key customer groups, identifying interventions and rolling out the most effective treatments at scale.
Our approach draws on research from across the social and behavioural sciences. We consider four factors in understanding decisions and behaviour: 1) the customer, employee or citizen actors, and the 2) economic factors, 3) behavioural factors and 4) social factors that influence those decisions and behaviour.
PwC designed a behavourally-driven customer process flow for the client to use and redesigned communication letters with defaults which increased customer response rates by over 300%.
75% of councils have made decarbonisation commitments, however many recognise significant challenges to achieving their targets. We outline the opportunity to apply behavioural insight to harness the power of communities in tackling the climate emergency.
Over the last few years, we've seen a rise in the number of businesses investing in employee-facing technology, but benefits don't just come from buying the technology itself. What insights can behavioural economics provide to help navigate change and get good habits to stick? And how did we apply these insights in practice to drive an 81% increase in employee adoption of technology within 2 months?
Are you value-sensitive or time-sensitive? Active or dormant? Proactive or a procrastinator? These questions are at the heart of Behavioural Segmentation, an approach to segmentation that makes nudges significantly more effective at influencing behaviour.
Organisations are increasingly using Behavioural Economics (BE) to improve the way they interact with customers by better understanding their behaviour. Suresh Natarajan, who leads our BE practice, shares his experiences of using BE to help clients, and his views on where the field may be headed.
