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.
We have developed a series of repeatable propositions that have unlocked value for our clients
Under each group is a series of propositions
We have proven the effectiveness of these propositions
Our approach
How we tackle this with clients
Our 5 step approach diagnoses the behavioural biases affecting key customer groups, identifying interventions and rolling out the most effective treatments at scale.
How we design solutions
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.
Case studies
- Improving customer response rates
- Boosting tech adoption
- Improving employee engagement
- Increasing recurring revenues
- Reducing bill non-payments
Improving customer response rates
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%.
Boosting tech adoption
PwC worked with a major national transport project to design behaviourally-informed employee journey maps to identify behavioural blockers. This allowed targeted nudges and interventions to be designed to overcome these blockers which resulted in an 81% increase in daily users of key software.
Improving employee engagement
PwC designed over forty nudges to help an internal team improve compliance with a number of financial and personal independence issues. Implementation of these nudges resulted in a 55% increase in compliance software usage.
Increasing recurring revenues
PwC used customer segmentation to categorise customers into eight behavioural segments - enabling team members to design specific contact strategies for each - optimising sales conversations and ultimately increasing recurring revenues by $15m for a global enterprise software company.
Reducing bill non-payments
PwC used social norms, framing and simplification to redesign customer bill letters with nudges to encourage customers to promptly pay their bills, resulting in a 52% reduction in non-payments.
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