The mind is a powerful thing.
As much as brands want to depend on the logic of presenting great products at great prices, the attention of the consumer is won through feelings: nostalgic or aspirational advertising, personalization, the creation of a sense of urgency or exclusivity. It’s just part of why behavioral science is so important to CX.
Mark Levy (pictured below) is a CX executive, strategist, speaker, and author and he helps CX, product, and service teams apply behavioral science to design clearer, more human experiences that reduce friction, build trust, and drive measurable results across digital, service, and AI-driven journeys.
His latest book, The Psychology of CX 101, doesn’t just explain why customers act the way they do, but how organizations can design customer journeys that feel natural, reduce friction, and inspire loyalty. In short, it’s a handbook for applying behavioral psychology to CX.
However, this isn’t just another theory book. It distills 101 psychological principles into practical, easy-to-use tools, and presents experiments readers can execute to see how they can influence the behavior of their customers.
CX Network caught up with Levy to find out how practitioners can better understand customers, the three major customer behavior shifts that are happening right now, and where influence crosses the line.
CX Network: Your book is called The Psychology of CX 101, but it isn’t just a book about consumer psychology – and it isn’t intended for passive reading. Tell us what it covers and who it’s written for.
The book lays out 101 practical principles from behavioral science that explain how customers actually think, feel, decide, and remember experiences. A lot of it happens automatically, and often under pressure. When CX teams understand those forces, drop-off, churn, and hesitation stop feeling mysterious. You can usually see what’s causing them.
Onboarding is a common example. Teams often assume the issue is the offer or the product. More often, it’s cognitive load and uncertainty: too many decisions at once, vague language, no clear sense of progress. When you reduce the number of choices, make the next step obvious, and show momentum, completion goes up and the “how does this work?” tickets drop.
This isn’t a book you read once and shelve. It’s meant to be used. Each principle ties to real CX moments: onboarding, support, digital journeys, AI interactions. It also includes small experiments teams can run right away to see what actually changes behavior. That’s why there’s a workbook too. Reading helps, but testing is what moves CX.
I wrote it for CX, UX, product, marketing, and service teams who want to stop guessing and start designing around how people really behave. If you design for human behavior, good experiences don’t happen by luck. You build them on purpose.
CX Network: What’s one piece of advice you would give a CX practitioner who is struggling to understand the data they hold on customers and the decisions they make?
Mark Levy: Most teams don’t misunderstand customers because they lack data. They misunderstand them because they assume customers are making careful, rational decisions. Most of the time, they aren’t.
Customer data isn’t a verdict. It’s a trail of behavior. Drop-off, churn, hesitation, repeat contacts: those aren’t just “bad metrics.” They’re signals that the experience is creating friction, uncertainty, or perceived risk at the wrong moment.
My advice is simple: stop asking what customers should do and start asking what the experience is nudging them to do.
When someone abandons a flow, it’s rarely because they don’t want the outcome. It’s usually because the experience asks for too much effort, leaves them unsure what happens next, or triggers fear of choosing wrong.
One lens I keep coming back to is: confusion → distrust → inaction. If you can spot which one you’re triggering, the data starts making sense fast. And once you look at behavior that way, it becomes more predictable, which means you can design around it.
CX Network: What do you see as the most important customer behavior trends CX practitioners need to understand right now?
Mark Levy: Three shifts are hitting at the same time.
First, customers are cognitively overloaded. Attention is scarce, patience is thin, and people are juggling 10 things at once. If an experience feels confusing or effortful, they don’t power through. They bounce.
Second, trust is fragile, especially in digital and AI-driven experiences. Customers are constantly asking, often without realizing it: “Is this safe? Is this fair? Is this trying to trick me?” If the experience doesn’t answer those questions, people leave quietly.
Artificial intelligence (AI) makes this more intense. When you automate without explaining what’s happening, or without giving customers a clear path to control or escalation, you get efficiency on paper and distrust in real life.
Third, memory matters more than “satisfaction” as an average score. Customers don’t remember every step.
They remember moments of friction, emotional highs and lows, and how the experience ended. If you only optimize the average, you can miss the moments that drive loyalty.
The teams that do well are the ones who treat experience as psychological before it’s operational. If it doesn’t work for the brain, it doesn’t work.
CX Network: What interests you most when it comes to consumer psychology?
Mark Levy: I’m still fascinated by how often customers hesitate or leave over things organizations think are too small to matter.
A word choice. A default setting. A progress indicator. The tone of an automated message. Internally, those feel minor. Psychologically, they can be decisive. They tell customers whether they’re in control, whether they can trust what’s happening, and whether continuing feels safe.
Small shifts can change behavior. Swap one word that feels final or risky for something that feels like forward motion, and completion moves. Add a progress cue, and people keep going because they feel momentum.
I like that these aren’t massive replatforming projects. They’re small decisions with outsized effects.
I’m also very interested in where influence crosses the line. Psychology can help people make better decisions, or it can quietly push them into choices they don’t fully understand. Customers can feel that difference fast. The goal isn’t to make customers easier to influence. It’s to design experiences that respect how people actually think.
The Psychology of CX 101 is available here in Kindle, Paperback and Audiobook formats.
Quick links
- Solving the problems facing consumer insights
- Are AI-generated images putting customers off?
- Employee engagement 101: Rethinking EX in the age of declining trust