Most Customers Don’t Need Explanations. They Need Cognitive Relief.

Dragos Manescu
Dec 31, 2025
10 min read

Updated: Jan 2

The Hidden Failure Mode

Most customer communication assumes one thing: lack of information. "If we explain this more clearly, and more frequently, they'll understand."

This works when people are calm. It fails when they're stressed.

The blunt reality: Most customer interactions happen during stress caused by:

Confusion
Perceived loss
Time pressure
Power imbalance

Example: You're buying a gift for your partner. Your brain is asking: Will they like it? Is it their size? Is the price right? Then you contact customer service: Will this arrive in time for our anniversary?

What happens: Clear explanations increase frustration. Not because they're unclear—because the stressed brain cannot process them.

Under stress:

Working memory shrinks
Attention narrows
Language feels heavier
Explanation becomes cognitive load, not help

The problem isn't your message. It's their brain state.

Type 1 and Type 2 Mindsets in Customer Experience

The Two Neural Pathways

Baba Shiv, a professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business (I attended one of my favorite classes during my LEAD program and this course succeeded to synthesize most of what I’ve read about behavioral economics in a few simple concepts) , uses the concepts of Type 1 and Type 2 mindsets to describe how individuals and organizations approach risk, failure, and innovation. Your brain operates on two distinct neural circuits.

Type 1 (Protect) activates when you perceive a threat—it floods your system with cortisol, narrows your attention, and pushes you toward safe, familiar choices.
Type 2 (Prospect) activates when you feel secure enough to explore—it releases dopamine, opens your thinking, and makes challenges feel exciting instead of threatening.

The trouble here is that these mindsets are mutually exclusive. Your brain cannot be in both states simultaneously. When cortisol spikes, dopamine shuts down. When you're protecting, you cannot dream and prospect.

Situation 1: Making a Purchase Decision

Type 1 Purchase Brain

You're buying a gift for your partner's birthday. The questions flood in: Will they like it? Is it their size? Is the price right—too cheap signals I don't care, too expensive seems wasteful.

What's happening: Your amygdala (threat-detection center) is firing. You're not evaluating the product's features—you're avoiding the emotional threat of disappointing someone you love.

Customer experience impact: In this state, you need distressors, not delighters. Product recommendations feel like a cognitive burden. Detailed comparison charts overwhelm. What helps: simple binary choices, default recommendations, social proof ("Most people in your situation choose..."), and loss framing ("Don't let this sell out before the birthday").

Type 2 Purchase Brain

Now imagine browsing for a new car on a relaxed Sunday morning. No deadline. No pressure. Just curiosity. Is it going to be the new Tesla? Or a BMW?

What's happening: Dopamine is flowing. Your prefrontal cortex (planning, imagination) is fully engaged. You're playing with possibilities, imagining your future self in different scenarios. Problems feel like interesting puzzles.

Customer experience impact: This brain wants delighters. Show me the aspirational story. Explain the unexpected benefit I haven't considered. Give me details to explore. Comparison charts are now helpful, not overwhelming. I'll read your brand story. I want to learn.

Situation 2: Reaching Out to Customer Relations

Type 1 Customer Service Brain

Your anniversary gift didn't arrive yet. It hasn’t even shipped. You're panicking and reaching out to customer service.

What's happening: Cortisol is spiking. Your brain's stress-to-comfort pathway is activated—you need tension resolution. Now. Sentences require more effort to parse. Long explanations register as obstacles, not help. The longer the message, the more it feels like they are protecting themselves with policies and legal explanations.

What makes it worse:

"Thank you for contacting us. To better assist you, could you please provide your order number, the date of purchase, a detailed description..."
"I understand your frustration. Let me explain our policy..."
"We'll investigate this and get back to you within 3-5 business days..."

All of these increase cortisol. Your brain interprets them as: "Your problem isn't solved yet. It will require more waiting."

What might resolve it: "I see this is urgent. Here's what I'm doing right now: checking inventory at stores near you. I found your item at store abc, they're holding it until 6pm today. Here's the address and phone number." Actually solving the problem, even if the resolution is not perfect.

Why this works: Immediate action reduces cortisol. Concrete next steps provide certainty. Short sentences match your reduced working memory. The problem shifts from "unresolved threat" to "handled."

Type 2 Customer Service Brain

You're asking about upgrading to some sort of a membership. No crisis. Just exploring options.

What's happening: You're in boredom-to-excitement mode. Your prefrontal cortex is engaged in planning and evaluation. You can process complexity. Details are interesting, not burdensome. You want to understand tradeoffs and make an optimized decision.

What could help here (obviously not exhaustive):

Structured comparisons (but no more than 3 options)
Benefit explanations with specifics
Stories from other customers
Questions that help you self-discover: "What matters most to you: free shipping, early access, or exclusive products?"

The Transition Challenge

The hardest moment in customer experience: moving someone from Type 1 to Type 2.

When someone contacts you with a problem, they're in Type 1. Their stress must be resolved before their brain can engage with anything else. Any attempt to upsell, educate, or build relationships will fail—or worse, you will be seen as an obstacle to problem resolution.

The sequence matters:

First: Resolve the threat
Second: Confirm resolution (cortisol drops)
Only then: Introduce opportunity (activate dopamine)

What might work: "Now that we've taken care of that shipping issue, I noticed something that might interest you: we have a new notification system that texts you the moment items ship. Would a 30-second setup work for you?"

Why this might work: Problem solved → stress reduced → prefrontal cortex comes back online → brain can now consider improvements without perceiving them as burdens.

Why This Isn't a Tone Problem—It's a Systems Problem

Most communication systems were built for the wrong brain. They're designed for:

Auditability
Fairness
Defensibility

Nobody asked: "Can a stressed brain actually process this?"

Policies get written to be correct. Messages get written to be complete. Neither is written to be cognitively appropriate.

The result? Customers feel dismissed, overwhelmed, and talked at. Support teams compensate with more words, more apologies, more back-and-forth.

The system doesn't get kinder. It just gets louder.

This isn't a training problem, rather it's a fundamental mismatch between how we design systems and how human brains actually work under stress.

Tech products offer today strange solutions

The market is crowded with promises:

"Technology enables empathy at scale"
"The perfect empathetic chatbot"
"True 1:1 personalization"
"Automate the boring work"
Some even claim they're "building systems that understand the human brain better than humans do"

"Empathy at scale" sounds profound until you ask: scale for whom? Is this a system capability or a human skill we're supposed to develop? The vagueness is the point—it means nothing specific enough to fail at.

"Empathetic chatbots" mostly just apologize more. Profusely. As if saying "I'm so sorry for the inconvenience" seventeen times demonstrates understanding rather than automation.

"1:1 personalization" promised the right product, right person, right time, right place. What we got: algorithmic feeds. Walls of products. Infinite scroll. That's not personalization—that's surveillance with better targeting.

"Automate the boring work" only creates more boring work. The people drowning in this work are already in Type 1 (protect) mindset. Automation doesn't shift them to Type 2 (prospect)—it just makes them more efficiently stressed.

"Understanding brains better than humans" is hubristic at best, dystopian at worst.

I've tested one solution recently that offers "advanced super AI" to improve customer interactions—basically intent detection with some workflow automation. For the right price tier, naturally.

Here's what I actually believe: Systems can be designed to be less cognitively naive than stressed humans. Not smarter than the human brain. Just less blind to how the stressed brain actually works.

Product Metrics

Product teams and customer experience teams obsess over familiar metrics (whether lagging or leading / or input/output - depending on the system that they are using).

Some examples:

Lagging / Output: CSAT - Did they click the happy face?
- Leading / Input: Response time - How fast did we reply?
- Leading / Input: Resolution rate - Did we close the ticket?
Lagging / Output: NPS - Would they recommend us?
Lagging / Output: Revenue
- Leading / Input: Conversion rates - Did they buy?
Lagging / Output: Return rates - Did they send it back?

These metrics tell you what happened. They don't tell you why.

What we're not measuring:

Stress levels during the interaction
Uncertainty created by ambiguous language
Perceived loss from how we framed the situation

Two customers can receive the identical message and experience it completely differently. One feels helped. The other feels dismissed. Same words. Different brain states (Type 1 vs Type 2 state).

Your CSAT score doesn't capture this. It averages the customer who was calm enough to process your explanation with the customer whose cortisol-flooded brain registered it as bureaucratic noise.

The insight: We're optimizing for outcomes while ignoring the cognitive state that determines whether those outcomes are even possible.

You can have a 2-minute response time that increases stress. You can have a "resolved" ticket where the customer feels gaslit. You can have high NPS from customers who were never in crisis and low NPS from customers you helped objectively—but in language their stressed brain couldn't process.

What if we measured what actually matters: Did this message reduce or increase cognitive load? Did it resolve uncertainty or create more? Did we activate the stress-to-comfort pathway or just add more stress?

There metrics to consider, but I've started imagining (with the help of Claude, my friend) the following batch:

What we might measure:

Stress level based on the typing speed (e.g. in chat), words, message. Are they type 1 or type 2?
Cognitive load process per surface (time to understand a message vs time to read a message).
Type 1 to Type 2 conversion/transition rate.

I am imagining the dashboard of the future like this:

Weekly Performance: ├─ Cognitive Load Reduction: -34% (↑ from -28%). ├─ Type 1→Type 2 Transitions: 67% (↑ from 61%). ├─ Brain State Mismatch: 8% (↓ from 14%). ├─ Net Cognitive Burden: -2.4 points per interaction. └─ Stress-Adjusted Satisfaction: 4.3/5 (↑ from 3.9).

Top Insights:

Peak stress interactions: 2-4pm (shipping delays).
Highest cognitive load: policy explanations (avg 24 points).
Best transition agent: Maria R. (82% Type 1→Type 2).

Ethics

Disclaimer: This section is prescriptive (what I think should be true) not descriptive (what established research says). Not to mention that in ethics, there’s a lot to discuss and argue.

And I am not opening these ideas for debate. Yet.

The Central Question

Understanding how the stressed brain works gives you power. The ethical question isn't whether to use this knowledge—it's which direction you point it. Here are a few directions to consider.

Compliance vs. Decision-Making

Extracting compliance: Using neuroscience to get people to say "yes" in the moment.

Enabling decisions: Using neuroscience to help people make choices their future self will endorse.

The test: Would this person make the same choice if their prefrontal cortex was fully online? If not, you're exploiting cognitive state, not helping.

Example:

Compliance: Customer stressed about delayed order → immediately upsell insurance because their loss aversion is spiked
Decision-making: Customer stressed about delayed order → resolve the stress first, then mention options when they can actually evaluate them

The Clarity Paradox

The problem: Sometimes clarity increases distress.

Customer asks: "Will my order arrive Friday?" Truth: "73% probability, but weather may cause delays." Result: Clarity achieved. Stress increased. Problem unsolved.

The ethical response: Clarity must reduce suffering, not just inform.

Better: "I'm checking what I can control right now to get this to you Friday. Here's what I'm doing..." (truth + agency + reduced uncertainty)

The principle: Deliver truth in the format their current brain can process, not just the most complete version.

Suffering Reduction Practices

Core guideline: Use neuroscience to reduce suffering, not create it for your benefit.

Ethical applications:

Simplify language when customer is stressed
Provide certainty when they're drowning in ambiguity
Give control when they feel powerless

Unethical applications:

Create artificial urgency to trigger loss aversion
Use complexity to hide unfavorable terms
Exploit emotional state to extract compliance

The boundary: If you're creating suffering to increase conversion, you've crossed the line.

Truth Preservation Requirement

Non-negotiable: You cannot sacrifice truth for cognitive ease.

Not ethical: "Your package will definitely arrive Friday" (when it won't) → reduces stress now, creates rage later.

Ethical: "Here's what I can control to get this to you..." → reduces stress through agency while preserving truth.

The standard: Adapt the format, never the facts.

The Asymmetry Problem

The power imbalance:

Company: Sophisticated neuroscience understanding, AI detection, real-time cognitive analysis
Customer: Stressed, reduced working memory, compromised judgment

This creates ethical responsibility.

Just because you can craft the neurologically perfect message to get compliance doesn't mean you should.

Ethical standard: Use your knowledge to level the playing field, not exploit the gap.

The Future Self Test

Ask: Will this person, one week from now with a clear mind, feel good about the decision we helped them make?

If yes: Ethical persuasion
If no: Compliance extraction

Example: Customers want to cancel during stressful moments.

Unethical: "87% of people who cancel regret it. Let me offer you 50% off..." (exploits Type 1 state to prevent their stated choice)

Ethical: "I can cancel right now. Or pause for 30 days so you can decide with a clearer head." (respects autonomy and cognitive state)

Three Principles

When I am looking at ways to communicate with customers, I realize that every message must pass the below tests. If the 3 are not checked, you are not doing persuasion right.

1. Truth First Adapt the format, not the facts. Don’t hide facts, but present them in a way that is useful to the customer.

2. Suffering Reduction Use neuroscience to reduce burden, not create (artificial) pressure.

3. Future Self Alignment Optimize for decisions people will endorse later, not just agreement now.

The Real Work Begins Now

The uncomfortable truth: Most of us have been solving the wrong problem.

We've optimized response times when we should have been reducing cognitive load. We've crafted perfect policies when we should have been designing for stressed brains. We've measured satisfaction when we should have been measuring state transitions.

This isn't about making customer service "nicer." It's about fundamentally redesigning systems to match how human cognition actually works under pressure.

The shift required:

Stop asking: "How do we explain this better?"

Start asking: "What brain state is this person in, and what does that brain need right now?"

What this means practically:

For support agents: You're not message-senders. You're cognitive state managers. Your job is to move people from cortisol to clarity, from threat to resolution, from Type 1 to Type 2.

For system designers: Every policy, every template, every workflow should answer one question: "Can a stressed brain process this?" If not, it doesn't matter how correct or complete it is.

For leadership: The metrics you optimize for determine the systems you build. If you measure only satisfaction and resolution time, you'll miss the cognitive burden you're creating along the way.

References

These are my main inspiration sources, but I've been seing the concepts described above in many other sources that I don't fully remember.