People make purchases based on emotions. So evidently, the customer base would want the organisations to care about their experiences in the business ecosystem. This includes their onboarding and purchase experience, seamless touchpoint journey and a customer care service that offers feasible solutions as soon as possible. There are standard customer satisfaction metrics that track a customer’s emotion and efforts during their purchase journey. In this blog, we will explore what is customer emotion and the best practices to enhance the overall CX in the mapping journey.
What is Customer Emotion?
Customer Emotion refers to a buyer’s attitudes and feelings towards a brand or product, which can significantly impact their buying decisions. Positive emotions like happiness and satisfaction promote loyalty, while negative ones such as frustration and anger can cause churn and negative feedback. Negative emotions can cause patrons to share negative reviews on online platforms which can arise from an unattended feedback. Positive feelings stem from prompt customer service and a human touch during customer service interactions.
The role of customer emotion in CX
Creating exceptional experiences for people depends on their emotional responses towards your brand or product. Studies have shown that positive customer emotions such as happiness and satisfaction lead to increased loyalty and advocacy, whereas negative emotions like frustration and anger result in a high churn rate and negative reviews. Therefore, it is essential to manage customer emotions effectively throughout their journey with your brand. CX professionals need to develop critical skills such as empathy and emotional intelligence to understand the specific emotion behind the behavior of their customers. Doing so will help them create an emotional connection pathway that maximizes customer retention and the bottom line.
Managing Customer Emotion for Customer Experience
Understanding emotional motivators is crucial in creating a more personalized and effective customer experience. Emotional motivators are the underlying reasons why people make purchasing decisions. By tapping into these motivators like desires for social status, internal happiness, desire for a solution, businesses can create stronger connections with their customers and increase loyalty. Empathy mapping and customer journey mapping techniques can help businesses better understand emotional triggers to develop a new science of customer emotion that translates into value.
Measuring customer emotion with metrics
Measuring customer emotions with metrics involves identifying emotions critical to customer experience, analyzing collected data to identify patterns and areas for improvement, and understanding the reasons behind positive or negative emotional responses. Customer feedback and surveys are essential to understand how specific emotions impact customer behavior. Standard metrics include a rating system with open-ended questions where users can rate a product or service and share their personal opinion based on what they rated.
Other metrics involve net promoter score (NPS) which identifies promoters from detractors. Important metrics measure customer satisfaction score or CSAT score and customer effort score (CES). CES score measures the amount of effort a user has to take to understand a product demo or go through a customer support call.
Effect of customer emotion on retention
Businesses state that opting for a greater customer retention rate is more economical than spending to bring in new customers. To retain existing users, internal systems to gauge satisfaction need to be in place. The role of human emotion in a CX environment cannot be understated. This includes gratitude notes like thank you notes post shopping, capturing post purchase emotions, offering customer delight by rewards and incentives to name a few.
Implementing emotional intelligence strategies enhances the sense of well-being among customers leading to an improvement in satisfaction metrics and converting detractors to promoters gradually.
Personalization is the key
Feedback and grievances can come in multiple forms. Some of these experiences can be, for example, manhandling of products during delivery, non-response of customer care hotline, poor functioning of websites, ignoring Google reviews etc. These experiences eventually evoke emotional responses in people. Different age groups and feedback need personalization when it comes to an overall CX. This can only come from a place of empathy. If a delivery executive has misplaced a parcel, it could cause distress to the recipient. Personalizing responses during the closing of feedback loop implies that organisations have the ability to see issues from a buyer’s point of view.
Developing trust with customers
Establishing trust with patrons is vital for an outstanding customer experience. This can be achieved through open communication channels, consistent and reliable service delivery, and prioritizing customer satisfaction in every interaction. Encouraging prompt feedback and addressing their concerns efficiently can also go a long way in building trust. This includes real time assessments of trends, patterns and feedback systems via surveys deployed through various real time channels. These real time channels are Facebook messenger and Whatsapp surveys, dynamic AMP emails and website chatbots.
Curating questions with empathy
Respondents are not willing to answer surveys that are intimidating. To combat this barrier, create conversational surveys using Whatsapp messenger and interactive chatbots. These technologies are robust and can collect a large amount of data including multimedia format of responses. Marketers need to pay close attention when it comes to asking sensitive questions. Empathy is equally important when seeking responses from sensitive topics of drug use, medical history, intimate products and surveys on sexual wellness products. One has to note that not every customer satisfaction metric is appropriate during sensitive surveys.
Understanding Customer Emotion for Better ROI of CX
Identifying specific emotions that influence customers’ purchase decisions and decision-making process is a crucial aspect of improving CX. People desire to have a personal connection with brands. Customers want their favourite brands to be friendly with them in a way that assures them of brand support when they need assistance. An interactive brand is viewed more favourably as they are deemed as more trustworthy and transparent.
Brand perception for emotional connection
Customers tend to form an emotional bond with the brands that align with their values and beliefs, leading to positive emotions such as joy and gratitude throughout the customer journey. Emphasize on compassion and empathy while analyzing customers’ emotions based on feedback from social media platforms, messenger based surveys and chat bot surveys. Building brand perception based on specific emotions like happiness or sadness also impacts customer behavior positively, resulting in better retention rates.
Connecting with customers via omnichannel
People often want brands to add value to their life. Due to this facility and perception, there are patrons who have spent many years of their life, loyal to particular brands due to a lifetime of trust and cx value. Brands have to upgrade along with the times. This includes capturing feedback using omni channels such as social media platforms of Twitter, Facebook, messenger based mediums, website chatbots and analysing data with generative AI. People have diversified their presence on different platforms and expect a better digital experience. The only way to obtain a high response rate on surveys is to capture responses on platforms they are using frequently.
Addressing privacy concerns
The management of customer data usage by addressing privacy concerns is an underrated topic. Giving customers control over their information can assure them that the feedback collected will only be used for continuous improvement of internal processes. This includes recording real time feedback and recording conversations in a customer support call. It’s crucial for companies to respect customer privacy preferences while providing personalized and empathetic support through every interaction.
Conclusion
Customer emotions play a crucial role in shaping the overall customer experience. It is imperative for businesses to understand and analyze their customers’ emotional motivators and create an emotional connection pathway. This helps in improving CX with empathy, authenticity, and developing customer loyalty. Businesses can use big data to capture customer emotion and use metrics to measure it.
If you want to capture customer feedback in real time, sign up for a 14 day free trial with Merren. You can upgrade your pricing plan and choose the plan that best works for your enterprise.
