Emotion is a big driver of customers’ economic behaviour. So in order to have a meaningful engagement with your customers, you need to engage with them on an emotional level. Talking about how this works is one thing, but making sure it translates into real results for your business is a whole different challenge.
In order for this to work effectively, your whole team need to understand the context of the customer relationship so that they can decide how to interact with any new person that comes into the system.
If the implementation works, then emotion will be at the centre of all customer engagements and your business will start to see the benefits.
Move from cost-to-serve to a model that really engages
Rather than examining customer behaviours through the lens of how much profit they will potentially bring you, use their preferences to drive the actions you take. This will give a higher personalisation to your service, allowing you to anticipate a customer’s actions and reduce the likelihood of problems further down the buyer journey.
This change to the model not only raises engagement levels with customers but means that your employees start to think of customers as people rather than just data, this attitude will help establish higher levels of engagement.
Complaints will drastically reduce
You can anticipate problems more easily when you have emotional knowledge of your customers. With this knowledge, frontline staff will also be prepared to deal with customers in a variety of emotional states.
Being aware of where the customer is in the buyer journey or their own emotional state before they pick up a call will mean that they can quickly resolve problems without exacerbating them or having the complaint spiral out of control. This will make it more likely for a complaint to be resolved, leading to stronger levels of retention.
Empower Contact Centre employees
Giving Contact Centre employees more control over the customer experience means that they will be more invested in making your customers happy. As they deal with customers day to day, they are more likely to come up with creative ways of ensuring that the Voice of the Customer is heard and responded to efficiently.
The feedback you gather from listening to your customers means that you can then coach your employees through a variety of scenarios, leaving them more prepared and knowledgeable on how to deal with queries or issues.
Call volumes will be cut
If your customer's issues are dealt with on their first call you will experience a higher customer satisfaction and a reduction in repeat calls. You’re also more likely to retain customers that don’t have to repeat their problem to several customer services employees before giving up. Making sure that you’re listening to your customers and acting on their requests will ensure that they don’t have to pick up the phone and complain again.
Remember that emotion isn’t rational
Although these are very practical and palpable results, they are the result of emotionally investing rather than rationally compartmentalising your customers. By understanding how emotionally charged someone is and what areas of your service illicit strong emotion means you can start to think about your customer's journey and adapt or tweak so you are more likely to get positive customer engagement. Emotion isn’t rational by nature so the worst thing that you can do is try and rationalise it.
To explore emotion further check out our most recent eBook 'The Essential Guide to Emotional Engagement: The Secret to Customer Experience Success' which explores the role of emotion in capturing the Voice of the Customer and how to emotionally engage your employees.
