Traditionally, we’ve looked at feedback and our conversations with customers in a service environment. It’s a reactive model, though it’s the way that feedback is typically handled. But a shift is starting to happen. Now we’re looking to see if can we actually use this feedback and these conversations at the start of the customer acquisition journey in a meaningful way. Can we get early commitments and connections from our customers? Can we use what we know about typical customer journeys to put them at ease and help them to make informed decision?
At lot of this comes down to understanding emotion. As CX professionals, this is reassuring; we want to help customers and support colleagues and talking about emotion in this context is a framework to enable this to happen.
There's alot of talk about emotion
Analysts are talking about emotion. Psychologists are jumping into the conversation. If you go onto LinkedIn, emotion seems to be the buzzword of the year. Tempkin has even branded 2016 “The Year of Emotion” (not that others years haven’t also been about emotion!).
Forrester is producing a huge amount of analysis on the subject. Up until about two years ago, they focused on three areas to measure how successful customer experience was – ease, effectiveness and emotion. The three component parts were all given the same weighting. But, after more analysis, Forrester came to the conclusion that the emotion part counts for over 50%. They are now saying that the biggest primer to customer loyalty is emotion.
With this buzz, there’s an opportunity to use what some of these analysts are saying to create momentum within your organisation.
Emotion is not a trend; it needs to become part of the Customer Experience DNA
Everything you do is about emotion, it’s about eliciting emotion. The way we ask questions, the way we engage with customers, the way we run the company - it’s all about emotion.
But there’s a simple reason why it’s important for all of us. By focusing on emotion, you can start to broker the distinction between what people say and what they are actually going to do. There is a massive difference, which many (if not most) organisations are struggling to overcome.
When we approach things from a market research perspective, we’re faced with the challenge of people (our customers) saying one thing, but doing something else. The link between saying and doing is very poorly explored.
We want to create a movement of positive action within your organisation - using emotion to make feedback proactive rather then reactive
The key is to change a worrying trend that is taking place in many organisations where CX professionals are ending up with the ownership of the CX programme internally.
Somehow, they end up with collecting information, creating reports and distributing them to management teams.
What we need to do is delegate that responsibility throughout the organisation: it’s a cultural movement. It’s something that we want to create as an evolving, sustainable mechanism within our organisation. Emotion can actually help us to do that.
It’s about connecting our frontline employees and empowering them to be bring the real and the emotive back into day-to-day interactions with consumers.
Download our free e-book below to find out how brands such as Which?, Autotrader and Yahoo! are going from good to great by taking Customer Emotion into consideration.
