Winning the hearts of your customers and colleagues is never going to be easy. When you’re trying to provide a bespoke experience to very large and very diverse audiences, managing expectations is hard work. No single approach will (or can) be a silver bullet. What works well for some people, will leave others feeling cold and disengaged. This makes it difficult to prescribe a one-sized approach to emotional engagement.
There are, however, common traps and pitfalls that some organisations fall into, which stop them from being able to engage at an emotional level.
#1 It’s possible to control and create a formula for emotional engagements with your customers
Creating specific emotions and constructing emotional engagements is not a goal. You can’t manufacture an emotion that your customers feel; most customers only have an emotional reaction if they genuinely care about your brand or the impact you have on their life.
If we’re being honest, we know that most consumers don’t care about most brands. While we might want to create an emotional engagement, we have to accept that we’re starting from a position where the majority are not engaged. You can create a sense of belonging, which in turn inspires customers to care, but you cannot force them to feel anything, or control these emotions in a clinical way.
#2 Emotional engagements will patch-up problems with service delivery
Emotional engagement is not a silver bullet. If, as an organisation, you’re still not getting the basics right, then a plan, initiative or programme to focus on emotional engagement won’t patch-up these service delivery problems.
For example, if your customer is landing on your website and being instantly greeted with a feedback request – before they’ve even had a chance to do anything – then this needs to be ironed out. Brands need to stop making careless mistakes first and then work to build on this. Respond and act on customer feedback, to earn loyalty and trust. Then, organically, you’ll start to have quality engagements with your customers.
#3 Focussing on emotion will help you improve customer loyalty
Arguably, emotion is in vogue because loyalty and advocacy are running out of steam. People increasingly understand that creating an emotional engagement with someone is your first bridge to loyalty. This suggests emotion can help you create more loyal customers.
But (and it’s an important but) focussing on the end goal of customer loyalty can mean that you miss the subtleties of emotional engagements that start to form the bridge. Rather than focussing on the end goal – increasing the number of loyal customers that you have – shift your thinking. Start to focus on getting the emotion of the moment right and use this to slowly build and earn customer loyalty.
#4 You can take the same approach to emotion as you take with surveys
When some organisation start to approach emotion, they use the same thinking that drives their approach to surveys. But this is a problem – emotion doesn’t work like surveys.
Feedback responses are declining. If we look at this trend, we can see that what happened to survey response rates is now creeping into real-time feedback response rates. But this isn’t inevitable. It is actually the result of companies not really listening to their customers – they are simply trying to collect the score.
This approach (and the reason it’s broken) is not about closing the loop with customers and it’s not centered on creating true emotional engagement. It’s about getting the score because you need to measure NPS. There’s no culture of following-up or having conversations, so it’s not a surprise that customers stop giving feedback – they feel like they’re talking but there’s no one listening.
If you apply this approach to emotion and ask for free-flow verbatim, but fail to act on what your customers tell you, then they’ll stop sharing this with you too. Then, you’ve not only ruined it for yourself, you’ve ruined it for everyone else.
To dive deeper into the world of emotion 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.
