How a customer feels about their customer experience with your company is reflected in how much time and money they are willing to spend with your company. The customer experience and the emotions that go hand in hand with a good or bad customer experience can translate to tangible success for your company if you learn how to value customer emotions in the customer experience and employ customer-focused strategies.
4 Reasons Why Customer Emotions Are Important to the Customer Experience
Building an emotional connection with your customers can be the single most significant differentiator for a brand, yet it remains an untapped opportunity for many companies. When you prioritize how a customer feels rather than just what they do or what they purchase, you unlock hidden value that competitors focused solely on operational metrics cannot reach. This emotional resonance acts as a lifeline when mistakes are made, is a driver for customer brand advocates, and is a direct line to increased long-term revenue that will set your business apart in a crowded economic landscape.
1. Emotion Translates to Customer Loyalty
When customers feel connected to a brand emotionally, their loyalty skyrockets beyond what operational satisfaction can achieve on its own. Research has shown that customers giving high emotion ratings are almost 6x more likely to trust a brand and 5x more likely to purchase more than those with lower emotion ratings. Maybe the most telling statistic is that high emotion ratings generate a much higher Net Promoter Score (NPS) compared to businesses with low ratings.
2. Ignoring Customer Emotions is Value Lost
Despite the clear financial benefits of an emotional connection with customers, many businesses are leaving money on the table by treating emotion as a soft metric. Data shows that while general success and effort scores sit at 66% and 65% respectively, customer emotion scores lag behind at an estimated 55%, which represents a significant emotion gap. By failing to close this gap or ignoring it completely, companies are underdelivering on an element of the customer experience that is a strong predictor of loyalty and retention.
3. Companies That Value Customer Emotions Outperform Competitors
Investing in the emotional side of the customer experience is more than just a feel-good strategy. It is a successful strategy that breeds financial success. Long-term studies indicate that companies that excel in the emotion component of customer experience outperform competitors by an estimated 36% in stock returns. In addition, emotion leaders in select industries finish higher than industry averages, while companies that lag behind or who ignored this critical factor fell behind in key financial metrics, proving that emotional connection correlates directly with financial success.
4. Negative Customer Emotions Are More Persistent
While positive customer emotions can be difficult to maintain over time, negative emotional experiences stick with consumers longer and have trended upward in recent years. Analysis shows that positive emotions like happiness, excitement, and relief have dropped by significant margins in the past 5 - 10 years, while negative emotions like anger, worry, and confusion have increased. Because negative feelings are more persistent and stick with customers longer and continue to rise, brands must be hyper-vigilant in detecting and resolving friction to prevent long-term damage to brand reputation.
READ MORE: How To Create a Customer Engagement Strategy
Understanding how to value customer emotions in the customer experience is a key to unlocking sustainable growth, differentiating your brand from competitors, and achieving your financial goals. By using the right tools to listen, interpret, and act on customer sentiment, you can ensure your strategy aligns with the emotional needs of your customers.
Contact boostCX today for a demo of our customer experience management platform and start building connections that last with your customers!
