Emotion plays an important role in the customer experience with the individual experience determining if the customer feels happy, sad, angry, or frustrated. Businesses know and understand that emotion plays an important role — but what is that role, what is its impact, and why is emotion important to the customer experience? boostCX is going to try and answer a few of these questions for you.
What Is the Role of Emotion in the Customer Experience?
Emotion is the invisible engine that drives customer loyalty, brand perception, and long-term value.
It’s the subconscious filter that customers use to judge every customer touchpoint and is then used to remember and recall the individual experience. While rational considerations like price and product performance play an important part, emotion fills in the gaps, creating deeper connections with a business.
The data shows that focusing on customer feelings and emotions directly translates to business success. A Harvard Business Review study found that emotionally connected customers are more than 2x as valuable as customers who are merely highly satisfied, meaning they buy more, stay longer, and are more likely to recommend your brand to others.
In addition, research by Forrester indicates that emotion is the primary factor in customer loyalty across many industries, even outweighing performance. In the end, a positive emotional experience leads to a stronger relationship with your brand, while a single moment of frustration can erase trust and push customers to your competitors.
How To Use Customer Emotions to Improve the Experience
Understanding and planning for specific customer emotions is your secret weapon to improve the customer experience. This necessitates moving beyond simple customer satisfaction scores and integrating emotional intelligence into every customer touchpoint. By collecting, analyzing, and responding to how customers feel, you can turn short interactions into important relationships.
Here are a few key ways to use customer emotions to improve their experience:
Design Customer Experiences for Desired Emotions
Identify the specific, positive emotions you want your customers to feel — relief, confidence, delight, appreciation — at critical moments in their journey and create an experience to achieve that result. For example, a customer calling for technical support should feel relief when their issue is resolved quickly, not just satisfaction.
Act with Empathy and Compassion
Train your customer support teams to recognize and respond to emotional cues with genuine empathy. Studies have shown that customers are 32% more likely to forgive a service mistake when offered a sincere apology rather than just financial benefits. Showing that you understand their frustration is more valuable than a discount in many cases.
Identify Emotional Peaks and Valleys
Use customer sentiment analysis to map the entire customer journey and identify moments along the way that create intense positive or negative feelings. This allows you to prioritize fixing major pain points in the customer experience that cause frustration and to amplify moments of delight that create positive memories.
Personalize Customer Interactions with Context
Brands need to go beyond simple name personalization. Use emotional data to recognize if a customer is already frustrated from a recent support interaction or excited about a new product and tailor your communication and offers accordingly. This ensures your response matches their emotions.
Build Trust and Reliability with Your Brand
Focus on actions that consistently build trust between your business and potential customers. Customers who are looking for reliability and integrity. When customers trust your brand, they feel valued, which is the key to a long-term business-customer relationship.
READ MORE: 5 Characteristics of a Great Customer Experience
In the end, the logic is pretty simple — customers will always remember how you made them feel and that emotion impacts their opinion of your brand. By strategically focusing on the emotional elements of your customer experience — measuring sentiment, prioritizing empathy, and working to create an emotional connection, you are doing more than just improving service, you are creating long-term loyalty and driving value.
Contact boostCX today for a personalized demo of our customer experience management platform and see how we can help you design experiences that create an emotional connection!
