How to Enhance the Emotional Customer Experience

The Effect of Emotion on Our Lives

When was the last time you felt emotions? Chances are, you’re feeling them right now because they are ingrained in how we experience life: in our responses, our decisions, and even our memories. However, emotions are highly individualized. For example, some may feel happiness in response to seeing a dog and decide to pet it, but others might instead feel fear, causing them to walk away. That being said, such acts are rather instinctual.

Contrarily, the experiences that tend to warrant more thoughtful responses and decisions are emotionally-charged, such as buying a new car. For this reason, we remember these types of experiences better. If an experience is not overly emotive (such as petting a dog), we tend not to give it much retrospective thought, but our responses and decisions about heavily emotional experiences like purchasing a car will consequently be more significant.

This same logic applies to consumerism. Providing an emotional customer experience, beyond meeting the customer’s basic needs, can create a stronger connection between the customer and the company. Such a connection makes the customer more likely to come back, a valuable difference because even a 5% increase in customer retention can cause a 75% increase in the company’s profitability (Harvard Business Review). Additionally, it makes the customer more likely to recommend the company to others, as one satisfied customer can refer as many as nine other people (Feedier).

Understanding the Complexity of Emotions

In order to create an emotional customer experience, a company must first understand the complexity of the customer’s emotions during the interaction. Moreover, it is important to avoid judging interactions simply as successful or failed because this metric does not sufficiently evaluate the customer interaction.

For example, imagine you go to a store to buy a computer. You are immediately welcomed with a refreshment, then helped by an employee who takes the time to answer all of your questions and set up the computer you choose. Was your interaction successful in the company’s eyes? Yes, you made a purchase, but you surely have purchased items from countless stores and have only returned to some of them. However, much less frequently do stores offer an enjoyable experience, and chances are, you have returned to all of them because you can count on employees understanding your needs and anticipating means of bettering your experience.

Every customer has different priorities, so taking the time to understand them allows the company to better cater toward such needs and interact with him or her on a more personal level. When customers feel they are being understood and cared for, they are more likely to associate their experience with stronger positive emotions, as opposed to simply having their basic needs satisfied. In fact, there are seven primary human emotions (happiness, surprise, calmness, fear, sadness, anger, and disgust), all of which can be assigned to any aspect of a customer experience.

Furthermore, the customer’s emotions can change throughout a company interaction. Let’s say you go to a bank. You are warmly greeted and offered a coffee upon entering, have to wait forty-five minutes for assistance, then have a routine interaction with a banker. Now imagine how you would feel after each touchpoint, possibly happy, annoyed, then relatively calm and satisfied. Because each one generates a different emotion, it is more valuable for a company to analyze the customer’s experience at each step in the interaction than in summary. This way, the company can focus on fine-tuning the details, rather than struggling to find points for improvement from vague feedback.

Detecting Emotions in Customer Feedback

With this information in mind, a company is now tasked with determining how exactly to locate these emotions. This challenge may seem burdensome, but in fact, a wealth of data is already available through online reviews, customer service emails, questionnaires, and other forms of information collection. In fact, of the companies that offer the best customer experience, 70% utilize customer feedback, compared to the industry average of 50% (HuffPost).

Creating an Emotional Customer Experience with Qºemotion

Because such responses typically contain only subtextual emotion, it is understandably difficult to meaningfully decipher a large quantity of them, but Qºemotion does just that, and more! Through an emotional analysis of customer feedback, Qºemotion provides all of the necessary information for companies to enhance the emotional customer experience. Its advanced platform can synthesize large amounts of data to measure the emotional trends and intensity of customer feedback. Qºemotion assigns each emotion a temperature, with more positive emotions associated with higher temperatures, and with these results, companies can diminish customers’ irritants to create a more positive emotional customer experience. For example, as shown in the picture below, Qºemotion shows one airline company that its biggest success point is building trust with customers, with a temperature of 34ºC, but its biggest point of improvement is its transportation delays, with a temperature of 16ºC.

Moreover, the platform’s thematic and sub-thematic parameters allow companies to focus on the details of customer service and fine-tune their product. The airline, for example, can look at customers’ experiences pre-arrival, at the departure airport, on board, and at the arrival airport as a means of dissecting data into useful pieces. Additionally, as shown below, it can assess the staff’s skills, ranging from their roles to their availability, any of which can also be evaluated in more detail.

With this tool, companies can more closely see the areas of the business that need improvement.

Conclusion

With society’s rapid technological advancements, it is important to remember that at the core of every customer experience is human emotion. Therefore, providing not just satisfactory service, but an emotional customer experience, is infinitely valuable for companies. This is why despite using advanced software, Qºemotion keeps emotion at the center of its work. Although processing thousands of customer reviews can be daunting, Qºemotion is up to the challenge and is eager to help take your company to the next level!