Did you know that customer emotions influence over half of your Customer Experience? However, just knowing customers are emotional doesn’t help your business. You need to know how to use this information to improve your business outcome and experience.
How your customers feel about their experience is the most important factor to your Customer Experience success. Certain emotions result in the achievement of your business goals. So how do you determine which emotions you want your customers to feel?
It is important to know the level of your customers’ emotional engagement with you. People feel emotions in your experience whether you planned for them or not. However, I often share with my clients that in order to create successful Customer Experiences you need to spend some time finding out what customers feel and when they feel them.
There are three simple factors you need to consider in the creating an emotional response from your customers. Stimulus, Response, and Effect. These will help you know what motivates the customer and how customers act as a result. Let me share with you and explain what I mean:
1. Stimulating the Customer: What you do that encourages the customer to do something. You encourage a customer to use your website. You send offers that are interesting to your customers.
2. How Your Customers Respond: How the customer reacts to an interaction. The customer feels something about what the business did or did not do. The customer is pleased that you anticipate their needs by offering answers to common questions on a web-site or is your customer is annoyed that your web-site is confusing to them.
3. Effect: What effect does your business perceive as providing “value” to the customer that can result in an attitude towards your business both good or bad? This will create customer loyalty, recommend your business to a friend or colleague or not. It will inspire actual action of getting a new sale or gaining a new customer, keeping an existing customer or even losing a customer.
Here is an easy example of all three. A business provides their customers a 24 Hour Customer Service, 800 Number Hot Line. When someone sees the company provides this 24 hour 800 number to call when troubleshooting a problem, (Stimulus), making it convenient, customers feel “comforted” and “relieved” (Response), and these feelings make them likely to recommend the company to another person (Effect).
Use this simple exercise in your business, at each touch point with your customers, to identify your customer’s emotions. Then ask yourself, “Can we improve these emotions to create a better Customer Experience?”. This will help you avoid the guess work about emotions and customer behavior and show you what to do that will improve your business’s bottom line. Now that will be “Magical”!