One of the overarching keys to attaining true customer loyalty is to be able to develop emotional connections with consumers. It’s easier said than done, but Confirmit was recently named by Temkin Group as one of eight innovative vendors when it comes to dealing with customer emotions.
Loyalty360 caught up with Sarah Simon, Director, Voice of the Customer Consulting at Confirmit, to learn more about this esteemed honor.
“It is fantastic for Confirmit to be recognized as a leader in this area,” Simon said. “Truly effective Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs provide a tremendous amount of value for organizations who are able to bring in different types of data and insight from multiple sources. The ability to bring emotion into that mix can add a new layer of insight to such programs. Confirmit has a number of customers doing this, and we expect it to be an area that more businesses focus on over the coming years.”
Simon said companies that truly want to come to grips with customer emotion need to deal with a paradigm shift, from a purely transactional decision-making process to one where emotion has true impact. It is important for such businesses to consider the following:
-All companies, both B2C and B2B and across all industries, do not just sell goods and services, they sell an experience;
-Customers perceive the quality of that experience not just through their rational brain but through their emotional selves as well; and,
-The customer experience can be improved by attending to both the rational and emotional needs of the customer.
“To harness customer emotion, organizations need to leverage familiar VoC tools, such as surveys, as well as embrace newer channels, such as social media and speech analytics,” Simon explained. “The change in mindset revolves around measuring a customer’s perception of their experience with how doing business made them feel, not their measurement of performance against internal KPIs.”
Achieving an emotional, Simon added, means understanding customer emotions at key within the company.
“It is useful for businesses to look at their VoC programs and look at ways to tweak their surveys to get under the customer’s skin and get to that level of understanding,” she said. “Simple things like changing a question from ‘On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate our performance’ to ‘Did we disappoint you? Delight you? Meet your expectations?’ can deliver much more insightful responses.”
What’s more, Simon said, in addition to the tried-and-true survey, which is a hugely valuable tool for gathering a variety of customer sentiment, companies can look at ways to gauge customer emotion through other approaches:
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- Empathy Mapping: Conduct internal workshops that involve multiple departments, to consider what is the customer thinking, doing, feeling and saying at key touchpoints. Not only do these workshops build empathy for the customer, but they also highlight areas where service delivery may break down along the customer journey. By involving multiple departments, you can realize the added benefit of breaking down internal silos to see things from the customer’s perspective.
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- Depth Interviews: These yield rich insights into the customer’s emotion response to key touchpoints within your company, by not just asking a customer to “rate our performance” but asking “How did we make you feel?” and probing for details. In these types of interviews, customers are invited to share their stories and their gut-level reactions to your products and services in a structured format.
“It is important, however, to use these tools in addition to, not instead of, traditional VoC approaches such as journey mapping, transactional, and relationship surveys,” Simon said. “Emotion is only one element of the customer experience.”