There is now a clarion call among consumers for a more personalized customer experience. To be successful in today’s challenging marketplace, brands need to connect with their customers in a meaningful way. And most companies don’t disagree. In fact, most of the top CEOs from across the UK believe that creating an emotional connection is the key to effective customer engagement.
There seems to be a problem, however, between the collective acknowledgement of this abstract idea and its actual application in the real world. In short, Brands believe that emotionally salient customer engagement is vital, but don’t seem to know quite how to make that connection actually happen.
This insight was demonstrated during a recent University of Reading workshop that brought 100 CEOs and managers together from across the UK to discuss a range of business practices. The workshop reveled that one in ten CEOs feel their customer engagement efforts are significantly lacking.
They also confessed negligence in analyzing or using customer feedback data in any meaningful way. A study conducted by Rant & Rave, a customer engagement solutions platform provider, and Henley Business School found that over half (58%) of business leaders “don’t factor [customer emotions] in when building a business case for ROI.”
Rant & Rave CEO Dennis Fois stated that CEO’s view emotional customer engagement as “hugely important.”
However, “they just aren’t taking advantage of this knowledge or putting a tangible plan into action. It is companies who really make the next step to get to know their customers, and connect with them, that are rewarded with loyalty and of course extra spend,” Fois continued.
The workshop also offered a possible explanation for this apparent discrepancy. Many senior executives are struggling with how to exactly manage and integrate the abundance of data related to the emotions of their customers. And, all to often, the emotional dynamics of customer profiles continue to get sidetracked in favor of a habitual overreliance on standard ROI metrics.
“When it comes to measuring customer experience, brands need to concern themselves less with traditional metrics, and focus on making it ‘easy’ to be a customer – in other words reducing the amount of effort it takes for a customer to do business with them,” said Professor Moria Clark,
Director of the Henley Centre For Customer Management.
In this new digital age, many forms of emotional customer engagement are more important than ever. Especially those related to trust. Customers want to believe that their favorite brands are keeping their best interests in mind.