The emotional factor is an essential element for the success of any company. Thus, more and more everyday, we must be aware of the importance of emotions in the experience of our customers and act accordingly. In this sense, multiple studies have shown that emotions matter more than reason when it comes to customer satisfaction and experience, so that rational factors would only have a weight of 33% in the final decision.
Therefore, you must delve into the feedback that your clients provide you to really understand the emotional mechanisms that guide their behavior. What your customers feel in their relationship with the company matters more than whether or not they like your product for objective reasons. In the end, emotional satisfaction is more relevant than rational satisfaction, as the Forrester Customer Experience Index indicates.
Measure emotional satisfaction
As Lord Kelvin said, “what is not measured cannot be improved. What is not improved, is always degraded”. Therefore, we must find a system for measuring emotions in the experience of our clients that allows us to evaluate the result of our actions and design improvement plans.
In most companies, customer satisfaction evaluation systems are based solely on purely rational cognitive factors: receipt of the product in a timely manner, coincidence of functional characteristics with those expected, resolution of incidents, etc. However, the rational satisfaction denoted by these systems does not have to guarantee that emotional satisfaction is also met.
There are many studies that show with data that emotionally satisfied customers are more loyal to the company, spend more money on its products, recommend its services, etc.
However, it is clear that measuring the emotional factor is not easy and there are no perfect formulas for it. Each company is different and each product or service needs a particular approach, so you will have to develop the most appropriate measurement system for your company. Despite this, we can distill a number of key factors to develop this assessment, as we will now see.
5 keys to measuring customer emotions
1. Identify the most relevant emotions for yor product
As we have said, each company and each product have very specific characteristics. In this sense, there will be certain emotions that will play a prominent role in the experience of your customers, compared to others that will have less importance, both positively and negatively.
In this way, you must identify whether the essential thing for your product is the feeling of trust (or mistrust), of joy (or sadness), of surprise (or predictability), etc. The emotional factors that we seek to stimulate with a financial product are not the same as with an adventure trip, although the ultimate goal is always to achieve a satisfied customer.
2. Determine key moments for the emotional experience
In your customers’ experience with the company, you must find the most relevant friction points from the point of view of emotions. Undoubtedly, there will be stages of the customer journey that are more important than others to define the emotional result of the interaction with your customer. It will be in those moments when will be decisive to evaluate and measure the degree of his/her emotional satisfaction. It wouldn’t be useful for decision making to have data out of context or not linked to the different stages of the customer’s purchase process.
3. Associate emotional and temporal factors
Once the relevant emotions and key moments of the customer journey have been determined, you must define what specific emotions you want to contemplate at each point of the customer experience.
Although the ideal scenario would be to be able to carry out a measurement in real time, in the field it is usually more feasible to make measurements a posteriori. In any case, you should carefully choose those emotions that you are most interested in knowing related to a specific point of the customer’s experience. In this way, for example, it could be very interesting to know if your customers feel frustration in the payment process of your website, or if they experience confidence when faced with an advice call, etc.
4. Measure without disturbing
Logically, it is a priority that our process of measuring emotional factors does not become a source of dissatisfaction. There is nothing more counterproductive than an untimely survey, a poorly posed question or questionnaires that are confusing and endless or of doubtful usefulness. On the opposite, your customer must have the feeling that the company is genuinely interested in knowing his/her opinion and, above all, that this data will be used effectively to improve the service.
5. Draw conclusions and act
The entire process would be irrelevant if it were not used to improve our customer service. It is necessary to address those possible sticking points where negative emotions arise in the customer and act on them. Analyze the possible causes of this emotional outcome and determine the main options to tackle them.
Once this is done, the process starts over. In this way, the next step will be to analyze how the changes implemented affect the experience of your customers. That is, if negative emotions have decreased and positive emotions have increased, if just the opposite has happened or if everything remains the same. As in any feedback process, the system must be continuously reworked.
The emotional factor always wins
Without a doubt, emotions are always at the core of the customer experience. Therefore, the company must always look beyond traditional metrics and take advantage of the immense value of emotional information. Really understanding the emotions of your customers will allow you to offer them exactly what they demand, even if they are not able to verbalize it rationally.
In this way, these emotional factors play an essential role in the loyalty of your customers. Beyond the logical elements, the characteristics of the product and the simple figures, there is the feeling experienced during the shopping experience and during the successive interactions with the company.
Moreover, considering the possible difficulty of the client to retain certain objective data, it is evident that he never forgets how he felt in his relationship with the company. The emotional factor remains etched in their consciousness beyond what is imaginable and will have a decisive impact on their loyalty to the brand. Analyzing the causes of those emotions, tackling the negative ones and nurturing the positive ones, is the best decision your company can make to achieve lasting success.
