When it comes to customer loyalty, it’s all about emotion. In just one short year, Gartner predicts that the average person will have more conversations with bots than their spouse. While chatbots aren’t necessarily “taking over” our business and personal lives, the digital experience has become addictive. Technology has enabled us to automate shopping, use virtual personal assistants to get more accomplished, and turn “voice first” interactions into common experiences. With so many advancements at our fingertips, when we do interact with a human, we expect it to be a quality interaction.
Bots are programed to perform repetitive tasks and spit out information as quickly as a human can request it. We view bots and humans as opposites, one made of wires, the other of feelings, with the biggest difference being the one that makes us human – we care.
Employees that care and act upon the feelings of customers at different points along their journey are more likely to win loyalty. According to a joint study conducted by Customer Think and Walker customers expect companies to know their needs intimately and personalize their experience. The organizations who deliver on those expectations will be rewarded with affinity and spend – 63% of customers with positive feelings about a company will remain loyal, while 74% will go a step further and advocate for the brand.
Begin with your existing customer journey. How are you addressing emotional motivators and potential stressors at each stage? The customer journey mapping process from Starbucks is a great example of not only looking at individual touchpoints but also mapping out a baseline for what would be an ‘enriched’ experience at each touchpoint.
At a minimum your customer journey map should include the following elements:
- Each touchpoint with desired goals and outcomes
- Potential pain points, areas of concern and frustration
- Areas of strengths – what processes are working well and how can you apply those best practices to other areas?
- The importance level vs effort and existing processes for each touchpoint
- Emotional needs of your customer at each touchpoint
Determining the emotional needs of your customers at each touchpoint is particularly important because emotion plays an essential role in how customers make decisions. How a customer feels about their experience with a company has the most significant impact on winning and retaining their business. And yet despite the importance, both customers and companies agree that organizations do a poor job of engaging customers’ emotions.
Experience management transformists, Tempkin Group, helps organizations improve business results by engaging the hearts and minds of their customers. Enjoy this video from Tempkin that further illustrates the importance of emotion when it comes to an organization’s approach to customer experience.
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