Empathy, emotion and the customer experience

Surveys reveal 80 percent of companies believe they deliver superior customer experience, yet only 8 percent of their customers agree.

If you take someone out for a romantic dinner, do you wear a grungy outfit or ignore your date at the restaurant? Not if you want the relationship to continue. Yet, many corporations expend tremendous resources wooing new customers without a clear understanding of what it takes to create and sustain a positive customer experience.

To create a great customer experience—one that encourages brand loyalty and advocacy—it’s essential to have a deep understanding of experiences that trigger the emotions and motivations that drive your customer’s brand preference and behavior.

1. How does it make them feel?

Maya Angelou once said, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” According to psychologists, what people remember about a customer experience is determined by the intensity of emotions created in specific moments—not the overall experience. This is true for most experiences throughout our lives. Our non-conscious mind categorizes and catalogues experiences according to the nature and intensity of emotions.

When processing new stimuli, the non-conscious mind associates past memories and responds emotionally before rational thought occurs. When neurologists discovered that 95 percent of thought, emotion and learning occur this way, behavioral economists like Daniel Kahneman realized that “We are not thinking machines that feel. We are feeling machines that think.” In other words, non-consious emotional responses shaped by past emotional memories determine customer attitudes, perceptions and behavior—not conscious, rational decisions.

Kahneman summarized this with his Peak-End Rule, citing that customer experiences are judged almost entirely on the intensity of emotions at their peaks and resolution point. Virtually all other information appears to be forgotten, including net pleasantness or unpleasantness and how long the experience lasted. For customer experience managers, this means only a few of the dozens or hundreds of touchpoints across the customer experience are significant for forming the emotional bonds that lead to customer loyalty and advocacy.

2. Leverage emotional insights to create positive experiences and build trust

When considering the customer experience, it’s important to be mindful that trust and faith are essential emotions. When someone trusts you, they tell you their secrets. When customers perceive your company as trustworthy, they buy your goods or services.

Demonstrating trustworthiness can be done even when a situation is negative. Imagine a customer whose flight is delayed due to inclement weather. Even though the experience is distressing, the customer’s experience with the carrier can be positive if the airline accommodates the passenger, making him or her feel valued and important. Conversely, a rude salesclerk can easily put off a retail customer who has found the perfect outfit at a great price.

Trustworthiness is demonstrated by being reliable, consistent and concerned for your customer’s needs. Often, the little things a company does, not the big things it says, create the sustained impression. Happy, smiling employees are just one social cue that goes a long way to building rapport. More than anything, the company must demonstrate that it will always act in a caring way toward the customer, no matter what the circumstances.

3. Build empathy walking in your customer’s shoes

Even though budgets are limited and schedules compressed, it’s important to invest in a deeper understanding of your customer. With a newfound clarity, teams are able to focus, certain that what they are doing matters to their customers. This is where empathy building can help.

It’s equally important for senior leadership and other key stakeholders to understand what customers experience throughout their daily lives. This often shifts how they look at their business, sparking fresh thinking rooted in an empathetic understanding of customers.

Consider the example where rail authorities in London realized a negative experience was created as commuters waited for Metro trains to arrive at their station. A deeper discovery revealed that the emotional anxiety wasn’t due to the wait itself. Instead, it was due to uncertainty about when the next train would arrive. Once officials installed digital displays indicating the arrival time of the next train, customer experience statistics improved. In retrospect, it’s easy to see how replacing ambiguity with order reduces anxiety, but it took decades of poor customer experience before an emotional insight was leveraged to design a dramatically improved customer experience.

4. Internalize the customer experience

For an initiative to succeed in improving the customer experience, senior leadership and stakeholders throughout the entire organization need to “live” the brand. This involves articulating the brand promise internally so that people understand what is expected for each touchpoint. Each aspect of delivering a positive customer experience needs to be “caught, not taught.” Leaders intent on changing employee behavior must do so by sharing, collaborating and exemplifying the vision and values for how the brand is to be experienced by customers.

By sharing a deeper understanding of the emotional drivers for a positive customer experience, it’s possible to refocus employees and organizations around what works. This approach creates greater meaning and engagement. Applied social science research has demonstrated that emphasizing the positive rather than trying to eliminate the negative is effective in improving an organization’s internal capacity for collaboration and change.

This approach motivates and inspires individuals while creating a sense that “living the new experience promise” is an ongoing way of life—not just a temporary project.

5. Implement a work plan

Finally, it’s necessary for a work plan to be undertaken to facilitate rapid acceptance, understanding and adoption of the essential behaviors necessary to bring the vision and values of the new customer experience to life throughout the organization. This process will help to transcend ambiguities and inspire individual colleagues to internalize and live the new experience promise.

Retail brands are most successful when they invest in understanding the emotional factors that drive people’s choices. This creates deeper trust in the marketplace and better engages customers. In other words, if you want to create better customer experience, you must uncover the truths about how you make them feel.

Source: http://goo.gl/VjgTtS