Customers are emotional beings. When you can connect with their emotions, you win the opportunity to earn their loyalty.
Research shows that emotions are a strong driver for customers, where more than 50% of a customer’s experience is driven by emotions.
So why aren’t more call centres measuring customer emotion?
The short answer is, they don’t know how. Measuring emotion is complicated. Firstly, you need to identify what to measure. Then, what you measure must be well defined. And how you measure must be consistent.
Often, measuring emotion gets put in the “too hard” basket. Since it’s easier to rely on traditional measures such as customer satisfaction and brand differentiation.
In The New Science of Customer Emotions published in the Harvard Business Review, the authors say it is possible to rigorously measure and strategically target the feelings that drive customers’ behaviour.
“But it takes a structured process of learning about your customers’ emotional motivators and conducting experiments to leverage them.”
Explaining that “motivators” provide a better gauge of customer’s future value to a firm than any other metric, their research found that fully connected customers are 52% more valuable on average than those who are highly satisfied, across a variety of metrics such as purchases and frequency of use.
The magic is in forming powerful emotional connections
How customers feel has an impact on their long-term loyalty to your business. The more you understand their emotions, the better you’re positioned to attract and retain the most valuable customers.
An emotional-connection strategy must start with your frontline staff who are the gateway to your customers’ experience. More important, is the need for buy-in across the entire organisation.
At CSBA, we use 30 measures that relate to emotion, to provide our clients valuable insights, to put emotional connections to work, and deliver a successful CX strategy.
Customer emotion is a metric on the rise
In the 2020 What Contact Centres Are Doing Right Now survey conducted by callcentrehelper.com, results showed that 24.8% of contact centres are now measuring customer emotion, with 9.8% coming one step further by targeting specific emotions.
And while the percentage of contact centres that are not measuring customer emotions is still well above those that do, more than a third of contact centres are planning to introduce the metric in the future.
However, 40.2% of organisations said they had no plans to introduce a customer emotion measure into their contact centre.
That’s still a big number of organisations not working to their full potential.
Interestingly, in the 2021 What Contact Centres Are Doing Right Now survey, industry professionals believe the ability to be analytical and to solve problems will be the most sought-after skill (38.6%), followed by communication skills (19.9%), empathy (16.3%) and resilience (9.4%) – all critical skills required to build emotional connection.
As customer contacts become increasingly complex, now’s the time to investigate how your customers’ emotion opens new opportunities to drive profitability.
Keen to know more? Contact narelle.warburton@csba.com.au
