In today's hyperconnected world, quality customer experience (CX) is absolutely critical to an enterprise's success. In order to improve CX, a report from Qualtrics insists that incorporating emotion into digital channels is vital.
Incorporating emotion to improve CX
In order to enhance CX, it is essential to understand the emotions that drive customer behaviour. According to Qualtrics, "of the three critical components of CX — success, effort, and emotion — emotion has the greatest effect on loyalty."
Despite this, just 28% of large companies consider themselves "good" at measuring the emotional responses of customers. Instead, the vast majority of digital enterprises strive to appeal to rational thinking.
Nevertheless, consumers are increasingly opting to interact with organisations using digital channels. It is thus evident that companies and brands "need to make an emotional connection online, or else risk diminishing customer loyalty."
Emotion drives customer decisions
The report observes that the average person makes up to 35,000 decisions per day, which consist of multiple factors. Alongside rational thinking, purchase decisions also incorporate intuitive thinking — "the automatic, subconscious, emotion-driven decision-making that dominates how we operate online."
Learning from human conversations is also incredibly important, which entails clear information. Indeed, a recent SAP report found that unclear information regarding delivery charges saw cart abandonment rates of nearly 70% in 2017.
When interacting with companies via digital channels, many customers have the same expectations as a face-to-face conversation. In order to address this, businesses must thus apply the seven elements of a human conversational model.
Improve CX with emotional reflection
No experience is absolutely perfect, so it is vital to use customer feedback in order to continuously improve. First of all, combining operational data and experience data allows companies to decipher whether they are "tapping into the customer emotions" that will drive their business forward.
A holistic view of the digital experience is also vital, as digital channels do not exist in isolation. Bringing all feedback into a single, holistic view enables enterprises to make connections between customer experiences across multiple devices.
Furthermore, usability testing is an effective method of assessing updates to digital channels and identifying how the changes may affect customer emotions. While user testing was traditionally in small focus groups, enterprises can now conduct usability testing at scale through online platforms.
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