Author: Stuart Richards

Emotion is coming to the forefront of Customer Experience (CX) management, not because it’s warm and fuzzy, and not because leveraging feelings is devilishly manipulative, but because when you use emotion to drive your CX efforts, it becomes a powerful differentiator.

More companies are getting better at the functional basics of customer experience, like responding in a timely manner to questions, streamlining the purchase process, and smoothing out onboarding (not to mention creating a decent product) – which means they need something unique to offer that separates them from their competition.  

What is the most unique, even unforgettable thing you can offer? The way you make your customers feel. It’s for this reason the bar for CX is inching up.

Emotion not only carries the ability to define your company in a sea of competitors, it can also inspire viral word of mouth marketing from people who love you and want to express that to a large audience, whether because they’re influencers with their own followers, or reviewers.

Bad things are worse than good things are better

We are hardwired as human beings to be more sensitive to negative events than positive events. And this sensitivity only increases when we’re in a heightened emotional state – focusing on the negative becomes even easier.

As odd as it may sound, this is good news for those of us in the business of relieving pain points. You’ll get more appreciation from your customer by removing pain than creating delight. So, if a customer comes to you with a problem, you can expect them to be in a heightened emotional state, which means not only should you tread carefully, you’ll do well to relieve their most urgent pain points as soon as possible!

As a species, negative consequences take an enormous toll on us. In fact, we’ll go farther out of our way to avoid negative consequences than we’d go for positive results of equal measure (it’s called “Loss Aversion”). This behavior is predicated on the emotional truth that something bad feels worse than something good feels better. Losing $20 might wreck your day. Finding $20 may make you happier for an hour.

How does this translate to CX?

Vanguard, one of the world’s largest investment companies, was getting ready to redo its site, and rather than just considering customer acquisition, or lead-generating instruction, they studied how people felt about investing. They looked at whether their target audience was new to investing, had been investing for a while, and what their emotional baggage might be around the topic of investing in general. They discovered that, new or experienced, most people feel overwhelmed. Now, if you visit Vanguard’s site, their design is very simple, even sparse. They knew that visual clutter would only enhance the feeling of overwhelm. Their new design reduces it.

Delta airlines also makes a point to reduce customer pains. They set up their phone systems so that if you call in response to getting a text message saying your flight was canceled, their automated phone system will put you straight through to the appropriate person rather than route you through a dozen exhausting options.

United Airlines has been working diligently to improve its public image by tackling some of its thorniest customer experience pitfalls, like lost luggage. The airline recently introduced a service that lets fliers follow their luggage on the United smartphone app, and get text message alerts if their bags miss their destination. Instead of being angry and frustrated by lost bags, passengers are calling this “Amazing” customer service. As one passenger told the Huffington Post:

After I arrived, I received a text message alert that one of my two bags did not make it and would be delivered to my address within 24 hours,” she says. “I also received an email where I could track my bag, see who was delivering it and at what time. At no time did I have to wait in line or on hold for them to rectify their mistake. They simply took care of it and kept me informed every step of the way. To me, that was amazing customer service.

Amazon offers one of the most loved customer experiences, some argue, because it provides “an unparalleled sense of emotional satisfaction.” How do they do that? Not through being especially warm and fuzzy, but by reducing pain points with features like multiple wishlists, a save-for-later area, an easily accessible cart, and even more easily accessible price comparisons, along with shipping cost reduction and the nearly instant gratification of Prime. If and when a customer does have a problem, returns are easy and customer service gets top marks.

A lot of bad customer experiences are ‘death by a thousand cuts’ annoyances. Avoid exacerbating pain in an already painful situation, and the better the customer’s perception of their experience will be.

Emotions lead to loyalty – the key to growing SaaS businesses

Emotion is linked to loyalty (and CX is linked to emotion). In the hotel industry, which has the largest percentage of customers that reported feeling “valued” one study reported, 88% of the “valued” people will advocate for the hotel brand, and more than 75% will stay with the hotel brand.

The TV service provider industry, unsurprisingly, has the largest percentage of customers who report feeling annoyed. Only 8% of these annoyed people express willingness to advocate for the TV service provider, and just over 1 in 10 intend to keep their existing relationships with the provider.

For the SaaS industry, retention is a key metric for profit and growth – you can’t afford to annoy, disappoint, or frustrate your customers. Essentially, customers are 5 times more loyal when they feel valued, than when they feel annoyed.

The most important emotions for loyalty in the U.S. are, in fact, feeling valued, appreciated, and confident.

For example, there’s something about Slack that makes you feel confident (and a bit cool) that you’re part of something that’s on the leading edge. That’s not just because Slack is relatively new – they engender this feeling on purpose with Slack release notes (which are hilarious, self-deprecating, and charmingly relatable) that make updating the app a pleasure. Not only do they manage to keep everyone up-to-date, they remove the significant pain of updating an app and replace it with a positive emotion.

Note: Positive emotions that drive behavior like repurchases and advocacy differ by country and culture, even by customer base. In the UK, Germany and France, for example, the top three loyalty-inspiring emotions are slightly (yet significantly) different.

Loyalty weakening emotions differ by country and culture too. U.S. customers share their loyalty-weakening emotions with their U.K. friends.

Be sure to understand the emotions of your specific customer base rather than make assumptions.

Interestingly, customer loyalty itself comes in multiple flavors. Loyalty can mean retention (the customer will maintain existing business), enrichment (a customer will buy additional products and services), advocacy (the customer will recommend the company).

Do you know how your customers feel about their experiences with your business?

How to Measure Emotion in Customer Experience

Most CX measurement programs don’t quantify customer emotions – they focus more on metrics that reflect a rational or cognitive evaluation of experiences. Maxie Schmidt-Subramanian, senior analyst at Forrester, says businesses can begin measuring emotion in CX by first defining metrics that measure critical emotions in influential experiences (the ones with the highest impact on customer relationships).

Yes, that means you’re making it up as you go along. You have to figure out for yourself which metrics effectively measure emotion for your customers, in your context. One way to do this is by tracking sentiment in Voice of Customer data – people convey a wide range of emotions with the words they use. Some companies, like Lenovo, use text analysis software to measure changes in sentiment scores, alerting when sentiment falls below a certain threshold.

Using a sentiment analysis tool, you can track positive or negative themes and dig into specific words most often used by your customers to describe how they feel. You can also mine customer feedback and questions, or any other written message from your customer to you. Of course, the most straightforward way to get Voice of Customer data is through surveys, and if you time your surveys right (and ask in the right channel), you can begin to tell what events trigger which emotions.  

Whichever method you choose to get your emotion metrics, the goal is the same: to define the emotional context customers have around your product, industry, and specific touch points in your sales funnel, onboarding process, and usage. From there, you can identify and alleviate pain points, gain loyalty, and win brand advocates.

Prove the value of emotion to yourself first

Emotion is a relatively ‘wooey’ topic. It’s still considered soft. It’s not taken seriously by many. So make it your mission to prove the value of emotion early on in your program by first targeting the highest-emotion touch points, and developing experiments for how to improve customers’ emotions around those experiences. Then track your success rates.

But remember, emotion is contextual, and you don’t have control over the entire context of a customer’s experience. That said, companies who value customer loyalty are willing to go to creative lengths to keep customers feeling good about their brand. Join them.

Omni-Channel Customer Feedback

You know your business inside and out. You know that listening to customers and responding to their needs is the key to staying competitive. Still, you might be struggling with where and when to survey your customers. A pop-up survey in your web app? Send them an email? What about a text message on their mobile phone? Figuring out the most effective channel to ask for feedback can be confusing.

The good news is that you have more options than ever before.  We’d like to help by giving an overview of where companies are engaging their customers, and how multiple channels can work together. Then, you’ll be better equipped to develop a plan that best meets your company’s unique needs.

Why take advantage of multiple feedback channels

Start with a customer-focused approach: when, where and how do your customers want to give you feedback? This inquiry can quickly lead to a multi-channel approach.

Fight survey fatigue

An improved survey experience helps you maintain high response rates. Not every customer wants to fill out an in-app survey, not every customer opens email in their inbox. However, a lot of people do want to give feedback, and appreciate the opportunity to do so. So your goal is to get more and more sophisticated about the “where and when” over time.

Reach more stakeholders, in the right context

When you leverage more than one survey channel you can expand the pool of users you’re hearing from. You may have an email relationship with some customers, and in-product engagement with others. A multichannel approach also lets you choose the right channel for a given interaction, and to customize your Voice of the Customer program for your business model.

Which Customer Feedback Survey Channel is “Best”?

Is one survey channel more brand-oriented or more transaction-oriented?  Which is the best? This is a very common question. We think the most important factor here is when you survey, rather than which channel.

Here’s why. If you send an NPS survey right after purchase, you can expect that response to be more influenced by that last transaction. However, keep in mind, an NPS survey triggered by a transaction is still colored by the brand experience.

To help you think this through, here is some information about the different channels:

Email: Lower response rates, but higher rates of qualitative feedback. Think about it: How often do you take the time to open emails from businesses, let alone respond? However, those customers who do take the time to answer a customer feedback survey via email are more likely to be invested in your brand and take the time to write comments that provide more detail to the “why” behind their score.

In-app (Web or Mobile): Higher response rates, lower rates of qualitative feedback. In-app surveys can deliver contextual feedback, and we find that customers will answer the question they are asked. They are absolutely willing to provide higher level feedback when prompted in a web or mobile app. This is why customer experience management platforms offer feedback tagging, sentiment analysis, and other means of gleaning insight from the fire hose of data that many companies receive via in-app surveys. Nonetheless, fewer in-app respondents will take the time to give qualitative feedback.

The high response rate that in-app NPS surveys deliver can be a positive trade off, especially for SaaS businesses focused on reducing churn. You may prefer to get a gut impression that you can follow up on rather than radio silence from a passive or unhappy user that ignores an email survey.

SMS:  With transactions, deliveries, and services, sometimes texting is the most effective and immediate way for you to interact with customers. It also allows you to grab customers in the place they tend to spend more and more of their time – on their mobile phones.

So, really, it’s not about which is better. The question is, “Which channel or channels are the best fit for my business and my customers?”

Scenarios Where Using More than One Customer Feedback Channel Makes Sense

1. Targeting Distinct Stakeholder Groups with Different Survey Channels.

Consider the enterprise sales model as one that can benefit from both in-app and email surveys. Here we are talking about a SaaS company or other business with a very strong digital presence. In this example, your company is using the Net Promoter Score system to measure customer loyalty.

If your brand is an online product, we’ve seen huge success when you choose in-app surveys as your primary channel. This is because end users of a SaaS product relate to your company through your digital platform. They probably don’t open your marketing emails because they aren’t looking to be sold to. They just want to do their thing in your product everyday. For them, it makes sense to give NPS feedback in-app, and they are mostly likely to respond there.

Now consider some executive stakeholders or buyers of your platform. They don’t spend as much time in your product (if any), but you definitely want to know their opinion. For this group, delivering an NPS survey via email is likely the way to go, and email gives you a higher chance of getting qualitative feedback in their response.  

So, in this case, it’s the combination of in-app and email surveys that gets you the info you need. 

2. Reaching Customers Throughout their Journey

E-commerce is an interesting use case here. The e-commerce business often has a couple of different customer survey touchpoints: online and offline. Every customer needs to place an order–typically on a website or mobile app. It can be valuable to learn how a customer feels after the ordering process, and that survey can often happen in the web application.

Once the product is delivered, the customer may register delight or dissatisfaction. For e-commerce businesses, it really makes sense to capture that sentiment via email or SMS because, honestly, if the customer had a bad experience, they’re probably not going to come back to your site to give you feedback.

The power of those two surveys together—one in-app and one via email—can give you an insightful story of the customer journey, and it can only happen by tapping into multiple feedback channels.

3. Surveying Customers Across All Lines of Business

As companies evolve and develop new forms of business for growth, customers of those different products might require distinct feedback channels. A good example is a technology company that hasn’t fully migrated to the cloud and still has legacy software offerings. These types of businesses in transition have a software user base “on premise,” where the only option is to do an email survey. Newer, cloud-based offerings from the same company can opt instead for in-app surveys.

Here is another example. A media company might get in-app survey feedback from subscribers or readers who visit their website. However, the same company may find that email surveys are a better channel to reach customers that receive subscription services via home delivery.

4. Improving Response Rates among Low Engagement Customers

Supplementing one channel with another may help you get a higher response rate.  For example, if you start your feedback program with in-app surveys and you find that certain customers just aren’t using your application that frequently, or aren’t receptive to an in-app survey, then you have the flexibility to try another channel. See what those customers prefer to respond to–try an email survey, try SMS, or try surveying in a mobile app if you have one. That way, every customer’s voice is being heard on their terms.

5. Evolve to Reach Your Customers Where They Are

There are times when companies communicate with customers primarily through SMS. Think about your mobile provider, bank, airline, or ride share service. You expect to hear from them through that channel and count on the immediacy that texting provides. This is when it makes good sense to survey through SMS in addition to other channels, particularly for transaction-related feedback.

You’ve Got Choices

There are times when “it just depends.”  Multi-channel customer feedback gives you the flexibility to survey customers based on the way they prefer to communication with your business. It lets you engage a broader segment of users across multiple touch points and lines of business. You can get the big picture, each step in your customer’s journey.

And, it lets you meet your customers on their terms. Don’t risk filling your customer’s devices with unwanted messages. The sensitivity that multi-channel feedback offers can help you avoid survey fatigue. That means higher quality feedback to help you grow your company.