Value Engineering and the Customer’s Emotional Journey

Many companies still fail to recognise the influence of customers’ emotions in their buying behaviour and don’t have the slightest idea of the importance of customers’ feelings when making decisions to buy or not to buy. They rather choose to create journeys or processes that is sufficient from the business perspective. They look at the customer experience from inside the business, using a typical Inside-Out Approach, neglecting to recognise their customers and use an Outside-In Approach.

One of the Customer Experience Management (CEM) lenses, is the emotional journey. This will help you to understand you how your customers are feeling at each touch point and even indicate the intensity of the emotions at each touch point. This is important because it will help you to identify how your customers’ emotions influence their behaviour.

Using a CEM Framework will give you the opportunity to not only identify your customers’ emotions, but to meticulously reflect and design an experience that will create happy and positive emotions throughout the customer journey.

The question is, which emotions should our customer experience be evoking?

Source: Beyond Philosophy

Colin Shaw from Beyond Philosophy refers to the emotional connection a business has with its customers as an Emotional Signature. The first step is to identify what emotions you want to evoke and then to carefully design an experience that will evoke these emotions throughout each touch points.

Often the emotional journey will look something like this:

Source: EOH Coastal

Research has shown that there is a strong correlation between customer’s emotions and their loyalty. The reason for this is that customers value the ‘reality’ they perceive and feel, and their emotions influence their loyalty.

To manage your customers’ emotions effectively and predict their buying behaviour, you need sufficient data relating to your customers’ emotions. This is where Predictive Analytics prove to be beneficial.

Sources:

Beyond Philosophy

Clued In: How to keep customers coming back again and again

This article was first posted on LinkedIn