How often do you hear anyone enthuse: “OMG, what a business!” I’m guessing, not very often. Perhaps that’s because their experience wasn’t very memorable.
In recent years, much has been written about the age of experience and specifically, the pursuit of customer experience (CX) design.
Customer experience strives to warrant that customers have positive touch points with businesses when buying and consuming their products and services.
Research has shown that memorable experiences, and the ensuing positive word of mouth, can influence customer decisions as much as, if not more than, price and functionality.
As a result, new tool kits and frameworks like journey mapping, service blueprinting, and problem-solving mindsets have emerged. And yet, Forrester’s 2018 Customer Experience Index (CX Index™) results continue to show that companies are struggling to create and sustain a human connection with their customers. This is despite insights gleaned about customers through advances in technologies and data analysis.
Something is still missing for most businesses when it comes to customer experience.
Emotion. The customer experience missing ingredient
Here’s a challenge – Ask your colleagues about their most memorable experiences as customers… Were you surprised by the phrasing that they used? When we did this exercise we heard… I felt special. They understood me. Really cared. I didn’t feel like a number. Trusted me. Didn’t argue or delay. The owned the problem. Surprised me. Things were simple. These phrases aren’t the standard language of business. Customers do not use terms like functional value, efficiency, and value proposition. Instead, they describe the emotional impact. Feelings of surprise, delight, happiness, relief, empathy, are associated with their most memorable experiences.
Here’s an amazing quote and a truth so often missed when talking about customer experience. “The essential difference between emotion and reason is that emotion leads to action while reason leads to conclusions,” writes neurologist Donald Calne in Within Reason: Rationality and Human Behavior.
The payoff for emotional customer experiences can be enormous.
A Gallup report suggests that businesses that optimize emotional connections outperform competitors by 26% in terms of gross margin and 85% in terms of sales growth. They nurture emotionally engaged customers who are less price sensitive, less likely to buy from competitors, and three times more likely to recommend and repurchase.
This leads me to ask the question, is your business trying to minimise complaints or maximise customer delight?
Unfortunately, many operate as ‘policeman and or fireman’ and focus almost solely on consistency or complaints. They obsess over brand consistency to the point that they remove the creative or human idea that drives engagement. And they try to remove the customer’s pain at every point where they and the business intersect. These actions can lead to a generic or a sameness to a business’s customer experience strategy – which is the enemy of great branding and customer experience.
The unintended consequences of pain point focus
Removing poor customer experiences reduces complaints, results in fewer irate customers, and will possibly reduce costs. However, the unintended consequence of moving most customers to the middle of distribution curve is that it will result in fewer great experiences. And these undifferentiated experiences, will leave customers with few, if any, memories which are the glue for brand salience, a key ingredient in Byron Sharp’s research on ‘How Brands Grow’.
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