Unlocking the Hidden Customer Experience - Short Stories of Remarkable Practices That Ensure Success

Part 1: The Emotional Experience

When it comes to business, most companies aren’t thinking about the emotional side of their Customer Experience. They don’t consider how the Customer feels, or what emotions they evoke. Instead they are focused on the rational parts of the Experience. Are their delivery times reasonable? Are their calls answered by the third ring? Do their widgets perform to the standards of the widget industry?

The rational side of the transaction is important, just not the only thing that is important. Not only must organizations have a quality product at a fair price that is delivered when it should be, but they must also make sure all of this happens in a way that appeals to the Customer’s emotions.

Emotions are a critical component of a Customer’s Experience. Emotions don’t really fit onto a spreadsheet, but they can absolutely wreak havoc on Customer loyalty and retention if your Experience generates the wrong ones.

With this in mind, let’s explore the emotional engagement an organization’s Experience creates with its Customers, and how that affects the Customer Experience.

The Power of Emotions in Customer Loyalty

What happens when a company you trust has a security breach that compromises your account information, leaving you open for credit card fraud? How quickly does the trust fade? We benefitted from watching two real-time case studies for this idea in the wake of the Target and Snapchat breaches in late 2013.

These were two rather significant breaches of security over the holidays, from two well-known brand names. They were hardly the first of these types of breaches, and sadly they are not likely to be the last.

First, there was the security breach suffered by Target, where transactions that took place between November 27, 2013 and December 15, 2013 were accessed, and the card numbers and Personal Identification Numbers (PINs) of over 110 million cardholders were compromised. The second was when Snapchat, a social media site growing in popularity, had 4.6 million user names and associated phone numbers hacked, which were then posted on a website called SnapchatDB for anyone to see on New Year’s Eve.

Happy New Year, indeed!

Customer loyalty is what a great Customer Experience helps create. It is the standard by which all Customer Experience champions are measured, and it is the reason that, frankly, any organization really gives a damn about their Customer Experience.

Customers give you their loyalty when they have a consistently good Customer Experience that meets or exceeds their expectations, and appeals to their subconscious and emotional needs as well. They reward companies that handle these expectations and needs well with their return business. For as long as those expectations and needs are met or exceeded, the organization can virtually count on these particular Customers’ loyalty.

Target took a beating in the court of public opinion immediately following the announcement of the breach. BrandIndex, which uses the responses of an online panel of 2.5 million respondents who weigh in on corporate reputations, said that initial findings showed Target’s brand suffered a 35-point decline in just one week.

Now, the drop in points could be associated with the crime, or it could be something else. One of the biggest complaints by consumers was they felt that Target’s response was lackluster; the same complaint uttered by Snapchat victims, who only got an apology a full week later when Snapchat finally fixed the problem in the system. It will be interesting to see what the long-term ramifications (if any) from these breaches will be to both of these brands’ Customer loyalty. Lackluster, however, is hardly the word I would want associated with my brand’s response to such a snafu if I was either of these two companies.

Abraham Maslow, the American psychologist born in Brooklyn in 1908, is famous for creating what we now call Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs.” The familiar pyramid teaches us just about everything we need to know about brand loyalty.

You can clearly see that security and safety help form the foundation of a person’s needs. Maslow shows us that safety and freedom from fear are two of the most important needs a human being has, right after breathing and fresh water. When these needs are not met, then none of the higher levels can be addressed. In other words, Maslow says that if a person does not feel safe or free from fear, they cannot move forward.

At Beyond Philosophy we have a pyramid that we use a lot, too.

Unlike Maslow’s pyramid, however, the Beyond Philosophy pyramid shows the Hierarchy of Emotional Value to a Customer’s Experience. This pyramid shows the 20 emotions we discovered in our research that drive or destroy value in a Customer Experience. This pyramid shows us how emotions can generate dollars. For a more detailed explanation of these emotions and your Emotional Signature, please read our whitepaper called, “Emotional Signature® (ES) the role of emotions in Customer Experience.”

Let me explain what you see here:

Destroying cluster: These are the emotions that, if evoked, will destroy value. In other words, you will lose the loyalty of your Customer, they will leave you, and you will lose money.

Attention cluster: These are the emotions that marketers target with their work. They try to make the Customer feel interested; they try to stimulate Customers to explore what is being offered. But this doesn’t mean the Customer will stay with you. These emotions drive short-term spending, but not long-term spending.

Recommendation cluster and Advocacy cluster: If you want your Customers to stay, you need to evoke these emotions that drive long-term value and are measured through Customer loyalty, Net Promoter, etc.

To discover your level of emotional engagement, you need to ask your Customers what they feel about you.

Below you can see a chart demonstrating the emotional profile taken from a case study of Memorial Hermann Hospital System in Houston, Texas. As you see, following our work with them they were doing very well on the positive and negative emotions compared against the hospital sector.

I am pleased to say, the whole idea of appealing to Customers’ emotions continues to gain acceptance. We really began to notice more companies were adopting strategies that addressed emotional experiences after Forrester, in their Forrester’s 2013 Customer Experience Predictions stated:

“Emotional insights will take center stage. The idea that happy customers are more likely to remain loyal, try new products and services, and spread good news about their experiences has started to catch on. Over the past several months, we’ve seen a rise in the number of companies pondering the connection between enjoyment and metrics like satisfaction and Net Promoter Score (NPS). In fact, one global company statistically demonstrated that several emotional factors trump NPS in predicting customer loyalty, effectively dethroning ‘would you recommend?’ as the ultimate question. As firms start to emphasize customer emotion in 2013, we expect to see more vendors developing offerings like Beyond Philosophy’s Emotional Signature, which examines the rational, subconscious, and emotional elements of an experience.”

We are very pleased they saw fit to mention our Emotional Signature® research methodology that quantifies the value of evoking emotions.

This is all great, but the issue becomes what do you do about it? What do you have to change that will drive value?

To answer this, we need to introduce the whole area of the subconscious experience. We don’t have enough time to go into this here, but suffice it to say, there is a big difference between what Customers say and what they do.

For example, Disney knows when they ask Customers what they would like to eat at a theme park, typically people will say they would like to have the option of a salad. Disney also knows that people don’t eat salads at theme parks! They eat hot dogs and hamburgers. Another example is that many people say they are worried about the environment and want products that are eco-friendly. However, when they are offered eco-friendly products that are slightly more expensive than the normal products, they don’t buy them.

This model shows that what Customers desire (i.e., what they say they want) can be very different from what drives “value.” You can place the different attributes or touch points of your Customer Experience over these four boxes.

• Conscious: Customers say they desire it, and it does drive value
• Subconscious: Customers don’t say they desire it, but it does drive value
• Deception: Customers say they desire it, but it doesn’t drive value
• Invisible: Customers don’t say they desire it, and it doesn’t drive value

It’s when you distribute the attributes or touch points of your Customer Experience across these four boxes that you really see where to focus your efforts.

Target, Snapchat, and the Pyramid

Using our Hierarchy of Emotional Value pyramid, we can predict how the breach will affect future business for both companies. As you can see, at the top of the pyramid are the emotions that drive value which include happy and pleased, which are emotions I am willing to bet very few Target or Snapchat Customers felt about those organizations...