It’s Emotional: Why Customer Experience Is Critical to Brand Success - Millie Tan
There are times when the ‘customer experience’ feels like a book that everyone talks about, but very few actually read. There is a rich and vibrant discussion amongst board members, on social media, and in offices all over the world concerning the customer experience. Leaders all over the world are constantly pioneering ways to think about and approach interactions between customers and employees. To describe the interaction in one word, however, the appropriate word would be — emotional. The customer experience is about how we (the company, the employees) make the customer feel.
I recently read an article published in the Wall Street Journal by Ursa Mihajlovic titled It’s Emotional: Why Customer Experience Is Critical to Brand Success. As a strong believer in the power of the customer experience, this article resonated with me and got me thinking about the role emotion plays.
“In today’s world, consumers face an overwhelming number of choices. And it’s the customer experience itself that increasingly influences purchasing behaviors.
These digitally empowered consumers have high expectations that include a streamlined convenient experience in every channel — online, on the phone, and in-person — and want products and services that exactly meet their needs.
What’s more, they place a premium on how well companies know them as individuals, using these insights to elevate each and every customer journey. Indeed, research reveals 86% of consumers willingly spend more on products and services from brands that engage with them in the manner they expect.
For consumers, providing a positive end-to-end experience that’s personalized and fully aligned with their expectations is the key to winning their business and lasting loyalty.
To deliver such stand-out experiences, companies must zero in on customer wants, needs, and expectations to get closer to the consumer than ever before, using this intelligence to make improvements to things like price, product, service quality, support, and more in order to retain and grow market share.”
Further, we must not forget the way in which the pandemic has impacted emotions — for employees and customers alike. Customers now value health, wellness, a personal connection, and human interaction so much more. Human interaction doesn’t mean face-to-face interaction — far from that given the social distancing norms. But customers want to feel like someone is listening to them on the other side of that computer screen, and that their wants and needs are being met by a company that cares. Being on the other side, we at organizations need to reassess how we approach the customer experience and how to better cater to our customers given the way in which the pandemic has severely altered our emotions.
You can read the original article here.
