New standard in CX–measuring customer emotions

Take a moment and think about your latest purchasing experiences. Can you recall buying a product impulsively because of excitement? Or can you remember leaving a store because of a bad experience? What was the main driver of your decisions?

Harvard Business Study shows that ninety-five per cent of purchase decisions are emotional. The traditional Customer Experience (CX) metrics like NPS, CSAT, and CES only measure loyalty, service quality, and functionality. But, in today’s world when competition is fierce, companies have started shifting their focus on emotional experiences.

Understanding and measuring customer emotions has become essential for companies to stay ahead of the competition. In fact, up to eighty per cent of all CX leaders indicated that they are planning to start tracking customer emotions (CX Trends Report by Zendesk). It is a trend that has arrived to stay.

Emotion is the main driver of customer experience and business growth

Customer experience is a perception of your business based on your audience’s interactions with you. Today, customers choose brands that offer satisfying experiences throughout their customer journeys, from discovery to purchase, post-sales, to re-purchase. As humans, our perception of good or bad customer experiences relies heavily on the emotions we feel.

According to psychologists, buyers make purchasing decisions based on their emotions and then tend to justify that decision with facts and logic. Therefore, to truly understand and measure the level of your customer experience, you need to dig deeper into the drivers of your customer experience—emotions.

Emotions go beyond the willingness to recommend, promote, or ease of use. That is why it is so powerful to focus on optimising the feelings your business evokes. Research by Feedbackly shows that the Emotional Value Index (EVI®) has up to an eighty per cent correlation with sales and conversion rates.

It means the higher the emotional value you create, the higher your conversion rates. By measuring and optimising the emotions that your business evokes, you are not only improving your CX but are actually optimising the growth of your business.

Turning customer emotion data into measurable outcomes

How can we turn something as abstract as emotions into something that is tangible, measurable, and actionable? It has taken years of research and millions of data points to understand how emotions can be structured. Nowadays, it is possible to measure and classify customer sentiment with the help of AI tools such as Zendesk AI or a customer survey and KPI such as the Emotional Value Index (EVI®). The new tools built for managing emotional experiences help to take action on tangible data and drive better business outcomes.

In the pre-purchase customer journey stages, measuring customer emotions helps to identify and prioritise gaps in the information available on a website or web store page, product selection, or customer service. By fixing the gaps that create negative emotions, you achieve higher conversion rates. The earlier mentioned eighty per cent correlation between the emotional value evoked and the conversion rates to purchase plays a big role in driving more sales.

On the other hand, data about positive emotions gives great upsell opportunities and demonstrates if you are on the right track in supporting your business growth. Feedbackly’s data shows that high emotional value (EVI®) has almost three times the positive impact on customer loyalty and customer retention as compared to likeness to recommend (NPS).

Measuring customer emotions is powerful if done correctly

After all, we sell to and communicate with humans, whether your approach is B2B or B2C. So making the right human connections, and striking the right emotional note is vital.

The complex world of human emotions can be tricky to navigate, but we are empowered with the rapid advancement in technology which can help untangle some of that complexity. Innovation is also at a high point in the field of emotional experience. The sure thing is that keeping a finger on your customer’s pulse and measuring their emotions can be a powerful tool in your business success strategy and toolbox—if done correctly. The proof lies in the data.