Customer experience reflects the relationship that a business co-creates with its customers. But, the attributes of CX continue to evolve with the dynamics and growing unpredictability of the business landscape. If brands are to remain competent and foster a unique relationship with their clientele, they have to adapt to the changing trends in CX.
Here are the attributes and strategies that will shape the future of CX. Consider it a winning roadmap to stay ahead of the curve!
Emotional Insight as a CX Game-changer
Understanding one’s targeted audience in and out will remain a central goal, but it will require a deeper and more nuanced approach. As customer journeys have only evolved to be more complex with an increasing number of channels and touchpoints, the complexity of customer behavior can stem from a multitude of factors.
“We had measured NPS and CSAT for years, but we struggled with getting valuable insight for decision-making. We needed a much deeper understanding of our customers to make decisions that have an impact on the behavior of our customers,” has also been brought out by Stockmann, one of the leading retailers in the Nordics.
In this regard, brands will turn to emotional insight to understand how customers feel, react, and behave in response to what the brand offers them. Brands will go beyond traditional metrics that pin on advocacy, customer effort, and satisfaction and dive deep into the emotional value offered by their products and services. This is because the measure of emotions has the capability to capture the bigger picture and help businesses understand customer sentiments and motivations more accurately. It will also help them provide better products and services, and create more effective targeted campaigns.
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).
Data-Driven Emotional Understanding
Customer emotions could seem difficult to measure. However, without data-driven insights, it’s only going to be guesswork about how your customers feel. Fortunately, metrics like EVI® make it possible to get an accurate and real-time snapshot of how your customer feels at different touchpoints in different stages of the buying journey. Integrated with Feedbackly, it can offer powerful insights into customer expectations and behavior.
Data on customer sentiment and emotional experience of buying journeys will prove to be catalysts of change. It will also unlock a host of opportunities for businesses and help deliver a better experience to their clientele. With a data-driven understanding of customer emotions, businesses can offer ultra-personalized experiences through relevant recommendations, bundled offers, and promotions. It can foster long-lasting loyalty and enhance advocacy rates.
Switch from Reactive to Proactive Experience Management
A lot of emphasis so far is on shaping customer experience based on insights from the past. However, the future of CX will demand a change from reactive CX management to proactive approaches.
With reactive management, brands resolve pain points after they are identified through survey results and feedback. Also, a lack of resources for customer service support can magnify the issue and lead to high churn rates. All in all, waiting till something goes wrong to fix it won’t bode well for your brand.
Instead, brands need to take a forward-thinking approach to fixing pain points, streamlining the buying journey, and optimizing customer experience well in advance. Metrics like EVI® are essential for brands in anticipating customer needs effectively through real-time data on customer emotions. The qualitative insights gathered from them, together with predictive behavior modeling, can help brands prepare for the expected even before customers step into the store. It’s the way forward in tailoring interactions to their liking, preventing negative experiences, and fostering lasting emotional connections.
Measuring Emotional ROI
With emotional experience being the way forward in CX, EVI® will introduce a new dimension of measuring ROI. It will quantify the impact of emotional connections on customer loyalty, brand advocacy, and long-term success, revolutionizing how businesses assess the value of emotional engagement.
EVI® results can also be correlated with other organizational and financial data to determine how emotions affect customer purchases and thereby affect business revenue. You can also identify the emotions that bring the highest sales and focus on evoking them throughout the buying journey.
“Thanks to the EVI® methodology, we have been able to identify what makes our eCommerce store visitors convert to customers. Web store pre-purchase EVI® score and website conversion rate go hand in hand. This is simply powerful,” stated Sara Toivakainen, Chief Customer Experience Officer from Stockmann in the interview.
