Customers now have dozens if not hundreds of touchpoints with the key brands in their lives. Shaping better customer experience by mapping and improving those touchpoints has become an obsession. But if journey mapping isn’t driven by empathy and emotion, rather than process, it can be an expensive investment with limited return.
Satisfaction, effectiveness, and ease are the classic vectors of customer journey mapping. This makes sense — what customer shopping for clothes or trying to get a bank account set up wants more difficulty? — but there’s a problem: companies worldwide are getting much better at the basic elements of customer experience. High call resolution rates and removing obstacles to sale has become the floor, not the ceiling.
This is especially obvious if you look at China. Key sectors like fintech and retail are deeply evolved and brutally competitive, constantly pushing forward on every front. The mechanics are just expected.
Going beyond the classic vectors to re-establish advantage is where emotional customer experience comes in. An experience can be highly efficient while still leaving you cold: imagine dealing with a service agent via webchat who quickly assigns you a case number and ‘solves’ your immediate issue by pointing you to a web page, but never uses your name or expresses any interest in understanding your problem. Now imagine if you experienced that from a hotel or airline (in some cases, especially airlines, little imagination is needed).
Emotional customer experience is built around empathy: the feeling that ‘this company gets me’. Done well, it increases the long-term value of the relationship far beyond individual transactions and tactics.
This insight drove us at riders&elephants to develop our Customer Experience (CX) Deck, a card-based tool to help people and organisations become more truly customer-centric.
The deck is built around two foundational questions:
“Who are our customers?
What do we want them to feel (and not feel)?”
It then works by sparking structured conversations about who your customers are, what you know and don’t know about them, and how you want customers to feel when they engage with your business.
We designed The Customer Experience Deck because we’ve found that many organisations struggle to get to the heart of these customer relationships. Leaders know they need to be more customer-centric. Front line teams often have great insights. But maximising the return on investment in journey mapping relies on being precise about the emotional connections you’re trying to build and focusing on the touch points that most affect that.
But the unfortunate reality of most businesses is chasing customer satisfaction has turned into an expensive, one-dimensional arms race. But there’s another way, an approach to engaging with people that’s more human and more profitable at the same time.
You likely know the gospel about customer experience: that your organisation needs to be built around it in order to survive, or at least to grow organically. Following the lead of the most valuable company in the history of the world, Amazon, everyone from retail stores to government departments are investing huge amounts of time, energy, and money in trying to optimise their end-to-end customer journeys. Every touchpoint comes under scrutiny. Vast analytic engines are deployed.
This is not a bad thing. Customer experience is indeed foundational in a world where price and product are increasingly commoditised. But the investments are sometimes misdirected, for a tragically simple reason:
Customer satisfaction is often the thing being measured, but satisfaction is a limited, low-ceiling aspect of human experience.
Customer satisfaction, broadly, is already pretty high. Going from 91% to 95% ‘satisfaction’ isn’t going to transform your organisation. Money spent there might not be wasted, but it’s not revolutionary either.
Customer emotion, though, the broader range of feelings and engagement that people can experience beyond a simple up/down ‘are you satisfied’, is vast territory worth exploring.
Research published in the Harvard Business Review by Motista, a consumer intelligence firm, looked at hundreds of different emotional motivators that shape customer behaviour. They focused in on ten that lie beyond ‘satisfaction’ and have huge impact. These included ‘projecting a unique social identity’, ‘feel a sense of belonging’, ‘take action to improve their surroundings’, and ‘have a positive mental picture of what’s to come’.
This is rich material. It’s the stuff real human relationships are made of, rather than just seeing people as data points. And on a lifetime value basis, the researchers argue that emotionally connected customers are more than twice as valuable as highly satisfied customers.
The Customer Experience Deck is a simple, human way to build shared understanding and better experiences. If you’re interested in learning more or getting hold of your own deck, our Kickstarter campaign is now live.
