Take a moment to think of your past purchasing behavior as a customer. Can you recount incidents of impulsive purchases you made out of excitement? Can you remember ditching a product or service because of poor experience? What was the driving factor in all these instances?
Traditionally, customer experience doesn’t account for customer emotions. With metrics like NPS, CES, and C-SAT, you only measure CX from the lens of loyalty, service quality, and product functionality. But, with the growing impact of emotions on buyer behavior, brands have started to shift their focus and pay more emphasis to emotional experience.
Emotional experience is the customer’s overall perception of the brand defined by their emotions. It encapsulates how customers feel as they transition from one customer journey stage to the other. Measuring and optimizing emotional experience can benefit your brand in many ways.
Why is emotional experience important?
Knowingly or unknowingly, customers base their purchase decisions on how they feel or how they are made to feel. For example, if customers face lagging in-store service, they can feel frustrated and leave the shop, although the product is top-notch.
Gone is the age when a fabulous product alone is sufficient to attract customers. Today, customers have high expectations from brands they choose to engage with. They prefer a seamless and satisfying experience from start to finish – one that taps into their best feelings throughout the customer journey.
Your customer’s emotional experience can reward or damage your business, depending on the emotions your brand evokes in them. If they are excited, happy, or joyful, it’s a mark of a positive emotional experience. If they are sad, angry, or frustrated, it’s likely that there are pain points that have to be fixed.
How to measure emotional experience?
It is only by measuring and studying your customers’ emotions that you can deliver an experience that meets their expectations. Wondering how you can measure a concept as complex as emotions? We got you a simplified solution.
Emotional Value Index (EVI®) is a metric designed to measure customer emotions and improve the emotional experience. The KPI uses a simple survey where you ask the customer to denote the emoticon that best describes how they felt about the particular touchpoint or engagement. Emoticons are displayed in a circular form to avoid survey bias.
For calculating EVI®, the selected set of emotions is grouped into clusters. Each cluster has a numerical value assigned to it based on the level of impact. You group the responses based on the emotions and take the weighted average. The final score will be a value between -1 and +1. Take a look at our detailed guide on calculating EVI®.
You can use EVI® at both micro and macro levels, and it’s applicable for any stage in the customer journey. It gives you a well-rounded analysis of emotional experience. It is a simple and versatile survey ideal for any type of business.
How can emotional experience help your business?
Essentially, data on customer emotions gathered from surveys helps brands eliminate the gap between customers’ expectations and the brand’s delivery. Similar to CX, emotional experience demands you to look at your business from your client’s perspective.
EVI® surveys give you much-needed insight into how customers perceive your business emotionally. By understanding how your customers feel when doing business with your brand, you can finetune the service and improve their experience. When brands align their marketing and sales strategies to appeal to customer emotions, they have a higher chance of retaining existing customers and attracting leads. EVI® helps you understand your customer personas better and cater to them.
Moreover, measuring emotional experience also helps you identify the emotions that lead to bigger purchase sizes, higher sales, and repetitive purchases. You can work on evoking these emotions throughout the customer journey. With EVI®, you can optimize the benefits of emotional experience and build the foundation for emotion-led growth. You can also correlate EVI® data with other organizational data to improve the performance of the overall company. Download our free EVI® and learn everything you need to know about emotional experience and Emotional Value Index!
