Understanding Customer Emotion
Companies must learn how to deal with 6 important emotions to drive business results
I’m sure you’ve been exposed to the idea that a vast percentage of customer decision making is based on emotion, rather than rational thinking. In fact, multiple studies have concluded that up to 90 percent of all customer decisions are driven by emotion, which makes understanding the emotions of your customer perhaps one of the most important things that there is in business.
We study this constantly in our work, helping clients improve their customer experiences. We’ve found six particular emotions that are the most important emotions to understand to drive effective business results.
These are emotions that when you can cultivate them in your customers, you are much more likely to create a sale.
Three of these emotions are positive emotions. These are emotions that when you can cultivate them in your customers, you are much more likely to create a sale, much more likely to create loyalty, much more likely to give the customer confidence in doing business with you, much more likely to get referrals and create positive word of mouth.
When you create one of those three emotions, you get positive results. And when you can create all three of these most important positive emotions, this is when you get a loyal customer for life — as long as you also avoid the top three most negative emotions.
We’ve also identified the three most dangerous emotions that you must avoid to be successful in driving emotional customer decision making. I’d like to tell you about one of those emotions and then offer you a free report that we’ve created. It talks about all six of these critical emotions and gives you some techniques to determine how you can most effectively cultivate the emotions that you want and avoid the emotions that you don’t want.
But right now, I’m just going to talk about one example briefly, and that example is confusion. Confusion is one of the emotions you want to avoid in your customer. When customers are confused, they typically take no action, meaning, they don’t buy. Customers don’t like the feeling of confusion, so they typically back away from whatever experience they’re having when they feel confused.
If they’re on your website or they’re in your email or they’re looking at your ad, and they start to feel confused, they bail. They get out of there and go somewhere else, whether it’s to your competitor or some other activity.
What is confusion, anyway? Confusion is simply when the customer does something and the response they get back is not what they expect, so they blame themselves. They blame their expectation. They think perhaps they’re just not smart enough to understand and figure out, whether it’s your content, your navigation, your checkout process, or whatever it may be.
And you might think, well, better they blame themselves than blame me, right? No, because when a customer blames themselves, that’s something that they can’t change. They feel, “This brand, this experience is just not right for me. I have to go find something else that suits me. I’m not going to change myself.”
There are many opportunities to confuse customers, whether it’s through the content that we include on our websites, the descriptions of our products, the way we ask them to fill out forms, the way we provide information, or the navigation of our websites or apps. It goes on and on and on.
I’m going to pause there on this. But I want to encourage you to download our special report, which goes into much more detail and talks about all six of the three positive emotions and the
Every time you make a change to an experience, you create the opportunity to potentially unintentionally plant a confusion bomb.
So, we are constantly spending time combing through digital experiences, looking for all those points of confusion, conducting customer research to try to find those places, and root them out. Because every time you make a change to an experience — and of course, great digital experiences are constantly evolving and being improved — you create the opportunity to potentially unintentionally plant a confusion bomb.
But let me ask you, what emotions are you generating with your experiences when you see your customers coming back to you with feedback? What kind of emotional tone are you hearing? What are the emotions that are most prevalent in your customers and what impact have you seen as a result of that? Let me know that in the comments and download our special report on the six emotions you must focus on for success in business: https://WDC.HT/Emotion
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