Too many businesses focus solely on the minds of customers and forget the importance of connecting emotionally – to customers’ hearts. What drives their passion, loyalty and engagement?
Attitudinal Information = Emotional Information
Measuring attitudes is a relatively new thing to do. The purpose is to understand the “spark” of the relationship. What was it that got them interested in the first place, and what values drive them to remain interested and engaged?
This information can be uncovered through asking attitudinal questions when gathering customer feedback. A critical step is to understand the role that emotion plays in the consumer decision-making process.
Given that customers remember the emotion of a brand experience, it is logical that much of their attitude about a brand is based on the emotional connection they have formed with that company. Yet many businesses continue to act like much of what drives their customers to buy is solely based on other factors, such as baseline products and features.
Customers get emotional about their business relationships, much like personal relationships. That helps explain these staggering statistics:
- According to Target Training International, more than 60% of all customers stop dealing with a company because of perceived indifference on the part of an employee.
- 70% of the reason customers leave a company has nothing to do with the product, and 84% of customers that leave do so for poor service. Forum Corp.
- Tarp Worldwide research found that customers who experience mild or strong dissatisfaction will tell between 9 and 16 other people.
- Up to 80% of defecting customers describe themselves as “satisfied” or “very satisfied” just before they leave. Business Week, October 2006
These statistics exemplify the issue facing businesses today – customers make decisions about staying or leaving a business relationship based upon a multitude of factors – and attitude and emotion play major roles. By collecting feedback in real time, and at all possible customer interaction points, a company can learn firsthand what customers think when interactions happen and why customers become emotionally charged.
Get a Complete Customer Relationship Picture
Customer attitudes reveal the softer side of the business relationship. Knowing why customers do business with you is critical to maintaining that relationship and to adding new customers in the future. The difficulty in business is that many of the solutions today reveal only a portion of what is needed to really understand the customer. Customer relationship management (CRM) systems are a good example. Most CRM-derived information is transactional in nature. It is solid information – critical to any business – but it doesn’t tell the entire customer relationship story. It tracks the ‘who, what, when, where, and how’ of the business relationship.
The missing element is often ‘why.’ Why do your customers do business with you? To uncover the ‘why,’ you must understand the basic principles driving any business relationship. A good relationship survey will reveal this. However, a relationship survey should not be your only Voice of the Customer component. Use it as part of a comprehensive program with transaction-based surveys, ad-hoc surveys, and unsolicited feedback management. Together they can offer you a clear picture of what your customers think, what drives their emotional connection with you, and how you can move the needle.
