Emotional Intelligence (EQ) is the ability to identify, use, understand, and manage emotions in an effective and positive way. A high EQ helps individuals to communicate better, reduce their anxiety and stress, defuse conflicts, improve relationships, empathise with others, and effectively overcome life’s challenges.
What if this also related to an organisation, a business, service, or product?
There are four fundamental aspects to EQ (as measured by the Emotional Competence Inventory, published by The Hay Group): Self-Awareness, Self-Management, Social Awareness, and Relationship Management.
Realising business value from Customer Experience (CX) has always required great intelligence. With the latest technology advances and rapidly shifting market trends, a different type of intelligence is required to sail smoothly through the highly competitive market.
Many research studies have proven that to make a business successful, you need to retain talent and deliver 5-star customer experiences at every micro-moment. This requires CX professionals to not only have the standard business acumen and intelligence, but emotional intelligence embedded in their technology solutions to win over their online customers.
Expectations of organisations to deliver meaningful, contextual, and positive interactions have never been higher. According to PWC’s Future of CX report, 1 in 3 customers say they would leave a brand they love due to just one bad experience. Being able to flex your customer journeys with emotional intelligence is an opportunity for organisations to convert more customers, build loyalty and retain their customer base.
What does an Emotionally Intelligent Organisation look like?
Experience management enables you to determine the emotional tone that represents experiences and is used to gain an understanding of the opinions, attitudes, and emotions expressed by a visitor or customer as it relates to the brand, product, user, or service experience. This type of data capture and analysis in conjunction with operational data such as; stock availability, orders, cart abandonments, and shipping information can put CX leaders in a powerful position to make informed business decisions that directly address customer sentiment and expectations.
Emotional power
Most people think that they act consciously while they go shopping, but studies have reflected that about 95% of purchasing decisions whether online or offline are based on emotional impulses. They are influenced emotionally and visually and online shoppers are likely to feel three times more excitement while adding various items to their baskets. Scientists believe there are 27 emotions and negative emotions play a huge role in decision-making. CX product owners must utilise emotional intelligence and alter their customer journey to offer a better experience. But first, you have to capture this intelligence and derive meaningful insights. Find out more about Intelligent Shopping Solutions at SAP.com
Trusted Preferences
70% of customers will provide personal preference information if they trust the source and receive something of value, for example, personalised products that actually meet their needs or expectations. Being one step ahead of the legislation creates an opportunity to differentiate and empower your customers to be in control of their data. Capturing customer data and potential customer expectations allows you to then analyse actual experience data to identify moments for conversion and experience optimisation. Learn more about SAP Customer Data Solutions
Conversion optimisation
Whilst some analysts say that this is an old technique, I am still a fan of A/B testing. This allows the Customer Experience owners to choose the best design or journey versions that yield the best conversion rates. With this technique, users are shown varied experiences, and their reactions toward different models are measured accordingly. Making sure you can capture not just the interaction data, but the experience data is crucial to making informed decisions on the best variants or how to optimise further.
When it comes to eCommerce organisations need to be agile to constantly test, track, adapt, and review different experiences to optimise conversions. A key enabler to this is a headless experience layer. Read more on the benefits of headless commerce.
Identifying future customer needs
Retaining customer details, auto-fill options for addresses, and offering incentives to people who are likely to return are great options to make things easier for customers. Being able to predict what the person wants in the future also helps a lot. Some tools that work are:
1. Reviews, likes, and suggestions from other shoppers often add a social component.
2. Maintaining transparency in purchases often creates a feeling of trust and security.
3. User-friendly experience makes the user feel that they are purchasing tailor-made products that match their style and taste.
Using a Customer Data Platform allows organisations to achieve a true single view of your customer by combining data from across the enterprise. Responsibly manage profiles with trusted governance and privacy controls for known and anonymous identifiers. Generate actionable insights and scale audiences with AI and machine learning and then deliver personalized experiences in real-time across all channels and destinations. Find out how Customer Data Platforms could be beneficial to your organisation.
To conclude, we can say that developing a continuous program to understand not just action, but tone and sentiment enables Customer Experience programs to be more successful and helps to optimise the conversion rates, creates a better experience for customers, and taps into emotional intelligence.
