The emotional side of the Customer Experience (CX) is often ignored, which is a big mistake in today’s competitive business environment. Since emotion influences more than half the typical CX, deliberate structuring of your emotional CX is essential. When you cultivate customers’ positive emotions, it improves your CX outcomes and serves as an enormous competitive differentiator.

But what should you focus on to ensure your program is a success? What are the key strategic questions you should be answering to ensure your CX program is a success?

In a webinar last Thursday, I revealed our seven strategic questions we developed over the past 15 years that can help you address your customers’ emotional needs. They include:

1. What is the Customer Experience you are trying to deliver? Our first question helps you develop your Customer Experience program. You must define where you are going if you want to get anywhere.
2. What are the emotions you are trying to evoke?  Customers have emotions and your experience produces them. Once you accept that, you can pick the specific emotions you want customers to feel during your experience.
3. What is your subconscious experience? Every organization has a subconscious experience, even if it isn’t deliberate. For example, banks provide customers pens—on chains. Banks put the pens there to help customers, but the chain tells the customer’s’ subconscious, “We don’t trust you.” There are good subconscious signals, too. Figure out which signals you send deliberately or not.
4. How much do you embrace customer irrationality?  Here, we move to the next level of Customer Experience, where we explore the deep-seated reasons why customers do what they do. I wrote a book about this question, The Intuitive Customer. But to summarize a general theme of the book, customers are irrational. You must embrace this fact to move to the next level of Customer Experience excellence.
5. What do customers really want and what drives value? Every organization has what we call an Emotional Signature®, which is the level of emotional engagement they have with their customers. Emotions drive behavior, therefore, customers’ actions communicate their actual desires more than customers’ words do. Discovering what customers actually want can help you discover how to use what you know about emotions to improve your bottom line.
6. Is your Customer Experience deliberate? To be deliberate about the emotional CX, you should create a moment to moment map of your experience or what we call Behavioral Journey Mapping. Behavioral Journey Mapping looks at the customer’s journey from the emotional perspective to understand how we can help manage those emotions to create a better experience for customers.
7. How customer centric is your organization? When you discover how your organization is oriented, whether on operations or on customers or somewhere in-between, you can often see how changing to a customer focus can improve your Customer Experience AND benefit the bottom line.

Ignoring the emotional experience inherent in Customer Experience is not going to make it go away. These seven questions give you a comprehensive perspective on what is required to improve your Customer Experience and change your way of doing business for the better.

So, I have one final question for you: Will you stop ignoring your emotional experience and optimize it to evoke emotions that drive value for you or will you let your competitors do it to their experience instead?

To learn more about how the answers to the seven strategic questions and how you can use them to help facilitate your CX success watch our FREE, 30-minute webinar, “Secrets Revealed: The Key Strategic Questions Critical for a Successful CX.” To access the recording, please click here.

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Colin Shaw is the founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy, one of the world’s leading Customer experience consultancy & training organizations. Colin is an international author of six bestselling books and an engaging keynote speaker.

Follow Colin Shaw on Twitter @ColinShaw_CX