Firms lack Emotional Intelligence
By Steven Walden and Zhecho Dobrev
Do you think you understand how your customers and clients think and feel? Well most corporate executives would say if not yes, then at least we are some way down the line: we know our customers through our satisfaction research, don’t we?
In the Beyond Philosophy Q1 2010 Customer Experience Trend Tracker of over 1,000 businesses and consumers across the UK and USA, we decided to test whether businesses really understood their customers, not just from a physical but from an emotional point of view.
Interestingly, from this analysis, while we found a good match on the physical or transactional side of the experience – price, product and so forth- there was a large difference in emotional understanding.
For while companies are happy to believe that their customers feel pretty positive and a little bit negative towards them, in reality this is a misinterpretation. As figure 1 below describes, customers actually feel bland and quite negative about the companies they deal with, creating a complete mismatch in emotional understanding between what the firm thinks and what the customer knows – see the positive and negative emotional gaps.
Figure 1: Gaps in Firms Emotional Understanding of consumers
If you like firms lack Emotional Intelligence, there is a bland and negative feel to experiences not reflected in corporate measurements of attitude e.g., satisfaction, recommendation and the like.
Yet with less than 1 percent of customers feeling that a businesses primary focus is on meeting their emotional needs and only 9.4 percent of companies stating that they do actually focus on this emotional side, this represents a very significant opportunity for differentiation.
So what to do about it, how can firms raise their Emotional Intelligence Quotient?
Well, looking behind the data we found several major reasons for this failing. Firstly and quite simply, many firms do not know how to measure emotions! And without some form of measurement, how can they change or even understand what will drive a higher score.
Secondly, there is what we call a ‘surfeit of arrogance’, many firms still believing that what they are doing is correct and does not need changing; for instance, in the Q1 2010 Customer Experience Trend Tracker we found that over 50 percent of customer research findings are not acted upon by the company as whole. Of course this is consequent on their emphasis on all things physical rather than emotional, yet if firms only took off their rose-tinted glasses they would see that without a strategy to evoke the right emotions they will never gain the kind of loyalty they need to lead the market.
And for this, of course, firms need to define the type of Customer Experience needed to evoke those emotions. To date for instance we see that over half of companies in the survey are unable to articulate or have yet to define this most basic of requirements. Hence, we see how just 5 percent of customers feel their Customer Experience has really improved over the last 6 months and only 5.8 percent think that businesses know what their expectations are!
Our advice is that organisations should start engaging emotionally. Understand what your firms’ level of Emotional Intelligence is – that is to say the degree to which you understand how your customers feel – how emotions drive and destroy value and what you need to do about it.
Has your company defined the emotions you want to evoke in your customers? Have you as a customer felt the company you are interacting with cares about your emotional state? Talk to us, we talk back.
By Steven Walden Zhecho Dobrev | Published: February 10, 2010