Forrester’s recent US Health Insurers Customer Experience Index, 2018 shows just how important emotive CX is.
In the context of health plan choice for US consumers, customer satisfaction is primarily influenced by how they feel during service interactions. When members end up feeling valued and appreciated, nearly 87% becomes advocates and 74% retain their membership.
Equally only 11% who feel annoyed or dismissed by health plan customer service interactions will promote the brand and just 28% remain loyal.
The Forrester Index notes that good customer service improves member satisfaction with health plans more than other engagement tools and strategies. Customer service was even more important than health plan costs or the benefits package offered.
These findings intuitively make sense. Good health matters. It’s something we care about, especially when things go wrong. So it’s not hard to trace the links between empathetic service and rewarding brands that know how to deliver emotive customer experiences.
In other situations, consumer might favour price or benefits as the decisive factor. Even then emotion has played its part.
Experts agree that every decision we make is triggered by emotion, consciously or subconsciously: irrespective of whether we see ourselves as an ‘emotional’ person or not.
Research using brain scanning technologies shows that in the interplay between our rational and emotional sides, we always need emotion to nudge us into making a decision. Otherwise we would be left endlessly considering the options generated by our rational mind.
Everyone uses emotion, all of the time.
We can easily spot the intervention that emotions make in our daily decision making. For instance, gamification works by using appropriate combinations of pain and gain triggers to get us to act immediately. This is constantly used in CTA (call to actions) to persuade us to engage immediately and thereafter become drawn into buying from a brand.
In a service context, self service FAQs can fail in terms of call deflection because sometimes customers won’t trust an answer until they have verified it with a customer service advisor. This might be illogical behaviour but is understandable as an emotional need and explains why effective self service has to consider more than just accurate content to work as expected.
A great deal of this emotional influence takes place at a subconscious level. According to Harvard Business School professor Gerald Zaltman, 95% of our purchase decision making takes place subconsciously.
I’ll explain why this is the case in a white paper that’s due to be published shortly. In the meantime while I have grabbed your attention, I’d like some insight from you please. Especially if customer experience is central to what you do everyday.
I’m running a survey that is designed to shine a light on current approaches to emotive cx in customer service. I’ve received some pretty illuminating responses so far which will be shared first with respondents and then more broadly over the summer.
I’d still like more points of view to clarify some of the emerging themes. Yours would be great. If you have five minutes now and want to grab a pre release copy of that white paper as well, please take the survey.
Customer Emotion Management For Contact Centres – click here
