As businesses set goals for the year ahead and strategies to achieve them, there’s a crucial one that should not get lost in the shuffle. It’s a goal that I set for my company last year, and one that makes a tremendous difference to any organization: improving how it communicates its value. This must take place not only on a rational level, but also on an emotional level.
When brands look to connect emotionally with customers or clients, they often think first of marketing. They consider how their products or services are presented and the messages that come along with them. Clearly, these elements can make a big difference. But these days, businesses communicate emotional value even more through how they design customer experiences.
Having spent years working with organizations of all kinds to help them radically improve CX, my team and I have come to see what it takes to leave positive emotional impressions. As one of our marketing specialists, Jeremiah Zerby, put it in a blog post, “The customer experience is the total emotional connection your customers feel… CX programs are concerned with the overall journey, considering the emotional engagement that customers have with your brand. They focus on satisfaction, ease, and enjoyment.”
The competition on this front is fierce. People no longer compare businesses only to each other. Now, they compare their experiences with businesses to the best experiences they’ve ever had. Delivering the best possible CX takes a lot of work. But it’s more than worth it, as organizations doing a great job can attest.
Take the San Antonio Spurs, for example. The organization, which holds multiple NBA championships, has worked to provide people with improved accessibility and seamless connection to the team. This makes people feel appreciated and expands the fan base. The Spurs also streamlined their internal communications, which makes work smoother, faster and more efficient for employees — and equips them to do a better job of staying focused on fan engagement and retention.
Recruit AI Tools
While well constructed CX extends good feelings toward a brand, it also forces the proverbial bar higher. The more upbeat people feel about a business, the higher their expectations are for what their next interaction will be like.
So it’s crucial to constantly build on previous achievements in CX, coming up with new and creative ways to communicate and engage with consumers. Businesses must always strive to not just meet but exceed those heightened expectations.
A study on “effective strategies to improve customer satisfaction, experience, relationship, and engagement” dug into how this is done. To build emotional connections, the researchers wrote, “Go beyond transactional interactions,” provide empathetic and personalized service, “actively listen to customer concerns, and demonstrate genuine care and understanding.”
Also, “Create positive brand experiences that evoke positive emotions and resonate with customers on an emotional level. This emotional connection enhances customer loyalty and advocacy.” The researchers (Nitin Liladhar Rane, Anand Achari, and Saurabh P. Choudhary) added that it’s important to make these experiences memorable.
While this study emphasized the need to train employees to ensure they provide all this, AI-powered platforms can also do a strong job of communicating value on an emotional level. As I explained in a previous column, studies show that consumers respond positively to chatbots that demonstrate not only competence, but also “warmth.” And those consumer emotions are heightened when people in turn feel empathy for the AI tool they’re interacting with. It’s known as a “cyclic empathic model.”
Connecting Over Values
Organizations also expand emotional connections with customers by clearly communicating what they stand for. For example, Conscious Step, a company that sells socks and other products to support causes, does a strong job of “aligning its brand with its customers’ values, emphasizing social impact and transparency,” our head of customer success Ken McMahon noted in a blog post. “It builds strong customer loyalty by fostering shared values and creating emotional connections through storytelling.”
AI-powered tools and platforms can also reflect an organization’s values. But this requires special training. As the Institute of Entrepreneurship Development (iED) explains, businesses must incorporate their values into their chatbots, and “continuously test and optimize” for improvement.
The key is for everyone to be on the same page. The more that people and AI tools prioritize emotional connections, the deeper those bonds will grow — in the year ahead and well into the future.