A while ago, I came across an article by TNO called:  Customer Journey: experience your customers’ emotions. Even though I do not believe that you can truly experience your customers’ emotions, understanding them is very important. The article poses some interesting statements/claims:

If you know what your customers are experiencing and thinking, then you know where you need to make improvements to increase the Net Promoter Score (NPS), increase turnover and cut costs. Often, standard measurements and studies do not provide sufficient information.

Their customer journey consists of three phases, measuring, experiencing and improving.

Measuring customer experiences

It does not really become clear how they actually measure experiences. Do they use observation, self-report tools, rational methods or visual methods? Nevertheless, starting with measuring allows you to develop a strategy, benchmark and set targets in terms of emotion profile.

Experiencing the customer experience

I would interpret “Experiencing the customer experience” as “Go through the process yourself, act as a customer”. At Design for Conversion 2009, former rocket scientist Karl Blanks (co-founder of Conversion Rate Experts) presented some interesting results on this topic. You might want to check ‘How we made $1 million for SEOmoz.‘ Actually trying to go through the process that your customer will experience in my view is very useful. Especially when you’re dealing with services. Applying this to product design is difficult. In the end I think that acting as a customer contributes to process optimisation and understanding the emotional drivers.

Improving the customer experience

As for every design cycle or improvement loop the final step is about implementation. Looking through emotion or experience glasses can reveal interesting insights. For TNO it resulted in improved customer experience with the aim of realising higher conversion, fewer calls and a higher Net Promoter Score. At SusaGroup we have gathered similar results.

PrEmo as a tool to improve an experience

We used PrEmo to evaluate the performance of the complaint process at an insurance company. This was a research project among real customers who had filed a complaint and whose case was closed. We measured their emotions before (measured afterwards) and afterwards.
It gave some really interesting insights in the key factors determining a positive experience. One of the learnings was that compensation was not the main driver. In some cases, to resolve the complaint it was needed to contact the client by phone. It turned out that despite the outcome in terms of compensation, the people who were called had a significant more positive experience.

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