How do you test and optimize your customer engagement tactics based on emotional outcomes?

I approach measurement from four levels of analysis. Level one involves attitudes and reactions. How did the customer feel about the experience? Positive reactions set the stage for learning, behavior, and results.

You can design the experience you want. For services, start with the expectations of your consumers, which vary by offering. From a services point of view, such as IT, for example, we want employees who use our solutions to feel productive, able to complete their tasks—and listened to. Five unconscious factors determine if we're satisfied, which are responsible for our emotional assessments and reactions. Think RATER (Reliability, Assurance, Tangibles, Empathy and Responsiveness.) You can use the framework to assess, evaluate, and improve the experience you deliver.

My professional career has been riddled with how to deliver an impactful experience for the customer. Whether it relates to the experience they have when they first receive there product or service, to how to support them throughout the lifecycle of their purchase. The way people feel about a product or service ultimate relies on how the company's touch points or engagements are managed. Soft skills, knowledge and a willingness to empathize with an individual's concerns can make all the difference. And those difference can either raise or ruin a company once you've lost purchasing power of your patrons.

In my experience, this starts with understanding how we want customers to feel about the brand. Do we want them to feel excited, valued, or connected? We’ll conduct surveys to gather insights into the current customer sentiments. Using this feedback we set SMART emotional goals, such as increasing feelings of loyalty or satisfaction. We always want to align these goals with the brand’s values and ensure they guide the engagement strategies. This approach helps create meaningful, emotional connections with our clients customers.

To effectively test and optimize customer engagement tactics, start by clearly defining your emotional goals. Consider what feelings you want to evoke in your customers—such as happiness, value, understanding, or inspiration—and how these emotions align with your broader business objectives. Tailor these goals to specific audience segments, channels, and stages of the customer journey. Documenting these emotional objectives ensures that your engagement strategies remain focused and relevant. By understanding and prioritizing these emotional outcomes, you can create more meaningful interactions that drive customer loyalty and advocacy.

All of the techniques presented are valuable tools in your toolbox. What you need to have is a framework for organizing and acting on the data you seek. NPS and CES are lagging indicators. NPS is great for people with freedom of choice, and CES is better for problem-solving. Both cross reference to parts of RATER but are non-diagnostic. Use them in a cascade: perhaps CES after a call to the support desk. If CES is low, use a short RATER-centric follow-up. If that shows failures and missed expectations, use direct contact to recover and learn how to improve.

We approach collecting and analyzing emotional data with these steps: Surveys and Feedback Forms: We want to ask customers about their feelings and experiences with your brand. Social Media Monitoring: Track mentions, comments, and reviews to gauge sentiment. Customer Interviews: Conduct in-depth interviews to understand emotional responses. Behavioural Data: Analyze customer actions, like repeat purchases or engagement levels, to infer emotions. Sentiment Analysis Tools: Use software to analyze text for emotional tone. We try to combine these methods to get a comprehensive view of customer emotions and refine our engagement strategies accordingly.

There are countless activities and ceremonies you can conduct as part of researching and empathizing. I usually suggest to teams that are experimenting with experience to conduct some ‘basic’ research and then based on results, simulate or prototype the experience. This gives you access to recording and measuring people’s reactions to existing and future experiences.

We believe optimizing emotional tactics is like fine-tuning an instrument. We started with A/B testing, trying different messages and visuals to see which resonated emotionally. Gathering customer feedback became our compass, guiding adjustments. We monitored engagement metrics and satisfaction scores closely, always ready to tweak our approach. This iterative process, constantly testing and refining based on real-time data, helped us better align with our emotional goals and stay in tune with our customers' evolving needs and feelings.

In my experience, satisfaction feedback is the door opener to better testing and optimization. First, learn both expectations for and perceptions of your current offering using a RATER diagnostic. Anything calling outside of expectations is a potential test. If Perception exceeds Expectations (P>E), you've found a delighter, so scale it out! If P<E, you've found a detractor that needs remediation—this is what you want to improve. Use the SERVQUAL Gaps Model to guide your testing.

In my experience, this is a continuous journey. We always begin by closely tracking customer reactions through engagement metrics and sentiment analysis. We regularly review this data and we’ll identify what was working and what wasn’t. Then, based on these insights, we can make small adjustments to our tactics, always aiming to enhance the emotional connection. This ongoing process of monitoring, learning, and refining ensured our strategies remained effective and resonant with our clients customers' evolving emotions.

I find, that improving emotional skills is an ongoing process. It starts with actively listening to customer feedback and truly understanding their feelings. We invest in training to enhance empathy and emotional intelligence across our team. Practicing these skills in daily interactions helps us connect better with our clients customers. Over time, this continuous effort to understand and respond to emotions not only strengthened our clients customer relationships but also made our engagement strategies more effective and authentic.

While you may be new at what you're trying to do, the science of satisfaction is well known. Learn about the science before trying to invent things on your own. Familiarize yourself and your team with the significant tools of our trade. Don't be put off by new and potentially intimidating words like "psychometrics." We're all human. What it takes to satisfy a person using your product or service and how to do that are well-known and instantly accessible to you!

Having worked with a lot of marketing teams, research teams, and business executives across industries, I found having decision-making models like Emotion-Centric Feedback Loop (ECFL) crucial to saves time and unnecessary biased bickering among decision makers. Here's how to go about ECFL steps: 1) Spot Emotional Touchpoints in customer journey. 2)Use Emotion Analytics for real-time sentiment measurement. 3) Initiate Dialogues, asking customers their feelings. Analyze & Interpret emotional data. 4) Apply Insights to tweak engagement strategies. Communicate Changes to customers. 5) Re-engage & Measure the impact. 6) Iterate based on new insights. ECFL fosters empathy, continuous improvement, building a loyal customer base.