Five ways to understand your customer emotions and empower your business

How do you raise the ability of your people and your organisation to fully understand their own emotions and those of your customer’s?

We can often take for granted the meaning of particular emotions expressed by our customers. This can be detrimental to our understanding of our customers and long-term relationship success.

In the last few months of finishing my Masters in Behavioural Psychology, I’ve come to recognise how often we can discount the importance of emotions both in our personal lives and especially in our businesses.

It’s said that there are over 34,000 different emotions that we can experience. These emotions help us in a variety of ways to assess threats, survive and grow.

They’re also the core drivers of all experienced behaviour and interactions we have with our customers. To ignore this reality is to be ignorant of the ways in which we can significantly improve almost every area in our life and business that involves our customers.

We can...

• Improve relationships
• Remove the emotional risk to new opportunities
• Reduce churn
• Increase customer ease and speed to results

In order to gain these results or more of them, we must get a base understanding of how emotions show up, why and what the basic emotions are.

The research

There are a number of theories about how emotions occur, most just moving around the order that things happen. However, all of them start with a stimulus or what some call an activating event.?This stimulus could be someone’s behaviour, even your own or a specific event past, present or future. It is something that you react to.

I want to introduce you to five of the most prevalent theories of emotion.

1. Common-Sense Theory

Stimulus - emotional reaction - physiological reaction

The common-sense theory suggests that emotions just happen and they happen as a response to a stimulus. And then your body responds. For example, you meet someone new, feel nervous and uncertain as an emotional response.

Then your body responds to a physiological reaction by blushing increased heart rate etc. This approach implies that you have no choice in the matter and the stimulus causes your reaction.

Potential business implication

I don’t particularly agree with this interpretation based on the overall study. If this is true then our interactions matter even more than we realise. It also implies that we have 100% control of every response our customers have when they interact with us. This just isn’t accurate. But it is worth exploring a question from this; if we’re 100% responsible for every emotion our customers feel, what would we change from today in our business?

2. James Lange Theory

Stimulus - physiological reaction - emotional reaction

The James Lange approach reverses the last two steps of the basic emotional stimulus approach.?

Imagine you meet a new customer contact for the first time. This meeting becomes the (stimulus) that might then cause your heart to pound, and have sweaty palms (physiological reaction). It results in you feeling nervous and uncertain, your (emotional reaction). In this example, if there is no physiological reaction to the stimulus, there would be no emotion.

Potential business implication

The James Lange approach proposes the stimulus (event) will cause a reaction that is associated with the person’s perspective of the event. In this scenario, we must understand that often our customers will carry their own emotions into a stimulus and the reactions we might see must make us curious, not defensive. We can often see this with inbound calls from customers that are upset before they’ve spoken with a representative. Think about how you help your customer navigate their emotions in the middle of their physiological and emotional reaction.

3. Appraisal Label Theory

Stimulus - physiological reaction - label response - experience emotion

The appraisal label approach takes the James Lange view and adds an additional step between the physiological reaction and the emotional reaction. The stimulus still causes the physiological reaction, but then your brain gets involved. You then label your response, and the label you use determines the emotions you experience. Depending on how you label the physiological response, you will experience different emotions.?

In other words, if you label your heart pounding and blushing, as nervous, you will feel nervous. If however, your label is excitement then you feel the excitement. This approach implies we have more control over our emotions because what we think is key to what we feel. If we change our thoughts, we can manage our emotions.

Potential business implication

This is an empowering observation. As an extension of James Lange, how can we help reshape the labels of events for our teams and customers? When a customer challenge is presented, instead of fear how can we move our teams to curiosity? When a customer is feeling anxious how can we help them move to trust or confidence??

4. Rational Emotive Theory

Activating event - thoughts about the event - experience emotion - physiological response

This approach focuses on the control we have over our emotions because what we think is instrumental in what we feel. If we change our thoughts, we can manage our emotions. This was proposed by psychologist, Albert Ellis in 1955, and it’s very similar to the appraisal label approach. Instead of saying that an event causes your emotions, Ellis says that how you think about those events is what causes your emotions. Yes – your thinking causes your emotions, not what someone says to you or how they behave around you. It still begins with the stimulus or what Ellis calls, the activating event. Then your thoughts about that event creates your emotional response, which results in your physiological response.?

Say a customer is late for an appointment. That would be the activating event, the stimulus or the catalyst that starts your thinking process. Your brain goes into action with thoughts, and there are a variety of thoughts to choose from. Is the customer going to turn up? Maybe they don’t think my time is important? And so on. You’re actually engaging in self-talk. And while you are talking to yourself, your emotions come into play — worry, hope, frustration. Acceptance of your thoughts causes your emotion.?

If you’re like me, your thoughts aren’t confined to a single sentence. It could start with, they don’t think my time is important. Then maybe followed by, this has happened before. And then, in fact, many times before... that’s not fair... I'm just as important as they are.

Before you know it, your thoughts have spiralled and your physical reactions have spiralled too. You find your jaws clench, your eyes roll, so what started as frustration has escalated into anger. So when the customer finally arrives you may not be in the most optimal state.

The value of this approach is that if you change your thoughts, then you change your emotions and how you respond to your emotions. If you can think rationally about the activating event, you will have greater control of your emotions.

Potential business implication

The beliefs we hold about the events of our customers, whether we like it or not has already shaped or will shape our approaches to them today. Knowing how to set your state and intention before customer interactions will raise your conscious behaviour and reduce irrational behaviour. Equally, for our customers, their behaviours with us can tell us something about the beliefs they might have around our relationships. Pay attention to the response and eventually, you’ll get to the meaning.

5. Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions

Dr. Robert Plutchik is credited as the developer of one of the most influential classification approaches for general emotional responses. He created the emotion wheel listing eight basic primary emotions.

You can think of these as four parts of opposites: joy and sadness; acceptance; guess fear and anger; and surprise and anticipation. He also classified them as positive joy, acceptance, anticipation, and surprise or negative anger, fear, disgust and sadness. According to Plutchik, we cannot experience opposite emotions at the same time, such as the positive emotion of acceptance and the negative emotion of disgust.?

In fact, this is a major criticism of the Plutchik approach. Many have stated that you can have both joy and sadness but yet it shows up on opposite ends of the emotion wheel as a positive and negative emotion. Plutchik offers a fair rebuttal in that we can experience blends of emotions. This is shown in the image.?

From this, we can draw great proven insight.

Potential business implication

Imagine being able to review all customer feedback, categorise them into distinct emotions, and lay out specific strategies and approaches in different areas of your business, to increase the likelihood of particular emotional experiences. This is what is possible here, and it’s where you may be able to make a more immediate practical impact. Check out the graphic and the image above!

What theory to start with?

The purpose of emotion, in general, is to focus our attention and motivate us to action. Importantly in the context of improving our customer relationships, it can help inform different aspects of how we might approach proposition development, customer effort, satisfaction, value delivery and more.?

To improve our understanding of emotions I’d recommend theory number 5, Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions as a great place to start.

There are four immediate benefits to gain from this.

1. Understanding your own emotions will make you a better communicator with your customers.
2. Understanding emotions in your business will improve team understanding, increase collaboration, openness and productivity.
3. You can design working practices and processes to identify the emotions customers may feel at different stages in their journey with you. Then correct it to increase customer happiness and referrability.
4. Add the wheel of emotion into your customer management training and service standards. Ensure everyone across your business can raise their emotional awareness and ability to better engage customers.

Have you learned something new?

What are you learning from your customer’s emotions about your business and relationships?

Learn how you can do this by booking my keynote “Becoming The Only Choice”?or contact my team.

Jermaine Edwards

Founder of Customer Mastery and The Irreplaceable Advisory Group

#customersuccess #keyaccountmanagement #customerexperience #customerleader