How to Discover What REALLY Drives Value for You

We get many contacts from companies that have been working on the Customer Experience for some time. In the beginning, they had some fantastic improvements. Now, however, their results have leveled off, and they call us for help moving to the next level.

They ask what they are doing wrong. The answer is simple. The reason the results have plateaued is they are focusing on the wrong things.

So, how do we get them to focus on the right things? We need to get them to understand their Emotional Signature.  

We discussed the Emotional Signature in our recent podcast. An Emotional Signature measures the level of emotional engagement with their customers that their experience provides.  It is also how to discover what REALLY drives value for your organization.

The Beginning of the Emotional Signature Concept

In 2005, we were working with an insurance company in Germany about their emotional Customer Experience. One of our clients asked us, “If we evoke these emotions you speak of from our customers, how much money will we make?”

It was a great question. At the time we didn’t have an answer for them. So, we decided to get one.

After two years of research with London Business School, we identified which emotions drive and destroy value. We discovered 20 emotions that drive and destroy value. Here they are:

As you can see, we have identified clusters to which these emotions. The twelve positive ones belong to Attention, Recommendation, and Advocacy clusters.

• Attention Cluster: These are words for the marketing department. They cut through the clutter your customers sort through each day.
• Recommendation Cluster: These are the emotions that get people to come back to you and leave good reviews on social media.
• Advocacy Cluster: These are what the statistician at London Business School described as the “Big Daddy” emotions, a technical term, to be sure.  These are the emotions that people feel when they actively recruit for your organization. They are also the emotions most associated with a high Net Promoter Score, the metric most organizations use today to measure their performance in Customer Experience.

The eight negative emotions belong to the Destroying Cluster.

• Destroying Cluster: These emotions damage the relationship you have with customers. These are the reasons they don’t come back, and they leave you poor reviews wherever and whenever they can. They can even result in active campaigns to keep friends and family from coming to you.

The Emotional Signature

We came up with a product we call the Emotional Signature. We named it that because when you measure where you are with your customers against these twenty emotions that drive and destroy value, you can see where you are with your Customer Experience. We felt like every organization had a different outcome after this exercise to some degree, like a hand-written signature. Hence, the name.

You already have an Emotional Signature. You are evoking emotions right this minute with customers. The Emotional Signature helps you see which ones so that you can revise your actions to be deliberate about which feelings you evoke.

One of the things we do in our global Customer Experience Consultancy is to see what an organization’s current emotional signature is. Then, we help organizations improve upon what they have.  

The Hidden Customer Experience

The Emotional Signature exercise is significant because it often reveals what we call the Hidden Customer Experience. The hidden experience is the one that customers don’t tell you they want, either because they don’t want to, or because they don’t know themselves.

An example I use a lot is salads at Disneyland. Disney asked their customers what they would change about the food offered at the park. Customers said they would like a salad. Disney put salads on the menu, and guess what? People bought hamburgers and hot dogs.

Did the customers lie to Disney? No. At that moment, they probably thought they should want a salad. However, when it was time to order at the park, they likely thought, “Hey! I am having a fun day, and part of that fun is eating some junk food.”

In other words, there is a big difference between what customers say and what they do. Consider the following:

This image demonstrates what we mean about the hidden experience. Some things drive value and are things that people want. When the things people want drive value, they would be on the top of the four squares. When what customers want doesn’t drive value, it falls to the lower right. For example, salads at Disneyland fall in the lower right. Excellent junk food on a fun day falls on one of the two top boxes, depending if the customer is aware of why they want the junk food or not.

You must know what customers want and what drives value to improve your Emotional Signature. If you are hanging out in the lower right box, you are never making it to the top of the pyramid above to the coveted “Happy and Pleased” level, and your results are likely plateauing.

It Takes Effort and Commitment, But It Works

It all comes down to emotions with customers. Finding ways to evoke any of the twelve positive feelings in your experience while avoiding the dreaded destroying eight can help you get to a good place in your experience. Moreover, you can also determine whether you are focused on the right things or if you have been led astray by what customers said they wanted.

The question is, are you ready to sign up for duty or continue leaving your signature to chance?

We get it. Customer Experience is a challenging concept. Giving customers what they want isn’t always as easy as it sounds. Also, having an emotionally engaging experience isn’t for every organization—just the ones that want to make a lot of money.

If you want to benchmark your organization’s performance in the new world of behavioral economics against other companies, take our short questionnaire.  Once you submit, we compare your answers against what we know about the market and send you a free personalized report about where your organization is today.

Hear the rest of the conversation on “How to Discover What REALLY Drives Value for You,” on The Intuitive Customer Podcast. These informative podcasts are designed to expand on the psychological ideas behind understanding customer behavior. To listen in, please click here.

If you enjoyed this post, you might be interested in the following blogs and podcasts:

How Do Customers Decide If Their Experience is Good or Bad? [Podcast]

How We Make Decisions—Prospect Theory

Why Customers Make Strange Decisions

Colin Shaw is the founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy, one of the world’s leading Customer experience consultancy & training organizations. Colin is an international author of six bestselling books and an engaging keynote speaker.

Follow Colin Shaw on Twitter @ColinShaw_CX