It's (almost) never too late to address negative customer emotions

Emotions matter most to perceptions of customer experience. Negative emotions, of course, are the ones you want to avoid, minimize or address if and when your customers feel them.

Negative emotions are bad news. They anchor very salient, long-lasting memories of customers who then looks for ways to punish you.

Emotions like anger, confusion, frustration, a sense of not being valued or appreciated all are emotions that when your customers experience them thanks to their interactions with you, they are likely on their way to becoming your former customers.

But, it's not all bad news, and you've still got a shot with customers experiencing negative emotions.

In the latest edition of the #CX Patterns podcast and newsletter, I highlight the opportunity to intervene and address the root-causes of negative emotion, even after the interaction that cause them has ended.

There's Almost Always Still Time To Make Things Better

You're delivered a service or a product or an interaction to a customer. Their experience was negative. Now they're feeling negative emotions about it. In many ways, you're too late to do anything about it. The emotions have crystalized, the memory has formed, and the negative feelings are associated with you.

And yet, if you follow-up, if you intervene, if you take responsibility to make some form of a repair or retribution, then you can mitigate the negative emotions.

The power of intervening, even after the interaction, is that it creates a new end to the experience from the customers' point of view. And experience ends feature prominently in our memories.

The customer will think, "yes, they screwed up, and yes it took them a while to contact me, but when they did, they apologized sincerely, and fixed my issue."

Addressing negative customer emotions is like baseball: It's never too late to stage a comeback.

Tune Your Feedback System To Spotting Intervention Opportunities

Here's the catch with all of this after-the-fact intervention. How do you know you need to do it?

The sad reality is that far too many customer feedback systems are oriented towards score collecting and reporting. They ignore and under-invest in identifying and acting on opportunities to intervene with customers.

Countless times, I’ve left very specific, negative feedback, or indicated I’d like to be followed-up with, or both, and a vanishingly small percentage of the time do those companies actually follow up with me.

This is evidence that these feedback programs are broken, and so don’t give these companies the sensing capability to pick up on negative emotions. It’s a sad state of affairs. Don’t be like that. Focus on picking up on customer memories of your experience, and the emotions associated with them.

If you're not listening, or listening for the wrong reasons, you won't know when you could make a customer feel better about your brand

If you're not listening, or not listening for the right reasons, you won't know when you could make a customer feel better about your brand.

Rely On Your Humans To Save The Day

The interventions to repair and recover situations where customers experience negative emotions require a human touch.

Customer-care centers of course, but frontline employees in your physical locations can do it as well. It can also fall to managers and leaders who aren’t necessarily on the front lines, but who can be part of the follow-up to address an issue you’ve caused.

Whoever it is though needs to be empowered to provide a solution that the customer will deem fit for the problem created. We all know the Ritz-Carlton example where employees are empowered to spend up to $2500 per day per guest to make it right. They can act, they can act quickly, they can use their judgment to deliver the right intervention. But they’re also enabled. They’ve been trained well to provide good interventions.

Addressing negative customer emotions requires a human touch

Monitor Carefully The Cusotmers You've Intervened With

Track and compare the results for customers you reached out to and made some form of restitution - apology, credit, even just listening to their frustrations. Compare the results of this segment to the customers you wanted to reach but couldn't for whatever reason (many customers feeling negative emotions with your brand aren't that likely to want to talk to you). Compare the results for both of these segments with all of your other customers.

This monitoring can tell you a lot about whether your interventions are working, and whether they are worth the effort you’re putting in. At its best, service recovery strengthens customer relationships, but you need to verify that your service recovery is good enough.

Service recovery strengthens customer relationships over time, but only if you're doing it well.