One singular sensation

Editor's note: Jim Tincher is founder and CEO of customer experience firm Heart of the Customer. 

Over the past decade, customer experience (CX) programs have proliferated, becoming a must-have investment for companies hoping to reap the financial benefits of increased customer loyalty and satisfaction. 

Unfortunately, most organizations have little to show for their investments and mounting evidence indicates the problem is dire. 

In his 2019 report, Customer Experience at a Crossroads: What Drives CX Success?, CustomerThink CEO Bob Thompson found that only one in four CX programs could show either quantified benefits or a competitive edge earned through their efforts. One year later, Forrester predicted that one in four CX professionals would lose their jobs because of a lack of business impact. (And that was before the pandemic.)

Many programs, rather than breaking down silos and driving organization-wide change, have actually created their own silos – focusing on improving survey scores that too often don’t produce measurable financial benefits.

The situation is even worse in B2B companies, which account for more than 60% of the U.S. economy. When looking at CX maturity, Qualtrics’ XM Institute reported that 59% of all companies are in the lowest two-fifths of customer experience management stages. When you narrow that down to just B2B companies, the number rises to nearly 80%.

The brighter side

But what about the brighter side of that same coin – the 25% of companies that are moving the CX needle to create great customer experiences that inspire their customers to stay longer, order more and cost less to serve? 

In 2020, I set out to study the current state of CX as it’s practiced today, to determine what sets those successful programs apart from the rest. 

Over the course of the year, my team at Heart of the Customer (the CX journey-mapping consultancy I founded) used both qualitative and quantitative methodologies to engage with more 300 CX professionals, including more than 150 hours of one-on-one interviews and shadowing successful CX leaders at three companies for an extended period.

We also conducted a survey that got to the heart of the challenges CX pros are facing. (Spoiler alert: it’s a three-way tie between organizational complexity, not engaging the right people and a lack of leadership buy-in.)

Most study participants led CX efforts within their organizations but we also talked with finance roles, CEOs, marketing and sales leaders and anyone else who could help us paint a complete picture of what was going on in an organization. The key to CX success is driving organization-wide change, so you can’t understand CX impact by talking only to the CX team.

The results of this research indicate a pressing need to rethink the way things are done in CX and look past widely accepted truths (including a reliance on surveys) to instead focus on what is actually working in the real world.

Four key accelerators of success

Our research revealed that the very best CX programs – we call them change makers – are doing four things you probably are not. Here are those four accelerators of success:

1). They focus on creating business value.

2). They design journeys to elicit one target emotion to create an emotional connection.

3). They utilize change management principles to overcome inertia and drive organizational transformation.

4). They deploy technology to measure and manage the experience and track the impact of their improvement initiatives.

In other words, the best CX programs start, end and do everything in between based on how their efforts will add value to the business.

So knowing what drives business value is key to achieving this goal.

It’s widely understood within (and outside) the CX industry that creating an emotional connection is critical to building customer loyalty (which, in turn, builds business value), but it’s hard to measure that intangible – so most companies don’t. Instead, they focus on easily quantifiable, though often fiscally meaningless, survey scores.

We found that change makers not only measure positive and negative emotional responses, they go deeper, focusing on eliciting one single emotion, which serves as an emotional North Star across the entire organization. This more nuanced understanding of the delivered experience and customers’ response to it drives accelerated improvement and growth by efficiently aligning every team around a shared outcome. 

This holds just as true for B2B and B2B2C organizations as it does for B2C, even though people (mistakenly) tend to consider B2B transactions devoid of emotion. The fact is, businesses don’t make decisions, buy products or recommend you to their peers – businesspeople do. Whether you’re dealing with a mom-and-pop shop or a seemingly impersonal global conglomerate, the decision to spend more with you, stay with you longer and try out your new products is going to be made by a human being governed by emotional responses. 

Strongest predictor of loyalty

In their studies of consumer relationships, both Forrester and the XM Institute use variations of the ease, effectiveness and emotion framework when they assess national brands’ customer experience quality. Both entities report that emotion is the strongest predictor of loyalty. Yet still, to their detriment, many companies continue to focus on ease and effectiveness. 

This leads to a narrow find-and-fix mentality that primarily addresses friction. Doing so might help you prevent disloyalty but it doesn’t create the loyalty that leads customers to buy more from you and refer you to others. Focusing on that “third e” by designing to elicit one specific emotion unleashes the potential of an improved customer experience.

Imagine what would happen if you asked each of your executives to design for customer emotions, then sent them back to their respective departments to build a plan. Marketing might focus on trust, so their messaging would be better received. Product might target desire, adding features to differentiate your offerings. Finance might go with simplicity to lower costs and IT might aim for an easy experience (even though those two aren’t really emotions) and so on. 

None of these goals are wrong in and of themselves but this Frankenstein approach – happening in most companies as we speak – handicaps your efforts to earn loyalty, wastes resources and increases your costs without delivering improved outcomes for your customers.

Now imagine this: Instead of asking your executives to design for emotions, ask them instead to focus on one emotion, such as confidence. While each will still come up with their own distinct ideas for how to execute on that (as they should), their plans will be more aligned, more consistent and more fruitful. 

Or say, for example, instead of confidence, this time you ask your teams to design for enjoyability. Creating enjoyability requires a different experience than one that builds confidence. Confidence requires consistently strong outcomes, so customers believe they will succeed when they use your products. Enjoyability speaks more to the power of the relationship and gets your staff thinking cross-functionally about customer needs and, most importantly, how they can go above and beyond to meet them. 

Brand identity is another factor that’s critical in your choice. Compare Publix and Aldi. Both are excellent grocery stores but they create very different emotional outcomes for shoppers. Publix, for example, works to create an inspired experience by offering subs with a cult following and cooking demonstrations that Aldi store layouts couldn’t accommodate even if they wanted to. On the other hand, Aldi focuses on well–priced quality, driving customer confidence that Aldi has what they want at a price they can afford. 

Both companies design for one emotional outcome – just not the same one.

There is no single “right” emotion to measure or manage that will work for every industry or company. But putting in the work to determine which one is right for you and your customers can pay off in myriad ways.

Trust was a leading metric

One of the most powerful examples of the benefit of designing for one emotion comes from the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs (VA). After a scandal involving extreme wait times for veterans to receive service, the organization created a Veterans Experience Office (VEO) that focused on creating a best-in-class experience. The VEO started to measure veteran experiences through effectiveness, ease and emotion. But as it worked with more veterans and their families and caregivers, it discovered that trust was a leading metric, one it could use to guide all their experiences. 

“It was risky, and initially there was pushback for not using a standard metric,” says Lee Becker, the then-VEO chief of staff. “Trust is an almost sacred relationship, complex and difficult to measure. We thought, ‘Can we really do that?’ The key was willingness at the leadership level to take that risk. There was clarity.”

In doing so, the VEO found it had improved the most significant outcome imaginable: lives saved.

Veterans as a population have a higher rate of death by suicide than the general public. But now, statistics show that veterans who trust the VA are more likely to use it and veterans who use it are far less likely to die by suicide than those who don’t use it. Recently, the VA announced that trust had hit an all-time high, with over 90% of veterans using VA services reporting that they trust the VA.

See results

But the stakes don’t need to be that high to see results. Take Hagerty, which has grown from a niche insurance company into an automotive lifestyle brand that is now also the largest specialty insurer in the world, covering everything from classic antique collectibles to today’s pricy sports cars.

Hagerty’s Vice President of Insights and Loyalty, Nancy Flowers, made the connection between emotion, customer loyalty and financial outcomes when the company began offering roadside assistance to its customers.

It turns out that when classic cars break down, it’s a much bigger deal than when it happens to your Honda on your daily commute. So Hagerty designed its roadside assistance program to meet its customers’ special needs. And it was a hit – customers provided positive feedback and ratings for the service. 

Until they didn’t.

When Hagerty changed its roadside assistance partner, satisfaction scores took a dive but no one could figure out why. Calls were being answered in the same amount of time, roadside assistance vehicles were showing up as promised – nothing seemed different.

Then Flowers and her team started listening to the actual calls between the drivers and the roadside assistance provider and something clicked: Drivers did not feel the new partner’s contact center employees were treating them with empathy. 

We all should hear some empathy from our service providers but for customers experiencing great emotion along with their classic-car breakdown, a lack of empathy was a dealbreaker.

Once those Hagerty customers were again provided with an empathetic emotional experience, customer satisfaction returned to previous levels. This piqued Hagerty’s curiosity about what other emotions could be behind survey scores.

“We did a deep dive with our loyal customers to understand our key drivers,” Flowers says. “Our customers kept telling us that they want us leaving them happy. So now we measure happiness at the relationship level and some transactions. It is definitely our emotional North Star and is highly correlated with loyalty. The big difference emotionally comes in with transactions. For example, after a claims or roadside incident, we do not measure happiness.” 

That shows a critical understanding. If a customer’s car was just totaled and you ask if their experience has made them happy, all you’re asking for is trouble.

Happiness would be a nonsensical goal for most insurance companies but Hagerty isn’t just another insurance company and it realizes its customers have unique needs. Importantly, its NPS predicts happiness, which in turn predicts retention. So now, rather than asking teams to design toward a higher NPS score, Hagerty is more successful by telling teams to target happiness.

Connect the dots for leadership

When Roxie Strohmenger, vice president of CX strategy at UKG, started at the global provider of human capital management and workforce management solutions, her first step was to discover how customers felt about their current experience with the organization. She used a battery of 30 emotion options to narrow down the ones that mattered most, then built a system to measure those emotions and design customer experiences to target them. 

“I ask about emotions in a survey,” she says. “If I could hook up people to get a galvanic skin response, that would be awesome, but this is the only way I can do it.”

The next step was to isolate the one emotion that could serve as UKG’s emotional North Star. Armed with financial and behavioral data to distinguish success, Strohmenger used a survey to identify which emotions had the strongest impact on loyalty behavior. This approach isolated four loyalty-building and four loyalty-degrading emotions, landing on confidence as UKG’s emotional North Star, since that emotion most reliably differentiated loyal customers.

Strohmenger then redesigned her experience measurement, replacing CSAT as UKG’s top-level metric to focus on questions measuring the CX quality dimensions of expectations, effort and emotion. She also asked respondents to select from a list of eight emotions they experienced working with UKG.

This enabled Strohmenger to produce far more powerful reporting to help the organization manage customers’ emotions – and thus outcomes. Most organizations have reports that say, “The NPS for your product is 20, compared to our overall NPS of 35.” Solid data but hardly actionable. 

Strohmenger’s approach can report (using purely hypothetical figures here): “Overall, 46% of our customers are confident but that’s true for only 25% of customers using your product. Worse, while only 15% of our overall customer base is frustrated, for your line, it’s 40%.” 

You’ll still want to find out what’s driving confidence and frustration but this type of reporting is far more likely to result in customer-focused change.

Unexpected ways 

Even at one of the world’s largest chemical manufacturers, emotions matter. Jen Zamora, Dow’s senior global director of CX and commercial excellence, has capitalized on that in unexpected ways.

I first met Zamora when Heart of the Customer was mapping Dow’s complaints experience. She told us her goal was to create a complaints process that was enjoyable. 

Um, an enjoyable complaints process? I thought to myself: “Why not just hunt a unicorn?”

But creating enjoyable experiences – every time, not just with complaints – is exactly how the company is differentiating itself. Zamora shared the philosophy behind this approach: “Everybody who transacts business wants an easy and effective transaction and we strive to deliver against that. But when you take it to the next level and understand what makes the experience enjoyable, you start to tap into a different aspect of the customer’s psyche. And that’s what we’ve been able to prove out over the last couple of years. Easy and effective are table stakes. But if your experience is enjoyable, nine times out of 10, you’re going to go back for the enjoyable experience. 

“Such efforts do much more than bring your current customers back for more. They open the door and get you a seat at the table for creating new products together. Innovations with customers is the loyalty gold medal for Dow. It tells us that not only do our customers have confidence in us but that they enjoy the relationship enough to invest in growth together.”

Customers self-educate 

Early in his CX career, Darin Byrne, vice president of client experience and delivery at Wolters Kluwer Compliance Solutions, wanted to understand how bankers decide on a compliance solutions partner. This work was inspired by a study by the CEB (now part of Gartner Consulting), which reported that 57% of the B2B purchase process happened before a sales representative was involved, primarily through digital channels. Potential customers consult websites and self-educate before ever engaging with a vendor’s sales team. 

The company began by documenting its hypotheses of the customer buying journey and identifying steps potential customers might take, like reading case studies and reviewing capabilities on websites – digital activities used to decide which products to consider. 

Then it interviewed dozens of bank leaders to uncover the real story. It turns out that while bankers did do all the things the internal company team hypothesized, something far more important happened first.

When bankers considered selecting a new partner, the first thing they did was contact another banker to ask which company they trusted. That trust was key to their decision making. 

Compliance is critical to lending, so choosing the wrong system can be disastrous. But every company’s website claims their systems enable easy compliance, so who can a banker trust? Their peers. 

If another banker doesn’t recommend Wolters Kluwer Financial Services, they’re unlikely to even be in the running. In order to continue its strong growth, the company focused on improving trust with current customers, so they would recommend the company to future ones. 

Eminently replicable 

One of the most uplifting findings of our research is that change makers’ success is eminently replicable. There’s no need to keep blindly throwing initiatives against the wall to see what sticks or spinning your wheels measuring outcomes that don’t capture your leaders’ attention. 

Identify the journey (or journeys) that matter most to your most important customers. Explore the emotions your customers currently experience and pay attention to your customers’ goals. (What is your customer trying to achieve in this journey? What emotions do you want your customers to feel during this journey?)

To select one top emotion, review the reason why your company wants this customer to have a successful journey. The North Star emotion that you choose should lead the customer toward your company’s goal.

Just know that you can’t create these strong emotional outcomes through one-off or occasional work. You’ll need to apply change management principles to rally the entire organization and utilize CX technology to measure and manage journey improvements. 

Nonetheless, having an emotional North Star will point the way to sustainable growth and profitability for the business, increased success for your CX team and optimized experiences for your customers.