In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as continued global crises, people’s values are shifting. Trust is more critical than ever, and businesses face new demands to elevate their relationships with customers.
To meet the demand, businesses have to more deeply understand and enact emotional loyalty – where customers view them as trusted partners, not just transactional entities. But emotional loyalty is complex and requires awareness and genuine curiosity from brands to successfully foster. Here’s how companies in the digital space can do so.
Businesses have to consider why customers should have an emotional connection with them in the current landscape. What value does the brand provide? How can products, services, and interactions convey that value? It begins with fixing the biggest gaps in the customer journey.
Brands need to pinpoint the moments within their journey that represent their unique values most. They should initially take one core moment from the beginning, middle, and end of the journey and transform them into the most emotional. According to the Peak-end rule, people judge experiences based on how they perceive them at their peak and their endpoint, as opposed to the total sum of every moment of the experience. Businesses shouldn’t try to fix all of the moments at once in a generic way – customers will feel hooked even if the rest of the journey isn’t perfect yet.
Being playful and lightweight when transforming these moments is smart. Question the legacy implementations with experiments, and take risks and learn by doing so. Once key moments are fixed and performing well, businesses can check their impact and correlation with KPIs, and if positive, they can move on to other moments in the journey, step by step.
In the modern era, products are the new brands – they are the interaction points between people and a business. Products subsequently have to drive brands’ value, culture, and lifestyle, and aim to create a sense of belonging that stops customers from even considering competitors. These products have to nail all aspects of a full experience to cement emotional connections with customers.
How? To start, businesses need to ensure that they have the basics around customer loyalty established. That means offering a holistic shopping experience across all channels, without friction, and meeting customers’ basic needs to retain users and instill basic habits on the behavioral level – for example, by providing points or loyalty programs that see customers return on a regular basis.
People-centric design must play an essential role in building loyalty and increasing overall satisfaction. By optimizing and connecting every touchpoint, design focuses on creating intuitive user interfaces, smooth navigation, and responsive layout to ensure that customers can seamlessly explore products. Thoughtfully placed elements, clear call-to-action buttons, and simplified payment processes reduce obstacles to conversion. In addition, brand consistency, visually appealing images, and user-friendly features contribute to a positive journey.
Businesses should also integrate personalization and tailor experiences to individuals’ preferences, making sure the right messaging hits at the right time. They should equally focus on general support throughout the customer journey to keep the dialogue alive beyond transactions. This could include customer support after a sale, or tips and tricks around how to best use a purchased product. These actions are particularly important where AI-driven assistants like ChatGPT are shaping a new standard for easy and direct conversations.
Like any strategy, businesses have to know how emotional loyalty impacts their bottom line. And while emotional loyalty can be more challenging to monitor than transactional loyalty, it can be done with a mixture of metrics.
Traditional metrics like customer retention, churn rates, Net Promoter Score, and other engagement metrics can be applied. Customer satisfaction can be taken into account via tailored surveys and listening and scoring reviews toward emotional language and unprompted brand advocacy. For the latter, businesses need to involve customer-facing teams in the process. And brands can establish specific KPIs along the way. For instance, when diving into product ratings, they can identify how often users mention the word “love” in their text, or which specific journey steps are positively mentioned in reviews.
Many tech companies are also employing Customer Advisory Boards – groups of dedicated customers who share proactive feedback around experiences with a brand and its services and products. Unsurprisingly, there has been a 20% increase in the number of advisory boards globally between 2021 and 2023.
While the bottom line will always be a priority for businesses (and any savings passed on to customers), they similarly need to emphasize the non-financial rewards and relationships of emotional loyalty. According to the Social Exchange Theory, people weigh up relationships based on a cost-benefit analysis including not just perceived costs, but also the potential rewards of new behaviors or additional value. As a result, brands need to realize the benefits of emotional loyalty for customers outside of the financial.
These rewards can be intrinsic, and connected to a certain lifestyle – for example, if a product or service helps a user feel healthier. Alternatively, rewards can be extrinsic, like helping consumers get social recognition. Brands that combine both aspects and make rewards tangible via their products and services will instill the most profound sense of emotional loyalty.
How businesses allow users to handle their data can be a non-financial reward. For instance, if customers have an accessible space in an app to intuitively adjust what data is collected and when, they feel more empowered. Moreover, the data that customers do select to share is more relevant to companies and can contribute to greater trust between the two parties.
Organizations should be investing in clients' emotional loyalty not only to build better products and services but also as a smart business strategy, with a holistic shopping experience serving as the digital backbone.
With this in mind, intive seamlessly blends MACH principles, composable commerce, data-driven insights, and the customer-centric approach of Experience Design & Design Thinking, empowering teams for constant and valuable outcomes beyond silos. By providing tailored offerings, faster services, and omni-channel solutions that exceed modern consumer needs, this infrastructure ensures that expectations are exceeded across the entire user journey. With such comprehensive and consistent value delivery, users trust brands more, and form profound, positive connections to brands for the long term.
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