Serving customer’s emotional needs

We all like to think our buying decisions are totally rational. Yet, according to Professor Gerald Zaltman of Harvard, 95% of purchases are driven subconsciously by our moods. Similarly, Forrester’s Customer Experience (CX) index survey found emotion to be the biggest perception influencer on CX. Yes, efficient service and reduced customer effort scored highly, but both were top trumped by good old-fashioned human feelings.

 What does this mean for CX professionals? Can we harness emotions to improve sales and CX metrics?

Before

The first step is to consider building emotion into your CX strategy and planning. Tools are emerging that enable organisations to match customer and agent personality profile-based proof points like call recordings and system interactions. That plays nicely to Genesys PureCloud because much of the heavy-lifting is done by analytics and artificial intelligence (AI)―natively or through tight integration with third-party solutions, greatly simplified by PureCloud APIs.

 During

Additionally, Speech Analytics can be applied to track customer sentiment during the actual interaction. For instance, to spot if the customer’s tone changes during a call from, say, neutral to frustrated or upset. At this point the agent gets a cue to help steer the conversation back on track. That could be something as basic as pointing out they’re interrupting or talking over the customer and need to let them finish. Genesys software can even be combined with Natural Language Processing applications to detect slang and cultural nuances.

 After

Analytics and AI can also be used to uncover learning from historic contacts by tracking and measuring agent performance and, through targeted coaching and training, addressing actions that result in negative emotions. PureCloud Quality Management can help pinpoint emotional CX areas that require fine tuning―improving understanding of why one agent handles a call better than another and sharing that specific best practice.

 Recipe for success

When it comes to creating consistently amazing CX, technologies like AI clearly have a big role to play. Not only in improving efficiency, but increasingly in building empathy too. Helping us sense how customers are feeling and plugging into that fellow-feeling to inspire more emotionally desirable experiences. Making it easier to build rapport and personalise service for customers. Keeping business human.

 Discover more about the hot CX trends for contact centres and advantages of PureCloud.

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