Leverage Your Business Growth with Customer Emotions

Identify and understand a customer’s drive and needs. It is an indispensable exercise that a business needs to do to ensure their long-term success.

Most of the buyer’s decisions are influenced by their emotions. Tapping into consumer emotions can, thus, give you a significant edge over your competition; allowing you to flexibly pivot your business.

The key word above is ‘pivoting’. Running the same business model and processes year-on-year without consideration for changes in the business and the customer environment is nothing short of being careless. By adapting to changing customer wants and emotions, you open the doors to higher business growth.

However, the question here is, how to identify and use customer emotions to help your business grow. Dig into this blog to learn more:

Listen to Your Customers

We, humans, are materialistic beings, whether we like it or not. We tend to buy shiny new objects and toys to make ourselves feel better. We like to live in expensive neighborhoods and keep up with the Joneses as well! All of these things cure an imbalanced emotional state inside us.

We would love it if someone listens to our emotional needs, don’t we? So, when we speak to a salesman and share our life stories (come on, you know you do!), we end up giving them a sneak-peak into the reasons why we are currently looking to make a purchase.

When such an opportunity presents, you can automatically build a closer relationship with your customers by listening and evaluating your customers’ motives and their current emotional state. By doing so, you’re immediately tapping into their emotional need, and you become—at that moment—the cure for their emotional need to buy something.

As a business, what’s the best way to show them that you’re playing doctor?

• Listen to customers
• Fix your eyes on them
• Empathize with them

There are chances that you’ve been in the same situation as them, and can relate to their emotional need. If so, you can tell them. Explain your customers how you connect to them emotionally and empathize with them.

However, don’t jump into a sales pitch, bombarding your customers with technical jargon and industry lingo. Forget impressing them, you’ll just confuse them, and for the most part, this puts people off. If they’re rushed into a buying decision, there’s a higher chance they will either request a refund later or just walk out of the door forever.

Related Read: Understanding Consumer Psychology for a Delightful Customer Service Experience

Reduce Friction

At some point, you’re going to encounter a disgruntled customer. Customers may become disgruntled with the product they’ve bought from you for various reasons including non-fulfillment of a contractual obligation. Let’s take an example of a real estate issue. Your customers might have a tenant who does not allow them access to their property.

No matter what the reasons are, don’t fight with fire!

I’m not saying you should do absolutely everything for your customer as there is a limit their demands and a line needs to be drawn somewhere. But again, emotion comes into play, and you just need to listen to them before you identify and address their emotional needs.

Nobel prize-winning economist, Daniel Kahneman, showed that

Customers remember their heightened emotions and final memories of an experience more than anything else—something you can definitely use to your advantage!

By reacting without first assessing their needs, you are more likely to become too emotionally protective about your business rather than spending your energy in finding a solution to their problems.

This is a classic case where you could turn a problem into a solution, and turn an unhappy customer into one that walks away with a smile on their face. Ensuring that the outcome of customer interaction with you is a positive one, you’re not only shouldering your customer service responsibilities well but also increasing their chances of reflecting positively on you and your business.

On the contrary, if you fuel the fire by putting up a barrier and putting your stubborn hat on, your customers are more likely to spread bad press about you, which can stunt growth. As you make efforts in resolving their needs and emotions, you could drive higher business growth.

An important note to make, though, is that you should never erode your integrity in any way just to satisfy a customer. Attending to a customer’s emotional needs doesn’t mean that you go against your integrity, as doing that can harm your business growth permanently.

Respond Faster

Your customers are also emotional in terms of the time you take in responding to them and they look forward to you. As and when they raise queries or requests, they expect timely responses.

If you fail to respond to your customers, they feel dejected and may plan to leave your business. This is when you need to make them feel valued. Introducing a help desk ticketing system can reduce your chances of losing customers as their service experience improves with timely responses to their queries.

Related Read: Experiential Branding Matters Because “She” is the Influencer

Closing thoughts

In contrast to doing everything possible to satisfy the customer’s emotions after you’ve identified them, firing your customer is one of the best things you can do for your business.

This means that you’re still identifying and using customer emotions to help grow your business. After all, why would you want a mood-hoover as a customer? One who is consistently draining your business and its resources, when you could put that energy and time on other customers. Such customers may add value to your brand and reaffirm why you started your business in the first place.