Business Tips: Connect With Your Customers Using Emotions

Understanding your customer experience is the key to improving it, and the best way to find out what customers do, think, and feel while interacting with your company is by creating a customer journey map.

This visual representation shows how a customer uses your product or service, or the decision-making process that turns a potential user into a customer.

But not all journey maps are created equal. There is no “standard map,” because there is no “standard” customer experience. The best maps are highly customised, documenting your customer’s journey, as it is today, through your customer’s eyes. This allows you to easily identify where to focus your resources in the future, and the most effective changes to implement.

To improve your chances of connecting with your customers on a significant level, here are some important considerations to keep in mind:

1. You don't know what a customer wants until you ask them.

When businesses introduce or upgrade products, it is amazing how few have their teams get out of the office and talk to customers. Companies should believe they don't know what customers want and be open to discovering what they do want. Customer empathy can be difficult to master, and impossible to master if it's under appreciated. Once you become obsessed with how to tap into customers' needs and problems instead of with what to develop next, the rest is easy... mostly.

2. Every buying decision is an emotional decision.

If it wasn't, our clothes, phones, homes, cars and cool new apps would be pretty boring and plain. We even judge a meal by how it looks before we taste it. Warm and comforting, cool and relaxing. Most people believe they are making logical buying decisions, but a significant part of this logic is emotions, experiences and beliefs. A product that can tap into a strong emotion or belief will get snatched up much faster.

3. Create a customer journey map before talking to a customer.

Map how you think the customer is using a product to reach their goals. Validate the map through customer discussions. Turn each assumption into fact. You might be surprised that how a customer uses a product or service isn't how you thought they would. Customers find interesting uses for features or ignore ones we thought worked well.

4. Don't randomly throw features at customers.

That is the traditional model to test a product. Instead, interview customers about their problems, interests and needs. What frustrates, excites or delights them in the world, or with your product? Listen. If they validate your idea, move on to a solution interview. Let them experience your new solution in a hands-on way. Watch and ask questions. Customers often have emotional connections to different solutions or ideas, and something that seems unimportant to us may be a big deal that they will happily pay for.

I hope this helps your business be outstanding. 

Just one more thing before you go ... I would like you to do one important thing for me - spread the word about this article.

That is all - 

David