The Emotional Impact of Great Customer Experiences

When it comes to building customer loyalty while reducing both price sensitivity and repurchase inertia, the feelings of surprise, delight, relief, empathy and specialness outweigh a person’s rational thoughts and needs. Customers of any kind want their experience to align with their feelings and emotions as much as their values and practical needs. Customer experience infused with emotion changes the game.  

Superb customer experiences trigger both a cognitive appraisal and an emotional reaction. Focusing only on enhancing the value proposition with new features, service efficiency, or frictionless interface is a big miss. Great organizations design customer experiences with emotion in mind… and they use expectations and convention to their advantage.  

Surprising or delighting customers almost always involves violating an existing expectation about how things are supposed to go. The conventions and scripts most likely to occur are powerful forces that dictate how people respond emotionally when events don’t go as they expect. When the new experience breaks with convention in a favorable way, surprise and delight floods the senses.  

The more experience a customer has with a process, even with a competitor’s service or product, the more they come to expect what is supposed to occur. Designing ways to trespass on these expectations is the key to creating emotional impact. Whatever your team can do to express unexpected compassion, caring, loyalty, empathy, thoughtfulness, or warmth infuses that experience with positive emotion. When expressed positively, experiences that impart challenge, relief, amusement, provocation, comfort, and uniqueness in unexpected ways can also achieve emotional surprise.  

Instead of trying to create surprise on purpose, the better path is to identify and stimulate the desired emotion inside the experience. The surprise is the end result and what will make the experience more memorable. A customer journey infused with emotion created by unexpected actions, features or treatment deepens loyalty and produces customers eager to refer others to the same experience. What is the emotional impact of your customer experience?  

In the words of philosopher Aldous Huxley, “Experience is not what happens to you; it’s what you do with what happens to you.” Customers do more with what happens to them when positive emotions are triggered during the ride. Emotion, not logic, creates the powerful customer experiences.