How to optimize the customer journey thanks to emotions?

April 21, 2021

When it comes to customer experience, the journey is never far away.

Indeed, in order to make the consumer experience as pleasant as possible, the development and analysis of the customer journey is essential.

What are the best practices? How to effectively analyze a customer journey? Let's take a look at the subject together.

1. How to define Customer Journey?

The Customer Journey represents all of the physical or digital stages through which a customer passes throughout his relationship with a brand or a company.

This begins with the formalization of a need by the customer and continues with various stages such as finding information, visiting the website, going to the store or simply purchasing, for example.

The journey can also continue after the purchase, for example by integrating after-sales service or additional purchases.

Nowadays, with the proliferation of acquisition channels, it is also common for a brand to have multiple customer journeys. There can be as many routes as there are different types of customers.

2. Why define Customer Journey?

The goal of building a customer journey is to better understand the needs and emotions encountered by your customers at each stage of the journey. This will make it easier to identify irritants and improve your customers' experience with your brand.

It is by creating a customer journey that you will be able to align your entire business with the feelings and emotions perceived by your customers at all the different stages, this is the "Customer-centric" approach.

Usually, each department of the company only takes into account the stage that concerns it without worrying about the other stages of the journey.

Following the development of a customer journey, it will be much easier to involve all employees in the overall experience and therefore to work in the same direction to improve it.

Finally, the ultimate goal of the customer journey is to identify the irritants and the points of enchantment encountered by your customers in order to put in place actions to improve the overall experience of consumers!

3. How to build a Customer Journey ?

First of all, it's important to point out that there are countless possible representations of a customer journey. Just type the phrase on Google to see it!

The same goes for how to establish the customer journey, there is a multitude of methods to achieve it:

- Carry out qualitative or quantitative studies

- Mystery shop visits

- Internal reflections with employees

- Direct discussions with customers or employees

- Etc ...

Depending on the nature or size of your organization, each method may have its interest, it's up to you to choose the one that suits you best!

Once you have chosen it, you have to keep in mind that you want to achieve a customer journey, so you have to put yourself in the shoes of one of them and listen to what your customers are saying even if it goes against it. of what you thought.

He is still the main concern and still too many companies do not take the customer's point of view sufficiently into consideration, which removes all interest in the exercise!

Precision is key

Indeed, each point of contact with the customer must be defined as precisely as possible for your journey to be truly useful.

When you collect customer reviews corresponding to a particular stage, the more precise you have been, the easier and faster it will be for you to identify the irritants along the way and correct them.

Conversely, you will also be able to understand in a few moments what are the enchantment points of your customers on the journey and capitalize on them!

Great precision on the definition of routes = Great precision on the identification of irritants and points of enchantment.

4. How can emotions be used to optimize the Customer Journey?

Now that you have completed your journey and are able to identify your pain points and enchantment points, you may be wondering how to prioritize the actions to take.

It is true that when you collect hundreds or even thousands of customer reviews concerning several stages of the journey, it is very easy to get lost in the data!

In addition, even being thorough, the analysis quickly becomes time-consuming if one wishes to be exhaustive on the treatment of customer reviews.

It cannot be said enough, the main driver of customer loyalty is emotion. It is by making your customers feel positive emotions throughout the journey that the bond between you and the customer will be created.

How to analyze the emotions felt by customers?

A very effective method for properly analyzing the customer journey and getting as much insight as possible is semantic and emotional analysis.

By analyzing the textual data coming from your customers, you will be sure to place yourself from the consumer's point of view and thus better understand their experience.

A tool like Q°emotion will allow you to automatically analyze your customer opinions by integrating the analysis of emotions.

Indeed, our emotional analysis solution is able to identify the 6 primary emotions (joy, surprise, fear, sadness, anger, disgust) in customer comments.

In this comment, for example, 2 negative emotions were detected and we identify a fairly high risk of attrition in this client due to waiting time on the chat.

To establish an average "score" for each stage of the journey, artificial intelligence will count the number of comments in each of them and assign them a main emotion.

Then, depending on the words and expressions used, our algorithm will automatically classify the comments in the stages of your journey. You can thus have a better understanding of how each step is experienced by the consumer.

Thanks to the measurement of emotions, it is possible to identify at a glance which are the critical stages of the journey and, on the contrary, which are best perceived by customers.

For example, for this insurer, we can see directly that opening an account is badly experienced and therefore that there are corrective actions to be implemented as a priority on this side.

Our solution takes care of the data analysis so that you can focus on the corrective actions to take!

You can try Q°emotion for free by registering here.

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