The Emotional Intelligence That Feeds Super Customer Experience
by Kate Nasser | 5 Comments »
Behind super customer experience is emotional intelligence (EI) that captures the hearts and minds of customers and their business. This is good news for all types of businesses from the large corporations and mid-size enterprises on the rise, to the struggling new start-ups with limited resources.
Capture the essence of emotional intelligence and you have a fail-safe guide to super customer experience.
The Emotional Intelligence for Super Customer Experience Image by: Istock.
Image by:Istock.com
The Essence of Emotional Intelligence for Customer Experience
In product design, web site usage, mobile access, and customer service interaction, customers are consciously and subconsciously deciding if it’s positive for them. Emotional intelligence about their needs and views feeds business success.
- Helps not hurts. Products, services, and interactions are assumed to cause no harm. If interacting with your business is so time consuming or stressful that it subsequently impacts the customers’ work, sleep, or happiness, you lose them. This is the emotional intelligence behind treating even the irate customers extremely well.
- Is Easy. People love ease — especially when they are paying for it. Even customers who love status perks over other customers, want and expect the experience to be filled with ease. Jumping through hoops to use products and services is more than a momentary bad experience. It registers in the subconscious and compares to better experiences with other companies. Unless your business is a monopoly, make it easy or lose them!
- Shows mega-caring. This is not sickeningly sweet cloying attitudes and fake smiles. Mega-caring uses and shows the essence of emotional intelligence. It listens to the customers’ needs, elicits their expectations, detects the mood and delivers the WOW.
It adapts to their communication and listening style instead of trying to control them. Mega-caring adapts the solution whenever possible instead of sticking blindly to procedures. It thanks the customer with every phrase you utter and every step you make.
- Is supremely competent. When customers receive service, your reps’ competence builds sublime trust and makes current and future interaction seem easy.
The opposite, arrogance, kills customer experience with self-absorption and emotionally unintelligent patronizing insults. So if you have a super expert with an arrogant attitude, be careful of making excuses for the behavior. You’ll lose customers who aren’t impressed or moved by arrogance.
- Is happily accountable. Before customers buy they are already thinking — what if I have a problem? How will they treat me? Your emotionally intelligent reputation of integrity, sincere apologies, and accountability for remedies relieves the fear of purchase and drives the business.
- Makes a Difference. Companies whose products, services, and customer interaction change life for the better illustrate emotional intelligence at its fullest. It doesn’t have to be the slickest new idea or most expensive five star service. It simply has to touch the customer in some way that leaves a positive memorable mark.
Leaders, when your design teams resist customer feedback and redesigns, or tired reps want to know the logic behind treating irate customers well, and numbers-only managers reject qualitative input, focus on the essence of emotional intelligence.
Companies who get and embrace these simple truths continue to flourish even in tough times.
From my professional experience to your success,
Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™
Related Post:
Customer Experience Superstars Celebrate the Giving
Our Future is Behind Every Customer
©2012 Kate Nasser, CAS, Inc. Somerville, NJ. If you want to re-post or republish this post, please email info@katenasser.com. Thank you for respecting intellectual capital.
Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™, delivers coaching, consulting, training, and keynotes on leading change, employee engagement, teamwork, and delivering the ultimate customer service. She turns interaction obstacles into interpersonal success. See this site for workshop outlines, keynote footage, and customer results.
You nailed it again. Perhaps too philosophical for the comments platform, but do you believe such sincerity can be coached or is it innate. I got a CC agent the other day when I needed help, totally thorough, but just a couple of degrees away from robotic. Nothing you could put a finger on. Would QA high, just didn’t feel it. Maybe the superstars are just rare. What think you?
Hi Matt,
Probably the most common question I get is —- “innate or trained”? Answer: There are some, that I call naturals, who need little if any training. There are a tiny tiny percentage who can’t learn it. The rest can shine with the right kind of engagement and training. That’s been a big part of my business for 20 years — so I can speak from true experience.
Great question and thrilled you asked it.
Warmest thanks,
Kate
Kate, you are right on with you premise that ‘companies that embrace will flourish even in tough times’; who will not forget the first experience that gave them real pleasure from the personal one to the group?
They may start to unravel at the edges but the core is there. Today to capture that effect immediately is easier and cheaper and this is were the strategists are going. We do not need an exit pole we have Twitter!look at the recent Olympics in London.
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