Improving Emotional Intelligence – Why it’s Key in Customer Experience.
Emotional intelligence can easily be described as the centerpiece of your customer engagement strategy. Customers buy your products based on how they feel. That feeling focuses on how your employees treat them, the quality of your product, and sometimes even your brand’s culture. Emotionally engaged customers have a higher lifetime value, as they tend to be loyal, satisfied, and ready to proceed to a new purchase.
Stress awareness and management is an emotionally intelligent practice that when learned and reinforced frequently leads to improved performance, a more conducive work environment, greater retention and Customer Satisfaction. It gives you a competitive edge in the marketplace.
Emotional intelligence starts with emotional self-awareness. Self-awareness requires accepting emotional experiences as real, valid, legitimate aspects of human experience and instead of denying emotional responses or reactions to situations, using the emotional information to make better decisions and take actions. Emotional self-awareness allows an individual to feel better or to do things better depending on the actions they take in response to emotions, as opposed to reacting merely to stifle unpleasant and intense emotional sensations.
We are trained through good Customer Service skills to satisfy the needs of the consumer but satisfying the needs of the consumer doesn’t always manage the consumer’s stress. Yet, every day consumers come through the door with the unconscious expectation that this need will be met too. In some circumstances, research has found this is met through complaint-venting. This means a more specialized understanding in places like call centers, hospitals, and high volume, long wait centered leisure experiences among others is called for. We need to cultivate our responses with deeper understanding and careful observation in order to supply a different kind of intelligence and support to front line staff managing emotionally charged clients and experiences coming through the door.
Having a workplace that practices stress awareness and management that regularly trains or refreshes it’s staff about the signs, the nature and strategies for lowering stress, creates a level of emotional intelligence that can help save money, increase productivity as well as foster satisfaction and longevity in the workplace. Taking this a step further into the marketplace offers the clientele of a given organization-or an entire region of industry-the opportunity to experience pleasure in the market with a strong value-added component. Value-added experiences tend to justify premium pricing and at the same time cultivate product loyalty. By addressing the quality of stress in the marketplace, above and beyond quality of product and quality of service, we create a more fulfilling, more attractive and better word-of-mouth generating experience. Consider meeting your Customers’ emotional needs a value-added service. Afterall we create a win-win situation for ourselves as well as our clientele at the end of the day.