Increasing brand loyalty - building a customer or client base where they come back to you time after time and also recommend you to their friends and family - is key in any business. The following article made several excellent points and this week we are sharing their wisdom with you.

By TIM GREULICH AND JENNIFER BUCHANAN
The ability to recognize and use emotional data can be one of the biggest, most important opportunities for companies.
It’s easy to understand that emotions can play a part in shaping customers’ experiences with brands and service providers. And yet, beyond marketing, very few organizations are adequately thinking about their customers’ feelings or acting on how and when emotions impact connection and loyalty to a brand. In today’s highly personalized consumer landscape in which people have grown to not only expect but relish in authentic and responsive interactions with brands, this represents a potent opportunity.
Get sticky
Consider three elements of connection between consumers and brands:
emotional responses
rational considerations
shared values
Research shows that when consumers initially interact with brands, rational considerations such as price, loyalty programs, or promotions are top of mind. These rational influences also tend to prompt the end of a brand relationship. Most people who leave while using a product or service leave for rational reasons like increased prices, faulty products, or wrong orders.
Emotional responses, on the other hand, are paramount to almost everything that lies between the beginning and end of a consumer’s relationship with a brand. They inspire brand “stickiness” or loyalty, as well as advocacy. Well over half of long-term customers use words like love, happy and adore about their favorite brands. That’s the same way they talk about their family, friends and pets.
While shared values are helpful for marketing and brand positioning, these shared values reflect a need that is satiated at the beginning of the brand relationship. In fact, only a tiny percentage of people would recommend a product or brand to others based on the company’s values or corporate responsibility principles—whereas nearly half would do so based on emotional criteria.
Clearly, there is business value in collecting and using the right kind of data to strengthen emotional connections with consumers. However, achieving this will be contingent on having a cohesive technology ecosystem in place that is capable of dynamically translating human insights into actions.
Inspire friendships, not “brand relationships”
When consumers describe the kind of relationship they want to have with brands, it sounds a lot like a good old-fashioned friendship. Across digital and in-person interactions with brands, today’s consumer wants responsiveness, contextual awareness, personalization, and empathy. They expect two-way dialogue that builds and deepens over time, just as with a friend. To put it simply, people want to do business with those they know, like and trust.

Brands must learn to mirror the qualities of positive human relationships by listening and engaging with customers. Nearly three in four surveyed consumers say that a brand relationship includes providing feedback—and most expect the feedback to elicit a response. In fact, many consumers surveyed expect companies to integrate their feedback into future product and service design, and to provide special offers based on loyalty.
While friendships may take years to develop organically, we believe that brands can speed the conversion of new customer to loyalist with appropriate interactions at just the right time and place. Customers expect brands to know their purchase history and their service history—and to be able to draw upon that knowledge to contextualize and personalize interactions.
Think about this: As a brand, what type of friend are you? Are you the friend who never stops talking about yourself? Are you only available when you want something? Do you remember what your friends told you just a week ago? Harnessing and acting on emotional data can help brands move the basic customer experience, into the broader, deeper connections that make up human experience, becoming the kind of friends they need to be.
Know the line between responsiveness and reconnaissance
Consumers are not naïve about the information that brands collect about them.
To the contrary, they recognize and expect that brands collect a great deal of personal data. Where people draw a line is with “sneaky” surveillance and monitoring that doesn’t serve to deepen the two-way connection. For example, people do not want brands—even their favorite ones—to know their browsing history for similar products or services just to serve up relevant ads or to provide chatbot help.

Consumers are also very particular about the way brands respond to their social media posts. While many expect a company response to their negative online posts within three days or less, they do not like it when brands chime in after positive online posts about the brand. It can come across as controlling and self-congratulatory, thus dimming the good, authentic glow created by the original post.
Given that a majority cite trustworthiness as the emotional reason most aligned to their favorite brand, brands must earn and protect customer trust by being respectful in their usage of the information they’ve gathered. After all, trust is broken more easily than it is established. Cross the fine line between responsiveness and reconnaissance and the hard-earned trust is breached.
Create predictable WoW
Consumers adamantly expect a consistent voice and a predictably memorable experience across all touch points with a brand. Almost 70 percent of surveyed consumers say “reliable, great customer service” is what makes a brand their favorite to shop online, and this expectation extends across every interaction—from online shopping sessions to in-store dressing rooms, from email newsletters to packaging.
Brand experiences that feel disjointed erode the emotional connection that is the foundation of loyalty. Think of how disappointing it would be to order items from a company that wins you over on social media with beautifully curated images, only to receive the wrong color of merchandise and then to be placed on a long hold while customer service investigates your complaint? These aren’t necessarily signs of a doomed company—but they are certainly signs of a company that is trying to deliver customer service via disjointed departments, rather than through a unified operational structure.
When emotional connections are damaged, rational thinking rears up again. At this point, consumers are more inclined to leave a brand for reasons such as high prices or inaccurate orders. Fortunately, the damage is not intractable. Many customers who have formed a strong connection to the brand can be forgiving about missteps as long as there is an honest, empathetic and timely response to their concerns. When they feel the issue has been addressed in that way, a solid majority of people will stand by a brand.
All of this goes to show that the foundation of trust that consumers have with their favored brands is fortified by consistently positive brand interactions. It’s remarkable how willing customers are to share with brands what they like, what they don’t like, and how they prefer to interact. But it’s up to brands to handle that information with great care. Only by capturing, understanding and appropriately responding to the consumer’s emotional state can brands hope to deliver a predictably incredible human customer service experience.
Leaping toward more human customer service
Emotional data is key to building reliable, meaningful, loyal relationships with customers that stand the test of time. To sustain those relationships, data needs to be handled carefully. Customer engagement needs to be contextually appropriate, consistent, empathetic and responsive.
Given the sheer quantity of touch points between customers and brands—both online and offline—the challenge of collecting, reading and reacting to every emotional cue in appropriate ways is enormous and growing. Many organizations already have a wealth of data about customers that can help jump-start this process. It’s gathering and using that data—at the right time, in the right way that will distinguish tomorrow’s most beloved brands.
Where to start? The answer is going to be very different for each stakeholder in an organization, and obviously the needs of each organization vary.
The key is, simply, to start.
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