CX Framework Series #2: Customer Understanding

Understanding Your Customers' Rational and Emotional Sides

Understanding customers is essential for determining how to design and provide products, services, and experiences that meet their needs, so you can deliver top-notch customer service, build loyalty, and earn great recommendations.

It’s all about how your customers perceive you and all their interactions with your organization. Perception is the key element.

Why are they reaching out to your company? How will they feel after interacting with you? If the customer doesn’t feel the way you want them to, that presents a challenge for you as an organization.

Foundations of Customer Understanding: Archetypes, Emotions, and Needs

Your customers aren't just a number or a set of personality traits. They are human beings with their own problems, hopes, fears, and needs. When making purchasing decisions, customers are guided by both rational and emotional factors.

Understanding your customers’ (buying) behavior is one of the factors that contributes to success.

When customers have an emotional connection to your brand, they not only become loyal but also become brand advocates.

To better understand your customers’ behaviors, you need to consider: Archetypes, Emotions, and Needs

A. Archetypes

The Bradford and Bingley Personality Framework identifies four different archetypes:

The feeler: they make decisions and take action based on their emotions
The entertainer: They joke around to draw attention to their problems
The thinker: They are rational and process-oriented
The controller: they want everything to go exactly as planned, and they get worked up when it doesn't

Just imagine the different reactions each of these archetypes might have when they walk into a hotel room and smell smoke. Understanding the attitudes of these personality types, for example, is critical for your front-line employees (i.e., contact center agents or hotel staff) who need to handle these customers’ reactions on a daily basis.

While each of us has a dominant archetype, this can change or become more pronounced, depending on the situation or the stage of life we are in, especially in the event of life-changing experiences such as a divorce or the loss of a loved one.

B. Emotions

Many different models are attempting to map emotions and make them understandable within companies.

Most of these models identify four main emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, and fear.

Arecent Temkin analysis of these four emotions in call centersdemonstrated the impact of these emotions on call duration!

This model is sound and widely recognized, yet it has limitations with regard to two essential elements:

Tends to perceive emotions as positive rather than negative (on a scale of 1 to 3)
It completely misses the mark when it comes to the fundamental human emotion: love

Rosaria Cirillo has applied what she learned from Marshall Rosenberg's NVC (Nonviolent Communication) and showed us how we can instead classify emotions into two broad categories:

The ones we feel whenever our needs are met (i.e., happiness and love)
The ones we feel when our needs aren’t met (i.e., sadness and fear). When customers express sadness and/or fear and their emotions aren’t acknowledged or understood, or when they feel judged, this can turn into anger.

C. Needs

To be able to understand and influence the emotions the customer is experiencing, we need to have a clear understanding of their needs.

Trainer Rosaria Cirillo explained how her analysis of thousands of survey responses—collected since 2005 from various companies across multiple touchpoints and industry sectors—shows that an adapted version of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs could be applied. There was a clear correlation between CSAT/NPS scores and the level of needs at which the customer felt fulfilled during the interaction. In the most recent year, she has added emotions to the model, as shown in this figure.

Another way to look at needs is to consider the value you deliver to your customer, as explained in the Elements of Value Pyramid fromHBR’s *The 30 Elements of Value*.

Setting up a customer insight framework to systematically understand your customers

To truly understand who your customers are and how they want to be treated by your organization, you need a reliable customer insight program. You can achieve this by following these four steps:

Collect data:
1. Listen to the voice of the customers by asking for feedback, analyzing incoming calls, and making sure to “drink your own champagne”—that is, putting yourself in your customers’ shoes.
2. Listen to what your employees have to say. What are they working on that isn’t bringing them any satisfaction? How can you make their jobs more fulfilling?
3. Listen to the Voice of the Process. How well are your processes aligned, and do they add value for the customer? Do you use Lean Six Sigma or another methodology?
4. Look at the value of the customer. Quantify your customer by revenue, size, or any other metric.
Analyze your data. What do the results mean, and can you identify any correlations or associations?
Document the data and make it visible and easy to understand. Customer journey maps and personas are two key tools that can help you present your insights in a way that is clear and easy to understand throughout your organization.
Share your insights within your organization. Make sure everyone knows how customers feel and how they can adjust their service or tone of voice accordingly.

Emotions drive loyalty and higher customer spending

When you’re reading this, you might be misled into thinking that customer experience is only about making the customer happy and that it doesn’t affect your revenue. Nothing could be further from the truth! Numerous studies have concluded that customers are more loyal to an organization when they have a positive impression of how they’ve been treated. For example: when a customer has a very positive impression of an organization, they are 7.8 times more likely to try new products and services. Think about the potential impact this could have on your P&L!

Reaching out to and staying in touch with your customers

The easiest way to gain insights into the actions of thousands of customers is by analyzing your website visit data or by looking at a chart showing your contact center volumes by reason for contact (Tip: Does your company have such an overview, and if so, who reviews it regularly and what actions are taken based on it?). The downside is that, in doing so, you’re reducing your customers to numbers or segments and you might forget that they are individuals. To compensate for this, many large companies require their employees to have direct contact with customers—either by listening in on calls, calling customers regularly, or acting as customers themselves.

The NS (Dutch Railways) asks its employees to travel by train regularly. That way, they can gauge passenger sentiment and gain a better understanding of how to improve the customer experience. Similarly, the CEO of KPN (a Dutch telecommunications provider) has a cell phone plan just like everyone else, so he can experience what it’s like to be a customer of his own company. Other organizations host “Customer Arenas,” where a small group of employees listens to and observes a group of customers as they discuss among themselves how they are treated and how the organization could improve. All these initiatives provide valuable insights and should be incorporated into every organization that wants to deliver a better customer experience.

Understanding your customers is crucial when it comes to customer experience. Listen, observe, and gain a deeper understanding of their emotions and their feedback—that’s a great place to start!

Want to develop your Customer Experience skills?

These are just a few of the highlights Milou took away from attending the Customer Experience Masterclass. Would you like to learn more? Join a CX Masterclass.

Customer Experience Framework and complete list of blog posts in this series

This post is part of a broader series on all six CX disciplines that make up the CXPA Framework, around which the CCXP exam is structured and which we cover in the CX Masterclass.

Here is the complete list of the other posts in this series:

Bonus: CXPA Exam & Becoming CCXP (to be published on December 11)

About this series

This post was originally published on Wow Now and is part of the CX Framework series by Rosaria Cirillo and Nienke Bloem.

The drafts for these blog posts were written by Milou van Kerkhof following the June 2017 CX Masterclass led by Nienke Bloem and Rosaria Cirillo. Milou attended this as a newcomer to Customer Experience. These blog posts have been slightly edited and reflect only the highlights of each module’s content

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Nienke Bloem is often referred to as the Customer Experience speaker in the blue dress.

She is a global CX thought leader, educator, and keynote speaker who inspires audiences with best practices and proven methodologies. She runs a speaking practice, a CX game company, and a training business; she lives and breathes Customer Experience and is the author of two books on CX.

Her two-day Customer Experience Masterclass is known as the best program to prepare for the CCXP, and she is the go-to person for CX leaders who want to advance their leadership and achieve immediate results from their Customer Experience transformation programs. Since 2020, she has been hosting a CX Leadership Masterminds program and helping leaders enhance their leadership skills and deliver an engaging CX story, including a solid CX strategy. In addition, she is a modern-day pilgrim and has drawn parallels between her journey and leading customer-centric transformations.

With over 20 years of corporate experience, she speaks the language of business. Her keynote speeches and training programs on customer experience are inspiring and practical. She is one of the few Recognized Training Partners of the CXPA, and her mission is to make customer experience work and help you achieve business results.