Emotions go beyond the willingness to promote and recommend as well as ease of use or doing business – CSAT, CES, NPS, etc are good – but not enough.
Emotions drive our purchase behavior – 46% of consumers say that customer experience is the main driver of the purchase decision whereas pricing is only 20%. The higher the price of your products-services and/or the more there is human interaction in your business, the more you rely on the emotions that your customers feel about you.
There was no comparable and easy way to understand and quantify the emotions of your customers, this is how the Emotional Value Index (EVI®) was created. EVI® is created based on scientific research and in collaboration with several CX professionals and retail businesses. Based on the correlations between EVI® and business revenue, research shows that customers that feel positive emotions towards a business spend up to 40% more compared to those who feel negative!
Here is how to make EVI® and Emotional Experience work for your business.
The most common survey to start with is the purchase stage survey. This survey can be sent to anybody who starts your purchasing process. Below is an example of how it could look like:
How did shopping at our web store make you feel? (EVI® question type)
What is the main reason for feeling this way? (simple open text field)
Please rate the following: payment options, delivery options, etc. (easy-to-use sliders)
Anything you would like us to improve? (simple open text field)
How likely are you to recommend our web store to your friends and colleagues? (NPS question type)
Emotional Experience purchase stage feedback survey shows you:
How shopping at your web store makes your customers feel – just like the first question says.
Insight into why they feel disappointed, trusting, or indifferent.
Insight into when you evoke emotions that are destroying your relationship (Destroying cluster) or building a long-term loving relationship (Advocacy).
Insight into the correlation between the smoothness of the shopping experience and the emotions that your business evokes -> often the easiness of the purchase process has a strong impact on the emotions!
Insight into the correlation between the emotions you evoke and the likeness that your customers would recommend you -> learn which emotions you need to evoke to make your customers recommend your business over your competitors!
By enriching your survey results with shopping cart amounts, you will also be able to learn about which emotions drive your sales.
Research shows that the strongest impact on business sales have the emotion clusters Advocacy and Destroying – which is very logical. This said, make sure your business evokes emotions that move anybody at risk away from the Destroying cluster and turn your customers into loving advocates. To do this, we suggest measuring emotions already from the beginning of your customer journey – as much pre-purchase as possible (website home page, website product and/or category pages, etc.). This is where the impact begins!
Our experience shows that the Emotional Value Index (EVI®) has a 3-4 times higher correlation with sales increase than any other KPI. By optimizing your EVI®, you will be able to achieve up to a 20% increase in your sales. This is powerful, isn’t it! 🤩