Over the past two months, we’ve been talking about ways to create different types of wealth with your enterprise betterness portfolio. And not all are tangible forms of wealth.
Last week, we looked at the value of social wealth and the cost of loneliness. But how could we build emotional wealth in general? How could our businesses help people move from negative to positive emotions more often?
How do emotions work?
To understand how to impact them, it helps to review how emotions work.
Two customers encountering the same physical situation (such as visiting your company homepage) may have different emotional responses.
One could have a negative thought which triggers a negative emotion: “I can’t find what I need, this is so frustrating!”
While the other could have a positive thought, triggering a positive emotion: “The headline resonates with me, and I’m excited to explore more.”
Or they could just be on autopilot, and unaware of what they feel or why that emotion was triggered. They could also feel an emotion first, and rationalize a reason why afterward.
Regardless, emotions and thoughts can influence the next behavior and situation. And the cycle continues at the next step of the customer journey.
People’s desired and actual emotions may also change throughout their journey. For example, most people have different emotions and expectations when they first receive a product vs. when they pay their credit card bill.
So when we consider what people are doing, thinking, and feeling in the customer journey, we need to recognize that all three are connected. What people think can influence how they feel, and vice versa. And both impact the action they take.
If you want to, you could go really deep into studying emotions, behavioral psychology, and how to measure and optimize emotions during the customer journey. But even with a basic understanding and intuition, you could probably identify a lot of simple business changes and make the world a little happier.
In general, if reality exceeds our goals and expectations then we tend to feel positive emotions. If reality doesn’t match up, then we feel negative emotions. For most companies, this framework is enough to start generating ideas. And the good news is that making people happier tends to pay off financially.
The business value of creating emotional wealth
Many businesses focus on solving problems in the physical world. But people purchase and use systems and products in the physical world to solve some kind of emotional need. To address their desires for feelings like safety, love, happiness, acceptance, recognition, or novelty. People ultimately purchase from and return to companies that provide emotional value beyond functional value.
According to an article in the HBR, they found that fully connected customers were on average 52% more valuable than customers who were just satisfied. Brand fans and evangelists will share your message and act as free marketing. Active detractors will hurt your reputation when they take to social media to complain. To improve repeat purchases and referrals, it may be more valuable to focus on making satisfied customers more emotionally connected than trying to help dissatisfied customers become satisfied.
The emotions that drive the biggest change in business outcomes like customer loyalty vary depending on the industry and business. But in general, here are some examples of emotional changes that create value for both customers and businesses.
Providing:
- Growth and development
- Fun/entertainment
- Connection to a bigger purpose
- Hope
- Increased social standing/reputation
- Affiliation/belonging
Reducing:
- Anxiety
- Frustration
- Fear
- Stress
Happy employees also lead to better business outcomes. People in Denmark are known as some of the happiest people in the world and the Happiness Research Institute identified a number of factors that most influence overall job satisfaction in Danish companies:
- Purpose: The daily work is meaningful if it can be linked to an impact on society, real people around us, or our own personal growth.
- Mastery: Feeling competent and improving our skills can contribute to flow, improved productivity, and pride in our work.
- Work-Life Balance: Personal life happiness can impact job happiness and vice versa so designing experiences that account for the whole picture can reduce stress across the board.
Some ways to create emotional wealth with your portfolio
- Recognize that customers and employees have multiple identities (work and life) and address those identities in your experience.
- Help people level up their skills to feel a sense of mastery.
- Connect their actions to a bigger picture to improve meaning.
- Clarify goals and help people experience concrete progress and achievements every day.
- Build products and services that are enchanting and fascinating.
- Pay attention to the “emotional rollercoaster” in your experience. Customers don’t need to be at the highest emotion all of the time, as long as the overall experience is positive. Like a good movie, the peaks and valleys make the experience more interesting.
- Provide opportunities for customers and employees to be generous with their time or resources.
- Create something to emotionally engage your satisfied customers.
- Exceed expectations.
- Add small surprises to the experience.
- Use positive words and body language during interactions.
- Make interactions more personal (ex. use their name, be present, greet and sign off like a real person).
- Reframe your messaging or experience to help people see it in a more positive light. (ex. problem to opportunity, impossible to possible, mundane to magical).
- Pay attention to the details and make your entire experience consistent with the emotions your brand wants to evoke.
How to incorporate emotional wealth generation into your portfolio process
You can fold an emotional perspective into each of the portfolio essentials with a few tweaks.
Current State
In your current state research, beyond investigating what people are doing, thinking, and saying, look into how they’re currently feeling and how they want to feel.
Surveys can tell you how people consciously feel while interacting with your brand. Net promoter scores could be a useful metric as well to give you an idea of how your customer base is distributed.
Interviews and comments can reveal the types of words that people use to describe their experience. There are also technical tools for analyzing unstructured text for signs of positive and negative emotions. Testing out your process yourself can also reveal opportunities.
But what people say will influence their emotions and purchasing decisions doesn’t always match reality. There are some firms that can track statistically how emotions impact decisions with your brand, which may be worth looking into.
Future State
Which of your customer’s desired feelings fit with your brand? Which are strongly related to your value proposition (ie. what are you in the business of) and which could you address tangentially to add extra value and differentiate your business? You can keep it simple to start by picking one primary and one secondary emotion.
For example, Netflix is in the entertainment business but also reduces frustration around needing to wait for your favorite show to air. MailChimp mainly helps businesses expand their reputation by sharing their message via email but it also aims to delight.
Now that you’ve narrowed down the emotions, you can research suggestions for evoking or diminishing those emotions.
For example, if your customers or employees want to feel happy, what are the components of happiness? What are happiness researchers studying? For your particular customer, what makes them happy? How could you shift their environment to make them happier? What words and images evoke happiness? Don’t forget all of the senses.
Value Framework
You could simply add criteria to your framework to track if a change could provide a positive emotion, such as if it could entertain or delight customers or employees.
Portfolio Allocation
Since emotions may come from a combination of micro-interactions, you could set an investment theme related to something like customer delight or trust.
Or you could get really detailed and try to calculate the cost of sticking with the emotional status quo. Are process hiccups just annoying or are you losing potential repeat customers because they were frustrated with your product? Do you have a lot of past customers referring you or are you missing out because your service was just “meh”? How much are you willing to invest to close that gap?
Execution Support
Clarify the emotions you want to focus on, and your findings from the current and future state. Set company or department standards if needed. Encourage each team to consider ways they can inject that emotion into their own piece of the business.
Research & Experimentation
To test the emotional impact of changes, you could try trials with before and after surveys. A/B tests are good for seeing how changing one part of the experience impacts other business metrics. You could also try outsourcing research to a company that specializes in investigating customer emotions.
Intake Process
Only your customers and people closest to them know how they feel so encourage customers to share their thoughts. You’ll get the customer’s viewpoint of the strongest positive and negative emotions they feel related to your brand. Collecting information from people who live or work with them can also lead to emotional insights that individuals may not be aware of or willing to share.
Open forums for sharing ideas, complaints, and information can help you connect individual feedback from the field with broader trends that you’re seeing in the business.
Dynamic Views
Customer journeys are an accessible view for most stakeholders. You could also share customer feedback metrics throughout the journey, to get an idea of the range of stakeholder reactions as they engage with your company.
Most people want to be happier, but many companies are structured around emotional struggle and building tangible wealth. It doesn’t have to be an either/or decision between internal and external wealth. Creating emotional wealth can lead to greater financial, environmental, human, and social wealth when positive emotions help people feel energized, connected, and productive.
Over the course of this series on implementing a betterness portfolio, we’ll continue to discuss other sources of wealth to fold into your portfolio process.
How will you incorporate these ideas into your business? Do you have other ideas of how to create emotional wealth with an enterprise portfolio?