Member Article

Emotion is Key to Customer Engagement say CEOs

New research by customer engagement specialists, Rant & Rave and Henley Business School has revealed that while the UK’s top CEOs believe that emotion is key to engaging with their customers, more than half (58%) don’t factor this in when building a business case for ROI.

In a workshop held by Rant & Rave and Henley Business School at the University of Reading, it was revealed that one in ten (11 per cent) do not consider themselves to be doing enough with their customer experience strategy, admitting they simply collect their feedback without analysing it or using it to benefit other parts of the business.

Dennis Fois, CEO of Rant & Rave says: “These results show that while CEOs see engaging with their customers on an emotional level as hugely important, they just aren’t taking advantage of this knowledge or putting a tangible plan into action. It is companies who really make the next step to get to know their customers, and connect with them, that are rewarded with loyalty and of course extra spend. CEOs who are unwise to this fact are doing a dis-service to themselves, their employees, their bottom line and their customers.”

The workshop of 100 CEOs and managers from companies across the UK listened to insight from industry experts including Professor Moira Clark, Director of the Henley Centre for Customer Management, Mike McMaster, Research Director at Rant & Rave and Helena Boulton, Head of Systems at NewsUK. Together they explored how to bring customers and brands closer together and how to create a truly customer centric organisation.

Professor Moira Clark, Director of the Henley Centre for Customer Management says: “When it comes to measuring Customer Experience, brands need to concern themselves less with traditional metrics like NPS and C-Sat scores and focus more on making it ‘easy’ to be a customer, in other words reducing the amount of effort it takes for a customer to do business with them. The Customer Effort score measures a customer’s perception of the amount of time and energy that he/she has to spend in an encounter with an organisation. Studies show that the Customer Effort score outperforms both NPS and C-Sat metrics in predicting behaviour. Customers that churn tend to be those customers who have had difficulty in dealing with a brand - BT for instance have found that there is more than a 40% difference in churn between those customers who found them “easy” to do business with in comparison to those who said they were “difficult” to do business with.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Katherine Adams .