The Importance of Emotional Intelligence in Customer Experience

What is Emotional Intelligence?

Psychologically, emotional intelligence refers to identifying, using, understanding, and managing emotions in an effective way. In business terms, emotional intelligence can refer to the ability to identify, use, and understand the emotions of your customers so you can empathize with them tailor your communications toward them. Emotional intelligence also helps sales teams manage their own emotions throughout their interactions as well.

Organizations can employ emotional intelligence by listening to their needs, letting them know you hear their needs, and carrying through on what they want. Being aware of your own emotions and those of your specific customers helps tailor individual interactions. Using emotional intelligence to determine your overall communications with your customers can also have a deep impact on your advertising, as we will explore later in this article.

As far as customer experience, emotional intelligence has another important role, which we will explore in the next section.

Why is Emotional Intelligence Important to Customer Experience? 

Customer experience refers to how your customer feels about your brand as a result of their interactions with it throughout their relationship with your brand. There are many factors that go into how your customers perceive your brand. Engaging emotional intelligence throughout your interactions from the beginning is extremely helpful in understanding your customers’ emotional needs and providing them with an experience they can relate to and, ultimately, prefer to others.

Being aware of your customers’ emotional needs helps you engage with your customers, which is the most effective way to increase the customer experience. Customers that are more engaged with your brand purchase more, are more loyal, and more likely to promote your brand.

Related Blog: Customer experience: The new driver of buying decisions

How to Develop Emotional Intelligence in Sales Teams

The purchasing process is an emotional experience for many consumers. The more sales representatives and marketing teams understand emotional intelligence, the better off they will be to make that emotional connection and increase sales.

So, how do we increase this soft skill among sales teams? An expert in the field, Gordon Tredgold, created a list of tips for businesses to increase their emotional intelligence.  Tredgold’s tips include reminding sales teams and leadership to be more mindful, less reactive, and empathetic. His tips are:

1. Listen more than you talk
2. Respond instead of reacting
3. Put yourself in their shoes
4. Apologize for mistakes
5. Don’t interrupt
6. Show vulnerability
7. Empathize
8. Smile more to create a positive environment
9. Ask instead of telling people what to do
10. Praise people around you

Becoming more aware of your own emotions and understanding how others feel will help sales teams increase emotional intelligence and create an environment more conducive to engagement.

What Are Some Examples of Emotional Intelligence in Advertising?

Marketing teams can also use these tips to understand their customers as a whole and create campaigns based on emotional connections. Some examples of emotionally-driven advertising campaigns include:

Coca-Cola

The Coke brand has used emotionally-based advertising for a very long time with slogans such as “Have a Coke and a Smile” and “Open Happiness.” Their more recent “Share a Coke – Share a Feeling” campaign encourages customers to share a Coke and an emoticon with their friends to tell them how they feel.

Apple

Apple uses emotional intelligence to understand consumers well enough to build a lifestyle that their customers want to be a part of. Apple’s emotional connection has more to do with making products that we need and that are physically close to us, plus stylish and trendy.

Uber

In 2020, as Uber was unable to provide its popular ride-sharing service, they continued to advertise, encouraging people to stay home and stay safe in a socially-responsible and caring advertising campaign. Uber’s CEO has stated the importance of emotional intelligence since he joined.

Subaru

Subaru tends to tug at customers’ heartstrings by showing parents who trust their children in Subarus because of their safety features. It also highlights all the adventures that are possible with a Subaru and even appeals to dog lovers.

How Can a Customer Relationship Tool Help?

Customer relationship success is very much tied to emotional intelligence for successful sales teams. Using a customer relationship tool, organizations can input all of the information learned about their customers, store it, and access it at any time in order to bring to fruition those needs of your customers.

In a study on emotional intelligence and customer relationship management, it was observed that leaders with higher emotional intelligence influence and inspire employees with their vision. A powerful customer relationship tool can help business leaders by giving them a platform to encourage emotional intelligence to enhance customer engagement.

Here are some ways organizations can turn emotional connections into actionable data with CRMs:

• Better Targeting with Segmentation
  Segmenting your customers within your CRM based on their emotional connections can help you target specific groups more easily.
• Enhance ROI 
  Understanding emotional motivators can help enhance your ROI by collecting and analyzing all of the information and customer touchpoints in your CRM. This will allow you to understand which parts of your brand, or your competitor’s brand, that your customers prefer so you can put your time and money into those aspects.
• Quantify Emotional Reasons Customers Purchase
  With all of the information gathered in your CRM, you can quantify these emotional responses and which parts of the customer experience made them make the decision to purchase.
• Turn Emotional Connection into KPIs
  Correlating the level at which your customers are emotionally connected and whether they re-purchase, churn, etc. will turn the information you collect in your customer relationship tool into actionable data.

Agile CRM is one such customer relationship tool that can help organizations put a scientific spin on their customers’ psychological traits. Agile CRM’s all-in-one CRM software allows for better collaboration between sales, marketing, and leadership to ensure the right information is collected and is accessible. Plus, since it is part of the 500apps Infinity Suite of workplace productivity apps, you can employ measures to improve customer experience and implement emotional intelligence much more easily and affordably across the board.

Is That It?

Yes, that’s it for now. We hope this information will be helpful to organizations throughout the world who have perhaps seen a connection their prospective customers have with other businesses that they are missing. Emotional intelligence is not tangible, but it can be much easier to grasp with the help of a customer relationship tool such as Agile CRM.