How do you handle customer emotions during customer experience innovation?

Once you know about customer needs it’s critical to socialize that knowledge across the organization. I’ve found that in order to get employees to empathize with customers, emotion needs to be baked into relevant assets that people rely on for design and business decisions. It could be as simple as adding a swim lane to customer journeys for emotion and labeling those at critical touch points. It’s important to call out customer emotions within context of their customer journey so innovators can understand the overall emotions flow and which interaction points to focus on.

The right emotions born from the knowledge of your client and the understanding of the business (even the worst part as returns and compliance), empathy is necessary to connect with the client. A couple of years ago, I had a great experience returning an item, I was mad only to think @Amazon won’t accept my return when I start the return process saw was very easy and frictionless, this thing create an emotion in me. I heard was easy but for me was difficult to think until I experienced.

The best way to ensure customer experience innovation will actually occur is to involve customers! Turn your customer research into a dialog, use it to inform your cross-functional customer journey mapping and validate the resulting customer journey map with customers - especially the pain points and improvement opportunities!

When you need to start explaining, you start losing. When you are co-creating with customers to create a better experience for them, you should not explain to the customer why this is better. Let them go through the new experience and explain to you whether or not it is valuable for them. Of course, you cannot stay quiet and need to play an active role in this. Though when it comes to the topic of value, only one group decides if this is valuable and clear for the customer. You can play a clarifying role and also ask for more information. If your value is unclear to the customer, it is a sign that you are not there yet and will need to make more improvements.

Setting expectations will also help you filter out which customer will have the time and energy commitment you seek. So, please don't put the bar too low. You prefer people with skin in the game. When you ask for time of your customers, you need to realise that you are taking away time from them from their customers. Therefore you need to be very clear and transparent about how you will use their valuable time and what kind of outcomes they can expect by when. You want to ensure that your customers can make an informed choice if the efforts they have to put in are worth it for them. This is the least you can do.