Value of measuring and understanding participants’ emotions

Probably we all are either making customer experience questioners, waiting for them, reading or analyzing them. We all are constantly measuring CX, ideally, eager to hear the customers' true thoughts of our services or products and looking forward to develop them even further. But sometimes one might be just passively waiting for the adoring phrases and high scores of the customer survey or maybe think of all this as a pure necessity and just want to get it over with.

Whatever goals for CX measurement one might have, the measurement itself is mostly focusing just on the 50% of the experience and the other half is often forgotten. I'm talking about the customers' emotions now.

The importance of the emotions is wildly acknowledged in the business world and we know for a fact that emotions motivate us, make our attention focus on certain things and drive us to make decisions - decisions to buy or not, or from whom to buy, for instance.

By understanding the emotions of the customers, we can truly understand our customers better. The understanding will help us in setting goals for our actions and give us the competitive advantage. Altogether, I believe the experts who tell us that understanding the emotions drive value.

It is said, that if the customer has a bad experience, he or she will tell about it on average to 9 different persons. Beside the one lost customer, bad customer experience could mean the loss of 9 potential ones. And as we probably all know, making more sales with the existing customer is easier than reaching for a completely new one. We all recognize the importance of recommendations (or just the opposite) that our existing customers are giving. Thus, if your most valuable marketing asset, and on the other hand the most damaging one, rely on the experience that you are providing your customers, it simply cannot be overlooked.

As I referred before, 50% of the customer experience consists of customers' emotions. For example, it is known that when the customers have fun, they spend more money. And it doesn't end here, there are whole bunch of emotions that correlate with our spending behavior, our loyalty to the brand and the Net Promoter Score.

But problem with measuring emotions is that emotions are easily forgotten and fading rather quickly. Especially in the event planning industry, and why not in others, it is important to measure the emotions while they are on. And this is exactly what we in Funmedia are doing next!

With the help of Tekes - the Finnish Funding Agency for Innovation, little bit of academic research, analysis of the exciting data and lots of testing and piloting in the actual events with actual participants, we are developing a way of measuring participant experience during the events. We want to understand the whole participant experience, including the emotional impact of the event. With the help of this data, we can help our customers to understand their guests and customers much better.

The first pilot that we are doing together with Tampere University of Technology, Tampere University of Applied Sciences and VALIT -project is happening already this week. I am so excited to see how do the participants actually react to expressing their emotions and state of minds during the business event, especially in Finland, where emotions are not so strongly presented in the culture, to put it mildly.

The fact is, that the emotions are influencing your customers throughout their experience, would you like it, measure it or not. So why not focus on what valuable information and deeper understanding lies behind them?