What is emotion's role in customer journey mapping?

Customer journey mapping has become one of the key tools for today’s customer-centric organisations. Representing an invaluable exercise in understanding the customer experience from the customer’s viewpoint, organisations are reporting that it is not only delivering insight, but also – critically – return on investment.

For instance, according to the Salesforce State of Marketing report, 91% of high performing marketing teams report that a customer journey strategy has positively impacted their overall customer engagement.

This is all the more extraordinary because in many cases, the journey maps themselves may be missing a key element – an element that may well push the ROI to even greater levels. That element is emotion.

“Emotion is a vital component of human decision-making,” says Jeannie Walters, a CX writer and speaker, and founder of 360Connext. “We often will make decisions based on emotions and then rationalise why we did it later with logic. How a customer feels about an experience is what will drive their story later. How a customer remembers their experience will be tied directly to the emotions they felt. The highs and lows of emotions will be what stays with customers.”

However, despite this, many journey mapping projects focus on the processes and touchpoints at the expense of the emotions being felt by customers during their journey.

Organisations can be extremely rigorous gathering data around the rational/physical side of the journey, capturing deep insight into price, speed, quality, etc. But if they are missing the emotional side, a crucial component is missing.

Beyond Philosophy CEO Colin Shaw explains: “Our research has shown that more than half of a customer’s experience is made up of emotional factors. When customers have positive emotions, they feel good about a company in general, building value. When customers feel negative emotions like anger, irritation or frustration, they might not make a purchase at all, or they might make one but leave with a negative feeling about the company. Either one can destroy value. Big Data can’t see the distinction because it doesn’t measure emotions. It only shows that a sale was completed (success!) or that the customer left without buying (perhaps you need to do something different).

“Big Data does provide useful insights in certain contexts. A website with a high bounce rate, for example, might need different marketing copy or more appealing graphics. If people fill up online shopping carts but don’t buy, there may be a problem with the checkout system or shipping rates. But in other contexts, it’s impossible to make real improvements in customer experience without taking customer emotions into account.”

Ignored experiences

As an example, Shaw describes his recent experience buying a Jeep.

“Data would tell you that I researched Jeeps fairly extensively online before visiting my local Jeep dealer, and that I test drove a Jeep one day and then made a purchase from that dealer for a certain price just a few days later. This sounds entirely positive from the dealer’s standpoint, apart from the fact that I didn’t buy a Jeep on the first day I visited.

“But in fact, my experience negotiating the deal was horrible, I was both furious and frustrated, and I would never buy at that dealership again. But data can’t see this. It only sees another successful Jeep sale.”

Without emotion, customer journey maps are essentially process maps and lack a story. Peter Haid, director of Strativity's journey mapping practice, says: “Including emotion provides an opportunity for empathy as a catalyst to change, it shows where customers are most vulnerable to negative experiences and where loyalty is likely to build through positive experiences.  An organisation can hide behind policy because policies tend to be facts but they cannot hide behind emotions because they are felt. Feelings are not facts and facts are not feelings.

“Brave organisations use journey maps to optimise towards positive emotion as priority number one.  Using emotion revealed in a journey map, employees can gravitate towards their common human nature to lift up customers and, thus, customer-centricity as a cultural norm.”

Measurement difficulties

So why is emotion sometimes overlooked in the journey mapping process? In the business-to-business world, it is often neglected because organisations under-estimate the importance of emotion, says Steve Offsey, CMO of Pointillist.

“Emotions drive most of human behaviour—even if we are not aware of it. While this fact is taken for granted by B2C marketers, it is often overlooked in B2B settings. For example, even the most rational looking B2B purchasing decisions, including those employing extensive questionnaires and detailed evaluation matrices, are at the mercy of the buyer’s emotions. B2B buyers are concerned with how the vendor they select will reflect on their job performance and personal image with their colleagues, subordinates and superiors.

“Regardless of whether your customers are individual consumers or businesses, you will retain more of your customers and gain more new ones if the experience you deliver results in positive emotions. In other words, delivering a memorable experience that your customers would want to repeat.”

But another fundamental issue – that is relevant to both B2C and B2B organisations – is the difficulty associated with measuring emotion.

While it is easy to gather information about customers’ physical activity by using the company’s system data or by collecting feedback through simple surveys, mapping the customers’ emotional state is harder to do. Traditional surveying may not always capture emotions accurately, as customers don’t necessarily think about it, or may have difficulties verbalizing it. Therefore, psychological work that digs beyond words and behaviour may be required.

You will retain more of your customers and gain more new ones if the experience you deliver results in positive emotions

But this effort is vital. Because only when customers’ physical state and emotional state are represented on a journey map are they truly accurate – and truly as valuable as they can be.

As Laura Sharp, insight lead, CX design at KPMG Nunwood, concludes: “Organisations must recognise where they are driving negative emotions or pain points, and the consequences of these, in order to establish key opportunities to fix and optimise the customer journey, both in the short and longer term.”

With this in mind, the next article in the series will explore how to capture and represent emotion in customer journey mapping projects.