Customer emotions influence their buying decisions.
High-emotion services include ones that relate to major life events, including deaths and births or even home renovations and car repairs. The home-based services that involve someone entering the home can induce strong customer emotions.
If you work in the service industry, there is a strong connection between your emotional intelligence and customer satisfaction. Working with anxious customers can be a huge challenge, but there are a number of ways you can understand and mitigate customer emotions, including:
1. Practice Emotional Customer Service
Even though identifying a customer’s emotions can be a challenge, it also presents business owners with the opportunity to exceed their expectations. Analyzing what touchpoints in their service are most likely to heighten these emotions, such as a representative entering their home for the first time, will enable them to create key strategies that minimize these feelings.
2. Respond to Customer Emotions by Being Informed
When a customer is anxious, the service provider has an opportunity to create a long-lasting impression, good or bad. Failure to identify the emotions of the customer and to respond quickly could leave customers feeling ignored, frustrated, and scared.
Businesses need to prepare customers for what’s next, telling them what they can expect at each stage of the service.
3. Speak to Customers with Care
Anxious customers can be heavily impacted by the appearance of staff members, their tone of voice, choice of words, and body language. They need reassurance that they have chosen the right company. To provide this, employers need to train their staff to use calm, reassuring tones that also present a quiet confidence. They should also focus on relaxed body language, the use of positive words, minimal hand gestures, eye contact, and giving customers enough personal space. Focusing on interpersonal skills and emotional intelligence will result in improved customer satisfaction.
4. Give Customers Control of the Situation
To enhance customer service experiences, business owners might want to look at the ways they give their customers peace of mind and a greater sense of control. They can do this by offering choices from which to choose, or making sure estimates are easy to understand so the customer can make an informed decision.
5. Hire the Right People
To handle emotional customer service well, it is crucial that business leaders hire the right employees. Staff members need to be able to communicate respectfully with customers, understand customer emotions to build their confidence, and reduce the stress that clients may experience.
At Neighborly, we put our customers at ease by offering professional customer service that makes homeowners feel safe and confident. Our home services companies get emotional customer service right! Contact us to learn more.
