ENews & Tech Experience Brief: Emotion Builds Lasting Brand Bonds

Deloitte’s latest research into human emotions indicates that brands can solidify customer relationships by adopting a personalised approach in four foundational areas.

Disconnected experiences, impersonal service, and invasive customer data collection practices can break emotional bonds between brands and customers as quickly as they are built. Once those bonds are broken, they can be difficult to mend – making it critical for marketers to consider the role that emotions play across the customer life cycle.

Since 2018, Deloitte Digital has conducted annual research into emotions to help brands understand how they can better connect with customers. This year’s research – conducted both before and during the first months of the ongoing pandemic – offers insights into what customers want today and provides a road map for companies seeking to build stronger customer relationships. By focusing on four fundamental areas – strategy, workforce, governance, and technology – businesses can elevate human experiences for their customers and build lasting brand loyalty.

Enterprisewide Strategy

In an age of fast-rising consumer expectations and increasingly commoditised markets, brands are expected to relate to customers, not just create products for them. This requires organisations to use data and insights to anticipate what customers want and shape offerings to fit their emotional as well as rational needs – an undertaking that demands a coordinated, cross-functional strategy.

Deloitte’s research shows that rational considerations such as price and quality are top of mind when consumers choose products and brands, yet emotional considerations cement the bond. Consumers put more importance on trust and less on price competitiveness for brands with which they have done business for three or more years. That trust drives loyalty, and even action: Four out of five respondents say they are likely to promote a long-time favourite brand.

To build such loyalty, businesses may strategically redeploy their people, processes, and technologies. That can include realigning functional incentives, restructuring teams to enable cross-functional collaboration, reorganising data collection and management methods to develop a comprehensive view of each customer, translating the customer’s voice into personalised policies, and taking an agile approach across the enterprise.

Empowered People

Generally speaking, customers prefer to interact with a real person – and that interaction is important in building brand bonds. Deloitte’s analysis of more than 300,000 social media posts showed that person-to-person service interactions are the most common factor cited in posts about feeling valued by a brand. Survey respondents, meanwhile, view speedy customer service and helpful employees as second only to quality and price when it comes to fostering brand trust.

The significance of great service became even more striking when Deloitte examined how consumers react after brands make mistakes. Sixty percent say they will forgive three or more mistakes by their favourite brand as long as those mistakes are corrected to their satisfaction via replacement, exchange, gift card, or simple apology. One third of respondents name no single acceptable solution – underscoring the value of intervention by human customer service representatives, who may better adapt to individual preferences for resolution than automated technologies.

Solving this challenge doesn’t require a leap back to a bygone (and expensive) model of allhuman service, however. Instead, it’s about recognising that people – both employees and customers – are fundamental to strong brand relationships. By empowering employees with access to customer intelligence, automated tools, and cross-functional collaboration processes, brands can make customer interactions more meaningful and rewarding.

Robust Governance

The ability to elevate the human experience at scale is grounded in a brand’s ability to collect, connect, and understand customer information across touch points. In practice, that means knowing what information customers are willing to share, when and where they’re willing to share it, and what they expect a brand to do – and not do – with their data.

Deloitte’s research shows that consumers are generally willing to share personal details with companies they love. In fact, when it comes to key personally identifying information or data about past experience and engagement with a brand, surveyed customers say they don’t mind brands knowing more than they already do – by a significant margin. Yet consumers’ willingness to share personal data comes with an important condition: People want brands to use their data to provide better service and personalisation.

These findings have significant implications for corporate governance. One-size-fits-all policies, risk models, practices, and processes are ill-suited to a paradigm in which brands listen to each customer and adapt accordingly.

A vital first step is recognising what customer data is useful and what is not, especially given new data privacy and customer access regulations. Brands may also want to rethink policies and processes in order to maintain appropriate boundaries and consistency across millions of unique relationships.

‘Harmonious’ Technology

Historically, brands have segmented customers broadly, based purely on demographic and transactional data. But that approach may be insufficient to serve today’s customers, who expect a more personalised touch. Visionary brands are leveraging the power of data, faster and more scalable processors, machine learning, and AI to understand people at an individual level rather than simply as segments.

Through intelligent, integrated technology, brands can deliver tailored interactions that better serve customers – whose survey preferences show great variance, even among those most loyal to a brand. For example, while most people are comfortable sharing personal information, 18% of respondents don’t want their favourite brand to do anything with that information. Meanwhile, one in four consumers is unlikely to purchase from a favourite brand again after receiving daily communication from the business, though most are neutral or fine with daily contacts.

By gathering and connecting customer data, applying predictive insights, and infusing that intelligence into every conversation, email, and offer, brands can orchestrate tailored experiences for each customer. By connecting the individual’s experiences across time, brands can also foster a sense of consistency and reliability.

***

In an ever-more-connected world, it is increasingly difficult to carve out and defend market share based purely on product or service. As Deloitte’s research on emotion demonstrates, customer bonds can be a significant differentiator because they inspire loyalty, advocacy, and even forgiveness. By nurturing relationships through personalised interactions, businesses can foster strong bonds and build brand value.