5 Ways to Emotionally Connect With your Customers

I was in the final semester year of my 4-year grad degree, and looking for a job on LinkedIn. I decided to avail the free trial of LinkedIn Premium to gain an edge over the competition. If you’ve subscribed to LinkedIn Premium, you know that all you have to do is provide your card details to activate the subscription – the first month is free. 

However, I forgot to cancel the subscription after a month, and ₹1,500 was deducted from my account. As a student, that was a LOT of money for me. I was mad at myself for forgetting to cancel the subscription and wrote a mail to the LinkedIn team letting them know what had happened, and asking for a refund if possible. 

Having dealt with similar incidents previously, I had no hope that they’ll give me a refund. But, within a day ₹1,500 was credited to my account. I was shocked and happy. This meant a lot and left a long-lasting positive impression on me.

Even though LinkedIn is an amazing platform with a lot of benefits and potential, that’s not the first thing that comes to my mind when I think of LinkedIn. The first thing that comes to my mind is how they treated me and made me feel. That’s what emotional branding is.

5 Ways to Emotionally Connect With your Customers

Research is clear on the impact emotional branding can have on your business. So, which team is responsible for this? It’s not just a single team that’s responsible – it’s actually the whole company. From marketing to sales to support to customer success, each team plays a pivotal role in building an emotional connection with your customers. Let’s now talk about 5 ways in which you can start doing so.

1. Employ Human-to-Human selling: Your sales team is more often than not the first point of contact a potential customer has with your company. This interaction has a huge impact on how the customer perceives your brand, and you want to make the best possible impression in these interactions. You can do that by leading the conversation with empathy. It’s important to keep in mind that it’s just another person like you on the other end of the phone, not an “account” or a “logo” to be conquered. 

 2. Personalise customer communication: Personalise communication, and offer genuine solutions to your customers’ problems, even if it means recommending a competitor. However, sales agents usually speak to multiple people every day and it can be difficult to keep track of the conversations and the context required to personalise the next call. This is where Exotel’s integration with CRM helps – every time your agents receive an incoming call, they see a popup on their screen with all the details about the customer. When they’re making follow-up calls, they can easily find the recording of the last call to glean the key points discussed.

 3. Don’t skirt the line between right and wrong: Emotional branding can at times be as simple as doing the right thing. Don’t skirt the line between black and white and don’t look for loopholes to exploit. Doing so may help you financially in the short term, but it’ll prove to be detrimental in the long run. Whenever you can, give your customers the benefit of doubt.

4. Be there for your customers: There is nothing more annoying than calling up a helpline number when you’re in dire need of an issue resolution and getting a busy dial tone. Or, reaching unhelpful support agents who keep transferring your call from one department to another, and each time you have to explain your issue from the beginning. Or, following up on a ticket you raised long ago and having to explain the whole thing all over again. All of this can be easily avoided by employing a reliable cloud telephony solution and integrating it with a helpdesk – with each call, your agents will get a popup with all the ticket history of the customer calling.

5. Tell your brand’s story – Humans have evolved to connect to and retain stories faster and for longer than numbers. While it’s essential to back up a story with data, numbers can never replace the power of a good story. So, it’s important to tell your customers about why your company started doing what it’s doing, talk about your core values and be as transparent as possible. Social media is a great place to do this – encourage your C-suite to talk more about how things began, and how things are going, challenges they had to overcome, etc.

While brand storytelling may take longer to show results, it is incredibly effective in the long run. It helps increase brand awareness, builds customer loyalty, and increases customer advocacy.

Over To You

Clearly, working on emotional branding doesn’t require you to make massive changes. Most of it is actually pretty simple – just treat your customers with respect and empathy. One thing to keep in mind is that there is no easy way to measure the direct impact of emotional branding, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth investing your time in. The earlier you start, the better it is for your business. I’ll leave you with a quote from Seth Godin that sums up the importance of branding perfectly –