Tapping emotions key to delivering customer experiences in India: Forrester

As enterprises in India become more conscious about delivering better customer experiences, brands should now create a clear vision of the exact differentiated experience and then work towards making it a reality, Forrester said on Tuesday.
Based on a survey of more than 9,000 Indian online adult consumers, Forrester’s 2017 Customer Experience Index (CX Index) that ranked customer experience quality of 36 brands in the banking, insurance and retail sectors found that no brand in India delivered poor customer experience.
The average score of the five industries rose, indicating better quality customer experience across the board.
In addition, the data showed that emotion has a bigger influence on customer loyalty than effectiveness or ease in nearly every industry.
“Overall, firms in India are becoming more conscious about customer experience. On the one hand, Indian customers are themselves more exposed to global experiences and demand the same level across industries – be it retail or finance or what have you,” Amit Bhatia, Forrester Senior Analyst and author of the report, told IANS.
“At the same time, Indian firms have been trying to up their digital game for some time now and their efforts are beginning to pay off,” Bhatia added.
The top five brands in India provided an average of 23 emotionally positive experiences for each negative experience; the lowest-performing five brands provided only eight emotionally positive experiences for each negative one.
The data showed that emotion has a bigger influence on customer loyalty than effectiveness or ease in nearly every industry.
“Our recommendation to improve further is that brands should focus on leaving customers with positive emotions; emotion is by far the largest drive of customer experience and ultimately, loyalty,” Bhatia noted.