Last week, my colleague Rick Parrish discussed the stagnation in CX for Canadian brands from our Canada 2016 Customer Experience Index™.

In this post, I’ll explore another big finding from our research: The way an experience makes customers feel has a bigger influence on their loyalty to a brand than the effectiveness or ease of the experience.

CX professionals often think that getting emotion right is simple: Make your customers happy, not angry. However, we find that anger and happiness do not have a very strong influence on customer loyalty. What does?

·         Making customers feel appreciated, confident, and respected drives loyalty. On average across the industries, if you make customers feel appreciated, for example, we see that 80% of them will advocate for the brand, 70% will stay with the brand, and 68% will increase their spending with the brand. In stark contrast, only 2% will advocate, 13% will stay, and 8% will increase their spending with the brand when they don't feel appreciated.

·         Annoyance, disappointment, and frustration weaken loyalty. On the flip side, on average across the industries, if you make customers feel annoyed, for example, we see that 10% of them will advocate for the brand, 17% will stay with the brand, and 11% will increase their spending with the brand. In stark contrast, 56% will advocate, 52% will stay, and 59% will increase their spending with the brand when they don't feel annoyed.

These results show that customers are nearly 5 times more loyal when they feel appreciated than when they feel annoyed. Take note – you will miss the biggest potential gains to customer loyalty if you don’t pull the right emotional levers. Emotion matters.

These two blog posts by Rick and me merely scratch the surface of the deep, actionable insights that Forrester’s CX Index provides. If you are interested in digging deeper into our data and insights, find out more here.