Customer Experience For Dummies

Chapter 9

So Emotional: Eliciting an Emotional Response from Your Customers

In This Chapter

Seeing how the brain processes emotions

Appealing to the five senses

Gauging your customers’ feelings at each touchpoint

A few years back, a video went viral. It was of an audition by a contestant on Britain’s Got Talent, a show similar to American Idol. The video featured a plain, middle-aged woman with frizzy hair — an unlikely pop sensation, to say the least. In the segment in which she was introduced, it was revealed that she lived alone with her cat; that she had never been married; indeed, that she had never been kissed.

It was clear from the audience’s reaction to this woman, whose name was Susan Boyle, that they dismissed her the moment they saw her. When Boyle revealed that it had been her lifelong dream to sing before a large audience, the video cut to a young woman in the crowd, rolling her eyes in derision. Even the panelists were visibly skeptical. In mere moments, Boyle had been typecast — labeled and dismissed.

But then she sang … and everything changed.

As Boyle sang the first soaring notes of the beautiful “I Dreamed a Dream” from the musical Les Miserables, the audience ...