The level of emotional intelligence of your staff directly relates to the customer retention and satisfaction rates of your business. For instance, they tend to help emotional customers better when dealing with sensitive issues. Thus, you should know how emotional intelligence increases customer loyalty.
What is Emotional Intelligence?
Emotional Intelligence – or EI – can be seen as the ability to recognize, understand and manage internal emotions. In addition, you should be able to recognize, understand and influence the emotion of other people.
Impact of Emotional Intelligence on businesses and customers
Do you know that research shows that a lot of people cancel a planned purchase due to bad service?
Employees with high EI skills are more creative
On the other hand, when your employees have high EI skills, they tend to find innovative solutions more easily.
EI Enhances the Customer Experience
Similarly, research shows that emotionally intelligent businesses report stronger customer experiences in many aspects. This includes higher levels of customer loyalty and customer advocacy.
These stronger customer experiences are relative to businesses that do not foster the development of employee EI.
How Emotional Intelligence Increases Customer Loyalty
Essentially, a higher EI builds better self-awareness, self-control, empathy, and social skills.
- with Awareness — you are able to identify your own emotions
- with self-control— you can manage and regulate your own emotions. More so, you can help others do the same.
- With Empathy — you can apply emotions to your tasks such as problem-solving.
Armed with these skills, you can begin to provide answers on how emotional intelligence increases customer loyalty.
Use Self-awareness to defuse tough situations
What you think of as being “business-like” others may see as being curt or unfriendly. Thus, you should be aware of the impact of your speech patterns and tones. this can then you handle tough conversations and even translate them into productive and pleasant ones.
That is to say, for every situation, you are quick to diagnose your feelings and how they affect your interactions.
Use Self-regulation to adapt to situations
In addition, you should be able to listen to customers without reacting emotionally. In other words, self-regulation enables you to maintain your calm even with excitable customers.
Use Empathy to facilitate trust
In the same vein, when you connect with customers through empathy, you deliver better customer experiences.
Focus on Solving Problems
For your business to increase customer loyalty, support reps have to show high emotional intelligence. After all, some customers can be angry, disappointed, or upset from the start.
Rather than be affected by the customer’s emotions, support reps should project a calm demeanor and good body language. Above all, a genuine effort to solve customer problems is important.
To sum it up
Ultimately, knowing how emotional intelligence increases customer loyalty should spur you to increase the EI levels of your staff. Consequently, they can turn challenges into opportunities to enhance customer experiences and improve customer loyalty. Moreover, one way to achieve your business objectives is to deepen relationships and increase customer loyalty.
