Mastering Emotional Experience Design: Address Customers' Real Goals

Companies hoping to engage their customers in digital channels should adopt what Forrester calls Emotional Experience Design (EED). The first principle of the framework asserts that firms need to address their customers' real goals by continually uncovering latent needs, helping people make good decisions, answering questions before users ask them, and blending experiences across relevant channels. Successful firms build disruptive experiences, provide complementary tools, and completely reframe existing interaction models based on insights gained through exploratory testing techniques. To lay a strong foundation for emotional engagement, customer experience professionals should foster a culture of empathy, use exploratory research techniques as a springboard for creating concepts, and use a combination of tools to document user sentiment.