The chart above captures some of the key findings:

• Joy leads to best calls. No surprise, the only positive emotion we examined results in the highest NPS, the shortest calls, and the least frequent call transfers. Interestingly, the calls where we detected joy are actually slightly longer than average (although well less than the other three emotions). While we didn’t analyze the exact reasons why this happens, it could be caused by the willingness of the caller and agent to take a bit more time conversing when the customer feels happier and more friendly.
• Fear leads to most expensive calls. In instances when customers felt detectably fearful, the call time jumps to 87% higher than company average, by far the longest of any emotion. In these calls, we also found that the caller was transferred to another agent or supervisor more than 3.5-times as frequently as the company average. The NPS drops lower than average as well.
• Anger leads to lowest NPS. When customers experience anger, they give the lowest NPS (19% below company average). The calls are also 40% longer than average and are more than twice as likely to be transferred.
• Sadness leads to low NPS. Customers who experience sadness give companies an NPS that is only slightly higher than the one they give when they are angry (18% below company average).

Additional Findings

Here are some additional findings from the research:

Joy is the Most Frequent Emotion. We could identify at least one of the four emotions we looked at on 43% of the calls. Joy was the most prevalent emotion, followed by anger, sadness, and then fear.

The Content of Calls Creates Joy. We examined the emotions in both the first half and the second half of calls. It turns out that customers are equally as likely to feel anger, sadness, and/or fear in the first half of the call as they are in the second. Joy, however, predominantly occurs during the second half of a call. What does this mean? That customers aren’t necessarily joyous when the call starts, but over the course of the call, something happens to spark that emotion.

Anger Plus Joy Is the Most Common Emotional Pair. We also examined the co-occurrence of the four emotions, which happens relatively often on calls. It turns out that when customers do experience an additional emotion, it is most frequently anger. Interestingly, the most common emotion felt alongside anger on a call is joy. And of all the combinations, these are actually the two emotions that show up together most frequently. We didn’t dig into this phenomenon, but it could be possible that when companies deal well with customer anger, it elicits joy. This may the similar to the trend we discuss in the report What Happen After A Good or Bad Experience, where when companies respond well to a customer issue, customers will often actually increase their spending with that company.

Taking Action on the Insights

Hopefully, this research has increased your motivation to focus on emotion. If so, here are some ways to get going:

• Learn how to explicitly infuse emotion into your experience design.
• Start talking about emotions. It may seem like a basic step, but it’s a critical one.
• Tap into a growing number of vendors that can help you measure, track, and design for customer emotions.
• Participate in the Intensify Emotion Movement.

The bottom line: Emotion drives customer and company success.

Net Promoter Score, Net Promoter, and NPS are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Satmetrix Systems, and Fred Reichheld.

This blog post was originally published by Temkin Group prior to its acquisition by Qualtrics in October 2018.