08/26/2025
How to Measure Emotion in CX
Customer experience experts have created measurement systems to track customer satisfaction, customer effort score and net promoter score. But there is one area that has been more difficult to translate into a simple metric. Customer Emotion. How do your customers actually feel? How do you measure emotion in customer experience?
The Importance of Emotion
A large amount of your customer experience is emotional. This can be both at a conscious level and subconscious. Throughout the customer journey your customers are having positive and negative emotional reactions. A great CX strategy will focus on creating an experience where the positive emotions outweigh the negative.
Competition is fiercer than ever with fewer barriers to entry. Just having a good product at a reasonable price is no longer enough. Customer experience is the new battleground and emotion should be your weapon of choice.
Emotion is a key element in customer loyalty. You need to make your customer feel confident, respected and valued. Equally you need to avoid emotions like annoyed, disappointed and frustrated.
74% of customers with positive emotions will advocate, while 63% will be retained.
Only 8% of customers with negative emotions will advocate for your company and only 13% will retain.
Customer emotions can affect not only whether you lose or keep customers but also if they will buy more or less from you. It can also dictate whether they will spread good or bad word of mouth about your company. So clearly it is important to try and measure and understand your customers’ emotions. The question is how?
How To Measure Emotion In Customer Experience
Most CX measurement programs don’t look to try and quantify emotions. In most cases they are focused on metrics that reflect a more rational evaluation of experiences. So, where do you start when looking to measure emotion?
Start by defining the metrics that help measure critical emotions and experiences that have the biggest impact on your customer relationships. Once you have done that, you can then define the emotion metrics. Many companies start with metrics that measure positive or negative sentiments and tend to measure retrospectively rather than in real time.
In a perfect scenario you would measure emotion in real-time. Alongside tracking positive/ negative sentiments, you would also look at more discrete emotions.
The best way to do this is by doing a simple CX Journey Map where you are identifying your customer’s emotion at every touch point with your brand, across all channels.
You may focus on the percentage of customers with negative sentiment or the percentage of customers who feel a specific emotion.
Analyze Data
Think carefully about how you collect and analyze your emotion data. There are limitations with most survey types to correctly measure emotions with questions and scales. Companies should look to allow customers to actually select an emotion that best represents how they feel. Text analysis in unstructured feedback can also be used to identify emotions.
If you can track negative sentiment around a particular area of your service, then you can make improvements. You can then monitor if the sentiment improves and see the impact this has on your overall NPS.
Use your emotion metrics to drive customer experience improvements and prove the value of emotion measurements. If you are measuring emotions in real-time you can help internal stakeholders identify when experiences turn bad and give them a chance to salvage these experiences instantly.
For more tips on improving CX and creating personalized experiences for your customers, check out
Jeff as a keynote speaker, he has spoken in over 50 countries and trained organizations in customer service experience strategies.
