KPIs tell you what people did. KEIs tell you how they felt.
The numbers your marketing is missing, and how to start measuring them.
Someone opens your email. They complete a profile. They come to your event. These are useful outcomes to track. But what did the experience mean to them?
Most businesses can tell you exactly how many people clicked, signed up or came back. Very few can tell you how those people felt along the way. Yet that feeling is often what decides whether they come back at all.
That is the gap Key Emotional Indicators, or KEIs, are built to fill.
What a KEI is
A KPI, a key performance indicator, measures behaviour: what people did. A KEI measures the emotional and relational quality behind that behaviour: how it felt to them.
An attendance figure tells you who came. Asking whether people felt welcomed tells you something different. Both matter. Together, they show whether the relationship is actually moving forward, or just the numbers.
You may also see KEI used for key experience indicators, a term from UX and service design that tracks how easy and effective an experience is. Key emotional indicators go one layer deeper: not whether the experience worked, but how it made people feel about you.
Why feelings are worth measuring
This is not soft thinking. Research published in Harvard Business Review found that customers who are fully emotionally connected to a brand are 52% more valuable, on average, than customers who are just highly satisfied. Satisfaction is a good result. Connection is a better one.
Forrester's Customer Experience Index, which surveys tens of thousands of consumers every year, found that emotion has a bigger impact on loyalty than how effective or easy an experience is. The emotions that matter most are not delight or excitement. They are quieter: feeling valued, appreciated and respected. The ones that push customers away are frustration, annoyance and disappointment, and they share one root cause: expectations that were not met.
Brand experiences aren't measured in star ratings; they are measured in feelings.
Patricia Houston, quoted by the experience agency Cramer
None of these feelings show up in a click-through rate. You only find them if you ask.
Why this matters even more in Asia
In many Asian markets, customers will not tell you when something feels wrong. In Thailand, kreng jai (เกรงใจ), the wish not to trouble or embarrass others, means an unhappy customer is far more likely to quietly leave than to complain. Your numbers stay flat, and you never hear why.
Politeness also shapes surveys. Ask someone to rate you from one to ten, and many will give a kind score rather than an honest one. A seven that really means "not quite" looks like success on a dashboard.
So in Asia, how you ask matters as much as what you ask. Simple this-or-that questions work better than rating scales, because they let people be honest without feeling rude:
- Did our outreach feel celebratory or transactional?
- Did coming back feel like a return, or a new start?
- Did you feel you received something before we asked for anything?
Neither answer is impolite, so people pick the one that is true.
What it looks like in practice
In a marketing strategy I developed for an alumni engagement programme, every stage of the relationship had both kinds of measures. KPIs tracked what people did. KEIs tracked how the relationship felt.
| Stage | KPI: what people did | KEI: how they felt |
|---|---|---|
| Visibility | Share of alumni we can contact | Did the outreach feel celebratory or transactional? Target: 70% say celebratory |
| Credibility | Email open rate, platform sign-ups | Did people feel they got value before being asked for anything? Target: 75% say yes |
| Safety | Profile completion, first to second event | Did re-engaging feel like a return or a new start? Target: 70% say a return |
| Loyalty | Active members, mentorship pairs, referrals | Are people proud to be publicly linked to the community? Target: 80% say yes |
Each KEI has a target and a deadline, just like a KPI. When a KPI stalls, the KEI next to it usually explains why.
How to start, this month
- Pick one stage of your customer journey that matters right now, such as a first visit, a first purchase or a first enquiry.
- Write one this-or-that question about how that moment felt. Keep it short enough to ask in a LINE message.
- Pair it with the KPI you already track for that stage.
- Set a simple target, ask after the moment, and look at both numbers together each month.
Choose indicators that fit the stage. Track them alongside your KPIs, and use the answers to decide what needs attention.
KPIs tell you whether something worked. KEIs tell you why, and whether people will come back.
Where does your customer journey feel wrong?
Every necter Three Journeys Map measures where customers hesitate, and records a before-and-after baseline so you can see what changed. A 15-minute call is free.