Emotional Value: Creating Strong Bonds with Your Customers

Citation

Rich, M.K. (2000), "Emotional Value: Creating Strong Bonds with Your Customers", Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing, Vol. 15 No. 6, pp. 458-460. https://doi.org/10.1108/jbim.2000.15.6.458.1

Customer satisfaction has lost any meaning in today’s relationship‐driven marketplace, with the term “satisfaction” having no differentiating connotation since all customers assume that characteristic from all vendors. The term “satisfaction” has been replaced with the likes of “delight” as a benchmark for measurement. Regardless of the term to be used, or the definition associated with it, Barlow and Maul have explored the component of emotion that possibly underlies all customer evaluative efforts. Today’s more sophisticated customers not only demand services and products that are of the highest quality, they insist on a positive, emotionally sensitive, and memorable experience. As customers become more sophisticated in how they seek out experiences, it is up to organizations to meet this challenge.

According to the authors, Emotional Value is the economic value or monetary worth of feelings when customers positively experience products and services. Emotional value, as much as satisfaction or quality issues, can make or break today’s business enterprise. Our memories, our relationships, our decisions are all infused with emotion. Emotion is central to our lives as humans, which include not only our families and friends and those close to us but also the many people we interact with every day in the services we use. In the service economy, and more importantly in the new concept of the experience economy, the role of emotion is becoming increasingly recognized as a critical aspect of these interactions and often comprises the core of the value we receive. The authors suggest that we consider the care of a doctor, the helpfulness of a sales assistant, the welcome of a waiter, the adrenalin thrill of a theme park ride, or the poignancy of a theatrical performance. Yet the interest in emotion has not always been the case, and for many, especially in the business world, emotion is still little understood and therefore kept out of the equation. Every business would agree, nonetheless, that customer satisfaction is vital for success.

Customer satisfaction measurement is now one of the leading performance indicators together with net profit and return on assets. Because we have statistical indices of satisfaction and can monitor and measure it, we often forget that satisfaction is itself an emotional response. We feel satisfied or we feel dissatisfied. But as customers we can also feel excited or relaxed or angry or disappointed or confident. The key question is whether this is the same as satisfaction. More importantly, do these other issues carry more weight in the evaluative effort we undertake when making a decision concerning a specific supplier or vendor? To say we feel dissatisfied hardly captures the experimental nature of the frustration and even rage that consumers say they feel when customer service does not meet their expectations. Service providers have to be increasingly emotionally competent and intelligent in their emotional labor.

These many customer emotions are the focus of a growing body of academic marketing research that is starting to open a window on the consumer experience beyond satisfaction. The study of consumer emotions is a new and exciting field. The research is already providing fascinating new insights which are pursued in this work. But the question of how to measure customer emotions still remains. How do we train staff to recognize and deal with emotions? How do we maximize the experiences of our customers? How do we increase emotional value? This book provides such a link and is one of the first practical applications in this new field of consumer emotions. It is a book for the new experience economy that gives service providers a leading edge into developing customer value beyond satisfaction.

By understanding the critical role of emotions, organizations can take their customer offerings to new levels of refinement, compete more effectively, and most importantly, better retain both customers and staff. With understanding, careful planning, and diligence, an organization’s current level of customer relationships can be defined appropriately for its specific business and then enhanced. Careful consideration of Emotional Value can guide all who want their customer service to function consistently with the demands of staging experiences for customers. To add emotional value to customers’ experiences, the authors develop five practices throughout the book that an organization and its staff must engage in if they are to fully embrace emotions in the customer satisfaction equation. They are:

1. 1.

   (1) building an emotion‐friendly service culture;

2. 2.

   (2) choosing emotional competence as the organization’s service model;

3. 3.

   (3) maximizing customer experiences with empathy;

4. 4.

   (4) viewing complaints as emotional opportunities; and

5. 5.

   (5) using emotional connections to increase customer loyalty.

Expanding on these practices, the authors point out that achieving emotionally competent customer interactions is work that is never done. Customer relationships can be taken to a new level, an emotionally sensitive level, fully anticipating that another yet unidentified level will emerge. This work does not provide all the answers but is a prescription for where the service economy and its practitioners need to move in today’s evolving environment.

The 265‐page work is divided into 14 chapters and five appendices covering previous research in greater detail. An additional 30 pages are devoted to extensive notes making the final product easy to read but abounding in additional support materials for the serious student of the subject. The writing style is comprehensive yet filled with examples to amplify and clarify points discussed. Since the authors are partners in an international training and consulting firm, many of the examples are drawn from the airline and hotel industries by default. With little difficulty, the reader can project these examples to more relevant issues confronting his or her specific industry. Accompanying these examples is a series of applications that can be incorporated by the reader into their specific work environment. At the end of each of the five parts in the book is a set of questions to assist the reader in assessing their own organization’s emotional awareness.

The authors indicate that the reason that they have written this book was out of their passion for the human element in service and a desire to shape the future of how people offer service to each other. They invite managers and service providers around the world to use the ideas in this book to think about customer relationships in an expanded manner, focusing on the emotional side, the side that can sting feelings if delivered poorly and create lifelong feelings of gratitude if delivered well.