add customer life-time value

Driving Positive Emotional Value: Customer Service

To create a rigorously customer-focused strategy, organisations really need to re-think the term customer satisfaction.  Even when customer satisfaction is high, there is no direct link with customer loyalty, retention and repurchasing. 

The trend in too many businesses is to make every attempt to develop positive CSI (Customer Services Index) where they can track customer satisfaction rather than creating strong emotional bonding with the customer. 

What too many fail to consider is that the causal relationship between CSI and customer retention is far more complex than they understand.  The CSI can be high and rising, but you can still lose business.  What is important is to identify the drivers that deliver the results – otherwise we measure all aspects of customer interaction with the business - measuring everything and understanding nothing!

Emotional Value  for the Customer

What we should be measuring is how can we increase the intensity of the  positive emotion experienced by the customer in order to generate loyalty and life time value.

People purchase from service providers for a host of reasons – the real problem is for the service provider to identify the critical events, incidents and opportunities for bonding the customer closer to the organisation. 

Telling the customer how great you are at answering the phone or dealing with complaints is only the first level of customer management.

Paradigm shifts in customer service

Organisations need to continually examine what creates positive emotions and intensify those factors.

The second level requires turning the organisation upside down to capture data that may be important.  The third level is a paradigm shift in customer management and that is to focus upon the precise events and actions that create positive bonding with customers so that the existing provider is the natural and only choice.

Customer EQ & Emotions are complex

Customer emotions are very complex.  Literally, there are hundreds of words in Webster’s Dictionary that describe specific emotions – so to which emotions, and to what extent are service providers going to focus on loyalty, retention and acquisition of customers. 

To make matters even more complex, the presence or conversely, the absence, of these emotions can significantly lead to satisfaction, loyalty, both or neither! 

Service providers need to research the ‘emotion’ issues rigorously.  And don’t think that reducing a negative emotion such as Anger can improve customer satisfaction (whatever that is) – all this does is reduce discontent.  

Create both a presence of positive andan absence of negative customer or client emotions

The reduction or absence of anger towards a service provider does nothing to improve retention or loyalty.  Organisations have to be very careful because they shape (by accident or by design) the emotions of their customers all the time.

Incidentally, the “top ten emotions” include;

• Anger
• Happiness
• Frustration
• Annoyance
• Disappointment
• Satisfaction
• Impatience
• Relaxation
• Excitement
• Irritation

...........and there are complex relationships between all these which organisations need to explore to really arrive at the customer loyalty formula.  

Perhaps it is time for organisations to start asking the right questions rather than measuring CSI in isolation of how customers “feel”.

• What strategies can we adopt to maximise emotional value for our customers?
• How do we develop a corporate culture to positively install the positive and ensure the absence of the creation of negative emotions with our customers?

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