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 Building Emotional Bonds to Retain Your Customers
Customers prefer to deal with companies whose employees demonstrate empathy, tact, humor, and eager helpfulness. To offer that kind of superior service, your employees need to willingly work with their emotions. Scripted politeness is not enough; your customers crave your employees' genuine emotional involvement, tempered by a sense of professional etiquette. This requires that your employees must perform emotional work. But how can you ensure that your employees put their hearts into this effort?
The authors suggest that you should not only ensure that your employees have the requisite people skills through careful hiring and training, but you should also foster a working environment that is conducive to performing the necessary emotional work. And they explain how.
Notable among the authors' advice is that while complaints may seem annoying, they should in many cases be considered attempts by your customers to continue doing business with your firm. Customers who do not care enough to complain will simply leave and may spread bad word-of-mouth instead. So rather than setting complaint reduction targets or brushing aside complaints, you should encourage customers to voice their concerns, and train your employees to handle complaints effectively. For example, since your customers are likely to feel emotional to some degree when making complaints, your employees should be trained to respond first with emotional words that express empathy, before handling the practical details of the complaint. Moreover, your employees should be taught to assume responsibility for educating your customers sufficiently to ensure that they are able to derive full satisfaction from the products and services you offer.
Personal interactions are what put a human face on your business. They are crucial in building the emotional bonds you want to cultivate among your customers, in order to retain their long-term loyalty. This is undeniable. Yet so many firms still squander their opportunities to build loyalty through superior customer service. One can only assume that their managers have not yet read this book.
Paul Francis Musgrave, author of Indispensable Marketing Strategies - How to Outwit Your Competition, Attract and Retain Customers, and Multiply Your Profits - Marketing Strategy Secrets for Profitable Small Business Management
perfect
Perfect, this book is a perfect tool for all the managers in a mid positions, it helps to understand emotion and their value in a business. Should be read not only by the customer service people, but also by the all rests
Highly Recommended!
Janelle Barlow and Dianna Maul go a step beyond most consultants (those who write business books to drum up customers). Instead, they offer a wealth of scholarly research and sources in their in-depth, colorfully written book, which successfully tackles the enormous role that emotions play in business and customer behavior. They explain and document it, and provide practical applications. We at getAbstract recommend this important book to all business people, whether they offer a product or a service, from CEOs through every level of staff.
Making Sense Out of Emotional Intelligence for Businesses
Since Howard Gardner first popularized the idea of multiple intelligences, thinkers and authors have been noticing that there is a vast difference in the "emotional intelligence" that people have for noticing others and responding appropriately to them. Daniel Goleman wrote a wonderful book developing that theme. He argues that emotional intelligence can be learned. In Emotional Value, Janelle Barlow and Dianna Maul take that one step further and identify what needs to be learned and how it should be learned. Their point is simple and profound. "Both staff and customers tend to stay with organizations that enable them to experience positive, meaningful, and personally important feelings, even if the organizations cannot always provide everything they want or solve all their problems." Few will disagree. The conclusion builds on the work of Jeffrey Pfeffer in The Human Equation. There are many important consequences to that observation. First, it costs a lot of money to get customers. It's much more profitable to keep the ones you have than to get new ones (see The Loyalty Effect). Second, if you can deal with the same customers and employees, the results usually are better. Third, with lower staff turnover, costs of hiring and training are lower . . . and operating costs are lower, too. Fourth, bonding can be created among customers and employees that will allow them to derive more value from being involved with the company. Fifth, these improvements are critical in many industries. Most people shift from one supplier to another because dissatisfaction with service, not price or produce offerings. (See The Customer-Driven Company). Sixth, in this stock-market-driven economy, the economic advantages will translate into a higher stock price which can be used to add more and lower-cost resources for the company. Basically, improving emotional value can be the start of creating a virtuous cycle of self-reinforcing improvement for an enterprise. I would be remiss if I did not point out that those who emphasize the importance of values and corporate culture are dealing with some facets of emotional value. What is brilliant about this work is that it transcends this earlier excellent work to take it to a higher plane. You can have great values and a wonderful corporate culture, and still have an emotionally damaging work environment for many of your people and customers. The authors identify five key elements for making this virtuous cycle a reality: (1) Build an Emotion-Friendly Service Culture (2) Choose to Develop Emotional Competence (3) Maximize Customer Experience (see The Experience Economy -- "positive, emotional, and memorable impact") and Empathy (4) View Complaints as Emotional Opportunities (5) Use Emotional Communications to Increase Customer Loyalty As you can tell from my references to many other works, this book builds on excellent studies done by others. Yet, the synthesis here is new and improved. Essentially the book is "a call for civility, empathy, and authenticity in dealing with customers." That goes well beyond the familiar concept of "The customer is always right." That concept usually is applied to mean that the employee who works with the customer must be downtrodden and suffer. Burnout is a major problem among frontline service employees, as a result. Ms. Barlow and Ms. Maul see beyond that current stalemate. They realize that the interaction between company and customer can be uplifting for both. Mother Teresa drew great pleasure from helping poor people die with dignity. Doing our work with civility, empathy, and authenticity can add a similar sense of worth to our labors, as well as providing a wonderful, emotionally-rewarding experience for customers. I especially liked the call to action: "It is the service providers' responsibility to manage the emotions in service exhanges." How many CEOs, executives, and managers are thinking about that? Wow! Before you leave that point, consider that 80 percent of all U.S. jobs are expected to soon be service jobs. The appendices and notes are unusually good in this book. Be sure to take time to review them. The primary weakness of the book is that the sections that allow you to assess where your company or organization is today could be more detailed and specific. When you have finished the book, take some time to imagine the ideal emotional exchanges that could be occurring in your business and organization every day. Then start to design them and teach others how to make them easy, authentic, memorable, and enjoyable to provide. Have a ball!
A powerful eye-opener
Reading "Emotional value" has been an excellent experience and an eye opener in many ways. The book pinpoints and explores one of the key criteria of working competitively in the "experience economy" - having a workforce that is skilled in emotional competencies. I particularly enjoyed the debate "emotional labour" vs. "emotional competence". It is a real live debate in many service organizations with management trying to control the customer experience by stipulating that service-providers should be able to smile pleasantly (i.e. grin and bear) through all customer encounters. And yet grin & bear by the rulebook is often not what the customer wants, but rather genuine empathy and emotional competence on behalf of the service provider. It takes much more than "grin and bear" and "the customer is always right" rhetoric to satisfy today's eclectic customer. "Emotional Value" has reminded me of personal examples where service providers have competently turned my dissatisfaction, anger or frustration into a positive feeling of gratitude. And in doing so they have won me over as a loyal customer. However creating loyal customers by adding emotional value cannot be left to chance. Here the book proves to be a gold mine of practical applications and exercises that can be used to develop emotional awareness and competencies throughout the organization. Thus the book is a valuable blend of inspiring concepts and very practical techniques. I have recommended the book to several friends and colleagues.
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