PREFACE

The authors spend an enormous amount of their time either providing service to clients, staff, and colleagues or alternatively receiving service from others. At times we experience incredibly fine service delivered by sensitive, caring, and emotionally competent humans, so fine we want to tell everyone we just witnessed an Olympic “10” in customer service. Other times—unfortunately all too often—we see the crass underbelly of unacceptable service. As every consumer undoubtedly knows, the space for improvement is immense. All of these experiences, both positive and negative, have rendered the authors fascinated by the role of human behavior and emotions in service, the great underpinning of today’s “experience economy.”

We have written this book out of our passion for the human element in service and a desire to shape the future of how people offer service to each other. We 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.

Unfortunately, emotions in service are elusive and are frequently offered without any conscious guidance, positive or negative. It is almost as if the most impactful aspect of service is thrown in the pot without any sense of the flavor it will add. Yet its effect is real. One of our colleagues recently sent us an e-mail describing his poor emotional treatment by airline personnel:

I was waiting in a queue to board when a lady came and said,”Only business class now,” and she said it in such a way that all the economy passengers (I think) felt very embarrassed that they fly economy.

These types of alienating emotional interactions happen all too often and are not improved by simple organizational mandates. A smiling gate agent in the above example could have told the lined-up economy passengers,”Good morning. We’re boarding rows one through nine right now. We’ll be happy to board rows ten and up in just a moment.” But it won’t work to just tell the gate agent to use these words. The emotional part of service cannot be “fixed” in a piecemeal fashion, which makes its improvement complex. It requires looking at customer interactions as part of the total organizational system and culture.

The distinction between customer relationships that have added emotional value and those that are emotionally insensitive may seem trivial, but it is a huge potential-filled room into which many organizations have barely entered, and they are frankly at a loss to know what to do once they get there. While the cost of adding emotional value is frequently minimal in contrast to upgrading the tangible or “hard” side of service, this is not to say that adding emotional value is free or without effort.

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. This book provides an opportunity to create, design, and deliver customer experiences that go beyond satisfaction by focusing on emotional impact. 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, an organization and its staff must engage in five practices, around which this book is organized:

Building an emotion-friendly service culture

Choosing emotional competence as the organization’s service model

Maximizing customer experiences with empathy

Viewing complaints as emotional opportunities

Using emotional connections to increase customer loyalty

1.Part I: Building an Emotion-Friendly Service Culture. The first part of Emotional Value deals with the requirement of building an emotion-friendly service culture. We particularly like Peter Jackson’s definition of culture when he says, “Cultures are maps of meaning through which the world is made intelligible.” An emotion-friendly service culture can be shaped by understanding the role and power of emotions in business and by supporting emotional awareness among all staff.

2.Part II: Choosing Emotional Competence. Part II explores an argument that has shaped and defined the service economy and is even more critical to the experience economy. This debate focuses on whether service workers labor under emotional duress when they offer friendly customer service or whether they display emotional competency when they deliver positive emotions as part of the service package.
This argument is one that runs deep in business and academic circles. We have positioned this debate with Arlie Hochschild, professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, as a representative for the side that argues service workers, out of necessity, must detach themselves from their own feelings when providing service, and Maureen O’Hara, dean of faculty at Saybrook Graduate School, as the spokesperson for the side that asserts emotional competency and its expression are positive, personally advantageous, and basic to fulfillment.
We have entered an era where a measure of psychological enlightenment and emotional sensitivity is a prerequisite for competent management. Staff, as well as customers, in today’s service/ experience economy demand it. The job of emotionally competent leadership is to create and manage the emotional context of business so staff will be aware of and trust their own feelings as they provide service. If we fail to do this, people will begin to lose contact between that which they feel and that which they experience; they will become, in short, inauthentic.

3.Part III: Maximizing Customer Experiences with Empathy. Our third part examines the emotional connections that create positive, shared experiences between staff and customers. The most potent means to maximize customer experiences is with empathy, the common boundary of emotional connectivity. Therefore, to measure an organization’s effectiveness with customers requires surveys that assess more than just “satisfaction.” Measuring levels of customer satisfaction is barely relevant as a tool for understanding the customer emotional reactions that create loyalty.

4.Part IV: Viewing Complaints as Emotional Opportunities. Part IV deals with the most challenging aspect of customer service: how to maintain positive emotions in the face of service failures. By understanding and working with the emotional dynamics of complaints, companies can use service failures to deepen relationships and strengthen customer interactions, rather than to poison feelings as happens so frequently.

5.Part V: Using Emotional Connections to Increase Customer Loyalty. Our final part examines the emotional drivers of customer loyalty and shows how to increase customer retention by adding emotional value to experience. This requires understanding that loyalty is a two-way street, that customer loyalty is related to staff loyalty, that loyalty resides in the emotional “extras” of service, and that perceived fairness is a major component of loyalty.

Achieving emotionally competent customer interactions is work that, like quality, is never done. We can take our customer relationships to a new level, an emotionally sensitive level, fully anticipating that another yet unidentified level will emerge. Emotional Value does not provide all the answers. It is, however, a prescription for where the service economy and its practitioners need to move next in today’s fast-changing business culture.

Orientation of Emotional Value

The authors of this book are partners in an international training and consulting firm. As a consequence of heavy work schedules and geographically diverse clients, we spend a tremendous amount of time in airplanes and hotels. For this reason, many of our personal examples come from these two industries. We in no way wish to imply that the hospitality and travel industries are the only places to look for examples of emotional value or its lack. In fact, all one has to do is listen to people talk about customer interactions, and examples will appear throughout every sector of the economy, including government, high tech, retail, education, medicine, and now e-commerce.

We present dozens of ideas, options, and examples of organizations that have already begun to systematically add emotional value to their customers’ experiences. We also rely on examples from our personal training and consulting projects. Our intention in writing about these experiences is to share examples with which we are personally acquainted. We apologize in advance to any reader who finds our selection of examples self-promoting rather than illustrative.

This book also contains a set of applications—tools that primarily come from our seminar and training experiences. While this book is not a training manual for using these exercises, we have found that they work very well for us. We have also included a set of “Assessing Your Organization” questions at the end of each of the book’s five parts. These are questions we like to pose in our training programs or consulting interventions, or they are questions we have been asked ourselves by our many clients. They are also a means to take the content of this book and share it in discussion with others.

Emotional Value summarizes important and recent research in the service marketing field. We have attempted to survey both popular commentary and academic research and present them in such a way that they do not present a reading burden. While our goal is to walk you through the maze of thought and research on customer emotions, this book was not written as an academic text. To keep the text easy to read and yet provide background, this book is heavy with references and additional content in the endnotes and appendices.

The book is best read in the order written, as each part serves as a foundation for the next. The exercises, sprinkled throughout the text, are titled “Application” and are clearly marked in the text. If you are not interested in practical applications, you can skip over them. The same is true for the assessment questions at the end of each part.