Emotional Value: Creating Strong Bonds with Your Customers

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 LoyaltyAs you can tell from my references to many other works, this book builds on excellent studies done by others. Yet, the synthesis h

I wore out my highlighter while reading Emotion Value. Every chapter was filled with profound wisdom. As a teacher and speaker in the field of customer service I was grateful to Janelle and Diana for presenting such a truthful, intelligent book backed up with research and statistics. While my classes have always focused on the front line, I longed for a way to reach the management. Emotional Value is written with the CEO in mind. I hope they sit up and take notice, after 20 years of service training, service has gotten worse. This book explains why!

Reviewer: A reader from Joshua Tree, California. April 17, 2000.Changes which serve to alter how we think and act often come upon us slowly. Suddenly we realize we are in a whole new world. Providing a new language for business, an exciting new book, Emotional Value: Creating Strong Bonds With Your Customers, has just been published. Authors Janelle Barlow and Dianna Maul do a superb job of articulating ideas, options, and examples which those in business can utilize to bringemotional value to their business environment.Emotional Value deserves our serious attention. It offers ideas which are refreshing, new, and practical. Barlow and Maul have developed their book based on years of working within the business community and upon solid research. Using Emotional Value as a guide for judicious use in application, Barlow's book sets the course for the business community to unlock the potential which exists within the millennial market place.

It is amazing to me to think about how much business gets lost, simply because front line staff are insensitive to the emotional states of their customers. This is one of the most fundamental facts about business today. Yet, it is one that has rarely, if ever, been addressed. Why? Apparently, because the emotional realm has just been too elusive for most managers and managemnt theorists. In fact, the leading theorist in this area, Professor Arlie Russell Hochschild, has approached the issue from a quasi-Marxist perspective -- suggesting that the acquisition of emotional competency is actually a form of "labor" that alienates workers and forces them to be inauthentic. Barlow and Maul go to great lengths to challenge this mainstream attitude, suggesting that emotional competency is a valuable skill that need not be regarded as a betrayal of one's inner being. The ability to engender sensitivity to the inner state of the customer can be viewed, instead, as the cultivation of our fundamental human potential.Janelle Barlow and Dianna Maul bring a refreshing perspective to this topic. Barlow is already known as the co-author of A Complaint is a Gift. Dianna Maul, her colleague, was one of the founding directors of Horizon Airlines. They base their book on a thorough and up-to-date review of the academic literature regarding emotions in the workplace. One of the most intriguing findings they develop is based upon the work of the Australian scholar, Michael Edwardson (who, incidentally, wrote the forward to this book). Edwardson documents in great detail the fact that customers in different industries have widely differing sets of emotional expectations. A "one size fits all" approach to customer satisfaction, therefore, can never work. But, with the research documenting so clearly the emotional nuances of customers in a wide variety of different situations, the possibility exists for more appropriately informed responsiveness from front line staff.In fact, Barlow and Maul, disabuse us entirely of the very notion that we should be pleased that our customers are "satisfied." The truth is that satisfied customers are not necessarily loyal customers. The implication here is that new forms of psychological and emotional mastery are required as we enter into the age of the "experience economy." Some businesses may even discover that they need to acquire skills in cultivating states of joy, perhaps even ecstasy, in their customers. Others will have to uncover new depths of meaning in the words "trust" and "gratitude." Furthermore, it is not enough simply to pay lip service to such concepts. Businesses are already getting into trouble because their advertising campaigns create emotional expectations that are not fulfilled in actual practice. In effect, with this book, Barlow and Maul reveal that the human potential movement of the past three or four decades has solidified to such an extent that the ver

Never have I read a book that so completely summarizes an entire field. Not only does this book "walk the reader through the maze of research on emotions," it is filled with practical useful advice, presented in a common-sense, accessible way. I think it is definitely bound to be a classic in the customer service field.