Emotional Value: Creating Strong Bonds with Your Customers

Anyone who's ever worked any sort of service job, from the minimum-wage McDonald's cashier to the high-paid account exec, knows that the old store-policy standby "the customer is always right" is a load of bunk. But in our increasingly service-oriented economy, how can companies get their front-line service employees to keep a smile on their face (or in their voice) when dealing with customers from hell? Or even just from Long Island?

By teaching them how to say to customers "I feel your pain"--and even sort of (gulp) mean it. That's the message at the heart of this book from Janelle Barlow and Dianna Maul of consulting heavyweight TMI USA. "Customers are not always right.... But customers are always emotional," they write. "They always have feelings, sometimes intense, other times barely perceptible, when they make purchases or engage in ... transactions." That's why businesses must construct cultures that promote positive emotional states for both customers and employees. Unhappy employees out of touch with their own feelings, they warn, cannot provide "emotional value" for customers. The bulk of the book lays out practices for bringing EV to one's customers, including teaching employees emotional competence, maximizing customer experiences with empathy, and using emotional connections to increase customer loyalty.

If all this sounds a little too touchy-feely to evoke more than lip service from bottom-line-minded suits--or outright jeers from the dumped-on, underpaid, overworked people they employ--Barlow and Maul's slightly New Age-y language actually masks a smart and practical premise: companies that give their service workers a structured support system for putting themselves in their customers' shoes promote genuine well-being on both sides of the service line, leading to profits. This is also one of those rare business books where everything--such as the hundreds of daily, street-level service anecdotes (many of which had this writer laughing aloud in recognition)--speaks to the possibilities and limitations of the marketplace we all actually shop and work in, where rudeness, frustration, and apathy mingle with decency, competence, and compassion every day. You won't find a step-by-step, one-size-fits-all kit for customer compassion here, but there are ample explanations, snapshot examples, key-point breakdowns, and end-of-chapter self-questions to help get the process going for any manager or exec with half a brain. Or is that half a heart? --Timothy Murphy