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Great organizations establish strong emotional connections with their customers. Emotional connectivity with customers decommoditizes a business, elevating a brand beyond price and features to a higher level of meaning and commitment for customers.
Connecting emotionally with customers requires an organization to create a cohesive, authentic and sensory-stimulating total customer experience that resonates, pleases, communicates effectively and differentiates the organization from the competition.
Maintaining an emotional connection requires systematic management of the customers' experiences with an organization and its offerings from the customers' perspectives. Why is this important? Because it is the customers' overall experiences with an organization and the goods or services it offers that evoke the perception of value that determines brand preference. Actual experiences oí customers trump all else.
It is important to systematically manage customers' experiences. AU organizations are service ones in the sense that all create value for customers through performances (services). Some firms are hybrids, creating value through manufactured goods and services. The services can facilitate the sale of the goods, directly generate revenue or do both. Other firms exclusively market services. But all organizations interact with customers.
An experience is inherent; a positive experience is not. Customers consciously and unconsciously filter a barrage of clues, in the form of experiences, and organize them into sets of impressions-some rational and others more emotional. Anything perceived or sensed-or-conspicuous in its absence -is an experience clue. If customers can see, smell, taste or hear it, it is a clue. Goods and services provide clues, as does the physical environment in which they are offered.
Employees also provide clues. Specific clues carry messages, and the clues and messages converge to create the customers' total experiences.' The clues, in effect, tell the customers the organization's story:
* Does this organization care about its customers?
* Does it want customers to feel well cared for?
* Is it progressive, honest, modern, in-touch, community minded, family friendly, dependable, responsive, flexible and so forth?
Managing the customers' experiences excellently means telling customers the right story excellently.
Focus on Feelings
Emotional connectivity is an opportunity for all types of organizations. There is no such thing as a commodity business-only managers who think of their businesses as commodity businesses.
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