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Jannelle Barlow and Dianna Maul. Emotional Value: Creating Strong Bonds with Your Customers. San Francisco: BerrettKoehler, 2000, 310 pages, $27.95.
Emotions play a central, but until recently underrated, role in the relationships between service providers and customers. Feelings take on economic value or monetary worth when they influence a customer's decision to return or never to return to a place of business. It is precisely customer retention, based on the building of long-term, personal relationships that constitutes one of the most crucial factors in achieving competitive advantage and bottom-line success in service enterprises. Thus the function of adding emotional value to employee-customer interactions is to enhance the customer's experiences, create a desire to return based on actual or anticipated feelings, and thereby contribute to the fundamental service strategy of customer retention.
Jannelle Barlow and Dianna Maul make a strong case for the necessity of turning attention to these oft-neglected relationships between feelings and the bottom line. Beyond customer satisfaction, the customer's positive affective response to the service encounter may thus be viewed as a leading performance indicator for the service firm! Because customer emotions count for so much, and since much of the customer's emotional experience derives from personal interactions with the service provider, the service provider's ability to recognize, monitor, and regulate both his or her own and the customer's emotions becomes a crucially important skill set. This is the crux of the Emotional Competence theme of this book, and parallels the current explosion of research and applied interest in the notion of emotional intelligence (Goleman, 1997; Mayer & Salovey, 1997; Salovey & Mayer, 1990).
Barlow and Maul also point out the necessary linkage between customer satisfaction/retention and employee well-being/retention. This theme is most strongly presented in Part V of the book, "Using Emotional Connections to Increase Customer Loyalty." This resonates with the contemporary movement toward high performance work systems across a broad spectrum of industries, as proposed by Jeffrey Pfeffer in his 1998 landmark book, The Human Equation. Pfeffer argues that customer satisfaction and resulting hard-core financial indicators are intimately linked to employee attitudes (regarding workload, teamwork, training and development, job satisfaction, fairness of pay, management's concern about employee welfare, fair treatment, whether supervisors encouraged an open and participative work environment, etc.). These...