Do You Know How To Leverage Emotions to

Develop Customer Loyalty?
By Leanne Hoagland-Smith

Do you know how to leverage the emotions of both your internal customers to develop loyal external customers during your customer service training? Possibly these suggestions may help you to leverage the power of emotions to build far more loyal customers and help to make your customer service training far more effective.

First, in your customer service training, do you help your employees to understand non-verbal communication? Since most communication is non-verbal, does it not make sense to be to accurately read both those non-verbal as well as verbal cues? By taking such action, would you not avoid or at least reduce the negative and out of control interactions between your internal and external customers?

Second, wow do you view emotions? Do you think of them as negative obstacles or as the basis for forming relationships? Are there any obstacles in your organization that is potentially driving negative emotions? HINT: Check out your phone system.

Third, do you keep the strong emotions at bay and try to keep the customer experience emotionally neutral? Why do people buy? People buy based on emotions, not on logic. P.T. Barnum is credited with this observation: There is a sucker born every minute.

We are suckered in by our own emotions. Something looks good, something feels good, something smells goods. Our senses transport all of these goods into our emotional processing center. And we are hooked.

Strong emotions mean something is happening. Ignoring those strong emotions will not make the problem or issue disappear. Help your employees to deal with those strong emotions.

Fourth, are you building the emotional bank account as Stephen Covey has described? Your business can keep the emotional deposits coming instead of having them be drained away. One study by Rosenberg in 1998 suggested that customer behavior can be predicted by emotions. How are you using those emotions to increase that emotional bank account?

Fifth, where are the points of connection and how can you leverage them? I was speaking with an owner of a niche retail store. He shared that corporate research suggests that people visit their retail stores at least 25 times before making a purchase. My question is how many of those visits are yours and what are you doing to make each point of connection exceptional?

Sixth, are you developing the own emotional competence of your employees?. By doing so they can more positively interact with your customers and build those loyal connections.

Finally, businesses must recognize that stress is a killer within the buying/selling experience. How are your people dealing with the natural stress that many customers routinely give? Are your policies and procedures adding to that stress? Your goal is to

reduce the stress of your internal loyal customers so that your external customers are not in a more highly volatile reactive stress filled interaction.

Business owners today can leverage emotions provided that they are aware of the enormous potential that emotions have specific to building customer loyalty. The old paradigm of customer satisfaction being everything has been changed to customer loyalty because customer loyalty is the strategic competitive advantage.