Serving emotionally charged customers can be difficult, draining, and downright miserable for the wrong employee.
Customers’ assessments of quality and value, buying decisions, and recommendations are all influenced by emotions. But too often companies don’t adequately anticipate those emotions and therefore can’t mitigate negative ones. This is especially true for high-emotion services—those that trigger strong feelings before the service even begins. Services relating to major life events such as birth, marriage, illness, and death fall into this category, as do airline travel, car repair, and home buying, selling, and renovation. They may elicit intense feelings for the following reasons: lack of familiarity with the service, lack of control over its performance, major consequences if things go wrong, complexity that makes the service a black box, and a long duration.
The authors have identified four guidelines that can help managers influence expectations and perceptions of quality and value, enhancing customers’ satisfaction and loyalty: (1) Identify emotional triggers, (2) respond early to intense emotions, (3) enhance customers’ control, and (4) hire the right people. They use some leading providers of cancer care to illustrate the application of these guidelines.
Learn more about HBRs focus on Healthcare Settings through this compilation of articles.
