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When your customer checks that “satisfied” box on your customer service survey, you don’t really know if they are rationally satisfied or emotionally satisfied. What’s the difference, you ask? A big difference in terms of your retention of that customer.

Why? Well, because rationally satisfied people behave the same way as dissatisfied people. What?

That is, they will leave your company even though they are rationally satisfied, because they sometimes feel a lack of loyalty from no emotional involvement with you. And someone else comes along with at least the promise of emotional engagement.

A customer who checks “satisfied” and are emotionally satisfied and engaged, will tend to stay with you through that sense of loyalty they have that stems from their emotional engagement with you. You’re a friend. They like you. They feel liked by you.

Here’s a simple example. I used to buy my Mary Kay Cosmetic products from the wife of a fellow professor. She always sent my package to me promptly, with a proper invoice…I would have said I was satisfied.

But my satisfaction was rational, not emotional. She never reached out to me to develop any sort of relationship. So, when I saw on Facebook that my dear friend Erin was now selling Mary Kay Cosmetics, I immediately began buying from her.

Was I dissatisfied with my former beauty consultant? No. But I was rationally satisfied, not emotionally satisfied so I ended up behaving like a dissatisfied customer. See?

This is important: Emotionally engaged customers bring a 23% premium to the bottom line with profitability, revenue, and relationship growth, according to a Gallup poll reported in the Harvard Business Review. Emotional engagement will almost always result in loyalty because of a personal connection.

So when your employees are interacting with their customers, are they developing personal relationships with them? Finding out about their families, their jobs, what they do for fun, what their dreams are?

Are they noting this information in the company database so that all employees, current or future, have access to it?

Are they showing how much they care about the customer so that the customer cares about them in return?

Emotionally satisfied and engaged customers is what you want to work hard to achieve.

Sincerely,