![]() ![]() By contrast, humdrum transactions (such as buying traveler ’s checks) generally don ’t offer the same opportunity to create an emotional bond with the customer. These moments often occur when the customer has a problem (such as a hold on a check or a need for a quick answer on a loan) or receives financial advice, either good or bad (Exhibit 1). McKinsey research on the customer experience in the United States arrived at the same conclusions. Marc Beaujean, Vincent Cremers, and Francisco Pedro Goncalves Pereira, “How Europe’s banks can profit from loyal customers,” The McKinsey Quarterly, Web exclusive, November 2005. McKinsey research in Belgium, Germany, and Italy recently identified the critical moments for customers as well as the prize awaiting banks that respond appropriately to them. ![]() What is the link between emotionally charged moments of truth and the purchase decisions of customers? The experience of the retail-banking industry is instructive. By supporting and developing the frontline emotional intelligence of its employees, it can ensure that more of those moments have a positive outcome. In any industry that offers a service (or sells a product with an “embedded ” service element), there are moments when the long-term relationship between a business and its customers can change significantly-for better or for worse. These missteps make it hard to foster appropriate behavior, to enhance the intrinsic emotional intelligence of employees, and to extend across the whole front-line network the excellence of exemplary individuals, branches, and offices.ĭuring our work with companies, we have found a number of practical ways for them to overcome these challenges. Others mistakenly try to script what are by definition spontaneous events, thereby removing authenticity and empathy from the customer experience. Some wrongly assume that the quality of emotional responses-what the author Daniel Goleman famously called “EQ, ” or “emotional intelligence ” 2-is so deeply programmed at birth or in childhood that it is impossible to influence. Superb handling of these moments requires an instinctive frontline response that puts the customer ’s emotional needs ahead of the company ’s and the employee ’s agendas.Įxecutives typically struggle to transform the way a company responds to its customers. That spark and the emotionally driven behavior that creates it explain how great customer service companies earn trust and loyalty during “moments of truth ”: those few interactions (for instance, a lost credit card, a canceled flight, a damaged piece of clothing, or investment advice) when customers invest a high amount of emotional energy in the outcome. What ’s regularly missing, in our experience, is the spark between the customer and frontline staff members-the spark that helps transform wary or skeptical people into strong and committed brand followers. William Bard, Jessica Harrington, Erin Kinikin, and John Ragsdale, Evaluation of Top Enterprise CRM Software Vendors Across 177 Criteria, Forrester Research, 2005. According to Forrester research, only 10 percent of business and IT executives surveyed strongly agreed that business results anticipated from implementing CRM were met or exceeded. We believe that many businesses are falling short.Īlthough companies are investing record amounts of money in traditional loyalty programs, in customer-relationship-management (CRM) technology, and in general service-quality improvements, most of these initiatives end in disappointment. The success of this strategy ultimately depends on expanding the breadth and depth of customer relationships and on translating the resulting loyalty into higher sales of goods and services, as well as a healthier bottom line. As many academic studies have noted, the costs of doing so tend to be much lower than those of acquiring new ones. In recent years, mature companies with far-flung networks of frontline sales staff-banks, retailers, airlines, and incumbent telecom providers, for example-have devoted a great deal of money and effort to retaining their current customers.
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