Customer Reviews

The DNA of Customer Experience: How Emotions Drive Value

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This book talks about the importance of creating a Customer Experience in very interesting and helpful ways. For example, Colin Shaw notes that each company has a unique Emotional Signature(tm), that is, the pattern of emotions your company and products create in the customer. Shaw notes that there are four clusters of emotions that are statistically significant in creating loyal customers. The author notes that his research shows that 50% of a customer's purchase experience is emotional. Other people claim that people purchase based on their emotions and use reason to justify their purchase. Whatever the fraction and balance of emotion and reasons, it is to your benefit to manage the emotions your customers feel as they walk in your door and after they take your product home.

Oh, and by the way, it is very important that you understand your customer segments, why they come to your store, and what they are using your products to get done. That way you can prepare the experience to handle them as they walk in the door rather than making them seek you out to get them what they think they want. You have a golden opportunity to show them you not only understand them, but have expertise in what they are trying to get done. This way you can not only push them to a higher emotional cluster, but possibly sell them additional items that improve their experience.

The first cluster includes the Value Destroying emotions. You drive customers away and prevent others from ever becoming customers when your policies, procedures, and staff make them feel stressed, neglected, unsatisfied, frustrated, disappointed, unhappy, hurried, and/or irritated. It may seem obvious to you that you don't want these emotions being caused in your customers. However, this doesn't mean you aren't doing it. One valuable exercise is to use your company as a regular customer would and see how it really works. You might be shocked. Another is to actually read your customer mail and talk to real customers about how your company makes them feel. It is probably a very different picture than the one you currently hold in your mind.

There are three clusters of positive emotions, the Attention, Recommendation, and Advocacy clusters. While they are separate statistically, it is hard to imagine that you can actually get to the level of advocacy without passing through and maintaining the attention and recommendation emotions in your customers.

The Attention emotions are also the ones most directly related to short term spending by your customers. If you want them to buy today make them feel stimulated, interested, exploratory, energetic, and indulgent. Makes sense right? These are also the emotions most closely associated with store openings and product launches. However, the effect is also short term. You must work harder to maintain these emotions as time goes on and be ready to cycle through other new products to keep the attention of your customers.

When you help your customers feel the emotions in the Recommendation cluster you are laying the foundation of customer loyalty. They are willing to talk about your company and its products when your friends ask them for a advice and recommendations. If your customers are doing this for you, it is because you make them feel valued, cared for, trusted, focused, and safe. Good going!

The customers who feel the Advocacy emotions (and there are only two) will actively promote you because you have made them feel happy and pleased. Happiness is a peak emotion that causes memories and when people have happy memories they treasure the places and people that were a part of it. They even want to take pictures. The author asks if your customers want to take pictures of their experiences with your company. It is a telling point, I think.

The author also talks about the Net Promoter Score. You ask customers to mark a scale from zero (not at all likely) to ten (very likely) in response to the question "how likely are you to recommend (place your company, a product, or the experience they had with you here) to a friend? Then, total ALL the responses. Then figure the percent of the responses of one through six and write this down. Ignore the responses of seven and eight. Then calculate the percentage of total responses that were marked nine or ten. You get the Net Promoter Score by subtracting the percentage of scores marked 1 to 6 from the percentage of scores 9 and 10. This is your advocacy score and you want to get that number as high as you can.

Obviously, I can't go through the whole book. I think its points are good. However, I do NOT like the metaphor of DNA. It is all wrong for what they are talking about. When you read the talk about spreading the DNA to others and similar comments, the author seems to be talking about a virus or some such, but never using the metaphor for what DNA really is. However, customer virus is an unattractive metaphor. But this is a small complaint. This is a good book on an important topic.

Reviewed by Craig Matteson, Ann Arbor, MI

If nothing else, this book is fascinating. Colin Shaw has disected transactions into measurable steps based on the emotions agents evoke during an experience. He uses examples that anyone can relate to, such as going out to dinner, breaks the experience into steps in charts and graphs them. He makes measuring an experience as scientific as anything about emotions could possibly be.

At the surface, when he started talking about planned emotional responses during customer interactions, I though his ideas seemed manipulative but reading on, I got it. Customer interactions have a sequence that at any point breaks down into a good or bad emotional experience. Managers who need to train workers to make customers happy now have a step by step method to show where any breakdown in the process may occur so they can fix it.

I have all three of Colin Shaw's experience books. They are all different and I recommend them all. Customer experience is the next wave in marketing. There is nothing new in the idea of making customers feel happy, but this book is a fresh look with a new angle.

Colin Shaw demonstrates convincingly why building a great "Customer Experience" is important to your company. He relates it to important clusters of emotions that either destroy or drive added value, and create loyal customers. While the DNA metaphor is a bit strained (after all, talking about the virus of customer experience wouldn't be nearly as poetic, even if it might be a slightly more accurate metaphor), Shaw gets his ideas across well and the underlying principles he outlines are quite good. He provides stories and quotes from his own consulting experience to clarify his points. getAbstract finds this concisely written book valuable and instructive.

The book is interesting and easy to read. Even if is not dealing the Customer Experience in all its global and strategic facts it deepens the emotional aspects meeting the reader expectations.