The Heart of Customer Experience is Happiness

In the happiness-centric economy, businesses are aggressively seeking differentiated customer experience as a way to build customer loyalty and competitive advantage over their competitors. The types of customer experience staged by organisations can be categorised into: transactional, relational, experiential and transformational. However, at the core of the customer experience is the emotional dimension and it is about the “HEART” which stands for Happiness, Emotions, Awareness, Relation and Trust. as illustrated in the diagram below.

Happiness. Customer experience is about delivering happiness. A study done by Ryan Howell, assistant professor of psychology at San Francisco State University shows that experiential purchases bring more happiness than things as experiences satisfy higher order needs in social connectedness and vitality – a feeling of being alive. Unlike material objects, people don’t get bored of happy memories. Leading experience-centric organisations have adopted “happiness” in their commercials and products. For example, Coca Cola launched the “open happiness” global campaign in 2009 and has appointed happiness ambassadors to seek out what makes people happy in 206 countries. 

Emotions. Customer experience is about emotions since happiness is one of the six basic human emotions besides anger, disgust, fear, sadness and surprise. An emotion is a sensation of varied intensity manifested in our body triggered by both internal and external events which drives us to act in certain ways.  Emotions play an important role in our life experiences. In the paper “Customer Experience: The Next Competitive Battleground” by Beyond Philosophy, 69 per cent of all consumers surveyed said that emotions account for over half of their customer experience. A brain-imaging study led by Benedetto De Martino of University College London supports the notion that emotion rules over logic in decision making. Organisations, therefore, have to satisfy their customers’ emotional needs, if they want to win their hearts.

Awareness. Awareness of our own emotions as well as the emotions of our customers is important in building and maintaining healthy customer relationships. Awareness is the ability to identify and recognise emotions through both verbal and non-verbal cues displayed by us and our customers. It heightens the sensitivity of emotional issues and gives us the ability to respond positively to the actions and behaviours of our customers with the purpose of delivering happiness in customer experience. Emotions are often triggered through our five senses (touch, sight, hearing, smell and taste), past experiences and memories. 

Relation. Relation is about the act of relating the feelings of our customers back to them. It involves the ability to observe and listen to our own and our customers’ emotions. Observation is about being non-judgmental. Listening empathically to customers helps us to understand how to serve our customers better, it also helps us to build and sustain positive relationship with them. The essence of empathic listening is to listen from the heart, which opens the doorway to understanding, caring and empathy. It requires listeners to refrain from judging the speaker and place themselves in the other’s position in attempting to see things from his point of view. It involves:

•          Paying full attention to the speaker’s total communication including body language

•          Being empathic to the speaker’s feelings and thoughts and suspending one’s own thoughts and feelings

•          Acknowledging and responding to the speaker with the purpose of trying to understand his point of view.

Trust. Part of the empathy process in relation is to establish trust and rapport with our customers. Jennifer Dunn and Maurice Schweitzer from the University of Pennsylvania conducted a study on the influence of emotion on trust and they found that incidental emotions significantly influence trust in unrelated settings. Emotions with positive valence such as happiness and gratitude increase trust, and emotions with negative valence such as anger decreases trust. Stephen M.R. Covey in his book, “The Speed of Trust” says that high trust increases speed and lower the cost of doing business. In personal life, high trust brings about greater enjoyment and better quality of life. To establish and build trust in all relationships, he advocates the following 13 behaviours:

1.    Talk straight

2.    Demonstrate respect

3.    Create transparency

4.    Right wrongs

5.    Show loyalty

6.    Deliver results

7.    Get better

8.    Confront reality

9.    Clarify expectations

10. Practice accountability

11. Listen first

12. Keep commitments

13. Extend trust