Balancing Emotions in Enhancing Customer Satisfaction: Being Emphatic or Empathetic

Business is all about competitive advantage and one of the key lead indicators to gain competitive advantage is the foreplay of emotions to enhance customer satisfaction. Customers are human beings satiated by emotions and appropriate projection of emotional communication from providers of products and services enhance their overall perceived benefits for the money being spent by them.

Needless to emphasize the importance of customer satisfaction for the business. Customers are the one for which the business exists. The power of customers have increased multifold with the mounting social media where consumers share their pleasures as well as displeasures.  One annoyed customer's feedback on social media could spread like a fire in California forests. Just assume the impairment a business could face with discontent customer.

Now the pertinent question hovering the lucid world of business is about the effective communication - logical as well as emotional to satisfy customer. This is one of the reasons why the scope of behavioral economics have increased in the recent times.  Emotions varies from person to person and have several deriving factors like past experiences, education level, psychological and situational behaviors amongst others which is why it is difficult to measure.

'The essential difference between the emotion and reason is that the emotion leads to action and reason leads to conclusions' (Calne, 2000).

Emotion is valued along with logic because according to researchers emotions, to an extent, are derived from logic. For example, yesterday I went to shop some of the beauty products in a German store. All the products were labeled in German language. As a non-German, I could not really find the suitable product I was searching for. In one of the big stores, the sales person answered my queries being logical, but failed to understand my need and recommend me a product. However, being indecisive about the product, I went to another store where the sales person spend around 15 minutes with me. She was empathetic towards my specific requirement and explained me about some products that suited and how will they work for me. I would call this as emotion. Being logical, both the sales persons navigated me through the products, but the latter one projected emotional behavior to derive repeated business for her store.

But at the same time, the emotional projection must be properly communicated, failing which make the situation emphatic rather than empathetic.   The customer might not feel as being forced to buy that product, or as if the sales person is going to derive special benefits for promoting a particular brand. The customers must have some space to apply their logic after your recommendations. In this example, the sales person acts as a brand ambassador of the organization who must be trained to communicate apposite emotional behavior.

The management implication for the above discussion is that there can be several deriving factors of the projection of emotional communication and the corresponding feedback of emotional satisfaction. An organization must find ways to nail down what emotional services work for them and imbibe appropriate trainings to endeavor such emotional behavior at required levels of organizations.

Calne, D. (2000) 'Within Reason: Rationality and Human Behavior' Vintage Books.