It is said nowadays that whether one buys a cup of coffee, a holiday, a house or a car the decision of purchasing has to be emotional. More importantly it is a crucial factor in customer retention and loyalty. Customer satisfaction is the underpinning factor in customer experience. Customer should feel good in doing business with the product or the service provider. 

 

While purchasing rationality, reflection, judgment of pros and cons do play a part but it has to have an emotional side to it. One’s gut feeling, intuition, sense and interaction plays a significant role in buying. 

 

In every single encounter what the customer feels or doesn’t feel is directly related with the service provider’s managerial capability and handling of customer expectations. Customer experience doesn’t end in keeping a smiley face or having a soft tone while communicating with an irate customer.

 

It must make the customer whoever they are feel the most important person at that time through operation, transaction and behavior. Addressing a fickle customer who is like “I want it now and can’t wait” and their emotions is not easy and cannot be handled by an individual manager. Reaching this emotional goal requires an entire company’s effort which should exceed beyond product quality and protocols. 

 

Before a service provider can decide the best way to achieve this customer satisfaction must decide what exact reaction they want to create every time an encounter occurs. It can be said that customer satisfaction survey and market research can provide the data for that. But sadly enough, these kind of data do not help much, and especially at an emotional level. 

 

Drivers of satisfaction and loyalty must be looked deeply into by the service providers. A good insight into the subject will show that a whole bunch of different factors lead to the sense of satisfaction and loyalty. Expectations, needs and reaction to the organization and the perceived value received by the customer would be some of them. 

 

The basic requirement for customer satisfaction then shifts from product, service quality, value-for-money, hygiene factors, etc which are common for everyone to creating an emotional, personal and psychological connection with the customer which makes them feel satisfied and loyal. To respond to the emotional approach of the customers the company must have a consistent, differentiated, valued and completely intentional outlook towards customers. This is the best way of dealing with unreasonable, shrewd, and specious and feelings based drivers that authenticate the buying decision.