The DNA of Customer Experience: How Emotions Drive Value [Hardcover]

The founder of a consulting and research company called beyond philosophy. They have had some considerable success (and became quite trendy) by developing a technique that measures the shape of the emotional response that consumers have to a brand or firm and to different brand experiences. Specifically, they identify a set of emotions that are related to advocacy (e.g. happiness), recommendation (e.g. trusted), attention (e.g. interested) and destroying (i.e. destroying relationship, e.g. irritated).

Their insight is that you can research these four different clusters in order to arrive at the emotional profile of your customer's response and this profile gives you much clearer and better insights into what you need to do to improve business success.

Moreover, the company and authors approach is to link these findings to the financial impact of change: what would be the result of moving particular emotional scores? By linking to the research done by Reichheld with the Net Promoter Score they are able to go significantly further in determining this value.

The background argument is made clearly and well (and is very soundly based, drawing on authoritative recent surveys of the mind and the role of emotion in shaping decision-making and behaviour). Emotions really matter, and understanding the detailed profile of your customer's response really does give much more useful insight into what to do.

Naturally, this is a book that is written to promote the author and his consulting/research company. All the evidence in it is drawn from these sources and are there not only to justify the argument but also to make the company and its 'beyond philosophy' approach attractive to marketing clients. Well, that is more or less something you do not put up with in the business world and Shaw does at least take us into the foothills of their methodology. I think you can learn from this even if you do not end up doing business with the company.

My own opinion is that this method needs to be taken one step further. The current tool is entirely generic: it assumes and uses one set of emotions for all customers. Given the relationship between emotion and value and the need of organisations to create unique value (their DNA), I believe that there is a step further that needs to be taken to get to a true DNA of customer experience.

A great read ....
This is a very thought provoking and practical read at the same time! Working for a company that uses Net Promoter, this has really helped me see what I need to do to improve my Net Promoter score. I now realise we should be measuring emotions as part of our Customer Experience.

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.