The Big Miss

The Big Miss

How Organizations Overlook the
Value of Emotions

Zhecho Dobrev
The Big Miss: How Organizations Overlook the Value of Emotions

Copyright © Business Expert Press, LLC, 2023.

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 Description
In The Big Miss: How Businesses Overlook the Value of Emotions, Zhecho
Dobrev reveals how organizations are frequently deceived by customers
and fail to act on what they fail to notice—thus are missing the biggest
driver of profitable customer behavior! His extensive research shows
that emotions are the key drivers of customer behavior, yet few organiza-
tions have a strategy to evoke specific emotions based on science and data.
Does yours have?
In this book, the author provides business leaders with a practical
framework for how to embed emotions in their business practices, which
includes learning how to:

• Discover the difference between what customers say and do;

• Create a data-based strategy around specific emotions;
• Use customer science to future-proof your business and make
the most out of digital transformation, data, and AI;

… and much more.

Keywords
why emotions are key to customer experience management; how busi-
nesses can design for emotion and growth; why digital transformation
programs fail to deliver results; using data, AI and behavior science in
experience design; customer science based strategy for business managers;
how to businesses can appeal to customer emotions
 Contents
Foreword�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ix
Introduction������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������xi

Part I What Do Organizations Miss on Today?�������������������� 1

Chapter 1 The Nagging Questions��������������������������������������������������3
Chapter 2 Big Research Findings�����������������������������������������������������9
Chapter 3 Evidence From Independent Research��������������������������33
Chapter 4 The Psychological Explanation��������������������������������������41

Part II What Organizations Need to Do Tomorrow— The Seven

Business Practices for Emotional Connection���������������55
Chapter 5 Practice 1: Aim Your Design on Building an
Emotional Connection and a Feeling of a
Relationship With Customers���������������������������������������57
Chapter 6 Practice 2: Take Into Account That Customers Are
Not Aware of Their Inner Drivers���������������������������������85
Chapter 7 Practice 3: Include Emotions in Your Research�������������93
Chapter 8 Practice 4: Be Deliberate About the Emotions
You Want to Evoke and How to Evoke Them�������������103
Chapter 9 Practice 5: Aim for the Same Emotions in the
Employee Experience�������������������������������������������������113
Chapter 10 Practice 6: Make Your Customer Experience
Program Sustainable���������������������������������������������������123
Chapter 11 Practice 7: Aim Your Brand at Making an
Emotional Connection�����������������������������������������������135

Part III The Tomorrow of CX Management and How to

Get There��������������������������������������������������������������� 151
Chapter 12 The Problem With Digital Transformation Today�������153
Chapter 13 AI and the Future of Customer Experience�����������������167
Chapter 14 The Rise of Customer Science Teams��������������������������179
viii Contents

References�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������185
About the Author��������������������������������������������������������������������������������197
Index�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������199
 Foreword
“This is business. Leave the emotions at the door.” Sounds familiar? I share
my own personal story which proved just how wrong this thinking is.
In 2008, Maersk Line was the largest container shipping company
in the world. Due to globalization and outsourcing, the industry had
seen extraordinary growth and opportunity for decades. However, the
financial crisis of 2008 and overcapacity in the industry put Maersk
Line into vicious price wars with competitors, resulting in losses and
vastly lower margins. The company leadership decided to fight back by
building a strategy around differentiation as a premium brand. In support
of that strategy, I was asked to lead a global initiative called Customer
Experience Innovation.
My first step was to build as diverse a team as I could, representing
different cultures, functions, backgrounds, ages, experience, and skills. But
once the team was formed, what next? I knew we needed help. I researched
several consultancies. One stood out—Beyond Philosophy. They under-
stood B2B; Customer Experience is what they do (vs. general management
consultants). The CEO, Colin Shaw, was a clear thought leader in this
space and the company had absolutely the best survey mechanism. The
survey was called the Emotional Signature, and rather than just getting the
usual satisfied/not satisfied, it was designed to uncover the subconscious
needs Customers have. I have a master’s in statistics and appreciated the
elegant and sound design.
Perhaps even more important than the statistics underneath was the
simplicity with which the results were provided. It made it abundantly clear
where we needed to focus and that became our foundation. Interestingly,
the results were almost completely at odds with where most thought we
should focus on to improve the customer experience. Rather than service
quality, such as on-time delivery, correct invoices, and snazzy websites,
the Customers needed us to help them resolve problems, show empathy,
and be proactive in our communications. This was about ­emotions. So the
saying, “This is business. Leave the emotions at the door” is erroneous and
x Foreword

blind to science. As human beings, we experience the world through our

senses. And the things that touch our senses drive emotions. Psychology
and overwhelming business research show that focusing on emotions is a
sound business strategy. The Emotional Signature was the best tool I had
to prove this point to the C-suite and our colleagues.
Armed with our focus areas, we selected colleagues from around the
world to be our ambassadors. Together, we set out to find ways to make
our Customers feel trust, cared for, and happy. Many of the ideas were
simple. Most did not cost a penny more. It was about how we did things,
as much as what we did. I was absolutely amazed at many creative and
innovative ideas from the teams.
The results far exceeded what we imagined could be done. Our Net
Promoter Score (NPS) improved by 40 points in two and a half years. We
were able to show a direct correlation between improved NPS and the
increase in Customers’ volume. Perhaps the part I loved the most was the
significant improvement in employee engagement. Gone were the days of
1-800-who-cares. Colleagues talked about “my Customers.” Trust, cared
for, and happy spilled over in how people worked and treated each other.
If you are thinking of reading the book, my recommendation is YES!
That initiative and Beyond Philosophy changed my life. I see the world
through different, and I believe, wiser eyes. Do I believe others can do
what we did? YES! I plan to with my current company Hellmann World-
wide Logistics. Colin, Zhecho, and the Beyond Philosophy Tteam are
already part of my Quality Customer Experience core team.
P.S. You may wonder why the word Customer is capitalized in afore-
mentioned story. During our rollout at Maersk, a colleague shared with
me that he decided to capitalize the C in Customers to (1) highlight their
significance and (2) remember they are real people. I never forgot that
and took that idea with me.

—Michél Patterson
North America VP
Digital Transformation and Innovation,
Customer Implementation, and Performance
 Introduction
“You guys have religion. I don’t. Prove to me that emotions drive value
in business.” These were the words of an executive of a global insurance
provider toward us more than a decade ago when we were talking about
focusing on customer emotions. That was and feels like it was a long
time ago. Since then, Beyond Philosophy has done research with London
­Business School proving that in fact emotions do drive value in business
and a lot more other organizations have done the same.
Nowadays, it seems like we don’t have to convince people that ­emotions
are essential in business. But, and it’s a big “but,” how many organizations
are actually deliberate about evoking certain targeted ­emotions? How
many CEOs have you heard talking to staff about focusing their strategy
on making an emotional connection with customers and evoking specific
emotions? And that is a big miss because by not being deliberate and not
operationalizing the focus on certain emotions, organizations miss on the
biggest driver of customer attitudes and behavior.
Hold on, some people might say, we do have data on customer
­emotions. We are measuring emotions. We have heard this answer many
times. But do you? Just very recently, someone working in the research
department of a large pharmaceutical company said to us they measure
emotions. So when I checked, “so you are measuring the extent to which
customers feel trust, feel cared for, feel valued and appreciated,” that person
said, “No, we don’t have that kind of data.” Most people we speak to, when
they say that they measure emotions, they mean doing some sentiment
analysis on customer verbatims. That could indeed be useful if done using
a trained Machine Learning (ML) algorithm, as we’ll discuss in the later
chapters of the book, but then again, that’s not what most organizations
are doing.
Hold on a minute, you still might say. We may not be explicitly
­measuring those, but our executives are intelligent people, they know
what customers want. The fact is that customers themselves don’t know
what they really want and what really drives their behavior. We’ll explain
xii Introduction

the underlying psychological reasons for this phenomenon later in the

book but just consider some of these examples. The premium customers
of a charge card company said the most important thing for them was that
the card is accepted by more merchants. The company’s executives would
often say that this is the big elephant in the room. However, it turned
out that it was the feeling of prestige that was really driving their engage-
ment with the company. Telecom customers in both the United States
and the Middle East would say that the most important for them was the
network when, in fact, it was how customers felt about the organization
that was making them renew their contracts. How do we know? Because
we have done research with organizations in those sectors. Just like we’ve
done research with a global U.S. earth-moving equipment manufacturer,
whose customers said they wanted dependable machines and available
parts for maintenance but then again it was them feeling cared for and
respected as customers that made them buy again from the manufac-
turer. Or how about patients of a U.S. hospital system saying the most
important for them is to spend more time with the doctor, when in fact it
was not the quantity of time spent with the doctor but the quality of the
interaction during that time. It was their silent need to feel genuinely lis-
tened to and empathized with that really affected the patient’s perception
and made them recommend the hospital system to others. A great deal of
the manner in which people act on the surface is driven by subconscious
aspects and emotions of which they are not necessarily aware of.
No wonder many customer experience programs fail to deliver the
desired results. Imagine going to your chief financial officer (CFO) and
saying we need to lower our rates because to improve customer satisfac-
tion we need to make the card accepted by more merchants. Or walking
out to the CFO and saying we need to either bring in more general prac-
titioners (GPs) or plan for fewer time slots within their schedule so they
can spend more time with the patients. You’d lose your job either right at
the moment or a few months later when it turns out the whole thing was
a deception and it’s not what customers really wanted.
“I think because, at the end of the day, what consumers told us they
would do, and what they actually did, were different things,” says Simon
Fox, the chief executive of the publisher behind the launch of a new
newspaper called New Day. It closed less than three months after it was
 Introduction
xiii

launched! [1] It was released on the basis of market research that showed
readers wanted a positive, politically neutral newspaper.
“‘We underestimated the deep emotional bond’ they [the most loyal
customers] had with the original packaging,” says Neil Campbell, presi-
dent at Tropicana North America, part of PepsiCo Americas Beverages,
after a packaging redesign led to a 20 percent drop in sales for the famous
orange juice in North America. This meant a loss of $30M of revenue,
not to mention the investment of $35M for an advertising campaign to
accompany the package redesign. [2] “What we didn’t get was the passion
this very loyal small group of consumers have. That wasn’t something that
came out in the research,” he goes on to add.
These two stories go on to show not just the dangers of getting
­customer research wrong and being deceived by what customers say they
want but also the power of customer emotional bonds and the uncon-
scious drivers of customer behavior. To understand why customers behave
the way they do, you need to understand how our minds are made to
work and the role emotions play in decision making.
How the world perceives the role emotions play in decision making
started to change with the work of Antonio Damasio and his wife. The
pair spent decades studying people who had suffered brain injuries result-
ing in their emotions being impaired but whose reason was otherwise
unaffected. They discovered that those people found it really hard to make
decisions and that emotions play a central role in decision making. Their
insights date back to the early 1990s; Colin Shaw’s book, The DNA of
Customer Experience: How Emotions Drive Value (Palgrave MacMillan),
was published in 2007; we met the first large organization that actually
measures emotions in 2013, but to date, we have rarely seen an organiza-
tion taking a systematic approach to evoking and measuring emotions...
Fast forward to the present time. Many organizations have invested
millions or billions of dollars in customer experience programs, hired
customer experience specialists and chief customer officers, implemented
measurement programs... Yet customer experience indexes are stagnating
or are in retreat mode; high street retailers are defaulting. Only that it
doesn’t have to be this way. There is plenty of evidence that organizations
can reap the benefits of their customer experience programs, and retailers
that master an emotional connection with customers flourish and grow.
xiv Introduction

After a long research on our large database covering nine industry

­sectors and a multitude of organizations from the United States, the
United Kingdom, Europe, Middle East, Africa, and Asia, we found that
businesses miss on the biggest driver of value (i.e., profitable customer
behavior). It is not showing on their radars because many organizations
use flawed research methods (i.e., relying heavily on what customers say
they want, etc.) or they don’t include emotions in their research and
predictive analytics. By not doing so, they miss 50 percent of the pic-
ture! Consequently, by not being deliberate about creating an emotional
attachment with customers, most of the time, they waste resources focus-
ing on less impactful or outright deceptive aspects.
Take as an example the plastic debit and credit cards. You’ve had
dozens or even over 100 of them, right? And you’ve chopped all but a
handful of them, never feeling that you are losing something, right? But
then I remember when Barclays came up with a feature allowing you to
customize it with a picture of your choice. I printed it with a picture of
my relatively new girlfriend at the time (now my partner and mother of
my son). I was in a distant relationship with her at the time, and when I
showed her the card, I said, “now I can’t take another girl out and pay for
dinner” (which was, of course, not true as I had several other credit cards,
but still…). I could see that this created positive emotions in her and had
a very deep emotional impact. She took it as a sign that I’m serious about
the relationship. Later, when I’d go to the pub, I’d see other people with
Barclays credit cards, waiting to order, who had their pets, and so on, on
the cards, and once or twice we had a good laugh about it. Clearly, the
technology and logistics came at a cost to Barclays, but they must have
realized that this will create an emotional attachment to something as
lame as a plastic card, and when the time came to get it scrapped, people
would feel they are losing something. I know because when Barclays had
to reissue my card with a different sort-code on it, my first and only ques-
tion was, “It’ll be with the same picture, right?”
While on the subject of cards, I remember an article in Bloomberg
about the time JP Morgan Chase made a card with a weighty metal core
(i.e., the Chase Sapphire Reserve card). It was in such high demand that
in just three weeks, Chase burned through its inventory of metal card
stock that was supposed to last 10 to 12 months. Yes, Chase had designed
 Introduction
xv

a good product in terms of bonus points, and so on, but for a $450
annual fee, they had to get something else right to create fans, not just
customers. Here’s what a customer said, “I have the Chase Sapphire Pre-
ferred, and virtually nothing gives me more pleasure when I pay and the
cashier notices how gorgeous that card is.” [3]
Now tell me, where is the rational thinking in that? It’s all about the
emotion! Of course, this was no news to us as we knew for a long time that
American Express Centurion customers, whose card is made of titanium,
feel the same way. The card weighs more, feels different and cool when you
touch it, and gives the feeling of prestige to customers. A psychological
explanation could be that, according to experiential ­p­sychology, we
associate weight with importance. From an early age, we learn that it
takes a lot more energy to move heavier objects and therefore we only
spend energy on worthwhile activities. An experiment by University of
­Amsterdam psychologist Nils Jostmann and his colleagues even showed
that carrying a heavier clipboard, rather than a light one, changes people’s
perception and the value they associate to things. [4] They found that those
who carried heavier clipboards overestimated the value of various foreign
currencies, so next time you go for a job interview, you may want to put
your CV on a clipboard! It may also be that the weight raises customers’
dopamine levels. According to Sean McQuay, the credit card expert at
NerdWallet, “Chase has basically realized that the weight raises customers’
dopamine levels.” [5] Dopamine is a hormone associated with the brain’s
reward system and pleasurable sensations (in later chapters we’ll reveal
more academic research on the link between certain hormones, emotions,
and behavior). Given all this, at present times, it comes as no surprise to us
to see that most of the fastest growing FinTech companies offer the option
of a premium metal card. [6] Yet, many established financial organizations
missed on this.
Here is the conundrum though: as we’ve said earlier, if you ask credit
card customers what they want, they’re most likely to tell you they want
rational things such as low interest rates, more points, cashback, and the
cards to be accepted by more merchants. (It’s logical, isn’t it? When the
card is not accepted, there is not much use for it!)
We will review this phenomenon and the underlying psychological
reasons for it in the book and we’ll reveal previously unpublished research
xvi Introduction

on the extent to which the various customer life cycle touchpoints that
businesses typically measure drive business value across different indus-
tries and why businesses are missing on the key driver of value ($$$).
We’ll provide further evidence from other researchers and explain
our research findings through the works of notorious academics: Nobel
­Laureates for economics, professors of psychology, and marketing.
We’ll discuss what this means when it comes to managing the cus-
tomer experience in an organization and the reasons why it’s stagnating.
Heads up—this is huge and requires a fundamental shift, not just in
understanding but in action. Because, if businesses were focused when
making decisions on what would foster an emotional connection, they
would make different decisions. But we know that they are not. And they
are about to miss the boat big time as they are now busy designing digital
experiences as if they are a process of clicks. We also know that it is not
working well either because reports say that about 70 percent of digital
transformation projects fail to deliver the results they envisaged. That puts
the wastage figure at about $900 billion annually. [7]
We’ll also show how the brand and marketing can foster an emotional
connection with customers at a time of a generational shift.
Finally, we’ll build a picture of how customer experience management
will look in the new digital world post-Covid-19 with the rise of customer
science teams and AI-powered data analysis.
 PART I

What Do Organizations
Miss on Today?
Consumers don’t think about how they feel. They don’t say what they
think and they don’t do what they say
—David Ogilvy

Colin Shaw, the CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC and author of seven
best-selling books on the topic of customer experience, always thought
that we have been sitting on a gold mine. We had gathered a large data-
base of millions of data points related to the various aspects of customer
experience, 20 emotions, and proxies for future financial performance for
organizations. It’s been so large that we just couldn’t get our heads around
it on how to proceed about analyzing it. Just as it so often happens, when
you have a problem in the back of your mind, one day you look at it
from another angle and the solution hits you in the face. As all our client
engagements got put on a temporary hold in the midst of the Covid-19
pandemic, I went on to analyze a large part of our database with some
nagging questions in mind. In Chapter 1, “The Nagging Questions,” we’ll
explain what those are and provide some background on prior research
into the role of emotions in business. Notably, the question that put me
on the path of this research was finding how important the feeling of a
relationship with an organization actually is in comparison to product
quality, price, ease of use, customer service, account management, the
digital self-service capabilities, and so on.
In Chapter 2, “Big Research Findings,” we will explain our methodol-
ogy and the main findings of our research. After analyzing a vast amount
of data from many large organizations in nine different industries across
the United States and Canada, the United Kingdom, and the rest of the
world, we found that the feeling of relationship and the overall emotional
2 The Big Miss

attachment to an organization are much bigger drivers of value compared

to the traditional touchpoints that organizations look at. However, those
typically do not feature on their journey maps, organizations don’t mea-
sure them, and they don’t have a deliberate strategy for how to go about
them. Therein lies a big miss and a big opportunity for organizations.
Our research also found that customers themselves don’t know what
they really want and that could be the reason why these emotional attach-
ment aspects seldom get registered on organizations’ radars. In addition,
not measuring emotions could leave organizations blind for a big part
of the experience as our research also revealed that emotions account for
almost 50 percent of value in the experience.
Don’t just take our word for it, though. In Chapter 3, “Evidence From
Independent Research,” we will look at the research other organizations
have made about the role of emotions in customer experience and busi-
ness. It also turned out that academic research shows that what makes
customers buy more from organizations are largely the same things that
make patients rate their physicians and hospital stay higher and also what
makes some personal partner relationships endure while others fail.
Why is it that emotional aspects play such an important role and yet,
when you ask people, they say that other things are a lot more important?
In Chapter 4, “The Psychological Explanation,” we will try to answer this
question by looking at how our brains are made to function. We will share
fascinating discoveries from highly esteemed psychologists and academ-
ics. So let’s get on to it...
 CHAPTER 1

The Nagging Questions

Hands up if you think relationships are important in business! Every time
we ask this question, we see a forest of hands up in the air. But exactly how
important are relationships when you compare them to product quality,
price, ease of use, customer service, account management, or self-service
capabilities? We set on several-month-long research to find out the answer
to this and other nagging questions … but first some background.

Antonio Damasio’s Research

For most of 20th century, the predominant thinking was that people are
mostly rational and make sound decisions. At the same time, emotions
such as fear, hatred, or affection were seen as the reasons why people devi-
ate from rationality. As such, emotions were deemed not to have a role in
the business world.
This was about to change when neuroscientist Antonio Damasio met
a patient named Elliot. Elliot had been a good husband, father, and suc-
cessful businessman. Soon after he started to suffer from severe headaches
and become easily distracted at work, his doctors found a tumor in his
brain, almost the size of a baseball. The doctors carefully removed the
tumor from the brain, but relatives quickly discovered that Elliot was
no longer the same. His intelligence and speech were intact, but often
he couldn’t even make routine decisions. Having to organize his docu-
ments at work, he couldn’t decide whether to sort them by date, size, or
relevance to the case, while choosing where to have lunch took all after-
noon. Despite being made aware of this flow and the time he was losing,
he could not correct it. A brain scan showed that his IQ, memory, and
learning capabilities were fine, but when they started testing his emo-
tional capability with images of injured people and burning houses, it was
revealed that he couldn’t feel anything.
4 The Big Miss

Elliot dispassionately reported to Damasio that his life was falling

apart. While still in the 97th percentile for IQ, his marriage collapsed, as
did each new business he started. Damasio found Elliott an “uninvolved
spectator” in his own life. In his book Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason
and the Human Brain (first published in 1994), Damasio writes:

He was always controlled. Nowhere was there a sense of his own

suffering, even though he was the protagonist. I never saw a tinge
of emotion in my many hours of conversation with him: no sad-
ness, no impatience, no frustration. [1]

Damasio and his wife, Hanna Damasio, had since spent years working
with patients, who had suffered brain injuries resulting in their emotions
being impaired, but whose reason was otherwise unaffected. They found
time and time again that these people were perfectly capable of reason
and leading a conversation, but when it came to making a decision, that
is, should I eat chicken or pasta, they couldn’t come up with one. The
advancement of technology meant that they could use imaging techniques
such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to study patients and start
understanding more about the areas of the brain involved in different
types of emotion.
The work of Antonio Damasio completely debunked the myth that
emotions have no role in decision making (or that they must be kept out).
It turned out that emotions were central for moving a thinking human
being to take action.
Here is the main point, though. In the preface to the 2005 edition of
Descartes Error, Damasio wrote,

Today this idea [that emotion assists the reasoning process] does
not cause any raised eyebrows. However, while this idea may not
raise any eyebrows today among neuroscientists, I believe it’s still
a surprise to the general public. We’re trained to regard emotions
as irrational impulses that are likely to lead us astray. [2]

More than 20 years into the 21st century, my observations show that
businesses have still not fully come to grasp this concept and have not
 The Nagging Questions 5

really operationalized creating emotions while conducting business. If

you think about it, the average age of the board of directors of the S&P
500 companies for 2017 was 62.4 years. [3] That means that most board
members have been educated based on the idea that emotions derail
sound decision making, not that they facilitate it, as an abundance of
subsequent work and the new field of behavioral science have shown. And
because most organizations are not measuring emotions, their analysis
can’t pinpoint them as something to focus on and thus those are missed
by organizations’ radars.
Jason Ten-Pow, author of UNBREAKABLE: A Proven Process for Build-
ing Unbreakable Relationships With Customers, thinks that since the 2008
financial crisis, executives have focused on cost-cutting and automation
and have largely neglected making any methodological steps toward creat-
ing deeper, more emotional relationships with customers. [4] So whether
it’s because of how they were taught when growing up, whether it’s due to
their methods of research, or whether it’s because of their focus on costs
and automation, there is overwhelming evidence that most businesses are
not being deliberate in focusing on creating emotional relationships with
customers and this is a big missed opportunity.

Beyond Philosophy’s 2005 to 2007 Research

When the second edition of Descartes Error was published (2005), Beyond
Philosophy, a pioneering customer experience consultancy selected by the
Financial Times as being one of the leading management consultancies
for four years in a row and counting (and where I’ve been working as
a management consultant for the last 12+ years), received a challenge
from a German executive of an insurer, with operations across the globe,
to prove to him that emotions are indeed important in business as the
team has been saying and that emotions affect business value. “The chal-
lenge with you guys is that you have religion, you believe in this, but
I don’t have a religion. Prove to me that emotions drive value in busi-
ness,” he said. So, Beyond Philosophy set on a two-year-long research
with professors from London Business School. The research culminated
in Colin Shaw’s book, The DNA of Customer Experience: How Emotions
Drive Value, P
­ algrave Macmillan, 2007. The team found 20 emotions (12
6 The Big Miss

Drivers Long-Term Value

Advocacy
cluster
Happy
Pleased
Recommendation cluster
Trusting Focused
Valued Safe
Cared for

Drivers
Short-Term
Spend
Attention cluster
Interesting Exploratory
Energetic Indulgent
Stimulated
Destroying cluster
Irritated Unsatisfied
Hurried Stressed
Neglected Disappoinment
Unhappy Frustrated

Figure 1.1  Beyond Philosophy’s 20 emotions that drive and

destroy value

positive and 8 negative) that drive and destroy business value and we have
been measuring them with organizations ever since.
The original research (Figure 1.1) found four clusters of emotions: the
Advocacy cluster consisting of happy and pleased; the Recommendation
cluster with trusting, valued, focused, safe, and cared for; the Attention
cluster with interesting, energetic, stimulated, pampered (indulgent), and
exploring options (exploratory); and the Destroying cluster with eight neg-
ative emotions: disappointed, dissatisfied, irritated, frustrated, neglected,
stressed, unhappy, and hurried.
Soon after we started measuring these with clients, we also realized that
we need to measure the stimulus for these emotions, that is, the aspects of
the experience that evoke those emotions and affect business value.

The Research Objectives

Fast forward to the Covid-19 lockdown in 2020. We have amassed a large
database of questions on the various aspects of customer experience that
cover all the life cycle stages of the customer journey. In addition, we also
have one of the largest databases on emotions and could link all these (the
aspects of the experience and the emotions) to business value (i.e., likelihood
to recommend the organization, remain a customer, and so on). We have
asked over 1M+ questions to customers of some of the largest and most
renowned companies across the globe, spanning many different industries.
 The Nagging Questions 7

We’ve also been working on many Behavioral Journey Mapping (as

we call it) projects, and we know that typically organizations look at the
customer journey life cycle. A simple Google image search will show you
many customer journey life cycle wheels or infinity wheels similar to the
one in Figure 1.2.

Billing &
B
Ad ran t Payment
ve d & uc

Cu r vice
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ar

rti
Pr
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sto
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sin
g

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Buy Use

ti o n s
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n ic a
ard ta
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Figure 1.2  Customer journey infinity life cycle

The work from Antonio Damasio and his wife showed that emotions
are intrinsic to our decision making. Colin Shaw and Beyond Philosophy
have proven that emotions drive value in business. Still though, sitting in
the lockdown, we had some nagging questions:

• Which of the customer journey life cycle moments drive the

most business value?
• Is there something important that these customer journey
wheels are missing, that is, where is the place to consider how
organizations create the feeling of a relationship with their
customers and form an emotional attachment?
• How vital is actually the feeling of a relationship and the
emotional attachment compared to the other customer jour-
ney lifecycle moments such as the buying experience,
the product experience, the digital self-service experience,
the customer service experience, the communications they
receive from organizations, and the rest of the customer
life cycle journey moments?
8 The Big Miss

• What journey moments have the biggest influence on the

feeling of a relationship with the organization?
• What role do emotions play compared to the rational aspects
of the experience?
• Is there a difference between what customers say they want
and what really drives business value ($$$)?
• Is there a big difference between business-to-business (B2B)
and business-to-consumer (B2C) or between industries?

So we set out on a research mission to provide quantifiable answers to

these questions.
 Index

Advertisements, 135–136 Business value, 5–10, 15, 18–20, 26,

emotional content, 137 55–57, 71 81, 93, 151–153
requirement, 138 customers want, 20–21
American Customer Satisfaction emotions, effect of, 30–32
Index (ACSI), 86, 93
Appreciation, feeling of, 116, Cared, feeling, 105, xii
118–121 Caring, 35, 115
Artificial intelligence (AI), 151–152, Chatbots, 175
165, 181 Communications, 18, 137
algorithms, 99 Conjoint analysis, 89, 92, 148
in customer acquisition, 168–163 Conscious thought, 50
in customer relationship building, Coordinated effort, 161–162
169–177 Customer
in customer retention, 169–177 acquisition, 168–163
machine learning (ML) algorithm, emotional engagement creation,
171 70–73
predictive analytics, 172, 180 feeling of relationship, 70–73
Attached customers, 38 personalization, 73–77
relationship building, 169–177
Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, 33 retention, 169–177
Background, Affect, Trouble, satisfaction, 86, xii
Handling, and Empathy service, 18
(BATHE), 24–32, 129 value, 126, 154, 157–158, 180
Baggage handling, 72 vision of, 103–104
“The Bankan Syndrome,” 45–46 Customer effort score (CES), 11
Barnum effect, 76 Customer experience, 51, 66
BATHE. See Background, Affect, indexes, 123
Trouble, Handling, and program, xiii, 123–133
Empathy (BATHE) value of, 12
B2B customers, 23 metrics, 13, 14
B2B health management software Customer-focused transformation,
application provider, 19 160
Behavioral level, 79 Customer journey infinity life cycle, 7
Behavioral science, 5, 12, 14, 29, 30, Customer life cycle journey
33, 41, 42, 47, 52, 66, 75, 82, touchpoints, 15–17
83, 91, 92, 124, 128, 148, Customer outcome metrics
151, 152, 160, 170, 180–184 customer experience metrics vs., 14
Benjamin Franklin effect, 118, 180 key experience metrics, 15–17
Big data, 177 Customer relationship management
Billing and payment, 18 (CRM) system, 71, 169, 176
200 index

Customer science, 179–184 Fear, 43, 58, 59, 64,96, 140

Customer service, 1, 3, 16-19, 88–89, Feeling valued, 105
105, 106, 135, 169, 174-175, Finance sector, customers, 23
183 Functional aspect, 22–23
Functional value, 126, 154
Data development, 164–165
Degree of brand, 11 Galvanic skin response (GSR)
Digital technology, 131, 152, 156 measures, 98
Digital transformation, 153–153, 166 Get onboard and training, 18
coordinated effort, 161–162 Growth, 157–160, 180
data development, 164–165
employee engagement, 162 Innovation, 157–160, 180
growth, 157–160 Integrity, 116, 141, 142, 144
innovation, 157–160 Integrity economy, 142, 147
marketing, 162–164 Interpreter, 45, 47, 52–53, 110
Intuitive system, 47–51, 53
Economic value, 126, 154
Electroencephalogram activity Journey mapping, 66–69
(EEG), 139 Jungle Adventure, 59
Emotional attachment, 15, 17–20,
22, 43, 77–78, 105–106 Key experience metrics, 15–17
aspects, 22–23, 31–32 Kids play, hospitals, 59
attributes, 20–23
brand, 35–39
Loss aversion, 12
Emotional connection, brand,
135–149
Emotional creativity, 140 Marketing, 39, 88, 126, 129–132,
Emotions, customer 140, 146, 151, 177, 179,
clusters of, 6 162–164
design, 57–65, 77–82 Machine Learning (ML) algorithm, xi
engagement, 64–65, 70–73 Mere-exposure effect, 30, 91, 180
emotional cookie, 65–66
in employee experience, 113–121 Nagging questions, 7–8
evoking, 103–111 Net Promoter Score (NPS), 11, 13
impact on business value, 30–32 Network, xii
importance of, 41–44 NICE ENLIGHTEN behavior
measurement, 6, 94 analysis model, 171, 172
momentary ratings, 96
recall-based ratings, 95 Open-ended questions, 86
recognition, 96–97 Operational performance, 13
Empathy, 61, 63, 64, 82 Organic growth, 157
Employee engagement, 116, 162 Oxytocin, 107
Experiencing self, 41–42
Experiential value, 126, 154 Partial least squares (PLS) path
Eye-tracking, 91, 97, 98 modeling, 87–89
Peak–end rule, 14, 42, 43, 52, 69–70,
Facial emotion recognition, 68, 91, 72, 96, 98, 172, 180
96–100 Personalization, 73–77
Facial expressions analysis, 91, 96–97 Personal relationships, 33–35
 Index 201

Pirate Adventure, 59–60 Structural equation modeling (SEM),

Predictive analytics, 9, 20, 72 9, 20, 21, 87, 92, 93, 100
Predictive behavioral routing (PBR), Subconscious aspects, 46–47
173 Symbolic value, 126, 154
Prestige, feeling of, xii, xv
Product and use, 17, 20–22, 78, 105, Telecom customers, 22–23
106 Time spending, xii
Product-related aspect, 22–23, 43, 46 Traditional conjoint analysis, 92
Trust, feeling of, 105, 106–107,
Rational system, 47, 49–53 116–118
Reflective level, 79–80
Relationship, feeling of, 70–73, 105
Unconscious thought, 50–51, 53
Remembering self, 41–42
Understanding, 35, 115
Respect, feeling, 73, 118–119, xii
United Kingdom’s Customer
Responsiveness, 35
Satisfaction Index (UKCSI),
Retention, 169–177
123
Role emotions, xiii
Running regression analysis, 176
Validation, 35, 115
Self-regulation, emotional, 34 Value indicators, 11
Social proof, 61, 109, 116, 180 Visceral level, 78
Starbucks, 105
Stimulus-response-effect model, 9–10 Well-being, 34–36, 38, 113, 117, 147