Emotional Satisfaction of Customer Contacts

Book excerpt: For marketing and customer services researchers and professionals who are interested in customer contacts, customer satisfaction and loyalty issues. Contact centers are playing a pivotal role in customer services of the 21st century. Nevertheless, despite their growing importance and presence, contact centers are increasingly becoming the center for customer frustration, and frequently associated with negative comments in the media. Therefore, this research explores the Emotional, Cognitive, General, and Transactional dimensions of customer satisfaction and loyalty process in the customer contact environment. As customer contacts can be a source of negative emotions and it is desirable to increase positive emotions in the contact center environment, this research focuses on the emotional aspects of customer satisfaction and on the Emotional Satisfaction of Customer Contacts (ESCC) in particular. Taking the ESCC as a starting point, this research demonstrates that frontline employees are able to observe and register customer satisfaction during service encounters, and suggests that the ESCC information can be employed for recovering service failures, increasing sales productivity and organizational learning for more customer satisfaction and loyalty.