A good indicator of service excellence is strong customer loyalty. Loyalty is about building sustainable relationships through an emotional connection.  At this year’s Member Summit we will discuss the emotional elements that drive loyalty. While we talk about loyalty as an important business outcome we don’t talk enough about the powerful underlying emotions that create loyalty.

Emotions are difficult to define. Fisher and Shapiro (see “Beyond Reason”) have identified a powerful, five element framework to deal with emotions.  Jamil Mahuad, one of our keynote speakers, used the core concerns framework to help resolve a fifty-year boundary dispute between Peru-Ecuador. We can see emotions at play in sustainable relationships, with customers, between customers in online communities and perhaps most importantly with employees.

The five core concerns are:

• Appreciation  our contribution, opinions and feelings are acknowledged
• Affiliation we are treated as a colleague in a community we care about 
• Autonomy we are respected for our freedom to make decisions on important matters
• Status our standing or reputation, based on past accomplishment, is acknowledged
• Role our role is fulfilling or meaningful
  
  These five concerns stimulate emotions that align with the same observations that Hertzberg makes in one of our most often referenced HBR articles “One More Time; How do you Motivate Employees?” Hertzberg’s research showed that a sense of accomplishment and recognition are the two strongest motivators followed by responsibility and interesting work.

How good are we at paying attention to these emotional elements at work, in our service organizations? As part of the Leadership Framework for Service Excellence we have coined the phrase “people are people first – independent of their role”.  This gets at the idea that in a services model loyal employees will create loyal customers.  Or stated another way – we should think about and treat our employees the same way we would treat our customers.

Join us for a discussion on sustainable relationships at the Consortium for Service Innovation Member Summit, November 10-13, 2008 at the Sonoma Mission Inn in Sonoma California.

There are often questions about how organizations and individuals get started with value networks.

There exists a well-crafted on-ramp for value networks adoption. It is gently sloping and step-x-step. Each Level of the comprehensive offerings furnish increasing degrees of personal attention and capability. Value networks adoption is configured as a simple a la carte menu of services and offerings. The table below elaborates your on-ramp.