Feelings: Elasticity of feelings

The moment feelings is brought up as a way of assessing customer satisfaction, some people gave a blank look. It's rather surprising that the majority of managers and customer service personnel still disregard feelings of a customer as a very important factor.

Fact: Feelings is one of the key factors in gauging customer satisfaction.

Here, we discuss elasticity of feeelings and what it means and also how you can undertake to address this area in your own organisation.

Picture this. Bob is in a queue at a ticketing counter. The line is long with some 25 people. He looks around and notices that only one clerk is at the counter although it has 5 other available counter staff seats vacant. He asks himself "Why can't they have 4 or 5 staff working on this shift? The line is so long and it FEELS like it's going to take forever before it gets to be my turn."

Before long it's Bob's turn. He looks at his watch and to his surprise it's been only about ten minutes he's been in line. However, it felt much more like an hour!

Companies must find a way to alleviate this type of FEELING from their customers. When customers FEEL like this, they also tend to FEEL that they are getting the short end of the bargain. They start asking questions like why can't more staff be put on duty? Does the company really care for their customers? Why can't the company at least try to make their customers more comfortable? And so forth. In fact, from this scenario alone, you probably have your own questions to ask too.

Let's understand elasticity of feeling. The example of Bob's feeling can vary from one person to another. Some others may have felt like they were in line for 2 hours or 3 or 4.

But the fact remains. None of them felt like it was 10 minutes.