Many clients often ask for advice with regards to setting KPI's for measuring customer service performance. Often discussions focus on Satisfaction, Advocacy (NPS), Effort and Query Resolution. Whilst these measures are very relevant, measuring the customer's emotional response to a service interaction is generally not top of mind. Research often explores the emotional responses consumers have to brand, marketing and advertising programmes, but less often focuses on the measurement of consumers' emotions prior, during and as a result of a service experience with an organisation. Traditional measures of service experience tend to focus on the cognitive response (level of satisfaction) whilst neglecting the emotional response and its impact on customer future behaviour.

It has been proven that the measure of customer satisfaction, as the primary surrogate of the customer experience and its usefulness in predicting customer behaviour is limited. Satisfaction is a mental assessment of expectations minus service received and does not pick up feelings or emotions. Service interactions can involve up to 75% emotional processing and, as such, it is essential that an assessment of customer experience encompasses both cognitive and emotional measures that can be used to predict how a customer will respond or act in the future.

Leading academics, marketing theorists and practitioners now prefer to model the customer experience on both a customer's psychological or cognitive response (satisfaction) to a service experience as well as their emotional reactions (connection). A combination of both cognitive and emotional response provides a measure of a customer's engagement with an organisation. Engagement has been demonstrated to be an excellent surrogate for the customer's overall experience and a significant predictor of a customer's future behaviour with an organisation.

At Fifth Quadrant we have demonstrated the importance of measuring and understanding emotion and have proven the link between emotion and future behaviour in every customer engagement research study it has conducted over the last 5 years. More specifically the measure of 'happiness' has been statistically proven, both by Fifth Quadrant's own research and from studies in the literature (e.g. The DNA of Customer Experience by Colin Shaw), to be the primary emotion that drives positive future customer behaviour i.e. future purchase/usage and advocacy. Whilst other emotions are important to the service experience (e.g. pleased, calm, stressed), happiness has been proven to be the strongest single emotional predictor of future behaviour and therefore why Fifth Quadrant places such importance on including 'happiness' within any measure of service experience.