Digitize for the emotions

Emotions are driving the performance of service businesses and professional organizations. When leading services, the profit should be placed in the middle and the key emotions around it. In the long term, profit provides the facts on whether right things are being done in the right way – with feelings driving the ultimate performance.

In the picture below, three feelings are surrounding the profit (€): happy people, happy customers, and meaningful collaboration between the two. As a leader, I often say that I am leading feelings most of the time, and when making decisions, also the facts come into play. After all, service business is a motivation game.

Here, meaningful collaboration is related to service objects which form the shared passion between the service supplier and the customer. Service objects may be products, people, processes or messages; and they are associated with many feelings such as trust in deliveries, love for the game, dependability of software, or appreciation on a message. The world is full of service objects, with many of those actually wishing to be more subjects than objects.

With happy people and happy customers, your business is doing fine. And when the service objects are also feeling good and constantly improving, both the purpose and the outcome of collaboration are beating strong in the hearts of your people and your customers.

The above-described emotional triangle forms the essence of service businesses, hence it should be in the focus when building new digital solutions. In my experience, all the three emotions can be amplified, and in fact, they can form the key digitization targets.

Consequently, I like dividing the digital strategy into three environments: iPeople, iService and iCustomer. Inspired by Steve Jobs, I am often using the i-prefix. Too many digitization programs are overly process-driven, so I want to highlight the user friendliness. We do not work in processes, we work in daily situations.

The first environment enables a digitally social working place, the second one a digitally mobile service work, and the third one a digitally attractive customer engagement. When you have a clear view on the key functionalities needed to reach these targets, you can make better decisions on how to digitize for the emotions driving your business. Furthermore, you can communicate your plan in an understandable and appealing way.

As a leader, you definitely need to be a shark in business performance because your organization deserves to be or become winners. However, you should not build control-oriented digital platforms. The real knowledge is in the action of your people and your customers, i.e., not in the digital database or in your P&L statement.

In summary, I recommend you to keep the digitization focus on solutions enabling smooth work flows, sharing of information, and exchange of ideas. In this way, both the facts and the feelings will drive the decisions and the performance of your organization in a committing, learning and rewarding way.

Be a kind shark also when digitizing!