Emotions have been "undiscussable" in business for a long time. "Feelings" is "F" word of business world. How many times have we heard that we are to keep our feelings out of it, keep our emotions away from our business decisions, and park our personal problems at door? Sound familiar? Well, I’ve learned that you cannot expect your staff to bring their passion to work but not their feelings. It just doesn’t work that way. It’s time we developed an emotional literacy in business.

Employees and Customers are people. People have feelings. And as people, their decisions are effected by their feelings, whether they can identify feelings or not. Any salesperson can tell you that while people make decisions that look logical, they are more often than not, based on emotion.

As people we are perceptive, conscious, sensitive, alive and feeling beings! It’s an essential part of our nature. When we recognize that in business, we’ll work harder at building emotional equity with a customer that determines whether or not they become a loyal customer or a lost customer.

It is perception, feeling of being cared about that keeps customers coming back. And it’s what we do to build and support and create that feeling that creates a positive experience for customer.

Every customer has two sets of needs. The business needs are logical, rational, and practical. The personal needs are emotional, illogical and sometimes even irrational, but carry a lot of weight. The fulfillment of customer’s business needs is usually what gets them in door in first place-you are selling what they need. But it’s fulfillment of customer’s personal needs that will keep them coming back. Once business needs are met, they often take a back seat to customer’s experiential needs.

It’s quality of emotional experience you have with a company that will determine whether or not you want to keep recreating that experience. We come back to companies that have what we want and create a positive experience for us. We leave companies that don’t have what we want or create a negative experience for us. Experience is emotional.

When a customer walks away from whole experience (your greeting, interacting with your Web site, dealing with people in your office...) of doing business with you with positive emotions like happiness, joy, delight, caring, security, welcome and appreciation - they will most likely want to come back (if you recreate positive emotions consistently).

If they walk away from experience with negative emotions like frustration, anger, disgust, fear, incompetence, indifference, if they leave with a lack of confidence, if they leave feeling stupid-and if that’s what’s delivered consistently - they usually don’t stay around unless they haven’t YET found some other place to go.

It’s quality of emotional experiences that customers have with you that will determine whether or not they will continue to do business with you over time.

What’s LOVE got to do with it? Maybe more than we thought!

Tim Sanders, Chief Solutions Officer, Yahoo writing in "Love is Killer App," says "What do I mean by "love?" The best general definition that I've read comes from philosopher Milton Mayeroff's brilliant book, On Caring. Love, he writes, ‘is selfless promotion of growth of other.’ When you help others grow to become best people that they can be, you are being loving, and as a result, you grow."

What a great description for what we want to happen in our business relationships! I want to do business with a company that believes in selfless promotion of growth of ME and my business! I want to give my money to companies that want to help me be best ME I can be - whether I’m buying cosmetics or computers or telephone service or food. I want to do business with someone who has my best interests in mind.

In lieu of that - I’ll do my own research, haul my own lumber and pump my own gas - but if I’m doing service work - then I want lowest price possible! I’m not loyal to companies that don’t care enough about me to make my experience with them easy, stress and hassle free, and pleasant. How about you?

What’s love got to do with it? A whole lot more than we ever thought. Let’s start doing a better job of creating experiences that customer perceives as positive, caring, and yes, maybe even loving.

I for one do not want to have to check every email I send and see if for instance I have unsubscribe as a word in it. Especially when anti-spam laws say I must give opt-in subscribers a way to un*subscribe. I also do not want to put in my address book people I want mail from and then have someones spam filter look in my address book this is more an invasion of privacy than spammers.

I think more communication between isp's, ezine publishers, internet marketers is need. Call your isp tell them how much or how little you want to have filtered. My experience when I did this is they told me they have filters in place but they are not blocking me sending directly to domain or are they blocking my incoming mail. One email box I have takes my spam and puts it in my trash folder that way I can go through it sort by spam scores and get emails I want this is at least a acceptable scompromise between spam and me deciding who I want to hear from. Call your isp object to filters, call your congressman or email him and object to isp's having power to decide who you email and who you receive mail from.