Competition for the emotional loyalty of customers to a brand is in full swing. Aldous Huxley once wrote that “experience is not what happens to you -- it's how you interpret what happens to you.” It’s no longer just about what is objectively measurable; rather, a considerable part of customer loyalty now takes place on an emotional level. What makes a good product or service is simply a matter of customer perception.
For this reason, it is no longer sufficient for companies to concentrate on factual success factors such as:
• Does a product work properly?
• What is its average life expectancy?
• Are the features better than those of the competition?
• Is the design cutting edge?
• Is there a high level of customer satisfaction?
Companies that desire to be successful in the face of global competition must be able to give an emphatic “yes” to questions like these. Who would seriously argue with this? After all, it is the fulfillment of a brand promise -- and that alone is no longer good enough.
What Is a Customer’s Emotional Reaction To An Experience?
The difference between merely successful companies and true champions lies in another dimension. Real leaders try to understand how a customer emotionally reacts to an experience. True champions work with emotional intelligence and endeavor to penetrate the depths of their customers’ emotional world.
Let’s take a concrete example: In hardly any other area do emotions play such a dominant role as in customer service. While product experiences and the emotional reaction of customers can be predicted relatively well, the service world is much more complex. Put simply, emotions are more important than customer satisfaction.
The range of customer experiences together, when tied to different emotional reactions, is enormous. For example, a waiting time of three days for a smartphone repair may be perceived by one customer as too slow, but another customer may find this satisfactory. Was the call center employee friendly or not? Did the service staff really try to help me solve my problem? At the end of the day, these are questions of interpretation.
Now you could argue that this alone is not a new insight. That’s right! However, with the rapidly advancing development of artificial intelligence, we are making quantum leaps on the journey from knowledge to practical solutions -- something that would have been unthinkable until recently.
Emotional Intelligence: When The Robot Predicts Emotions
Artificial intelligence emulates human decision making processes in an unstructured environment. Computers work on problems independently and replicate thinking patterns that were previously unique to us as humans. Intelligence becomes replicable, automated and scalable. An artificially intelligent computer can already handle recurring processes effortlessly and is constantly learning new things:
• Chatbots replace conventional FAQ sections on websites and add new customer requests to the question catalog.
• Industrial robots perform routine production tasks and suggest ideas for process optimization.
• Autonomous warehouse vehicles analyze their routes and optimize their planned routes independently.
However, can a computer also take into account or even predict a person's emotional reaction when interacting with them and dynamically adapt its own behavior? Are computers capable of emotional intelligence? The answer is yes, as the following examples show:
• A research team at Ohio State University fed artificial intelligence with typical patterns that we use to assess other people’s emotional states based on their facial expressions. The computer was able to apply these to photos and videos and determine the emotional situation of the person being portrayed.
• In a chat dialog or call center conversation, many words are exchanged that provide information about the customer’s mood. The computer extracts these from the call log, analyzes them in real time and gives the service employee valuable information about the customer’s emotional state.
• Even static data such as geolocation, time of day, age, profession or click behavior on a website can be used to draw conclusions about a customer’s emotions. In order to make reliable points at the end, the trick is to use as much data as possible for the analysis and to check the correlation with other emotion indicators.
Emotionally intelligent applications like these are technically possible thanks to computers and algorithms that merge and interpret emotional indicators. The assessment of the emotional state is more precise when more indicators are available, which, in turn, serves as an important basis for building an emotional relationship with customers.
According to a Harvard Business Review article, "Emotionally connected customers are more than twice as valuable as highly satisfied customers." They buy from a brand more often, pay less attention to the price and recommend the brand to others. It is therefore worth investing in a strategy that goes beyond classic customer experience tactics such as mapping customer journeys and measuring customer satisfaction.
Modern, customer-centric organizations focus on strengthening the emotional connection to their customers at decisive points along the customer journey, and thanks to intelligent technologies, this is no longer rocket science.
