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Human emotions are complex. Studies have uncovered 27 basic emotion types—which is why it’s no surprise that a person’s feelings can be difficult for the next person to comprehend, let alone for a computer to analyze and capture. However, when you consider that emotions are central to customers’ decision-making processes, a data-driven tool that can help you understand how customers truly feel is invaluable to business growth.
Emotional Intelligence: An Overview
While it may sound like a loose plot for the latest artificial intelligence (AI) Hollywood blockbuster, using machines to understand customer emotion is now very much a reality. In this process, known as emotional intelligence or EQ, computers capture emotion from human speech and actions.
For example, Amazon is honing its Alexa AI tool to decipher users’ emotional state through their voices. The AI assistant can then use this insight to provide personalized responses based on the user’s mood and facilitate more in-depth conversations. An emotion AI system is also capable of scanning a person’s face to monitor their responses for levels of dependability, empathy, nervousness and truthfulness.
These unique AI qualities can assist customer experience (CX) leaders in pinpointing how their customers truly feel, which in turn can help them craft offerings and interactions that are more customer-centric.
How AI Captures and Measures Emotion
People convey their emotions not just in what they say but in how they say it. Machines can now capture a range of human emotions, from anger and happiness to sadness, by analyzing a person’s tone of voice, the speed at which they speak, the volume of their voice, their body language and facial expressions.
Emotion AI assesses a person’s emotional state, including their mood and attitude, using advanced algorithms. It evaluates a person’s tone and voice quality, the position of their face and even subtle facial movements or expressions, to generate a score based on specific emotions, like anger, fear, happiness, or neutrality. It can also recognize mood changes during an interaction, which can be vital to understanding the person’s needs in real-time.
How CX Leaders and Their Teams Can Benefit From Emotion AI
Emotion AI enables brands to recognize how people feel about their products and services. It can help them track customers’ happiness levels throughout the entire customer journey, as well as before, during and after every interaction with salespeople and agents.
Advantages of emotion AI:
- Enhanced consumer understanding: Brands gain a deeper understanding of customer sentiment, with emotional AI assessing human interaction for qualities like anxiety, disgust, frustration, enjoyment, satisfaction and surprise. These insights provide a window into how customers really feel about a brand, especially since emotions can change from day to day.
- Improved contextual awareness: Context is vital to recognizing how a customer truly feels. For example, a customer may tell a call center agent they’re happy with the service they just received, but emotion AI can analyze patterns in their speech to deduce that they are being sarcastic or lying. Understanding this in real-time can help brands capture customers’ true feelings and take the steps necessary to drive loyalty.
- Better understanding of customers’ requirements: A customer’s change in mood during an interaction provides brands with valuable insight into their unique needs. Using emotion AI, CX leaders can identify which messages or services click with a customer and what triggers their discontent or unhappiness.
How Emotion AI Can Drive CX Strategies
Transforming CX with emotion AI can help brands reshape their short- and long-term strategies. CX leaders can use real-time emotion AI data to understand how intensely a person feels about their products, the quality of their customer service and how that affects consumer behavior.
With emotion AI in CX, companies can:
- Offer better products and services: Emotion AI can help identify services that make customers feel happy and valued. Likewise, it can measure whether users are frustrated by updates or believe that products aren’t relevant to their needs and requirements.
- Improve product roadmaps: Information provided by emotion AI can guide organizations in creating product roadmaps better suited to customers’ expectations. It can help them tailor their solutions and services to each customer’s individual needs, as well as evolve their offerings based on customers’ real-time state of mind.
- Personalize CX: Brands can also use discontent triggers or changes in emotions to improve customer experiences by personalizing their services for better engagement. This is particularly beneficial during virtual sales engagements, where digital channels make it difficult for sellers to “read the room.”
- Improve team performance: EQ feedback from interactions can help coach team members to be more effective and empathetic communicators and to even identify selling opportunities revealed by emotional cues.
Truly Understanding Your Customers
Emotions are a powerful tool in establishing human relationships, solidifying customer experiences and connecting consumers to a brand. Understanding how a customer truly feels and why they like or dislike a service or product—and then proactively taking the steps to turn negative sentiment around— can help CX leaders and their teams strengthen customer loyalty and engagement.
No one knows this better than Uniphore. Our Conversational AI platform leverages the power of emotion AI to unlock the full value of every enterprise conversation. Our latest innovation—Q for Sales—empowers revenue teams to perform more effectively during remote engagements with real-time EQ data. Combining computer vision with automated speech recognition (ASR), natural language processing (NLP) and audio-based tonal/sentiment analysis, Q helps sellers who can’t meet customers face to face “read the room” and adjust their presentations based on live emotional feedback. With the rise in digital interactions, the ability to effectively gauge EQ gives CX—and Sales—organizations a significant advantage over their competitors.
To discover what’s actually happening in AI and how Uniphore’s solutions are enabling brands across all industries to revolutionize their CX, read our blog on advances in AI.