The document discusses measuring emotions in customer experience. It argues that capturing customer emotions is important but challenging due to the many measurement tools. It recommends building a measurement toolbox by defining metrics for key emotions, finding experiences where emotions most impact behavior, and identifying value-creating versus value-destroying emotions. Examples of tools for measuring emotions include surveys, sentiment analysis, facial coding, voice analysis, and body sensors. Case studies show how companies have used these tools to better understand customer emotions.
A few weeks ago I was on the plane from SLC to Chicago and had a 90min layover to connect to my flight home to Boston. It was Friday, I had a long week, I had a lot of pumped milk (maybe TMI) in my luggage and I wanted to get home to my kids. And – as it always happens in those kinds of situations, my plane out of SLC was delayed, first 30 min, then 60 minutes, then 90 minutes. [As I was in the air, connected to paid WIFI, I kept trying to reach the airline on twitter. If you were following me on twitter you would have been able to read my pleas to wait for me – which increased in intensity as we neared Chicago.]
Long story short, I got stranded in Chicago. I vowed to not fly this airline again. I was so, so annoyed. And this left a lasting impression because it was SUCH an emotionally exhausting journey. I actually ended up crying in front of the service desk agent – who gave me a tissue (do they keep them there because they know customers are going to cry?). And when I finally got home, I was still drained.
But these kinds of stories don’t only happen to people like me in the CX profession (I just have the advantage to be able to spread the word like I am doing today). And not only to airline flyers. They happen every day, to customers and often they are much worse.
And that is a problem. Because we know from data that
If customers feel annoyed, they are 5 times LESS loyal than if they feel valued! This is based on a large scale CX benchmark Forrester runs each year where we also measure the emotions customers feel and can model which emotions drive CX and loyalty.
If it is so important to avoid emotions like feeling annoyance, we must be able to measure whether they occur.
And we should also be able to tell whether the signature moments we so carefully designed actually work to evoke the positive emotions we were striving for.
So we must be able to measure how customers feel!
But when you think about how we measure CX…
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Capturing emotions when measuring CX is at best a nascent practice
I talk to a lot of people in CX about how they measure CX. And I often find a very rational approach through surveys that focus clients on attributes of the experience and asking them to rate those on a scale.
It’s not so surprising that emotion measurement is nascent. I talk about this to companies all the time and there are really 3 big challenges.
First…
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…emotion measurement is hard.
Emotions happen at a subconscious level, making them hard to verbalize. Therefore, to measure emotions, you have to find a way to measure indicators of emotions.
Emotions depend on context - “Mundane” experiences can be emotionally charged in a specific context. Bank account example where husband died
And emotions are fleeting, i.e., experienced in the moment. How customers remember the emotions they felt depends on a number of factors, distorting the original emotion
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Most CX pros are only starting to delve into how familiar tools like surveys and text analysis can help measure emotions. Fewer still have explored the quickly evolving landscape of advanced emotion measurement tools – like facial coding or neurophysiological measurement – and how to apply them to CX measurement. That’s partly because current use cases for those tools center on marketing or CX design, not CX measurement.
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Skepticism about measuring emotion at all abounds. Companies too often shy away from focusing on the emotional dimension of CX because emotions seem abstract, intangible, and irrational. Even if stakeholders concede that emotions matter in CX, the subjective nature of emotions leaves people unsure if emotion metrics are trustworthy.
I have been doing this for a while and let me tell you – metrics really take hold in an organization if the organization trusts them enough to include them in employees personal goals.
So who if you works in companies that’s measure NPS or effort? How many of you work on companies who tie any compensation to that? And who of you work in companies that tie compensation to emotion metrics?
Most organizations have long moved past the doubt that “experience” is far too subjective to become part of a measurement program. Many companies now even base compensation for some or all of their employees on CX metrics like NPS, CSAT, or customer effort.
So when it comes to emotion metrics, we are a loooong way from that!
But very few CX pros and vendor experts we spoke to said that firms trust the data enough to hold employees accountable for emotion metrics.
So how do you get to a place where you can help avoid negative and validate positive emotions? You need to upgrade your existing CX measurement to better capture emotions.
Let me tell you today about how to do that.
So what should you do? Let’s start with what a good measurement program should allow you to do. Because that is your baseline.
[Read the three steps]
So first, define emotion KPIs – that means define metrics for critical emotions.
What you’ll see is that I will ask you to focus, focus, focus to not get lost in emotion measurement land
Ask yourself first – which are the …
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…experiences where emotions affect customer behavior the most
Existing research and journey mapping are great tools to do this.
For example, Andrew Reise Consulting worked with a health insurance client to do this. They reviewed existing research and then conducted a series of workshops to isolate critical experiences . One example for an experiences where emotions impact member decision-making most, was receiving notice of a premium increase.
KLICK
Now, for each of those experiences – ask yourself, what are critical emotions? There are so many you can measure…
Think for example of publicly available …
… emotion frameworks like this one from Paul Ekman
This emotion atlas is a great resource.
In the emotion atlas you can see the intensity of emotions, triggers but also behaviors that follow.
But remember what your goal in measuring emotions is – understand the emotions that most influence behavior. That’s why you should …
SOURCE: Maersk
…identify which emotions create value and which emotions destroy value.
That’s what Maersk did with Beyond Philosophy. They used advanced statistical analyses to find three emotions that create value throughout the customer relationship: feeling trusted, cared for, and pleased
If you don’t have this kind of time to study you can rely on data that is available like …
Forrester’s customer experience index data. In our CX Index study I mentioned earlier we found
Making customers feel valued, appreciated, and confident drives loyalty. For example, in the hotel industry, among customers who felt valued, 90% will advocate for the brand, 67% plan to increase their spending with the brand, and 87% plan to stay with the brand. This matters to the bottom line because a one-point improvement in its CX Index score can lead to an incremental $65 million in revenue for an upscale hotel brand. (see endnote 6)
Annoyance, disappointment, and frustration signal an underperforming brand. Angering your customers isn't as harmful to their loyalty as making them feel annoyed, disappointed, and frustrated. We found that the TV service provider industry had the largest percentage of customers who felt annoyed compared with any other industry in our study. The result is that just 8% will advocate for the brand, only 13% plan to increase their spending with the brand, and barely 15% plan to stay with the brand. These negative emotions hurt revenues: A large TV service provider leaves $61 million on the table for every one-point decline in its CX Index score.
When you have defined critical emotions, you can
…you define metrics that allow you to track how customers feel.
Here are a few examples that measure how customers feel or what emotions are expressed about an experience.
READ
An interesting one that I recommend you look at is the ratio of positive to negative emotions. And let me give you a few benchmarks here
8 to 1 on average in the CX Index
24 to 1 the best brands in the index, including brands like USAA, Navy Federal, QVC, Etsy
64 to 1 is – can you guess? zappos
Once you know which metrics you would like to measure, you must build your measurement toolbox.
Let me show you different ways to think about measuring emotions but my key message for you is that start by being pragmatic so you can even make the case for investing in more advanced technologies.
Before I go there, let me share some essential fact about measuring emotions.
You have probably heard about Daniel Kahneman who wrote a lot about behavioral economics. And one of the key distinctions he makes is between…
The experiencing self which will ask “How do I feel now” and the remembering self which will ask “How did I feel overall”
Do you know why this is important? It is important because you depending on the tool you use you can measure one or both of those.
In most cases what you must understand is how the remembering self feels because it is those memories that shape our behaviors as Diane said. And that’s what you see many of the metrics out there do – think about sentiment for example.
If you can intervene in experiences, there is a role for realtime and near-realtime detection, to help you flag negative emotions as they occur and adjust the experience in realtime.
Ok, so I said “toolbox”. Why toolbox?
You need a toolbox because ways to capture emotion really fall into three groups.
There are three different indicators of emotions
1) Subjective feelings – how somebody feels, usually self-reflected
2) Expressive behaviors – like how my voice changes, my expression
3) Bodily arousal in response to a stimulus
Each tool available focuses on one or more of those indicators. So you must decide what you want to measure to select the right tool.
BUT you also must be pragmatic – some of these tools require investments
So first, think about how you can use some of the ways you currently collect data about customer experiences.
And much of that asks customers to self reflect in surveys or they look at other feedback – which measures subjective feelings
So let’s start with that.
Just as HSBC did…
SOURCE: Brainjuicer
With brainjuicer. They used visual queues to survey HSBC customers about how they felt about their visit right as customers left the branch. They used a kiosk.
Neutrality was the result of normal service – normal service does NOT trigger happiness!
Happiness was triggered by a warm welcome, quick service and an overall positive experience that surpassed expectations
Anger was usually triggered by perceived incompetence
Disgust was triggered by when customers felt their custom was being taken for granted and that they were not being looked after.
Contempt was triggered by irritations at the branch resulting from a lack of care or attention to detail
Note also, that BrainJuicer also asks WHY customers felt the way they did which helps get more context. And what they found was that emotions were negative after lunch – which was when managers in branches weren’t as present to motivate employees. And emotions were low at the end of the month when there was still month left but money might have run out for customers. Now that isnt something employees can affect primarily but it is important to know because it tells us that we need to train employees to expect this.
So this is surveys - but when it comes to measuring CX, unstructured feedback becomes more and more important.
So you can use this data source to measure how customers feel. Like in the case of Verizon…
Verizon used Clarabridge for their sentiment analysis and found increased negative sentiment on social media about billing during Hurricane Sandy. Further analysis highlighted a spike in words and phrases associated with “concern.” When the firm dug deeper in the posts, it found customers were anxious they would incur charges because outages prevented them from paying their bill on time. To alleviate this concern, Verizon announced that they would waive the late fee.
However, what customers write or say isn’t always easy to mine for emotions. For example our friends from Personality Labs found that in 57% of calls customers have not used a specific word describing emotion. This makes it hard to figure out what customers felt.
So a very interesting approach is to…
…combine what customers say with their personality style
The process communication model is one way of getting at that personality style.
It describes 6 styles in which people communicate. And when people are stressed they tend to fall back on their specific style even more.
And to identify distress, one can look at the speech patterns of customers.
For example
EXPLAIN/READ
So taking this, it is possible to identify customers in distress – and I mentioned earlier how important annoyance is to identify
So you can identify when calls go awry and coach employees about those patterns so they can better identify distressed customers and turn the call around.
The next way to measure emotions is to look at what customers give away in their voice or their face.
>Joke about me and not being a diplomat<
And here it is really about microexpressions
This is what companies like Affectiva track
Affectiva has automated facial emotion recognition.
1 Extract landmarks on the face
2 Assess movement shape and texture
3 infer emotional and mental state
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http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/jonathan-kay-you-think-youve-got-a-stressful-work-life-try-clopening-a-fast-food-restautant
So here is a practical example of this: Facial analysis is already used to measure emotions in ad hoc studies – like a deep dive into customer emotions. So not practical for tracking, yet but good for measuring ad hoc
For a major fast food restaurant, facial coding firm Emotient who was acquired by Apple recently deployed cameras in restaurants that monitored the order line, pick up line, drive up window, and crew. Using these cameras, they collected data on emotional experiences of customers and employees during the course of the day. An important finding was that employees were more stressed than customers, especially before the lunch rush. As a result, Emotient’s client developed a project to handle the rush, including better support for the drive-through.
And finally, measuring emotions using physiological signals
IMAGE: Youtube spot by British Airways
British Airways used those mood blankets that lit up red when a passenger was stressed and blue is a customer was relaxed. Yes, this isn’t practical for ongoing measurement. But it was a great way to test in ad hoc research when passengers feel stressed or relaxed during a flight. It confirmed that sleep was good which tells you that airlines need to do more to enable good sleep
And there are ever more and new developments – maybe you have heard of this one…
http://news.mit.edu/2016/detecting-emotions-with-wireless-signals-0920
mPath – a spin off from the MIT and their mPath sensor. They use that for example to measure stress levels in a shopping journey.
Or the newest development: MIT Lab’s EQ Radio! It sends wireless signals that reflect off of a person’s body and back to the device. That way it can measure subtle changes in breathing and heart rhythms and can at an 87% accuracy detect if a person is excited, happy, angry or sad — without any on-body sensors.
[The exact correlations vary from person to person, but are consistent enough that EQ-Radio could detect emotions with 70 percent accuracy even when it hadn’t previously measured the target person’s heartbeat.
“Just by knowing how people breathe and how their hearts beat in different emotional states, we can look at a random person’s heartbeat and reliably detect their emotions,” says Zhao.]
So to summarize, here are a few examples of methods that help detect these different indicators of emotions. They all have their pros and cons and if you want to know more about the pros and cons of these methods, let me know and I am happy to discuss.
So when you think of these tools, there is one more important thing to keep in mind … You have probably heard about Daniel Kahneman who wrote a lot about behavioral economics. And one of the key distinctions he makes is between…
Thinking about how to measure and drive action is critical. But it isn’t enough.
You must
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To get their engineering-driven company to focus on how customers feel, the CX team at Lenovo started to analyze and report on sentiment. To show why sentiment mattered, the team analyzed sentiment and operational data across geographies. They were able to demonstrate that sentiment is an early indicator of business KPIs like cost to serve, sales, and returns. As a result, they increased the number of employees who consume and act on VoC insights, especially sentiment data, from 0 to 600 in 2 years. Moreover, sentiment score has become one of the key metrics for managers and executives in the firm. The SVP of product looks at changes in sentiment frequently, while the chief operating officer and the CEO have asked to see the data on a monthly basis.
To share both quantitative and qualitative insights about how customers feel about experiences with a large retailer, that firm shows digital feedback management vendor OpinionLab’s Comment Mosaic throughout its headquarters. The Mosaic displays actual customer verbatims in real-time on red, yellow or green tiles, depending on the self-reported sentiment
Understanding and buy in is great. But you also need to give employees a sense of control on how they can actually influence customers’ emotions (and with that emotion metrics). Which is what …
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…FedEx did. FedEx created a 50-page guide that teaches employees how to detect emotional states by listening to a customer's voice. The guide offers tips like resisting the urge to interrupt because it makes customers feel "inadequate, uninformed, and powerless." FedEx also coaches employees to deliver bad news, like a shipping delay, very early in an interaction and move quickly to a discussion about how to minimize the fallout
If you want to know more about this topic, here are a few more resources.
Here are some further resources. First, reports. And then there is also our CX Cast which you can download from itunes
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Like Diane showed you, United Airlines used its post-trip survey question about emotion to highlight journeys that went poorly.
United then uses text analysis on open survey comments combined with customer information (e.g. loyalty program status) and operational data (e.g. gate, flight delays, seat assignment) to provide more context.
And this was really worthwhile. Because after United found negative emotions and sentiment around baggage delivery for one of their big hubs, they decided to changed processes and schedules for baggage handlers, which led to improved emotion metrics. This ultimately resulted in an NPS increase of 30 points for baggage delivery in that hub.
HSBC!!
It helped them identify when during the day customers generally felt more negative emotions vs positive emotions and they were able to make concrete recommendations for improvements – like XXX
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