Organizations need to embrace that emotional side of their experiences. Not only to design an experience that surprises and delights their customers, but also so their Artificial Intelligence works to provide useable insight. Combining the emotional data into the formula with concepts from the behavioral science side will make it so organizations can understand what and why their customers do what they do. 

 

However, I worry that they don’t. 

 

You’ll remember that Customer Science is the fusion of data, the behavioral sciences, and artificial intelligence (AI). Today, we will discuss what role AI plays in predicting customer emotions and how they affect customer behavior. 

 

AI isn’t perfect. Yet. We did an interview with Broderick Turner, Ph.D., from Virginia Tech about AI recently. Turner explains his skepticism about AI since he views AI as opinions written in code. 

 

However, imperfect or not, AI technology gives us some options we didn’t have before.  Applied intelligently and with a deliberate approach, AI has the potential to solve problems, and help us achieve goals. 

 

This episode is the second of a series of podcasts we did with Beyond Philosophy’s own Zhecho Dobrev (@ZhechoDobrev), author of The Big Miss: How Organizations Overlook the Value of Emotions. We talked with him before on our podcast a month ago about how emotions drive customer behavior. This week, we dive a little deeper on this concept, and explore how emotions affect the insights we get from Customer Science. If you’d like to read a bit more from Zhecho on emotional attachment being a key factor in customer-drive growth check out this article here.

 

 

 

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

 

In the book, Dobrev shares research about AI. It looks at the typical customer journey touchpoints and how much value do each of those drive. Also, Dobrev examines where emotions and customer relationships affect the outcome, and how much value those provide. Now, he is analyzing how AI uses each of those customer journey mapping touchpoints, meaning the customer infinity lifecycle thinking about the brand, learning about the product, purchasing experience, and all the other points until we get to customer retention. 

 

 

Here are a few more key moments in the discussion:

 

• 03:36  We talk about the recent podcasts that led to this one, including the first one with Zhecho a little while ago, the podcast we did on Customer Science, and an episode we had with a guest, Broderick Turner, about how opinions make their way into AI code. 
• 08:30  Dobrev explains that regarding AI in the Customer Science mix, it should include customer emotional data, as they are the main drivers of customer behavior; otherwise, the insights it has gleaned may not be authentic drivers of behavior.
• 10:43  Dobrev shares three organizations that have done a great job using AI to understand how emotions affect and drive customer behavior and why it helped. 
• 20:26  Colin shares how a previous podcast, one about the book, The Myth of Experience, demonstrates one of the problems with AI, which is that organizations don’t have the data they think they do and how that leads to problems with their application of it.
• 29:09 Dobrev shares his plans about what is next for AI and experience, and his effort to piece together a strategy that can improve all experiences moving 

 

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Customer Experience Information & Resources

 

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

 

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University. 

 

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 35,000 subscribers. 

 

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