While many focus on customer experience, few understand how customers “feel” about them.

“Customer Experience Isn’t A Thing, It’s A Feeling”
– Forbes –

Emotional Insights

When you understand how your customers feel across the customer journey, you are able to elicit specific emotions and influence experience. Emotions become anchored to customer interactions and combine to form beliefs about an experience. These emotionally anchored interactions are interpreted as positive or negative experiences and end up being the difference between ” they are great“, “that place is horrible” and everything in between.
Surveys and in-depth interviews are relied on heavily to measure customer experience, but these tools have limitations. For example, people have a hard time recognizing and communicating their emotions, they are free to misrepresent themselves and will many times tell you what you want to hear when it comes to getting their feedback. The most valuable feedback is often not what someone says, but how they behave.

Nonverbal Behavior Speaks Louder

According to Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP), “You cannot NOT communicate“. We are communicating at all times and our nonverbal communication has a lot to do with that, especially when it comes to communicating how we feel. Communication can be verbal and nonverbal. The primary purpose of verbal is the communication of a message, while the primary purpose of nonverbal is the communication of an emotion. Nonverbal communication can be summarized as communication without words. For example, posture, hand gestures, eye movement and facial expressions are nonverbal forms of communication.
Think about how much information gets delivered through facial expressions. Many times, a facial expression is the first thing we notice, before saying a word. Primary facial expressions are happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, fear, and disgust. We also communicate through body movement and posture. Think about the way you and others stand, sit and use your hands. If you are speaking with someone and their feet are pointed away from you, what does that tell you? Similar to facial expressions, posture and behavior, eye movements provide a wealth of information. The eyes may be a window to the soul, but they are also a direct link to brain activity. Eye movements provide insight into how someone interprets the world. Do they see, hear or feel experiences? Also, the eyes tell us if someone is remembering or constructing a response. This information can be used to measure confidence of voice of the customer (VoC) responses.

BoC (Behavior of the Customer)

While voice of the customer (VoC) tools such as surveys, in-depth interviews and focus groups provide valuable feedback, they have limitations. People have a tough time recognizing their emotions and will often tell you what they think you want to hear. Adding to the complexity, interviewer bias, interviewer mental filters and employee influence on survey responses can make you wonder if your customer feedback data actually provides an accurate view of customer experience .
Fortunately, adding behavior of the customer (BoC) to voice of the customer (VoC) not only provides deeper insights, but increases confidence in voice of the customer (VoC) feedback. For example, what someone communicates verbally and what they communicate through body language may be different . If an interviewee responds and their body language says something different than their response, we would consider their response to be less confident than someone who was congruent in their verbal and nonverbal communication. For the majority, body language is displayed unconsciously, communicates our true feelings and should not be ignored.
Add nonverbal behavior analysis to surveys, in depth interviews and focus groups to uncover how your customers truly feel about their experiences with you while gaining greater confidence in their voice.

MoodMe Facial Insights & Emotion Recognition SDK

MoodMe, a leading provider of facial insights and emotion recognition artificial intelligence, provides facial insights and emotion recognition capabilities that run 100% local, ensuring privacy and performance, while providing an out of the box dashboard called BERT (Brand Emotional Response Technology) for displaying insights visually.
According to MoodMe CEO, Chandra De Keyser,”MoodMe focuses exclusively on the continued development and support of our Software Development Kit (SDK) providing partners and customers the ability to add facial insights and emotion recognition capabilities into their applications, without the need for artificial intelligence expertise“. MoodMe made the strategic decision of supporting industry professionals to apply their expertise in the development of application needs, while sticking to what MoodMe does best – facial insights & emotion recognition insights.