Zomato has been at the helm of things in the past few days and by far became the most talked about Food app in India because of few interesting and thought provoking ads and incidents. CX was the central point in both the incidents. Just to refresh memories, Few months back a video went viral where  a delivery guy from Zomato eating food meant for delivery went viral which prompted a strong thought among the customers whether to trust and order food from such companies.

The customer experience was in question where this incident was considered as a breach in the company’s delivery strategies.

The company off course took massive corrective actions and went on a fierce damage control campaign to ensure that the customer trust was regained and Customer experience was perfectly delivered.

Moving on with the incidents, the latest incident where a customer refused to take the delivery of the food from a delivery boy owing to his religion. Considering the customer experience focused of the organization, the company including the CEO immediately swung into action by tweeting promptly that “Food doesn’t have a religion. It is a religion”. A statement which found them in the middle of a lot of positive and negative reviews .  Infact the company refused for the refund.

Their CEO Deepinder Goyal even went further to quote that “We are proud of the idea of India – and the diversity of our esteemed customers and partners. We aren’t sorry to lose any business that comes in the way of our values.”

A bold statement issued by a leading foodtech unicorn whose roots are firmly entrenched in India catering to  the people of all diversities and religions. Such was the impact of this that even Uber Eats a rival of this unicorn supported them.

While soon after its tweet, there was a positive response on Twitter, with users supporting the “secularist” stand, the negative comments took over soon. Since then over 100K tweets have tweeted against Zomato through the #BoycottZomato and #ZomatoUninstalled.

In a world where brands are specifically told to avoid intentionally hurting religious sentiments or even commenting on such matters, Zomato’ s stance is definitely uncommon, but even though its heart may be in the right place, the ensuing backlash on Twitter might just come back to bite it at a later stage.

A heart winning advertisement was placed which was very cute but a very thought provoking one.  The caption read : “A well settled smart and loving brand looking for those who can’t cook. The statement straight away stuck the right chord with the customers as there a millions who cannot cook.  It explains the superb level of customer focused of the organization immensely”.

What is important to note here is the fact that the customer experience cannot be compromised and by far the most powerful tool for any organization to flourish and stand out from the competition.

The ethics, the values and mode of operations can always differ. The most critical element is placing the customer at the center while building your product or product strategies and ensuring the deliverance of a perfect CX.

We strongly believe that Zomato has undoubtedly come out as a perfect winner in terms of offering unique values to the customers and so has been it’s superlative CX quotient.

It’s no secret that emotions drive behavior. Happy people whistle. Angry drivers crash cars. And now, with the help of emotion detection and analytics, more companies are tuning into their customers’ feelings in an attempt to learn what makes them tick.

This customer’s emotions will eventually determine their brand loyalty and likelihood of churning. That’s why monitoring customer sentiment through emotion recognition is becoming an increasingly important way to improve customer experience. As you’d expect, it’s all about the data.

What is emotion detection?

Emotion detection measures an individual’s verbal and non-verbal communication in order to understand their mood or attitude. The idea is to evaluate a customer’s experience with a product or their interaction with a representative of the company and to uncover any weak links that cause negative reactions. Also known as emotion analytics, the ramifications of implementing this technology into customer support systems are endless.

Limitations of current feedback systems

Many popular KPIs – such as NPS and CES – are single questions, with or without a free text option. At best, they provide a narrow snapshot of likelihood to recommend or level of effort. Such feedback is collected at the end of a customer interaction and is biased by the outcome – it doesn’t tell the story of the ‘ups and downs’ of the episode.

Emotional language is limited – is there a material difference between being happy and elated, frustrated and dissatisfied, or surprised and confused? Then there’s Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle – the idea that the evaluation itself will impede upon the system being evaluated in unpredictable ways. In other words, it’s essentially unscientific to ask a customer to evaluate their own emotional reactions.

That’s why emotion recognition represents a ‘secret weapon’ for any business looking to get ahead by getting inside the heads of their customers.

How Does Human Emotion Detection Work?

Emotion detection is an effective and objective measure of consumer feedback, which uses artificial intelligence to detect and analyze data, without requiring customers to take any additional action. In other words, you can’t fake your feelings. Examples of technological methods for analyzing emotional data include:

Text (Sentiment) analysis:- uses algorithms to analyze text and determine whether the writer’s perception of a specific topic is positive, negative or neutral. Sentiment analysis has become a key tool for making sense of the multitudes of opinions expressed every day on review sites, forums, blogs, and social media.

Speech analysis:- refers to the process of analyzing voice recordings or live customer calls using voice emotion recognition software to find useful data, such as stress in a customer’s voice. For example, smart speakers can measure your mood and select music to match it. The technology can also be used in fraud prevention, analyzing the unique vocal characteristics that may indicate dishonesty or concealment of information.

Facial Analysis:- uses facial emotion recognition technology to analyze a person’s expressions within a photo or video, such as raised eyebrows, smirks or wide smiles. By setting specific parameters around different facial reactions, educators can spot struggling students in a classroom environment, while security forces can detect individuals with malicious intent at public events.
While these are exciting uses of algorithm-based technology, the goal for enterprises is to apply the lessons learned from recognising and analyzing emotions to improve their relationship with customers.

Business Applications of Emotion Detection

Leading B2C providers are now taking these lessons “to heart,” holistically combining the various technologies to optimize customer assistance at every stage of the journey.

1. Emotion-based call routing

Emotion analytics can be used to pick up on a customer’s tone of voice and mood, and to classify the call with the right priority to the right agent. For example, an angry customer might be routed to the customer retention team, while a happy, satisfied customer might be routed to the sales team to be pitched a new product or service.

2. Powering customer personalization

When an agent is in tune with a customer’s feelings, the conversation can be tailored to ensure empathy, thereby enhancing CX. For example, emotion recognition software can ensure that a frustrated customer might be greeted differently than a happy customer, and a sad customer who might appreciate a few warm words at the start of the conversation will be greeted appropriately.

3. Tracking emotional reactions over time

Data provided by emotion analytics is multifaceted and can provide information on every aspect of the interaction at each moment of the episode. For example, contact centers might tweak their processes when emotion analytics indicates that while a friendly introduction is effective, the follow-up identification process is seen as intrusive and annoying.

4. Delivering corporate-level analytics

Decision-makers benefit from a goldmine of data that helps them understand at the macro level which of their products or services elicit specific emotions. For example, a perfume manufacturer might rely heavily on emotion analytics to finetune its formulas based on customer reactions to specific notes of fragrances, or an ad campaign may be pulled when analytics detect that a specific percentage of people grimace when they see a particular image.

The ability to read a customer’s emotions is clearly a game-changer when it comes to improving CX. And the introduction of computer vision has upped the ante, as new advanced technologies enable computers to both see and interpret the customer’s facial emotions simultaneously, creating unprecedented possibilities for intuitive service.

Visual Assistance is the Key to Holistic Emotion Analytics

Visual Assistance is an emerging technology that enables agents and product experts to visually guide customers using augmented reality during live video sessions. With the introduction of dual camera recording, companies can leverage split-screen snapshots taken simultaneously with both front and rear smartphone cameras, providing a glimpse of both a customer’s facial expressions and their environment.

The Potential Role of Emotion Detection in the Call Center

Real-time insights into customers’ emotions can help agents engage with them in a highly personalized manner and deliver empathetic service, a vital quality in today’s customer-centric business environment. For example, agents providing instructions for setting up a smart TV can see confusion registering on a customer’s face, enabling them to repeat or simplify the steps.

Voice analytics may help an agent detect high levels of frustration and provide personalized service that addresses the customer’s specific issue. When there’s a language barrier or a noisy environment, a voice-to-text app will enable agents to benefit from sentiment analysis, providing insights into a customer’s mood when speech or facial analysis is not possible.

Emotion Detection    Brand Loyalty    Customer’s Emotions    Customer Experience    Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle    Consumer Feedback  Artificial Intelligence  Customer Retention  Computer Vision

Consumers are constantly interacting with brands. But how they interact, when they reach out, and why they engage is unique to each person.

Successful marketers and customer experience professionals know that having a great product or solution alone won’t bring you new business.

To attract and retain customers, marketers must focus on the holistic customer experience — creating and enabling interactions that are engaging, differentiated, and personalized to the individual at every step.

Today, this means building an informed, contextual relationship with your audience through every stage of the customer journey.

Adopting a journey mindset means the customer’s intent and needs come first.

Content, offers, and experiences are triggered and delivered in the moment, to the right channel, on an individualized basis. It’s a customer-first world, and your brand is just living in it.

The challenge is scale in managing many users and sequencing in real-time actions across many different touchpoints. You don’t just
have one customer, you have many — thousands, tens of thousands, perhaps millions — and your customers are always on the move.
They may visit your site, depart, resurface, read your emails, follow you on social media, call your contact center, and, if you’re a
retailer, walk into your store to interact with staff or purchase a product. All of which means you have a large and growing
accumulation of customer data that can tell you a lot about every individual. And you have many channels of engagement, including
those you control — say, website, mobile sites, email, in-store — and other channels on which you connect with customers, like
Twitter and Facebook, voice-interaction channels like Google Home and Amazon Alexa, and more. Even if you control of your
message and your channels, you can’t control who sees your message in what context. As a marketer or customer experience
professional, you are no longer in the driver’s seat. Your customers now decide the experience they want to have with a brand —
what they want to consume, where they want to consume it and when – and they expect that each and every digital interaction be
highly relevant and personalized for them. Here’s the tough part: It’s your job to anticipate, to react fast, and be where your customers
are in each moment of the customer lifecycle. Welcome to the era of the customer journey.

Customer Journey   Customer Experience  Customer’s Intent   Customer Lifecycle  Customer Data

Untapped value for all parties is common due to the absence of clarity on customer perceptions of value, which is a composite of his or her functional and emotional judgments of your product, service, brand, culture, processes, policies, and business model — all relative to what the customer is striving to do. A keen understanding of customers’ subconscious value equations and perceptions is essential to zeroing-in on management efforts yielding highest return on investment (ROI). Yet most customer research focuses on brand recommendation and sentiment or new product development. Customer value is typically implied, or awkwardly derived from questions about price expectations, or simply assumed. However, Customer Value Management supplies tried-and-true methodologies for discovering how customers think about specific value relative to your competitors and to their expectations.

Customer Value Chain

Another reason for untapped value is weak management of the inter-dependencies among entities in the value creation and delivery chain. Traditional thinking charges R&D with value creation, but in reality, the customer experience is impacted even by your support functions’ internal and external policies. In fact, everyone in the company, including suppliers and alliance and channel partners, plays a role in the snowball effect of decisions and hand-offs that eventually shape the entire customer experience.

Customer Value Techniques

• Total Customer Value Management,
• Customer Value Creation,
• Customer Value Measurement,
• Pricing & Customer Value.

Should Customer-Value-Added (CVA) be included in your financial statements? What are the customer-focus and value creation roles of your CFO, Head of HR, and other top execs? How can you recognize gaps in customer-centricity that invite competitive footholds?

By seeing value the way customers see it leaders gain the context for collaborative value generation that offers sustainable differentiation and is rewarded by the market place.

Customer Perceptions   Customer Research   Customer Value  Customer Experience   CXREFRESH    Global CX

The laws of customer experience are meant to empower highly effective customer experience efforts.

By understanding these fundamental truths about how people and organizations behave, companies can make smarter decisions about what they do, and how they do it.

“Every leader needs to understand the laws of customer experience.”

Here are highlights of the six laws of customer experience:

• CX Law #1: Every Action Creates A Personal Reaction. Simply put, experiences are totally in the eyes of the beholder.
• CX Law #2: People Are Instinctively Self-Centered. Everyone has their own frame of reference, which heavily influences what they do and how they do it.
• CX Law #3: Customer Familiarity Breeds Alignment. Given that most people want their company to better serve customers, a clear view of what customers need, want, and dislike can align decisions and actions.
• CX Law #4: Unengaged Employees Don’t Create Engaged Customers. While you can make some customers happy through brute force, you cannot sustain great customer experience unless your employees are bought-in to what you’re doing and are aligned with the effort.
• CX Law #5: Employees Do What Is Measured, Incented, and Celebrated. Employees tend to conform to the environment that they’re in, so you need to adjust the environment if you want change.
• CX Law #6: You Can’t Fake It. You can fool some people for some of the time, but most employees and customers can eventually tell what’s real and what’s not.

CX Law    Customer Experience  CXREFRESH   Global CX              CX Strategy