Human Experience is the complete experience a person has with a brand or service both digitally and physically. It represents the collective experiences that a person feels when dealing with any organisation, be that as a customer, an employee, a patient or a citizen. Human Experience is driven by human centricity, the idea that people are much more than statistics or data. They are driven by the emotions, needs and relationships they experience with brands or services.
Human Experience & metrics
Commercially, organisations often label business to consumer experiences around products and services. These factors are easy to measure as numbers and metrics can be assigned such as number of users, number of customer calls, number of complaints or products sold. Measurements can be applied like customer churn, employee engagement, NPS or CSAT score.
These metrics are still useful but lead businesses down the detrimental path of viewing their customers and employees as numbers and statistics, rather than human beings. That’s why Adoreboard’s mission is to unite these experiences by measuring what matters most in any experience: human emotion and trust.
Why measure Human Emotion?
Measuring Human Experience is critical to the sustained growth of a business. It is important to measure how people feel about a brand, service or experience to fully understand the steps to take to optimise business strengths, transform weaknesses and seize opportunities.
It is not just important to measure customer experience, it is our viewpoint that all the fragmented parts of a customer or employee journey combine into a unique Human Experience, aka HX. Emotion provides a framework for human experience measurement that provides a consistency regardless if that human be customer, employee or patient.
According to Professor A. Damasio from Harvard Business School, “90% of our buying actions driven by the limbic brain by our emotions”. Emotions are a key differentiator in Human Experience, one that if overlooked could have harmful effects on business development.
How Emotion plays an important role in Human Experience
So why measure emotion? Emotion plays a key role in customer decision making. The necessity of emotion in decision-making has been demonstrated through an interesting example: individuals with brain injury. Specifically, damage to the areas of the brain associated with emotional processing has been found to significantly impair the ability to make decisions. And these aren’t just big decisions, such as whether to leave the country; these also include simple, everyday decisions, such as deciding what to have for lunch.
Often in these cases, the people involved have had no change to intellectual or problem solving abilities, which indicated that their inability to make decisions can’t be explained by logical reasoning. Leading the research to conclude that emotion is a fundamental aspect of the human decision process [1].
A recent study found that when people are faced with a decision that can have both negative and positive outcomes, people are more likely to go with their emotional evaluation rather than their cognitive evaluation. For example, a situation where the positive evaluation of an object (e.g. a doughnut) is emotional in nature (e.g. “delightful”), while the negative evaluation is cognitive in nature ( e.g. “unhealthy”). In this situation the emotional evaluation is more likely to be favoured. This process can be applied to consumer behaviour when deciding whether to purchase something. If the emotions that a consumer feels toward a product are more positive, then they are more likely to complete the purchase and vice versa [1].
Emotion is a dominant and fundamental factor in the decision-making process of humans.
An understanding of the Human Experience and the emotions driving the experience will allow all organisations to better relate to their customers, and therefore better market their products and services.
A better understanding of human experience as a whole, improves customer experience and employee experience reducing churn and increasing retention and loyalty.
How Adoreboard measures Human Experience
Adoreboard focus on extracting decision ready insights from customer data using Emotion AI. Emotions constitute powerful and predictable drivers of decision making. Adoreboard’s Emotion AI platform, Emotics can uncover the ‘Why?’ behind customer experience and decision making.
The science behind Adoreboard is based on blending common sense reasoning with affective computing, an AI technology, to create an index for each emotion on Plutchik’s wheel.
Businesses and organisations such as Unilever, Allstate NI, McCann, Three Mobile and Rice University to name a few have found that measuring emotion unlocks deeper insights about human behaviour that impact business imperatives such as customer satisfaction, product and service quality and employee engagement.
[1] Naqvi, N., Shiv, B. & Bechara, A. (2006). The role of emotion in decision making: A Cognitive Neuroscience perspective. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 15(5), 260-264.
