Two trends are currently transforming our understanding of customer experience: sentient analysis and infographics. Infographic presentation of sentient analysis makes emotional experience more accessible. This means customer experience strategists and managers will likely pay more attention to the emotional side of customer experience.
One of the historical challenges of customer experience management is engaging the senior leadership team in something that sounds soft and fluffy. Usually, companies employ linear “functional” touch point mapping, which artificially assembles the customer experience in a linear way, and the story is often dictated by predetermined metrics. The opposite methodology is “emotional” touch point mapping, which seeks to experience a customer’s encounter with your company in real-time.
The challenge of touch point mapping is communicating customer senses in a coherent way. Emotional content flows according to an organic, non-linear process. At Beyond Philosophy, we’ve used storyboarding and “brown paper fair” techniques to drill down into the emotional elements that drive customer decisions. However, these techniques are but pit stops in the drive toward infographics and data visualization. The cutting edge is applying engaging visualization techniques to:
- engage the target audience into the customer experience world in a way that is immediately palatable and metricized,
- demonstrate the “hard” nature of customer experience and its effect on the business, and
- motivate the target audience to use the information at their desks when the customer experience spotlight is not shining directly on them.
We Feel Fine, an independent web initiative by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, collects and collates sentient data from social media and presents it in an engaging way. The project demonstrates the trend of investigating the emotional experience and tying it together with creative infographics. It is a perfect example of where things are headed.
The result is a compelling visual display of sentient analysis. On the site you can organize emotions according to feeling quality (happy, sad, depressed, etc.), age, gender, weather, location and date. I could look up relevant data for fifty-year-old men in London on September 30, 2011, or I could ask a question like “Are Americans on the west coast really happier than their east coast counterparts?”
Most senior executives now say they “get” customer experience, but few do anything about it. It’s tough to avoid doubt when current methods tend to suffer from being too soft or subjective, too complex or too dry. Sentient analysis demonstrates the trend of metricizing emotional tone and content. Infographics will take customer experience information out of the back-room binder and transform it into a decision making tool.