Stress is a normal human experience; it can fuel your brain, boost your alertness and memory, even motivate you to perform better. But, what happens when there is too much of it?

The stressors of the outside world are limitless. Today, our brains are overwhelmed with stress from work, school, family, and undeniably COVID-19. Stress is even normalized as the baseline for successful individuals, constantly pushing themselves to grow. So much so, the American Psychology Association reported in 2021 that 84% of Americans experienced strong emotions correlating to prolonged stress over the 2 weeks post-inauguration. Of which, at least 33% were categorized as extreme stress. Estimates show that employers in America spend over $300 billion annually on stress-related health care and lost workdays, a figure which has likely skyrocketed in the times of COVID-19.

Prolonged Stress throws the Body and the Brain off-balance.

It causes permanent structural and functional changes in the brain, which can start a domino effect impairing other functionally connected brain regions. Leading to the symptomatic development of depression, anxiety, and burnout.

Chronic stress is also implicated in the accelerated development of many physiological diseases, including cardiovascular dysfunctions, diabetes, cancer, and autoimmune syndromes.

Chronic stress, a double-edged sword for health care outcomes.

As it stands, chronic stress is one of the largest contributors to disease development and progression, leading directly to increases in illness rates and hospital admissions. With hospitals at or approaching capacity, due to COVID-19, the second pain point of the stress cycle is strained - healthcare provider (HCP) stress.

HCP stress harms more than their well-being, it is consistent with increased rates of medical errors and compassion fatigue, significantly reducing the patients’ quality of care (QOC). Inherently, reduced QOC leads to even greater stress for the patient and higher rates of hospital readmissions. In doing so, further increasing the stress burden on HCPs and contributing to long-term effects on the healthcare system.

Thankfully, stress is treatable without medical intervention if recognized in time. The severity of the psychological component of stress is directly dependent on an individual’s perception of its predictability and controllability. However, chronically stressed individuals struggle with this due to avoidance mechanisms. Avoiding your negative emotional state can be helpful in the short run, however, in the long run, avoidance behaviours lead to decreased self-awareness of stress level, further perpetuating chronic stress.

Using Heartbeat Emotional AI to Break the Stress Cycle

With the assistance of stress monitoring AI technology, we can break this cycle by increasing people’s self-awareness of their stress level by measuring the physiological and emotional correlates of stress.

Heartbeat AI can measure the deep emotional signature of stress through the integration of Heartbeat Touchpoints into the routine of patients and HCPs. Between speech to text and tone of voice analysis, these touchpoints will acquire rich human experience data, correlating to stress, from regularly scheduled voice notes. Heartbeat AI can use this qualitative data collected over time to develop a quantifiable and personal stress signature.

For patients, Heartbeat Touchpoints would enable real-time stress-monitoring based on their experience with recovery challenges. Identification of critical patient stress levels can be used by HCPs, to suggest personalized behavioral and treatment-related interventions preventing further progression.

HCP touchpoints would facilitate a better awareness of critical stress levels and suggest appropriate behavioral or operational interventions to mitigate them. With the long-term goal of reducing HCP stress levels and providing more insight towards addressing issues related to the reduction of patient QOC.

Coupled with advancements in biometric analysis and physiological stress-monitoring AI, stress can be predicted and controlled reliably in breaking the cycle. Not only is this applicable to hospitals, but highly accurate stress detection has the potential to significantly improve psychotherapy outcomes and revolutionize our understanding of work and school-related stress.

Effective employee engagement is essential in promoting emotional health in the workplace.

As we enter the second month of the new year, the novelty of turning our calendars to 2021, hoping to leave the mess of 2020 behind us, has all but worn off. With February upon us, the sensation of ringing in the new year hoping that the “new normal” will no longer be what is normal has all but disappeared. Burnout, defined by the World Health Organization as “chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed” is at an all-time high.

While the hope of a vaccinated world population exists for 2021, most countries still have their citizens in strict lockdowns to combat the spread of the highly contagious new variants of COVID-19. Zoom meetings, online-school and reduced (if not zero) social interactions are here to stay for a while longer, and may even persist after the crisis is finally over. Though vital to surviving the ongoing situation, these measures take a toll on employees' well being.

While there are many ways to practice good individual emotional health, organizations need to ensure that their employees cope with this new reality’s added stress. Leaders must understand which of their employees may be particularly at risk of pandemic-related burnout and take steps to protect them from it. There is a massive disconnect between what executives believe they are delivering, and what employees say they are providing. Nearly 80% of C-suite executives say they’re supporting their workers’ physical and emotional health right now, only 46% of employees agree.

“Covid-19 has permanently shifted the expectations employees have of their employers — employees now expect that their employers take an active role in supporting their physical and emotional health and providing training in the skills they need to work in new ways.”

Amy Wright, Managing Partner, Talent & Transformation at IBM

Empowering human resources personnel to build trust, confidence and compassion among employees are critical to creating an emotionally healthy workplace, and a sustainable and happy workforce.

The consequences of not effectively engaging your employees are more severe than you think…

Failure to keep up with desirable employee experiences can be significant for employee attraction, retention, and your businesses bottom line. The median turnover cost is 21% of the lost employee’s annual salary and can double for executive or specialist level recruitment. These are avoidable costs that ultimately affect your bottom line and should be evidence enough to start prioritizing your employees. 

Organizations with highly engaged employees experience revenue growth 2.3x higher than average. Empowered employees who feel respected and have their voices heard by their organizations are happier and work harder. If you want to maximize your teams’ productivity and efficiency, you need to understand how they feel over time.

“Identifying how differences in the individual employee experience (EX) manifest themselves in differences in individual customer experiences (CX) and identifying, quantifying and prioritising the dimensions of EX that drive CX. This provides clients with a blueprint for where to invest in EX to improve transactional CX best.”

Howard Lax, Principal Director, Customer Experience at Confirmit

How Can You Empower Your Human Resources Personnel?

Use better listening and practical measuring tools to create better working environments.

How Can Heartbeat Ai Empower the Human Resources Personnel In Your Organization?

Unlike manual analyses of employee engagement feedback, which can take hundreds of hours and yield inconsistent results, Heartbeat AI quickly outputs reliable insights about your employees’ true feelings.

Heartbeat Ai can help your organization:

Unlock The Full Value Of Your Employee Data:

Increase the value of your employee monitoring. Engagement survey comments, onboarding questionnaires, performance reviews, the chatter on employee social networks— all of these data channels can be used to understand and improve your organization.

Predict Problems Early Enough To Prevent Them:

Identify emotional trends and themes in employee responses, uncover pain points and formulate better preventative measures based on a more detailed grasp of their wants and needs.

Monitor Employee Emotions And Improve Culture:

Uncover the real feelings and emotional drivers of your employees. Understand how changes affect their emotions and how feelings can contribute to individual employees’ actions and desires. Improve employee alignment, understanding, and productivity by digging into how they feel and optimizing their happiness. 

The COVID-19 pandemic is following the world into 2021, and the added stress of remote work is expected to remain the norm, both during and after it. Employers have an increasing responsibility to ensure their employees’ emotional health and well being aren’t at risk. 

Taking proactive steps in effectively listening to their employees to understand their needs and make adequate operational changes is essential for business success. By paying attention to their workers’ needs, especially those most susceptible to pandemic fatigue and burnout, leaders can build better organizations for all of their employees.

Empowering Newton Grove School with actionable insights to improve student, parent, and faculty experience during the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Client Background

Newton’s Grove School is a private school in Mississauga, Ontario. The first private school in Mississauga, Newton’s Grove School has established a reputation for exceptional teach, outstanding university placement, and a progressive inquiry-based approach to learning that produces the highest results across academics, athletics, and the arts.

Always seeking to stay ahead of the innovation curve, Newton’s Grove School partnered with Heartbeat Ai to try and better understand how their students, parents, and faculty felt about returning to school in the fall of 2020, amidst the COVID-19 pandemic

Heartbeat Ai measured respondents from ~300 parents and faculty for the Newton’s Grove School Survey

The Challenge

Understanding the worries and concerns students, parents, and faculty have about returning to Newton’s Grove School amidst the COVID-19 pandemic and implementing effective strategies and protocols to adequately address these concerns.

After finishing the 2019/2020 school year off online because of COVID-19, students, parents, and faculty alike were eager to return to “normal. However, with COVID-19 cases being extremely high in Ontario region at the beginning of the 2020/2021 school year, innovative solutions and necessary precautions to ensure safety for everyone.

How can Newton’s Grove School administration make sure they understand how people feel about returning to school? And how can they know what to do to make sure they are addressing everyone's concerns appropriately?

The Solution

Newton’s Grove School partnered with Heartbeat AI to measure the emotional responses of over ~300 parents, students, and faculty in relation to their thoughts about having kids return to school amidst the COVID-19 pandemic in the fall of 2020

• Heartbeat Ai was used to extract and quantify emotions and themes of parents and faculty to reveal key insights into concerns and necessary protocols to feel safe

• This research allowed Newton’s Grove School to understand the implications of insights by mapping emotional drivers to students, parents, and faculty’s pain points

Newton’s Grove Schools effective engagement allowed them the agility to understand faster and implement earlier. 

How It Works

Heartbeat Ai makes it easy for organizations to sift through their text data; in this case, employee feedback - tag emotional words, and extract valuable themes and important insights in no time!

Some examples:

The Results

NGS was able to identify cohorts of parents and faculty that needed additional support and implement effective policies to help ease their concerns. Parents with young children and veteran faculty were among the most concerned segments of respondents. Heartbeat Ai allowed NGE to understand the collective pain points and create innovative solutions to address specific concerns. Creating a safer environment for students, parents and faculty alike!

It Doesn’t Stop Here

By using Heartbeat AI, Newton’s Grove School was able to sophistically emotionally profile their various segments of parents and faculty, uncovering pain points, areas of optimization and mitigate potential issues across the business. 

By conducting another survey with Heartbeat Ai, NGS will be able to monitor the improvement of their policies over time.

Thank You

Please feel free to reach out with any questions, or if you’d like to book a discovery session to see how your organization can leverage the power of Artificial Emotional Intelligence to unlock valuable insights on your organization, its employees, customers and more!

Tobin Sydneysmith
Director of HX Analytics
tobin@heartbeatai.com

]]>Decoding Human Emotions for Deeper Consumer InsightsMediaLana NovikovaThu, 17 Dec 2020 20:55:00 +0000https://www.instagram.com/tv/CI6HzeJlhi2/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link5f5102fccc85467f14b20472:5f5d23006ff2a57e9240e054:601324dfbcc783596e848333Lana Novikova, the Founder & CEO of Heartbeat AI Technologies Inc., sits down with the TRMC team to share her insights on all things entreprenuership and Emotion Analytics. We are honoured to welcome Lana as a speaker for the Bold Strides Panel at TRMC 2021!

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]]>Ted Rogers Management Conference (TRMC)ArticleTobin SydneysmithWed, 09 Dec 2020 23:44:07 +0000https://www.heartbeatai.com/blog/emotional-health5f5102fccc85467f14b20472:5f5d23006ff2a57e9240e054:5fd154602c7e2d2d0fabe037

What is emotional health? 

First off, it is not the same as mental health. While the two terms are often used interchangeably, mental health is defined by the World Health Organization as “a state of well-being in which an individual realize his or her abilities, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and can contribute to his or her community”.

Emotional health is harder to define because the precarious balance that constitutes emotional health is not only unique to each individual but also varies among different societies due to cultural inputs and norms. While the experience of emotions themselves is a universal phenomenon, how the individual experiences those emotions, is not. Expression, perception and regulation of emotions vary as a function of a wide range of cultural influences, such as expected normative behaviour of the surrounding society. For example, research suggests that maximizing positive emotions and minimizing negative emotions, is the predominant social script in Western cultures; which is not inherently true in others.

North America is obsessed with individualism and the idea that a “good society” is one in which individuals are provided with the freedom to pursue their private endeavours, independent of interference from others and the state. This form of thinking is expressed mostly through the relentless market mentality of the society, and the transactional approach to co-existence.

It is even more critical for people in cultures that emphasize individualism to maintain good emotional health due to the lack of societal structures in place to help them.

Research on the relationship between culture and emotions dates back to 1872 when Darwin argued that emotions and the expression of emotions are universal. Since then, how emotions should be classified has drawn input from sociologists, psychologists and anthropologists alike; creating a wide range of theories spanning many disciplines, including, neurobiological, somatic and cognitive. Discrete Emotion Theory assumes that there are seven to ten core emotions and thousands of emotion-related words which are all synonyms of these core emotions.

Why is emotional health important?

Emotional health is finding the equilibrium between the various pillars of your life. Your emotional health covers the spectrum of your mental, physical, emotional and spiritual well being. You can fortify these foundations through friendships, self-purpose, social reassurance, and love. Emotional health includes aspects like the ability to navigate tragic life events, the capacity to manage internal stress, removing unnecessary anxieties, or fostering the will to be able to try again after failing.

When feeling mentally and emotionally healthy, we are better equipped to juggle different aspects of life and make the necessary changes to restore balance.

Having good emotional health is an essential aspect of fostering self-awareness, resilience, and overall contentment. Maintaining a strong sense of emotional health can lead to successes in work, relationships and psychological health.  In the past, researchers believed that success made people happy. However, newer research cited by the American Psychological Association reveals that it is the other way around. Happy people are more likely to work toward goals, find the resources they need, and attract others with their energy and optimism.

How does emotional health affect the ability to learn?

While fluctuations in emotions are natural, failure to proactively manage your mental state can be detrimental to your ability to learn. When negative emotions like stress are left unchecked, it can cause individuals to become overwhelmed, discouraged, and sometimes, spiral out of control. However, stress is a fact of life, and learning to manage stress-inducing external inputs is vital in the ability to learn in fast-paced environments. Being able to recognize the sources of your stress, understand why these sources are causing you stress, and ultimately channel that stress into positive sources, like motivation and determination, are vital for individuals in learning environments.

Whether you are in grade school, college or in a working environment, being able to continuously and consistently learn at a fast pace is a very sought after attribute. Maintaining balance in your emotional health is fundamental in your ability to absorb information in overwhelming and potentially negative scenarios. Emotional health is the key to improving your effectiveness. It’s the foundation for dealing with impulses, coping with negativity, and responding versus reacting; it is the input that makes the difference. A lack of emotional health is what limits some people in their ability to manage themselves, manage others, or manage situations.

“There are certain emotions that will kill your drive; frustration and confusion.  You can change these to a positive force.  Frustration means you are on the verge of a breakthrough.  Confusion can mean you are about to learn something.  Expect the breakthrough and expect to learn”

— Kathleen Spike, Master Certified Coach

By fostering good emotional health, you’re equipping yourself with the ability to learn regardless of your environment or external inputs.

How can I foster good emotional health?

Focus on balance, introspection, mindfulness, and the things you can control. When was the last time you sat alone and reflected? When was the last time you sat alone and focused on your feelings? When was the last time you sat alone and appreciated everything you had? 

It sounds simple and elementary, but so few put meaningful introspection into their routine. They are caught up in the chaos of life and struggle to find time to balance their minds; it is within this lack of balance, that irrationality and distress can enter your life. You lose the ability to see and think clearly, you allow yourself to fall victim to resentment and will resort to blaming things outside of your control. Ultimately, you remove your ability to focus on the things that matter.  

Never forget, your focus determines your reality.

— Qui-Gon Jinn

Make a point of practising mindfulness, notice your thoughts as thoughts, don’t put significant judgment or weight into any particular thought just because you held it. Having bad thoughts doesn’t make you a bad person, nor does having good thoughts make you a good one. It is your actions that determine the quality of your character. By practising mindfulness, you can disentangle yourself from your thoughts and focus on the present. 

Mindfulness is the basic human ability to be fully present, aware of where we are, what we’re doing, and not overly reactive or overwhelmed by what’s going on around us. Mindfulness is something we all naturally possess, but it is more readily available to those who practice on a daily basis. If you want to learn more about mindfulness and start practising on a daily basis, this is a great place to start.

Like mindfulness, being aware of what you can control is a fundamental part of emotional health. Be aware that there are endless external forces, that you have no control over, and can impact your life in significant ways. What you can control is your perception of these external forces.

“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”

— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

You have the power to change that perception - it’s not easy, but it is possible, and it starts with allowing yourself to let go of the things you can’t control. Let go of the things that only cause you to compare yourself to others. Let go of things that only cause you anxiety. Focus on the things that you can control; at the end of the day, the only person in charge of your happiness is you.

But what can I control?

There are things you can try and control, and then there are things that you alone can control. Focusing on the latter is what helps bring you balance. A few of those things are:

Your Beliefs: What do you choose to believe? What philosophies do you identify with? What morals do you hold? What is essential for you to believe in? Foster beliefs that align with your morals.

Your Attitude:  How do you approach things? Are you inherently optimistic or pessimistic? What are your expectations? Happiness = Reality - Expectations.

Your Perspective: Why do you view things a certain way? What is contributing to your viewpoint? Why is it different from others? Once you realize that no two people are going to have the same perspective, understanding differences gets easier. Reading about sonder will help with this.

Your Effort: How much are you willing to commit? How much will you sacrifice? Nothing of value in this life comes easy - how hard will you work for your happiness? When you know you gave it your all; the results are meaningless.

How Much You Listen: Listening is the cure for ignorance, it's the key to understanding differences, and an essential part of any relationship, business, platonic or romantic. Being able to listen genuinely, without the need to interrupt or say your piece, is one of the most important skills someone can foster. After all, “If we were supposed to talk more than we listen, we would have two mouths and one ear” - Mark Twain. 

How Gracious You Are: If you’re reading this, it is likely that more than half of the world’s populations would do anything to change places with you right now, even just for a day. Being thankful and gracious are two of the most important aspects of someone who is truly happy. Do to others as you would like others to do you, and that includes giving thanks.

How Patient You Are: Life journey isn’t linear; it’s filled with peaks and valleys, amazing surprises and devastating disappointments. Being patient with yourself and those around you will allow you to handle the unexpected with greater resilience. Patience is indeed a virtue.

These aren’t profound philosophies or original ideas, but they are all true. By fostering balance, introspection, mindfulness and the understanding of what you can control, you’re equipping yourself with the resilience to manage the chaos of life. These elements are the foundation of good emotional health, and only you have the ability to change them. Change won’t happen overnight, it will take practice and persistence to get you where you want to go, but by committing yourself and keeping an open mind, you will see the difference.

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]]>The 6 Best Market Research Tools Right NowNewsletterTobin SydneysmithWed, 07 Oct 2020 20:27:49 +0000https://www.heartbeatai.com/blog/heartbeat-ai-2020-year-in-review5f5102fccc85467f14b20472:5f5d23006ff2a57e9240e054:5f7e24c61247d3263760aa26With one Quarter left in 2020,

This year's impact on global and national norms has already solidified change for years to come. Every year has defining moments, but 2020 has been packed with paradigm-shifting events that have changed all of our lives forever.

It’s hard to believe that on January 31st, the global media cycle was being dominated by Britain becoming the first country ever to leave the European Union and COVID-19 had less than 10,000 cases worldwide (7 in the US).

Fast forward to March, COVID-19 cases sky-rocketed to 858,340 cases worldwide and 188,724 cases in the US - leading the World Health Organization to declare a global pandemic. Markets around the globe faltered, spiraled and crashed, causing months of economic suffering and unemployment levels to reach record high. 

With Endless Data - Emotional AI Is The New Frontier

Every day we produce over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data, and 90% of that data is unstructured data, which is mostly made up of different text inputs.

Technology has quickly become an avenue for companies to gather an even higher volume of data on users, and concentrating on the emotional aspect of customers can ensure better loyalty, lead generation, and retention. Brands can leverage emotional analytics to identify what are the unique expectations of the customers and create a customized and personalized experience for them.

AI comes in many aspects, but leveraging cutting edge technology is essential for the continued success of your business. Identifying new trends in your consumer base, increasing the quality of your employee engagement and understanding the feelings towards your brands are just a few of the many ways Heartbeat AI can empower your organization to the next level. The adaption of new technologies, specifically AI, is vital for sustained growth in uncertain times. A recent study found that 84 % of C-suite executives believe that you must leverage AI to achieve high growth objectives.

Where Is Heartbeat Ai Amongst This?

Although virtually no industry has gone unscathed, the first two quarters of 2020 saw effectively no organizations taking on new software. At Heartbeat, we utilized this time to strategize and reposition. We saw this as an opportunity to improve our service offerings, explore new avenues of analyses, and improve our team’s effectiveness.

We focused on expanding our accessibility for different industries, improving our algorithms to uncover deeper emotions in context, and developing our dashboard for greater theme identification and actionable insight extraction. But we realized...

We Needed More Human Power

Recognizing that our ambitious goals would need more human power, we hired Tobin Sydneysmith, to the position of Director of Human Experience Analytics. Tobin has a background in economics, marketing, statistics, user interface, and building data-driven strategies. He has worked with multiple tech startups across many industries and is an avid fan of the outdoors.

Tobin will be leading our growth/sales efforts, helping improve the analytic capabilities of Heartbeat’s HX platform, and improving our dashboard’s navigation and insight extraction capabilities.

Technical Improvements And New Tools

At Heartbeat, we are always striving to take our software to the next level for every client, and it is through this constant working process with our clients, those essential improvements to our tool are uncovered.

As of the beginning of 2020, we have launched our fully operational API, allowing us to connect Heartbeat’s HX analytics to virtually any source. We have already integrated the Heartbeat API with organizations like Tableau, Qualtrics and Telegram. 

To Improve Analytical Ability Of Our Software…

We added a statistical significance calculator for primary emotions. Statistical significance is the likelihood that a relationship between two or more variables (in this case, emotions) is caused by something other than chance.

At Heartbeat, we utilize statistical significance tests to understand whether the differences in primary emotions and sentiments among different groups are significant. These tests help formulate better analyses and understandings of the emotional data. 

Going Forward - Our Plans for 2021

At Heartbeat, we pioneer with purpose. We are innovators, leading the evolution of artificial emotional intelligence (AEI) and equipping our partners with the tools necessary for them to get the full value of their data.

We are never satisfied, continuously pushing ourselves to expand the possibilities of Heartbeat Ai. So what’s coming in 2021?

Topic Identification

While topic and theme extraction is already made easy with the Heartbeat software, it’s not automatic. Our features allow users’ to easily identify actionable insights, themes and pain points in their users journey. In 2021, we are taking that to the next level, with Heartbeat Topics. Automatically analyze the language structure of your data; and populate your dashboard with “Topics” found in your data set. The automizing of topics within Heartbeat, combined with our already-automatic emotions identifier, will create an even more powerful tool to perform robust analysis on unstructured data.

New Emotional Classification 

We are always looking to improve, and we do so best by working with clients in different industries. Over the last 5 years, working with thousands of different sets of data, leading us to deepen our understanding of how clients utilize our emotional classification. This continued learning allows us to continue to develop the world's most sophisticated algorithms at understanding human language and behaviour. In 2021, we are releasing Heartbeat’s Emotional Classification 2.0. Our newest classification will see us reduce the number of secondary emotions, from 97 to 70.  We are doing this to improve our accuracy and consistency when analyzing your data. 

(To see the Heartbeat dashboard for 2016-18 Millennials and Future, click here.)

I started asking young adults these questions three years ago: How do you feel about your future? The future of your country? The future of this planet?

Hundreds of Millennials from Canada, the US, Australia, UK and Mexico shared their feelings. I wrote a post about Shades Of Fear. Unfortunately, today fear is still growing in the US and Canada.

Just like in 2016 and 2017, American Millennials are more negative about the future of their country than Canadian youth.

This word cloud sums it up

I am reading a very interesting book called The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning by Jeremy Lent. The main idea (among many brilliant ideas) of this book is that "culture shapes values, and those values shape history". The author lays the foundation of “cognitive history” and integrates such complex fields of science as neuropsychology, history of East and West, biology, anthropology, systems theory and linguistics. He argues that the human mind has the power to constructs its own reality.

I wish I had answers or solutions.

I just spent two months in Japan, going through an AI Accelerator Program by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government. I walked a lot and watched people, especially young people on Tokyo streets. Without understanding a single word in Japanese, I focused on their body language, how they dress, what they eat, their non-verbal communication with each other and the world around them.

I still can't describe the world of difference between Japan and North America, but I felt no fear from Japanese Millennials. They feel happy and connected - to each other, their environment, their culture and their country.

Now, I am curious how Japanese feel about the future…

This is an example of a customer journey of John McMillan, through his Life Insurance claim. This video outlines the importance for emotional intelligence, and how leveraging emotional AI can fundamentally change how organizations understand their users.

By uncovering the emotional drivers of your users, in this case, John, the life-time users of ABC Insurance. It allows the organization to understand truths about their users, and turn them into paths to treat people more meaningfully. 

As well as employee engagement. The difference between fleeting transactional customer interactions and experiences that leave a lasting impression – whether positive or negative – is whether the experience strikes an emotional chord with the customer. No matter how well executed and delivered, interactions that leave no emotional imprint are eminently forgettable, while those that stir emotional responses shape more enduring memories.

Given the importance of emotions in decision making and how people (in both B2C and B2B settings) interact with, respond to and behave towards companies they use or decide not to use and where they work, it’s time for firms to assess their own emotional intelligence.

The concept of Emotional intelligence (EI or EQ for Emotional quotient) is a popular measure or description of the emotional skills and awareness of people. Daniel Goleman, who popularized the concept, identified five components of EI. For business applications, I see four key aspects to EI:

1. The most basic is simply the awareness that people are emotional beings and that, while a company is not a feeling, emotional entity, there is an emotional component to the way a firm presents itself and its products and services to the market and its employees. A company projects “feelings,” as interpreted by stakeholders, in everything from its branding, imagery and packaging to its advertising, communications, PR and public outreach.

2. Awareness of emotions is foundational; next is the ability to differentiate between and accurately identify emotions. This isn’t just labeling a sentiment positive or negative. That’s a start, but anger, frustration, disappointment and fear all are negative emotions – and they are quite different. Ditto on the positive side of the scale with regards to love, pleasant surprise, trust and joy.

3. The next step up the EI ladder is responding to the feelings of stakeholders, that is displaying empathy and replying or acting in a manner that is emotionally appropriate to the feelings of the stakeholder. At a bare minimum this means acknowledging the feelings of customers and employees and trying to react in a manner that is sensitive to those feelings.

4. Finally, and here it’s a tightrope walk between adaptation and manipulation, the firm needs to adjust to the emotional landscape (adapt) and/or try to influence (we call that marketing) or even control (that is, manipulate) the emotional reactions of customers and employees as a way of motivating desired behaviors.

Awareness

Although perhaps seemingly rudimentary, awareness is anything but universal in the business community. While all marketers will raise their hands in agreement that people are emotional beings, they often are overruled by more senior leaders who cite their firm/industry/products as the exception: we are the industry leader; emotions don’t apply in B2B settings; our products and people are the best . . . Instead of appealing to the emotional needs of customers and illustrating how their products/services meet those emotional needs they default to an over-emphasis on “rational” performance criteria: expertise, quality, differentiation that says my product/service is objectively better.

While awareness of the emotional nature of consumers is on the rise, recognizing the emotional projections of the company is an alien idea to many business leaders. Obviously a firm is not an emotional organism with autonomous feelings. Whether intentional or not, however, a company projects “feelings” that affect its stakeholders, and firms need to be far more introspective about the emotional messages they are conveying in every touch they have with customers, prospects, employees and other stakeholders.

Differentiate and Identify

How do customers and employees feel? If you accept the premise that (1) your company wants to encourage or motivate certain behaviors on the part of customers and employees and (2) emotions motivate behavior, then the conclusion is unavoidable that (3) you need to at least try to measure and understand customer and employee feelings. (BTW, if you reject the premise that emotions motivate behavior, you are reading this piece by mistake; please stop reading now.)

People express their feelings in numerous ways: what they say, what they write, pictures they take or create, how they evaluate, the tone of their voice, their facial and body expressions and their autonomous physiological responses. There are pros and cons to every approach to measuring emotions (see http://customerthink.com/measuring-emotions-for-cx-and-ee-and-anything-else/) and no one approach will meet every need.

The approach with the most universal applications and practicality almost certainly is in the analysis of what people say and write. Between open-ended comments (both solicited and unsolicited), social media, telephone and chat interactions, reviews and other sources of unstructured text there is a wealth of content that can be mined for its emotional content. But it’s critical to go beneath the surface of the simple positive/negative, good/bad distinction and to distinguish between different positive and negative feelings. It also is equally important to determine when the stakeholder is projecting no emotional connection and is essentially yawning about your firm.

Responding

Empathy analytics, a term I borrow from Lana Novikova, CEO at Heartbeat Ai Technologies, implies both differentiating and identifying emotions, as well as understanding how to express empathy in communicating and responding to customers and employees (and others). Crafting an appropriate response first necessitates identifying how employees and customers feel. This punctuates the need for identifying and differentiating between emotions and not simply relying on a positive/negative distinction.

Expressing empathy requires acknowledging the feelings of people – and it’s impossible to acknowledge those feelings if you haven’t identified the feelings in the first place. This is why the closed-loop survey feedback process of many firms falls short. Rather than identifying the feelings being expressed, they rely on a cut-off score on a survey question (typically the NPS question) to trigger a response. While this certainly is better than not responding to a problem, this engenders a mechanical, not an empathetic response. This approach, moreover, almost always is limited to responding to very poor numerical ratings, while people often have multiple feelings that cannot be captured in a simple score.

Platforms for pushing outbound communications face a similar challenge: how do you empathetically communicate with customers without having a sense of their feelings in the first place? In many, if not most, instances when customers and employees communicate with your firm they are telling you in some manner how they feel. The questions is: are you reading those feelings and responding empathetically?

Adapt and Influence

Marketing can best be defined as the effort to influence the behavior of others. I like to think of it as motivating (or, as the case may be, de-motivating) people to behave in a certain manner. At its most benign, some will see this as the company adapting to the reality that customers and employees are emotional and adjusting everything it does to meet the emotional needs of stakeholders. This is the pure empathetic perspective. At the other extreme are those who will paint this as an effort to exploit the knowledge of people’s emotions to manipulate their behavior. This is the Machiavellian view.

It is in your company’s self-interest to be empathetic in dealing with stakeholders. Quite frankly, it also is in the best interest of stakeholders that companies act with a measure of emotional intelligence, even if it is purely for the firm’s financial gain.

The Emotionally Intelligent Firm

A company does not have feelings. But it interacts with stakeholders – customers and employees in particular – who are inherently emotional. While companies do not have emotions per se, everything the company does projects emotional content, even if only in the eyes (and hearts and minds) of stakeholders. Oh, and all of the people who work at and act on behalf of the firm have feelings.

• Acknowledge the emotional nature of interactions with customers and employees and recognize that there is an emotional dimension to everything the company does,

• Strive to turn this awareness of emotions into an understanding of emotions by identifying and distinguishing between the different feelings stakeholders express,

• Try to react empathetically to customers and employees, acknowledging and validating their emotions, and

• Work to adapt to the reality of emotional decision making in all of their initiatives from the start, as opposed to only reacting to the feelings stakeholders project.

I know the “soft stuff” can be a hard sell. I’m not calling for the creation of a Chief Happiness Officer. But let’s go back to the premise: relationships with customers and employees and other stakeholders hinge on the emotional glue. As such, emotionally intelligent firms that recognize, internalize and act on this understanding will have a competitive advantage over those who might be described as emotionally ignorant.

Today, I want to talk about the intersection between humanity and technology, particularly, the role that artificial intelligence is going to soon play in our lives and definitely will play huge roles in our children. We need to put humans at the center of AI". 

Heartbeat AI is a SaaS platform that looks at the wide range of emotion in text, including open-ended survey responses, product reviews, customer feedback, employee surveys, and social media. The platform takes text input and turns it into ten primary and a hundred secondary emotion categories. Through this emotion analytics platform Novikova and her team hope to provide an analysis of the emotional drivers of behaviour.

“Once you understand what your customers, consumers, employees feel you can walk in their shoes,” she says in the video below. “Today, I want to talk about the intersection between humanity and technology, particularly, the role that artificial intelligence is going to soon play in our lives and definitely will play huge roles in our children. We need to put humans at the center of AI.”

According to Novikova, Heartbeat is providing solutions to a small puzzle amidst a greater vision that teaches machines the language of emotions to build empathy.

“There is this old joke from the 70s that AI is a machine that can make the perfect chess move even when your room is on fire,” she says. “It’s an old joke, but it’s kind of sad that it still holds true. We are still creating AI that is great at playing games and apps and having fun, while the planet needs really serious solutions to our problems.”

Novikova discusses Stanford AI professor and Google chief scientist Fei-Fei Li’s vision for the next wave of artificial intelligence research and related it to the technology being developed at Hearbeat AI. She quoted Li’s approach, saying, “we’ve got to bring back the contextual understanding. We have got to bring back knowledge abstraction and reasoning. These are all the most important steps.”

When asked about the security risks of this technology Novikova emphasized the importance of building these tools so they don’t control people, but rather offer “a psychotherapist in their pocket.” Novikova believes that creating this emotional technology will require a lot of AI building and testing, but in the end it is empathy that will get the job done.

“Heartbeat is about understanding emotions from text and understanding a wide range of emotions from how you express it verbally in language. There are other tools that understand emotions from facial expressions, tools that understand emotions through biometrics, so I think the combination of those tools will create that future AI that will help us 24/7,” she says.

See Lana’s full story in the video below:

Most chatbots that you come across today have female names: Cortana, Alexa, Siri, Nina, Amelia and more. When they have a voice, it's often soft and somewhat seductive. If they have an avatar, it's cute. There are different design trends for bots: human-like (and often creepy), innocent cartoon-like or futuristic. A new profession called "a bot personality designer" is a hot thing now. A lot of time and money is invested into building these chatty machines.

Some people love chatbots, some hate them. Many people are skeptical or cautiously optimistic. My 12-year old daughter does not type requests to Siri - she talks to her iPhone like she would talk to her friend and gets quite mad when Siri does not get it. I heard their conversations many times while driving. Dasha asked for Siri's help with navigation, and when Siri would not get it right away, Dasha would repeat the same question with a rising level of agitation up to 10 times (last time I counted). Siri kept repeating the same thing and failed to read any signs of emotional distress. Dasha hasn't given up on Siri yet.

Let's look at the scope of this new technology and just imagine the mega amount of human hours that will be spent conversing with bots (VDAs), globally.

Here's a definition of this technology that's taking over the world:

Virtual digital assistants (VDAs) are automated software applications or platforms that assist the human user through understanding natural language in written or spoken form, are rapidly gaining traction in consumer and enterprise markets alike.

( "Virtual Digital Assistants: Virtual Agents, Chatbots and Virtual Assistants for Consumer and Enterprise Markets" report)

Today, they are on our smartphones and smartwatches, on enterprise platforms, in fitness trackers, smart home systems, and cars. The will be literally everywhere in a couple of years.

It's forecasted that "unique active consumer VDA users will grow from 390 million in 2015 to 1.8 billion worldwide by the end of 2021," and enterprise VDA users - from 155 million to 843 million. Over 20% of people on this planet will be active users of VDAs! How many human hours will it amount to?

Total VDA revenue will grow to over $15 billion. This is a lot of money to be spent and made from these conversations. Let's think how we can optimize the time and money investment and create a pleasant and useful user experience beyond giving bots cute names and voices.

First, step into the shoes of your customer and look at the world around you through her eyes (check out my old post about empathy). She is busy, stressed and often overwhelmed. The world is complex, and her brain can't keep up with this ever-increasing complexity. Can your VDA understand that when she drives, the last thing she wants is a list of websites to read? Can it learn that when the same question is asked 5 times, the answer is probably not satisfying and it's time to politely ask the user to re-phrase it?

Always aspire to hire UX designers with high Emotional Intelligence (EQ). People with high EQ could see the world from a customer's perspective and build great products. Research shows over and over again that teams can build EQ and retain it over time.

Understand what people feel when they talk about your apps in product reviews. Natural language is the best tool we humans have to express our likes, dislikes and to share a wide range of feelings with other human beings. Machines, by contrast, don't understand words so well - they understand numbers. App creators tend to look at "star" reviews and poke into verbatims for a few minutes. It's humanly impossible to read all 6,598,404 reviews for Google Now.

There are a few emotion text analytics tools that go beyond "star" reviews or positive/negative sentiment to understand all the emotions shared. This is how we @Heartbeat use app reviews to extract 100 secondary and 10 primary customer emotions.

Finally, spend 20% of your team's time fixing bugs and addressing complaints, and 80% on designing delightful experiences. Here's a great talk by a bestselling author and Stanford professor Chip Heath about the power of “defining moments” and how UX designers can create meaningful experiences for users.