From Personalization to High-Definition Emotional Intelligence

People with high emotional intelligence (EI) are well-liked, show strong performance, and are generally more successful. They are emphatic and have good social skills: they show an awareness of the feelings of others and manifest this awareness in their words and actions. They can find common ground with a wide range of people and nurture relationships beyond friendliness and the ability to get along.
They achieve this by noticing and analyzing subtle nuances: gestures, voice intonation, word choice, facial expressions – stated and implied codes that transpire between people – and adjusting their behavior accordingly. The jury is still out on the quintessential quantification method of EQ, but we don’t need a test: we recognize people with high EQ as good listeners, the ones who nurture in us the feeling that we are understood and who react to us seamlessly.
In his research on EQ, psychologist Daniel Kahneman of Nobel Prize fame, found that people prefer to do business with a person they like and trust rather than someone they don’t know, even if that person offers a better product at a lower price.
Imagine if brands could do that!
The People Behind the Data
The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself.
Management Guru Peter Drucker (back in 1974!)
The central principle of marketing is that knowing a customer better helps you to offer products and services they want. Understanding the context of a customer has always been a part of that, but recently the amount of contextual information available to marketers has sky-rocketed.
Personalization is a first step – we know that because automated emails now use our first name more often than our parents. For instance, the ability to call customers by name and display weather-appropriate apparel is a good start for making a connection.
But if you could look at a picture of all of your customers on a TV screen, personalization would convey a crude, low-definition picture flattened into nine or twelve pixels. You would target the green pixel differently than the yellow one, but that’s about the amount of differentiation you could base your customer engagement on.
If you’re still viewing your customers through that pixelated paradigm. In that case, you are missing out on the next wave in the customer revolution, empowering brands to be sensitive to their customers and display emotional intelligence and personality in their communication.
The key to achieving a higher definition is in the data. Your customer data is technology’s equivalent to the gestures, tone, content, and expressions that emotionally intelligent humans perceive. Your customers’ affinities, wants, needs, and hesitations are all engrained in the data. But to create that emotionally intelligent communication with your customers, you need the technology to translate that data into behavioral patterns.
Nurture Your Biggest Asset
Cutting-edge customer marketing technologies can deliver an increasingly granular and defined picture of your customers. As algorithms and data analytics become more sophisticated, those pixels on your TV screen become continuously smaller. Suddenly, you notice that the blue pixel is not blue at all – it’s four pixels: green, grey, brown, and light blue.
Now, you can target increasingly defined groups of customers, each one with a message, content, or offer that matches their preferences, place in the customer journey, touchpoint, and state of mind. As the technology keeps collecting and parsing data, your customers’ picture is finally exhibited in its fully defined glory.
This emotionally intelligent communication gives successful businesses an edge over the competition by winning over the hearts of customers and helping them nurture the most significant asset they have – their customer base.