Can AI teach us how to become emotionally more intelligent?

The debate over whether AI will replace humans in the workforce often boils down to a simple, double-edged sword: AI will replace humans for the most repetitive and manual labor tasks, while man communicates creatively. And will take the lead in soft skills such as relationship building. While some of this is true - humans and machines will each play to their strengths - it probably makes the role of AI in our professional lives easier. We believe that AI will help humans to do better human work, that is, to help us improve our emotional intelligence, soft skills, and communication skills.

Taking advantage of advances in emotion detection, natural language processing (NLP), and computer vision, and combining it with psychology and linguistics, AI algorithms have developed accents, pitch, facial expressions, eye contact, body language. Improved detection, analysis, and action. , And dozens of other verbal and non-verbal communication features affect communication.

By allowing AI to tap into your user's speech, voice, video, or text, AI can retrieve complex and often disturbing data and find patterns in effective communication that are not visible to the naked eye. The potential applications of these technologies transcend sales and customer success. Many professional roles require strong communication skills, including leadership, public speaking, product management, virtual therapy, teaching, language learning, and a bedside approach to take advantage of AI that measures emotional intelligence. In fact, by 2026, the combined market for emotion detection and communication AI is expected to exceed $ 55 billion.

Success with emotional intelligence and AI

Since Peter Salvai and John Mayer first defined emotional intelligence as "a type of social intelligence that involves monitoring the emotions of oneself and others, distinguishing between them, and guiding one's thinking and actions." Researchers and companies have tried to disprove the art of being a "public figure." Data show that emotional intelligence is a strong predictor of professional success.

A study by Yale found that emotional intelligence helps us make better decisions at work. Another Harvard study found that emotional intelligence was more helpful than IQ in predicting team success. And a 10-year study at Google called Project Oxygen showed that emotional intelligence is more important to one's success as a manager than IQ or technical skills. Important point: Emotional intelligence is as important as any "difficult skill" and investing in it helps individuals and teams succeed at work.

Professionals seeking to improve their emotional intelligence should work on their self-awareness and emotional self-discipline, while at the same time adapting to the emotional state of the client they are talking to. This is not only the context for reading the current interaction and situation, but also the history with this person and their common goals. AI can help make this process easier for customer representatives: it not only gives you an idea of the emotional profile of the customer on the other line, but also enables you to mimic talking to them.

This kind of insight is especially important in a high-risk world of customer success, where the average customer success manager (CSM) manages $ 2 to $ 5 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), often in the United States. Understandably, the cultural and interpersonal nuances of US-based consumers are critical to success.

One company that has recognized this is Gainsight, a leading customer success platform based in the Bay Area, which incorporates EQ analysis into their hiring and onboarding, and is currently in India. Located Pilot with one of its customer success teams.

Gainsight uses gong and zoom to record calls between its India-based CSMs and US-based users, then analyzes the data to analyze and understand its users' learning style, emotional response, and personality profiles. Conversations feed into the intelligence platform. This data is then fed into a training simulator to help prepare other CSMs for incoming calls with users in the region. By properly tailoring their delivery and meeting customers at their emotional level, CSMs can accelerate the winning agenda with customers.

Emotional intelligence in AI and action

The sales data analysis firm, Gong, analyzes the interaction between salespeople and customers to help sales professionals communicate better and close more deals. Gong takes advantage of machine learning (ML) and NLP to index customer emails and video calls, and gains quality insights from quantitative customer data to develop better pitches and adopt more persuasive and empathetic language. Is. Gong is no small startup that follows the promises of AI. It was recently valued at $ 7.25 billion and its client list includes Accenture, LinkedIn, Service Titan, Slack, PayPal, Zillow and many more.

In early 2020, as the epidemic forced a global lockdown, Zello began using Gong to help his sales professionals personally transition to virtual sales. Zillow created a video tour and paired it with gong trackers to monitor which key phrases help close more deals. Zillow also used Gong's Whisper product, which ranks sales team members based on their performance, to determine how their top actors were interacting and the rest of the team. Competitions were pitched in different ways, enabling managers to institutionalize these best practices.

Another example is BenchSci, which helps pharmaceutical companies and scientists advance their clinical trials. An important aspect of customer success for a VP for Mike Egan is for his team to stay active with customers so that they can get the right help at the right time to turn them into evangelists on their platform. Coins Because pharmaceutical companies are unable to record online meetings due to privacy and security concerns, BenchSci worked with the AI chat intelligence platform to receive signals from emails, support tickets and surveys. The platform can run personality and behavior analysis on a customer's emotional state and enable the customer service representative to better reflect and respond to customer service tickets.

AI feedback loop

Because customer interaction is so important, the field of customer success has been fertile ground for establishing a 360-degree AI feedback loop: providing insights into the emotional state of consumers before, during and after customer interaction. Is done. In this section, we break down every step of the customer's journey and the ways in which AI can help improve emotional intelligence.

Before customer talk:

Customer Success Managers should have an environment of training and practice before talking to customers, especially when they can rate conversations. Is it a renewal? Cancel a customer? Upgrade request?

If you've spoken to a customer before, Cyrano.AI has acquired patented technology that analyzes past conversations to create a customer profile. This profile can include the client's communication style, identifiable preferences or goals, and even their level of engagement in the final conversation. If you look at the emotional moments of the call and how they inspire, you can customize your offer according to your customer's personality type and see how they respond.

During customer conversation:

Customer Service and Customer Success Guides can get real-time feedback and suggestions on how to better close a deal, handle objections, or empathize with unhappy customers. Krista, for example, uses AI to give call center workers real-time feedback via text prompts, so they know what to tell customers under normal circumstances. If a customer has a problem, the technology offers a step-by-step prompt to assist the delegates in overcoming it. An unhappy customer? Technology offers key phrases or words to calm the customer.

EarthLink, a privately held Internet Service Provider (ISP), used Krista to modernize its Contact Center operations, allowing their agents to communicate more sympathetically. Within the first month of using the Krista, EarthLink experienced an 11% reduction in average handle time (AHT) and a 124% improvement in the conversion rate of value-added services, which is a measure of success.

After customer interaction:

Insights Customer post-conversation is where the real power lies, as AI can read past conversations with the customer and provide feedback. Like a good cycle, the more AI is used, the better the impression.

Reciprocity, a key risk and compliance platform headquartered in San Francisco, enables the same scenario for their CSM team as part of their tech stack. While their customer meetings are recorded in Gong, they analyze these calls from the Conversation and Emotional Intelligence platform, which not only provides a profile of their customer's stakeholder personality based on past conversations. But also uses the Natural Language Generation (NLG) to advise CSMs. Working with specific people. The software can also combine CSMs with customer stakeholders based on similarities in their personality and communication style, which reduces friction in the buying or selling process, and makes customer-focused individuals more authentic and efficient. Enables communication in a way.

Companies are wise to find AI solutions that can help their teams become emotionally more intelligent, and better coordinators. In fact, AI can enhance our emotional intelligence by making us more self-aware and helping us to organize important work relationships. Enhancing our emotional intelligence and communication skills makes us more efficient, productive and empathetic. Although technology is far from perfect, it is becoming more intelligent every day as the platform is increasing in data, scale and sophistication. Technology is there to make our teams more emotionally intelligent and companies more successful and profitable.