- Use empathy ‒ the killer app for the customer experience
The biggest business opportunity is enabling customer-facing applications to respond in real time to how an individual feels in order to deliver a more meaningful, personalized, or authentic experience.
- Determine what affective data is available
Companies should determine what inferences about mental states they want the system to make and how accurately those inferences can be made using the inputs available.
- Scope out the technical challenges
Involve IT and engineering groups to figure out the challenges of integration with existing systems for collecting, assimilating, and analyzing large volumes of emotional data.
- Consider the level of emotional complexity
Some emotions may be more difficult to discern or respond to. Context is also key. An emotionally aware machine would need to respond differently to frustration in a user in an educational setting than to frustration in a user in a vehicle.
- Respect customers’ privacy
Whether customers will be comfortable having their emotions logged and broadcast by companies is an open question. Customers may find some uses of affective computing creepy or, worse, predatory. Be sure to get their permission first.
There’s more.
