Smile, you are being listened to!
You receive a call from a call center at 7:30 PM while it's rush hour at home. You answer, very irritated, but against all odds, the salesperson hooks you with a staggering promotional offer for the gym you dreamed of joining! Only a handful of seconds passed between the moment you were about to hang up on the caller and that very fleeting moment when their offer caught your attention. However, during this very short instant, your slight hesitation was analyzed by artificial intelligence software, and the salesperson was informed of your receptiveness. The sale is therefore close to being concluded! Let's see how all of this works…
Artificial and Emotional Intelligence… What are we talking about?
The term ‘emotional intelligence’ (EI) was proposed and defined in 1990 by Salovey and Mayer, two psychologists who had written a book on the subject. According to them, emotional intelligence is “a form of intelligence that assumes the ability to control one's feelings and emotions and those of others, to distinguish between them, and to use this information to guide one's thoughts and actions”.
This observation has truly become a godsend for communication and marketing teams around the world! So it is not surprising that this science has been utilized for commerce; all the genius of developers has been to create software endowed with artificial emotional intelligence. Thus, machines today are capable of analyzing emotions and translating them instantly into marketing responses. For example, contact centers can analyze, in real time, the emotions of their interlocutors and dictate to their agents or chatbots (robots also called conversational assistants) the appropriate responses and behaviors, in order to respond in the best and most personalized way possible to the customers' issues…
Cutting-Edge Marketing or Manipulation?
Of course, every scientific advancement has its detractors, and asking about potential mass manipulations is quite legitimate. Does dissecting a consumer's emotions to better target the response to their complaint stem from a genuine desire to fully satisfy them, or does it respond to basic economic realities (namely, of course, selling more and more…)? To this, Michel Badoc, a speaker and specialist in neuro-marketing replies: “Marketing in itself is manipulative. One must look at what ends these techniques are used for. If a company uses them to communicate more intelligently and meet consumer expectations, there’s no problem…” Thus: consumers, since they find benefits, will be the sole judges – and potentially consenting victims – of the use of artificial and emotional intelligence!
Update of the article: January 11, 2022
