Agile Human Experience Intelligence™: More Than a Fancy Name

According to a recent Salesforce study, almost 70 percent of customers expect brands to demonstrate empathy, and 66 percent expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations. 

In an attempt to meet this growing desire, many brands over the last decade have been collecting as much information as they can, from as many sources as they can, to better understand their customers and users. But these data points often miss some kind of ‘connective tissue’ to make them meaningful and actionable for insights, research and marketing professionals looking to connect deeply with their audiences. 

Beneath all these insights sits a layer of multi-dimensional human understanding which connects the emotions, personality, and needs of a person – in context – that are responsible for driving their behaviors. 

This is what GutCheck calls Agile Human Experience Intelligence™ (HXI). 

Agile HXI tells the story of people, so brands can create empathetic experiences that resonate on a deeper level. As Jess Gaedeke, Chief Revenue Officer, says, “It’s a system that connects brands to people.” Each dimension of Agile HXI is critical to painting the complete picture of this deeper human understanding. 

Let’s break it down.  

Agile: Businesses need to remain agile in this constantly changing world. “For us, agility at its core means meeting the client where their needs are, at that intersection of speed, cost, efficiency, and flexibility,” says Jess. This approach helps brands ensure their insights are fresh and relevant, keeping up with changes and shifts in consumer emotion and sentiment.  

Human Experience: Gaining a full understanding of the human experience requires looking at the whole person – their needs, emotions, and personalities – and then building a sense of who they are in the context of your brand or product category.  

Our methods for deriving these insights are rooted in science, such as the OCEAN personality model and the 12-needs framework of Kotler and Ford. Emotion analytics goes far deeper than simply understanding positive or negative sentiment, instead identifying and analyzing eleven distinct emotions that are the underlying drivers and predictors of behavior. 

“When we have an emotional response to something, it’s often in relation to the degree to which our experiences match the expectations we had going in. If they matched, we’re going to feel delight, love, happiness. If our expectations are not met, that’s when we get frustrated or angry or disappointed,” explains Kelly Port, EVP Product Development & Commercialization.  

Our studies reveal the gap between what people desire from a product or service and their actual experience of it. With the right data, brands can craft experiences that better align with user expectations, increasing the positive emotions and with them, brand affinity and loyalty. 

The human experience is even more important to understand when you have no existing product or service and have wide open space in front of you. People make buying decisions based primarily on emotion, which can still be measured and analyzed even when there isn’t a product to make an intelligent decision about.  

Intelligence: Of course, Kelly reminds us, “It’s not enough just to have the data. You need to be able to do something useful with it.” We use a unique blend of AI tools and systems like Hybrid Natural Language Processing to collect authentic data in the wild (i.e. unsolicited commentary from online reviews, blogs and forums). Then, we use human analysis to translate these facts (the who, what, and where) into actions (the why and how). 

“Technology is really helpful and can give you significant gains. But you still need the human expertise to help you select the right technology in the right application, and also know what to do with the data that’s captured,” Jess adds. It’s digitization with a humanization touch. 

Agile Human Experience Intelligence is much more than a fancy name – it’s a revolution in understanding. Get started with us today and see how your business can benefit from Agile HXI.