Ever send a text or email you thought was neutral, but the reader took it as snarky? It may not be your fault or theirs. Humans aren’t great at empathetic accuracy – guessing the emotion someone else means to convey – in email or text. Even people who know each other well struggle with this task. My mom would say it’s a sign we should pick up the phone more, and she’s not wrong. But, email and text aren’t going away. What can we do to boost digital emotional intelligence (DEQ) and stop misunderstandings before they start?
It turns out there’s an app for that (probably more than one). A writing tool I use called Grammarly* recently launched a new tone analyzer. When you start a draft, it asks who the audience is for your piece and how you want to sound to them – confident, urgent, respectful, etc. It looks at the text as you type and offers tips to spice things up or tone them down to hit your emotional target.
I just started playing with this, so I’m not sure how well it works. If you’ve used it (or a similar tool), please share your experience in the comments! In some ways, though, it’s not about how well the tech works today; that will improve over time. What excites me is that anyone can get feedback on, and start a conversation around, the emotional experience we deliver as individuals.
We ask employees to take ownership of CX and EX; this will help. Any B2B sales rep, customer success manager, or team leader can check how their words sound to others before sending them. Even a small improvement brings you one step closer to lift in the corporate metrics that come from high powered voice-of-the-customer and text analytics (VoC) tools.
Given the compelling link between emotion, trust, and loyalty, a tool like this can’t hurt, and the potential for upside is enormous.
* This is not a sponsored post, I just thought it was a cool feature and wanted to share.
