Nowadays one of the most common questions around Customer Experience is “What is Emotional Value Index®?” or “EVI®”? Well today, let’s answer that question!
Thanks to the rapid development of technology we have moved quickly from a single touchpoint world to a world where the customer can dictate how they want to do business with us in a multi-touchpoint world. Customer journey took over and purchase behavior evolved rapidly from product lead and price lead decision into experience-driven to emotions being the main driver today.
Emotions have been taking over marketing and the position to be the main driver of our purchase behavior during the past decade rapidly. Today, a whopping 46% are saying that customer experience is the main driver of the purchase decision whereas pricing is only 20%. In other words, look beyond NPS and CES to emotions that you want to drive in your business and find a way to measure those.
This lead to the creation of the EVI® as in the Emotional Value Index. EVI® is very much like NPS or CES as it is a standardized way to see a more complex phenomenon. On the other hand, emotions are more complex so the model to calculate the index is a bit more complicated, though still very simple.
The benefits of EVI® are uncanny as it is a very versatile, yet simple KPI (Key Performance Indicator). What makes EVI® powerful, in addition to its actually unveiling the emotional structure behind your customers purchase behavior, its versatility brings many benefits like:
EVI® is both strategic and tactical KPI offering intelligence for all levels of the organization
Unlike any other CX KPI, you can use EVI® throughout the entire customer journey.
EVI® can be attached to operational data like sales and churn data to see how CX impacts your business
But how does EVI® actually work? Here is a quick refresh!
Measuring is fairly easy and you would use the question “Please select the emotion that best describes your emotional state regarding…” and you would give the options of selecting the emotion on a circle form. There are 8 main emotions plus an indifferent option to choose from. Using this type of circular form is really important as the emotions are not linear even though they might be positive or negative by nature.
Now that we have set the measurement in place, the numeric index comes out fairly easily. The main point is to categorize the emotions into different clusters based on the effect and the amplitude of the emotion. There are four different clusters based on the amplitude and which value the cluster receives. The clusters then have values -1, 0.33, 0.66, or 1. From here, the calculation is fairly simple. You would just take the weighted average of each cluster based on the amount of how many times a person has selected a specific emotion that goes to each cluster. This will then create a number between -1 and 1. This can be then transformed into -100 to 100 on which EVI® is usually presented.
Hope this helps you to better understand how to utilize EVI® in your own business. You can always read more from the emotionalvalueindex.com or ask directly from me, I’m happy to help!
EVI was first developed during my time in the university of Turku, if you are interested on that, please check out the site above and https://www.jaakkomannisto.net/books
-J