Do you like to use strategic models in your business.

Do you like to use strategic models in your business. I love a good model! I came across the “Emotion Canvas” recently when Jaap Wilms CCXP presented it to our Elevate participants during a sales cadence masterclass and here is my experience of it.

First, the model itself is like a “customer journey map”, but where each dot along the way is associated with an emotion on the part of a customer. Jaap Wilms CCXP also talked us through the “signature moment” (with the WOW factor) and the “moment of truth” when the customer realises they’ve gotten what they sought out.

In this video, I share our experience of applying the Emotion Canvas in two different Active Peers AI initiatives.

The first was with Louise Foody in a post-masterclass session. We asked each of our Elevate participants to look at what we thought our customer journey map was and amend it so we could see what they “saw”. Next, we asked them to assign an emotion of each part of it and explain it to us. They were invited to think through thier signature moment and moment of truth too before discussing it afterwards. We did this with a view to turning the theory that Jaap Wilms CCXP shared during the session into practise so they could go on and apply very practically in their own businesses.

The second was on an internship we led last month with 33 college students in universities across Ireland, UK and the US. We asked them to share their emotion canvas with us of the experience so they could see how a model like this works in practise in a company but also to give them another way to express their perspective to us.

Here are some takeaways:

1. Hard doesn’t always mean bad… and sometimes it’s necessary (to trigger a customer interaction or outreach in the first place).

2. What causes somebody to feel a certain way about an experience might be totally different than what you think (or you may be trying to create or diffuse).

3. What you think a customer or participant or user sees in their interactions with you might be very different than what you see (or see regularly).

4. Just because somebody is happy with something in your customer experience doesn’t mean you should just stop there. Is there scope to increase the level to where it’s a really signature moment that differentiates you?

5. What do you need to change, not in terms in the product or service itself, but in terms of how you communicate about it?

6. What have you been missing all along?

7. What are people expecting from you and how can you help them realise themselves that they’re benefitting from your brand promise?