How much value does your app really deliver? Quantifying your app’s emotional value is actually more simple than it sounds.
There’s a difference between emotional value and delivered value. Part of the delivered value of your app comes from its rational value, or how much your user perceives it to be worth based on its price, features, and usefulness. But as humans, we don’t make all our decisions based on what’s in our heads. We use our hearts, too. And what we’re feeling about an app or product is an important factor in its overall value — we’re just not always conscious of it, nor do most companies seek to quantify and measure it.
So which influences your users more? Facts or feelings? While some experts say that emotion is behind 50 percent of a purchase decision, others claim that as much as 95 percent of decision-making comes from subconscious emotional factors. Still others argue that our purchasing decisions are all subconscious, and we just use rational factors like price and convenience to justify our choices. Whichever the truth may be, it’s clear that emotions play a huge role in your app’s success and value perception.
So how do we leverage this information? Let’s find out.
Today, let’s focus on how we can quantify something as nebulous as emotion, and what actionable steps come next.
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey is the CX industry’s most well-known and frequently-used customer loyalty survey. It’s a simple 2-step survey that takes just a few seconds to complete. The NPS survey is one of the pre-built surveys included in your Instabug survey dashboard.
How do you measure user loyalty in just two questions? When you ask the right questions, you don’t need to ask a lot of questions. Here’s the basic format.
| Score | Classification | Description |
| 9–10 | Promoter | Promoters are your brand’s biggest fans. Very enthusiastic customers will tell their friends about you and are likely to become repeat buyers. |
| 7–8 | Passive | Passives are just that: passive. They’re satisfied enough not to complain, but they don’t have much to say about your brand, either good or bad. |
| 0–6 | Detractor | Detractors are people who are unhappy with your product, likely to push others away from it, and even more likely to churn. Everyone has them, even the most successful businesses. |
To calculate your score, follow this formula:
Your Net Promoter Score = % of Promoters – % of Detractors
Your final score will fall between -100 and 100. If you’re using Instabug, this will be calculated for you automatically on your survey results page.
After the Survey
Generally speaking, anything above zero is considered “good,” over 30 is great, and over 70 is absolutely exceptional—these are companies like Apple, renowned for their products and service, with dedicated fans who voluntarily act as casual (sometimes fanatical) brand ambassadors.
NPS surveys are so simple that they can be misleading if you stop analyzing after calculating your score. The most important step after sending NPS surveys is to read each one of your verbatim responses and pay close attention to what your users are telling you in their own words.
For example, just because someone gives you a high NPS score, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re completely satisfied with your app. Sometimes a big fan may give you a score of 9 or 10 because they love your app but then elaborate in their feedback on the areas where they feel you fall behind.
Net Emotional Value (NEV)
Let’s talk about quantifying emotional value.
This sounds pretty difficult, but it’s actually very straightforward. When you combine all the feelings of your users, positive and negative, what do you think the sum of those emotions will be? On average, are their feelings positive or negative? Your Net Emotional Value (NEV) is the sum of all your users’ feelings. You can use surveys or apply sentiment analysis to your feedback to obtain the data you’ll need.
The simplest way to do it? This question, sent in a survey (on its own, or as part of a longer survey):
To start, categorize the responses you receive into positive, neutral, and negative groups. The equation for Net Emotional Value is straightforward.
Despite appearing simplistic or even reductive, your NEV score can be used in several ways. NEV isn’t a substitution for NPS, but there’s a strong direct correlation between the two metrics. Your users’ emotions about their experiences are tied to their likelihood to recommend your app to others.
Like NPS, your NEV is a KPI that you should strive to raise every time you measure it. Unlike NPS, there are few benchmarks available for NEV (it is a lesser-known metric), but positive and negative answers are relative indicators of the emotional health of your app experience. The bigger the number, the happier your users are.
Emotional Clusters
NEV can also be used to identify which emotions drive the most value for your app. Customer experience specialist Colin Shaw’s Hierarchy of Emotional Value pyramid plots emotions and their impact on value. You can identify these emotions in your own feedback and determine specifically which of them bring the most value to your brand. You’ll want to encourage those valuable emotions as much as possible in your user experience.
The base of the pyramid is comprised of the destroying cluster of emotions that eliminate value for businesses, like irritation, dissatisfaction, frustration, and disappointment. These feelings decrease user loyalty and may push unhappy users to seek alternatives.
The attention cluster includes emotions that drive short-term profits from impulse buyers who may potentially become long-term loyal customers. These emotions include feeling energetic, stimulated, or indulgent.
Moving up the pyramid, the recommendation cluster is a big contributor to long-term value. Users in your recommendation cluster will use words that express feelings of trust, safety, and being valued and cared for. These users are likely to recommend your app to others.
The advocacy cluster includes emotions that typically drive long-term value and loyalty: happiness, pleasure, joy, and similar sentiments. These emotions inspire people to speak positively about your app even if they weren’t asked about it. Encouraging these emotions from your experience will create longtime loyal users.
The Five A’s of Emotional Responses
Like the Net Emotional Value method, the Five A’s involves grouping your users’ emotions (either single words or full responses) into bins separated by intensity and sentiment. CX research pros Temkin Group did the math, and their Five A’s will help you predict your users’ next moves.
A few key highlights from these numbers:
- Customers who feel adoring are 11 times more likely to buy again than those who feel angry
- Appreciative customers are 5 times more likely to trust a company than agitated customers
- Adoring customers are 9 times as likely to try new offerings than angry ones are
Tracking the Five A’s
Take a look at the words you’ve recorded from your feedback and assign them to clusters. Use common sense and word meanings to decide which category each belongs to. Assign points to each category. Here’s a rubric:
- Adoring (+3)
- Appreciative (+1)
- Ambivalent (0)
- Agitated (-1)
- Angry (-3)
Your sum total is your user delight score. You can calculate this on a regular basis (perhaps a weekly or monthly survey, for example) to track how your app is performing. If you’re seeing growth in any undesired categories, do some investigation to find out what’s happening.
Wrapping it up
Having an overview of your users’ emotional distribution will help you to identify your strengths and problem areas, and choose which emotions to focus on improving in the future. Now that you’ve discovered several new ways to measure your app’s emotional value, you can use your new knowledge to fuel smarter decisions about your app.
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