How emotional intelligence is changing online retail trends – By Aditya Abeysinghe

What is emotional intelligence?

Emotional intelligence (EI) is the ability to control and identify emotions within a person or that of other people. EI can control and respond to attitudes of others as well as control emotions within a person. Therefore, intelligence of emotions is often considered important than maintaining cognition intelligence.

Levels of EI

According to [1], there are four levels of EI: perceiving emotions, reasoning with emotions, understanding emotions and managing emotions. The first stage of EI is to perceive them. This involves accurately understanding emotions such as facial expressions, gestures and signals. Once emotions are perceived then these emotions can be used to reason whether they need to be responded. For example, some people do not want to respond to someone who is angry but may respond to someone who is joyful.

The next step of EI involves understanding emotions. This includes understanding the reason behind emotions and any effects it may cause to the person. After understanding emotions these emotions need to managed. Managing involves what emotions need to be responded to the person who expressed the emotion or whether any response to the person is required. This is the most advanced level of EI and often controls how people respond.

Components in EI

According to [2], there are five components in EI: self-awareness, self-regulation, social skills, empathy, and internal motivation. Self-awareness is the ability to know emotions of other people and their effect to other people. This enables people to perceive the effects of emotions and manage them. Self-regulation is ability to control emotions of a person and control them. Social skill is the ability to know emotions of other people and build rapport with them to strengthen their emotional or social ties.

Empathy is the ability to know emotions of other people and appreciate their emotions. These can then be used for guiding a person’s behavior. Motivation is important in understanding what passions lie within a person and how they can be used to achieve aims of that person. Some people are motivated beyond other components and often are not bound by external emotions.

Use of EI in online retail

Online retail focuses on selling products over an online website or mobile app. Today, online retail is competitive as many businesses have started selling products over a platform. To understand emotions of customers and improve customer sales EI is often a requirement in online retail.

Self-awareness is a component that is very important for retail. Retailers should identify emotions that cause surge in purchase of products. Perception and reasoning behind these emotions can identify buyer requirement based on factors such as season of the year, weather, etc. Then EI can be used to manage emotions and change methods used for product marketing and selling.

[1] Salovey P, Mayer J. (Emotional Intelligence) http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.385.4383&rep=rep1&type=pdf

[2] Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman

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