httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1ZaDZo0z1I&feature=player_embedded

It’s an exciting development for businesses and brands; there’s a need to understand how customers feel towards products and services and even though Foviance has traditionally used research techniques to reveal conscious reactions, we are now able to unlock unconscious reactions with analysis of hidden reactions and impressions from customers using Emotional Engagement Measurement™.  This technique can boost revenues for our clients because they will understand on a greater level customers’ unconscious behaviours; it’s not just a case of knowing that experiences need to be optimised, but how to create better customer experiences and heighten engagement.

The importance that emotions play in a decision making process really cannot be ignored. By combining developed research techniques we can provide measurements in several key areas including; excitement, engagement, boredom and irritation (which provides a full picture of unconscious responses and reactions). It’s exciting for us to be able to provide the physical response to experiences, an area that was previously missing.

We have already witnessed great results for clear stimuli such as imagery, layouts, colours, email campaigns and more, which reveals entirely new levels of customer understanding.

To find out more about EEM™ and Emotional Engagement, please refer to our dedicated website

Foviance, the expert in customer experience, worked with SensoMotoric Instruments (SMI), a world leader in computer vision applications and developed their Emotional Engagement Measurement™ (EEM™)  service, which is a fresh approach to customer experience research. The Emotional Engagement Measurement™ service combines a variety of Foviance’s user research methods, eye tracking data collected with SMI solutions and brain data on emotional states collected with a specialised neuroheadset.
Measuring emotional engagement has always been a challenge for customer experience professionals because emotions are largely driven by unconscious processes.

Electroencephalography (EEG) data provides a view on how the brain responds to different experiences, revealing unconscious emotional states. Foviance’s expert consultants are able to use this brain data to offer clients actionable insights on how to increase the effectiveness of marketing and improve customer experience.
In a pilot project with Foviance UK, SMI developed a special interface to integrate the Emotive EPOC neuroheadset with the SMI Experiment Suite 360 ° eye tracking software and the SMI RED eye tracking device, which successfully delivered a service to analyse home, product and landing pages, as well as banner and email content.

By adding eye tracking to EEM™, each emotional reaction can be objectively associated with the focus of visual attention at a certain time. Or in plain words: “In an EEM™ study, we get deeper knowledge on the process of information processing because we know where someone was looking when the brain reacted in a certain way”.

Foviance is really excited to have this resource available, which will become the knowledge base of emotional engagement worldwide.

Explore the Emotional Engagement website

About Foviance 
Foviance is a leading customer experience consultancy that helps some of the world’s best known global brands to deliver better customer experiences that drive improvements in customer satisfaction for increased customer loyalty and better financial performance.

About SMI
SensoMotoric Instruments (SMI) is a world leader in dedicated computer vision applications, developing and marketing eye & gaze tracking systems and OEM solutions for a wide range of applications.

The past few weeks I have been looking at the need for organisations to focus more heavily on the user experience and to more rigouroulsy understand what their customers want online and how best to deliver that to them. Good customer insight is core to that process and insight comes from a range of systems, methodologies and techniques. Last time  I looked at the use of quantitative approaches to customer insight and this week I want to look at some of the more qualitative approaches.

For years in “offline” marketing quantitative and qualitative approaches have been used side by side to understand consumers’ preferences and behaviours. It is only relatively recently that in the online channel that businesses are pulling these disparate sources of insight together to get a fuller picture into what is happening in the online channel and why. Part of the problem has been technological – it’s been hard to integrate data – but another part of the problem has been organisational with different functional silos focussed on different aspects of the customer journey or the customer experience. Certainly here in the UK and I’m sure it’s the same in the US and some of the other more sophisticated digital economies that we are beginning to see roles and job titles such as “Director of Customer Experience”. Something we didn’t see a couple of years ago. With functional integration we are beginning to see more data integration as joined up thinking requires joined up data. Part of that integration involves the “blending” of hard quantitative based data with softer qualitative data collected using a variety of predominantly observational techniques.

Website usability testing has been around for ages (in digital marketing terms) and has been a core tool in the website development process for many organisations. But I am still constantly amazed by how many organisations don’t do any usability testing either during or after the product development process and still spend large amounts of time and money on developing sites or functionality without testing to see whether typical users can actually do what they wanted or expected to do. Simple usability testing can tell you a lot about why things don’t work that you would never get from staring a bunch of web analytics reports and given that often the respondent will be talking about their experience at the same time, you not only get to see why things may not be working, you get to hear it from the horse’s mouth as well. Usability testing techniques are evolving all the time and methodologies like eye tracking are becoming standard features of most tests rather than expensive optional extras. Eye tracking shows where the user is looking and combined with other data such as a click map from a web analytics system is really useful for page level optimisation requirements such as merchandising and promotional work.

One of the criticisms about usability testing is that labs can be an artificial environment in which to observe the user experience. As a result we have seen more use of “ethnographic” style research in which customers are observed interacting with websites in their “natural habitat” such as their home or their work place. For one piece of research we conducted for a retailer we went out into the homes of customers to see how they managed to use the website in their own environment. Pictures fed back to the client showed users balancing laptops on their knees on the sofa or standing in the kitchen with the laptop on a worktop. We might think that customers are focused on the site but the reality is that they could be in an environment which is full of noise and distractions and it certainly puts a different perspective on the kind of experience they may be having.

Some of the newer and more innovative qualitative approaches to understanding the user experience include techniques such as electroencephalography (EEG) to try and measure emotional engagement. This approach uses brain scanning techniques to monitor subconscious responses in the brain when users are subjected to different stimuli on a website. How do they emotional react, for example, to different types of messaging, images or layouts? It’s like eye-tracking on steroids.

With all these innovative developments though the fundamentals remain the same and that’s the recognition that good user experiences cannot be built in a vacuum and without a deep insight into, and empathy with, the goals, aspirations and expectations of our customers. The data, the tools and the techniques just help us to get there.

The golden age of the Web2.0 has seen an increasing number of customers complaining about bad online customer experiences. The online world is flawed with poorly designed websites delivering sought services in an undesirable fashion. But does that really put off customers provided that they get quality in what they pay for? What is it that we like so much about these Internet brands that don’t provide a good customer experience?

Let’s have a look at Amazon and Ryanair: frankly these sites will never figure on the hall of fame for the most smartly designed website. Amazon has a cluttered and messy layout all the way, whereas Ryanair looks cheap and is often mischievous in terms of pricing as the final price of a flight ticket rarely matches what’s advertised on the homepage.

But does that make customers stop consuming? Well not really, at least for the majority of them. And the reason is simple and well known in the marketing industry: most of the users are emotionally bonded to brands, even more when they are outstanding in some way. The Amazon site is a jungle (easy pun!) but it is also renowned worldwide for being the most popular and number one goods reseller website. The Ryanair site might be deceiving in terms of its flight fares, but it nonetheless remains one of the cheapest air carrier to fly with across Europe.

I think we all agree that “what it costs to us” is a key decision-making element when purchasing something. More generally, what matters is the end result and the quality we get for what we pay for. But is that enough to be used as an excuse for not delivering a good customer experience?

From a customer standpoint, it obviously isn’t enough as quality is expected throughout the process. From a brand perspective, the philosophy might be different. Executives may think that cheap experience is inline with the cheapness of the prices in place, or that money and effort not spent on the platform is spent on the quality of the actual service.

Whatever reason it is, those companies offering a poor online experience are playing with fire. Internet being generally their sole selling channel, they can hardly rely on other media to communicate their image and emotionally tie consumers. Should transactional processes, for example, be affected by design or conceptual shortcomings, customers could easily decide to move to new pastures. This is all the more valid in the current financial climate where comparison websites are flourishing, the competition (in prices and ideas) is becoming fiercer and customers are becoming increasingly demanding.

In conclusion, the emotional attachment to a brand plays a tremendous role in the overall brand experience, hence the emergence of new measurement techniques to assess emotional engagement such as the Emotional Engagement Measurement™ (EEM ™). However, I believe that companies only relying on brand perception might be digging their own grave by neglecting their customer experience.

This post was originally posted by Xavier Klingenfus

The session will be held at 9.30am at the Online Marketing event called “Barclays Online Banking – Putting the customer at the heart of it”

Hot topic : Electroencephalography (EEG), Download Foviance’s white paper on Emotional Engagement Research

The research, conducted initially in the gaming sector with PKR, reveals 5 measures of emotional engagement that reveal a great deal about customer experience at a subconscious level. A great deal of consumer behaviour has been conclusively demonstrated by psychologists as irrational and that emotion invariably trumps logical thinking. Until now there has been limited research in to emotional engagement online.

“It is no longer sufficient to create websites which are just easy to use, or have value for money products associated with them. Websites need to appeal to the subconscious; to engage with consumers at an emotional level” says Catriona Campbell, founder of Foviance with a background in behavioural psychology.

Revealing how people respond to specific aspects of an experience has been hard to measure, but by combining electroencephalography (EEG) with other research methodologies it is possible to accurately gauge emotional engagement.
Foviance’s approach, EEM^TM (emotional engagement measurement^TM) has been shown to offer significant new insights and enable brands to better meet the needs of the market.

“At Foviance we have proven with a number of brands that this holds true for websites. Using our neuro-technology to have a deeper understanding of the emotional facet of the customer experience, we have found we can deliver insight that other methods previously haven’t” says Campbell.

The film and advertising industries have widely used approaches combining EEG and qualitative research methods to help explore the depths of the subconscious, helping to create successful merchandising, packaging and creative conceptual ideas that people want.

Microsoft’s Halo 3, because of its player engagement, was the first person shooter
game to become the fastest selling entertainment product of all time. Microsoft’s Dennis Wixon comments, “Building Halo 3 with emotional engagement methodologies was essential to the product”.

When focused on a sector like the gaming industry, EEM^TM has enabled Foviance delve further into customers’ perceptions and responses. “It has helped us understand in more detail the satisfaction and impact something like a ‘hard luck’ or ‘congratulatory’ message may have. The implications for businesses in all sectors are extensive” says Marty Carroll, Consultancy Director at Foviance, and author of the white paper “Unlocking the subconscious: Understanding emotional engagement” available for download from the Foviance.com website.

Press Coverage:

OnlineSlots: Foviance Makes History By Studying Slots Pplayers’ Needs
By Online Slots.net, October 27, 2009

Congoo.com: Online Gambling Subconscious Reasoning Measured
Posted by Congoo.com, May 30, 2009

OnlineCasinos: Online Gambling Subconscious Reasoning Measured
Posted by Online-Casinos.com, May 29, 2009

RecentPoker.com: Foviance Gambling Study
Posted by Pokerstars BonusCode – Use Pokerstars Bonus Code RECENTPOKER.COM for an exclusive 100% first deposit bonus, May 27, 2009

In any market, and in particular one that is in the throws of a global recession, making sure customers are satisfied is a critical success factor for businesses. In parallel, there is a growing focus on customer experience for businesses looking to not only increase customer satisfaction but also drive up sales and create new markets.

A great deal of consumer behaviour has been conclusively demonstrated by psychologists as irrational and that emotion invariably trumps logical thinking. Revealing how people respond to specific aspects of an experience has been hard to measure but by combining electroencephalography (EEG) with other research methodologies it is possible to accurately gauge emotional engagement.

Foviance approach, EEM™ (emotional engagement measurement™) has been shown to offer significant new insights and enable brands to better meet the needs of the market. And of course, marketers also know that connecting at an emotional level with consumers, pays commercial dividends. By measuring mind-states, emotions and other subconscious responses and marrying them up with cognitive responses, it helps us to understand the thinking, actions and behaviours of the respondents.

The film and advertising industries have widely used approaches combining EEG and qualitative research methods to help explore the depths of the subconscious, helping to create successful merchandising, packaging and creative conceptual ideas that people want. Similarly, quality customer experiences are vital to the long term survival of businesses and therefore the importance of getting to know your customers must also be combined with understanding them in new ways.

When focused on a sector like the gaming industry, EEM™ has enabled us to experiment further into the customers’ perceptions and responses. It has helped us understand in more detail the satisfaction and impact something like a hard luck or congratulatory message may have. The implications for businesses in all sectors are extensive.

Using techniques that provide answers that were previously unobtainable, Foviance describes the EEM™ approach in our May 2009 White paper.

This white paper describes how our approach, EEM™ (emotional engagement measurement™) can offer up significant new insights and thus enabling brands to better meet the needs of the market.