Eight Research Methodologies Proven to Create the Ultimate Customer Experience

An explanation of our research techniques.

Throughout our history we have employed industry leading research techniques as well as developing our own tools to provide deeper and more effective insights into the customer experience. Each of the eight methodologies we employ, six quantitative and five qualitative, are briefly defined. These are divided simply, but not exclusively, into techniques that are focused on uncovering emotional insights and those that are focused on the subconscious. Our expertly trained research and consulting team uncovers new insights through data analytics, one to one interview or focus group moderation to help you measure results, analyze the data, and, ultimately, do something profitable with the outcome.

Quantitative Techniques

Emotional Signature®

Think about the whether you can answer the following questions:

• What are the emotions and subconscious reactions that drive and destroy value in your business?
• What value could you generate from the emotions and subconscious reactions you evoke?
• What should you do to evoke these emotions and subconscious reactions?
• How can you get your customers to feel more loyal towards you?
• How do consumers use their emotions and subconscious response to make decisions about whether to buy from you or not?

The Emotional Signature® derives the value of the emotions and the subconscious aspects of the Customer Experience, defining how you should improve your experience to evoke emotional value in your clients and consumers. This unique and revolutionary methodology is the subject of our book The DNA of Customer Experience: How Emotions Drive Value. We can benchmark your organization’s Emotional Experience and document the key areas you should address to build value-driving emotions into your experience. Learn more about Emotional Signature®.

Emotional Segmentation

Answers the following types of questions:

• How do customer segments differ in their level of emotional engagement?
• What are the natural emotional segments and how do you use them effectively?

Emotional segmentation is a specific way to use psychographic data to enable experience designers to better and deliberately meet the subconscious emotional needs of customers. Traditional segmentation is intended to classify customers in some meaningful way that allows the organization to better meet their needs and achieve greater levels of loyalty. The classic approaches includes classification systems based on geographic, demographic, and behavioural (i.e., usage) factors. All of these approaches have their advantages but they fundamentally miss the emotional engagement the customer has with the experience provider. Do you already have a segmentation methodology? Consider whether your methodology is really differentiaing you in the market place or resonating with the right audience. What assumptions are you making about your customers' emotional reactions? If you do not have a segmentation scheme, isn’t it best to segment based on how customers and clients feel? Learn more about Emotional Segmentation.

Emotional Tracker® Service: Measuring and Tracking Change

Answers the following types of questions:

• How can we track changes in customer emotions and subconscious reactions?
• How can we measure the effects of Customer Experience in a pilot?

An easy-to-use tracking tool based on your Emotional Signature® result that tracks improvements in the level of your emotional engagement. As a follow-on to Emotional Signature®, we can incorporate the core emotional elements into a longitudinal survey process to enable you to measure how you are performing.

Emotional Audit for Six Sigma and LEAN

Answers the following types of questions:

• How will our cost cutting initiatives impact how customers feel towards us?
• Which aspects of our experience can be cut without impacting our level of emotional engagement?

In the long and medium run, are traditional cost cutting efforts going to actually cost you money as you lose your market differentiators? In this service we embed Emotional Signature® processes to provide a critical audit function for any cost-cutting initiative. We provide you with the tools to understand how a cut would feel to your customer and client base.

Emotional Design

Answers the following types of questions:

• How should we redesign our customer experience?
• What part of our experience is not working?

This service helps with the wholesale redesign of an experience, quantifying which new and better scenario(s) clients and consumers truly demand, and which changes are linked to business value. Within this service, we also facilitate a creativity workshop to help your internal stakeholders, clients, and customers think 'out-of-the box'

Subconscious Communication Model

Answers the following types of questions:

• How impactful are subconscious attitudes that even consumers and clients may not be aware as they interact with our brand and experience?
• What network of associations do consumers and clients hold about our brand or experience, and what should we do about it?

Understanding a subconscious experience is a challenge when so much research is based on 'explicit' rational measures. In our Subconscious Communication program we make the world of the subconscious real, demonstrating how clients and consumers have 'implicit and intuitive' feelings about you and your organization, Sometimes those feelings can be in direct contradiction to traditional, more ‘rational-only’ surveys! For instance, on a traditional survey, a consumer may respond 'I am satisfied' but this masks their true implicit feelings of their unhappiness with you and/or the experiences they have with you (and your company). In this service, we dive deep into subconscious response and assess how this relates to attitudes and brand value-critical behavior. We show you how your brand or experience is communicating to clients and consumers using techniques from the Implicit Association Test and Transactional Analysis.

Qualitative Techniques

Repertory Grid

Answers the following types of questions:

• What is our customer experience?
• Is there an experience gap between what we as an organization think our experience is and what our customers actually think it is?
• How do we compare to our competitors in terms of customer experience?
• Do we have a subconscious experience about our products and services? If so, what is it?

In this service, we extensively interview stakeholders and/or customers to understand exactly what your full customer experience is from the rational to the conscious to the subconscious emotional aspects. Instead of using traditional survey forms, this method lets the interviewees respond to the experience in their own words. The role of the interviewer is to extract the various common themes that lie behind these words. Using the Rep Grid, we map the hidden sub-conscious world.

Crowdsource Meaning

Answers the following types of questions:

• What are our clients and customers saying about us?
• What trends do we see in the way people are speaking about us?

This enables you to capture trends before they go mainstream! Some of the ways we get to measure these messages is simply by photographing resonant experiences, noticing some of the subconscious ways firms manipulate their image. We also look at the messages delivered by the written word. Here we use sophisticated text mining tools to identify the most resonant key words from which we can focus our qualitative analysis of ‘affects’. An example of this is the way we looked at how Promoters and Detractors talk to each other through time. Social media, such as blogs and Twitter, are interesting new sources to assess how your clients and customers are talking about you.

Visual Projectives

Answers the following types of questions:

• Do our clients or consumers have feelings that we are not even aware of?
• Do we have a subconscious experience, if so, what is it?

Visual impressions effectively open the mind to a different way of expressing an experience. In our work, we use visual impressions to help interviewees describe their feelings towards an experience. For instance, when we map the customer journey, we ask interviewees to discuss their journey through pictures. The advantage of this is that it pulls out subconscious feelings not accessible or muted by verbal description.

Ethnography

Answers the following types of questions:

• What is our subconscious and emotional experience actually like as consumers experience it?

Customer observation provides a rich mine of real data sometimes not accessible or muted by formalized interview settings. In this 'in the moment ' approach we observe the client and customer in action to deliver key insights. This can also optionally involve the use of video and audio recordings. We may also use a select sample of your own customer and client base to act as recorders of their experience using diary entry or video diaries.

Heartbeat monitor

Moving away from verbal responses to simply recording stress and relaxation points in the customer experience can provide invaluable data and insight. This has the advantage of recording instances, peaks and ends, and how these affect client and consumers in a way frequently not amenable to verbal response.