Leveraging Neuroscience-Based Insights to Improve Customer Experience

As product life cycles shorten and competitive differentiators become ephemeral, brands need a consistent strategy to stay ahead of the curve. Customer experience has proven to be a solid foundation for building such a strategy that becomes a powerful competitive barrier. One key ingredient of executing a differentiating customer experience is represented by deep, accurate insights regarding customers’ attitudes and expectations. Getting those insights requires more than merely stated preferences or inferred behaviors, as we need to get a good grasp of customers’ context, their emotions, and recall of the consumed experiences. Many organizations still continue to believe that a few structured questionnaires sent out to a select sample of customers is sufficient to acquire deep knowledge when designing their journeys and interactions with various touchpoints. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Let’s take customer personas, as an example. Too many organizations build those personas relying on the perceptions and intuitions of their marketing teams, completely ignoring the customer themselves. Therefore, they build their customer experience strategies relying on this inside-out approach, only to find out, to their considerable dismay, that their customers do not react in reality as those portrayed by the hitherto defined personas. This is where scalable consumer neuroscience plays a key role, allowing companies to measure their customers’ emotional reactions to each interaction across their journeys and collect unbiased and accurate insights regarding their perceptions and expected experiences.