In modern retailing, success no longer depends solely on the attractiveness of the shop and the quality of the wares. It depends on the customer experience that the retailer provides. Understanding the customer and the elements that influence their decision-making as they move from the high street to the bright-light shelves and then to the digital realm is the real path to success and revenue growth.
Understanding customers at a much deeper level is about more than looking at their likes and clicks. Suppose you could understand the emotional impact of your store layout, your marketing campaign, even the design of your product, and how your customers feel as their journey unfolds and they make decisions – and that you could discover this through research. That’s the power of biometric research in retail.
What Is Biometric Research?
Biometric research delves into the conscious and subconscious mind of the consumer, capturing physiological responses and understanding the inherent mechanisms for customers’ decision-making.
There’s a broad range of biometric sensors that can be used in various contexts and environments to capture physiological responses in real-time, providing insights about customers’ brain activity, emotions, and engagement levels. Examples of biometric sensors include:
Eye Tracking
Eye tracking captures and quantifies patterns of visual attention. It provides a way to monitor in real-time where people are looking, how long they are looking at something, and how their eyes move. This is a powerful way to investigate the underlying mechanisms that govern visual attention and information processing. Businesses can leverage eye-tracking studies that involve a small number of participants to inform important decisions within tight development timelines for specific interface elements while conducting larger-scale eye-tracking studies to examine the overall product experience.
Electroencephalography (EEG)
EEG measures brain electrical activity. The brain is essentially a network of neurons. When neurons fire, they create a small electric current in the brain. You can pick up this current using sensors that you place on the top of the head. This is called EEG. The beauty of this technique is that it can reveal all sorts of things about brain activity, including the different types of brainwaves that we can categorize into frequency bands that are associated with different cognitive states. For example, alpha waves are associated with being relaxed but also awake. Delta waves are associated with deeper levels of sleep. Since EEG activity can be picked up milliseconds after it occurs, it can be used to interpret user experiences in real-time. It is also possible to localize EEG signals to a general region. All this information allows us to understand customers’ cognitive experiences as they happen, whether the experience is effortless or cognitively demanding, and so on. This gives clear direction as to what needs to be improved. Retailers want their customers to have the best experience possible, so they need to know which touchpoints to optimize for engagement.
Electrodermal Activity (EDA)
EDA measures the electrical conductance of the skin, typically referred to as the ‘sweat response’ or ‘galvanic skin response (GSR)’. Measures of EDA include both skin conductance level (SCL) and rapid phasic components, which can be markers of physiological or psychological arousal. Broadly speaking, it measures how much a person is sweating, which can vary based on emotional states, including stress, excitement, or anxiety. In a commercial context, measuring EDA provides marketers with insights into consumers’ emotional responses and how their level of arousal can predict their decision-making processes. Notably, measures of EDA can reflect these responses even when people are not consciously aware of them.
These powerful tools go beyond satisfaction ratings and reveal untold stories about customers’ experiences.
Case Study: Luxury Watch Brand
In a collaboration with a luxury watch brand, we aimed to evaluate which product pages and exploration styles were most evocative and impactful for its customers. The brand contemplated a substantial investment in 3D presentation technology, which they believed could drive user engagement. To investigate this, we ran a biometric experiment to measure the users’ reactions and engagement levels with the different exploration modes. We defined the target audience and recruited participants matching this demographic.
Our biometric research involved several steps, including:
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Biometric Setup: EEG and GSR devices were worn by the participants while we ensured their comfort.
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Eye-Tracking Calibration: Eye-trackers were calibrated by asking participants to follow a moving dot on the screen. After that, 90 seconds of relaxing video were played to calculate the GSR baseline, and then baselines for resting-state EEG were calculated for 60 seconds while participants were fixated on a circle on the screen.
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Completing Tasks And Gathering Data: Participants were first asked to complete a series of tasks as they navigated product pages, each presenting a different mode of product exploration.
Biometric experiments on heart rate, skin conductance, and EEG proved that 3D presentations did not generate the anticipated engagement levels. They helped us identify other, more cost-effective methods of achieving better results. For instance, emotive high-resolution images and interactive storytelling proved more effective at capturing initial user interest and generating more positive levels of emotional engagement. As a result of our findings, the client avoided a costly investment in a less effective solution, and we helped steer them toward more effective and cost-efficient methods of enhancing their online customer experience.
Case Study: Home Improvement Retailer
Another project was for a home improvement retailer. It involved a thorough end-to-end journey assessment of a major retailer’s website, using biometrics to determine which parts of the website caused an enhanced cognitive load. At the same time, engagement went down, and stress was elevated among the website visitors. We’ve been able to make targeted recommendations for improvements, helping to lower the cognitive load, which in turn decreased the friction of the user journey. Conversion rates have increased by 20%. As a result, the client reduced stress during the checkout by 15%.
Infinite Possibilities for Boundless Growth Potential
In a time when every interaction is a means of creating ongoing, personalized relationships with customers, biometric research is a doorway to emotionally stimulating experiences.
Applying biometric research to various contexts creates an unlimited number of potential use cases. For example, there’s assessing how customers respond to a new clothing line, which layouts in a store cause customers to spend more time there, or what packaging design best influences how customers perceive products. Biometrics allows for the real-time evaluation of how people feel, using the human brain as a guiding light that informs retailers’ strategic decisions, driving tangible business results by improving key performance metrics.
Beyond immediate financial benefits, taking such an approach, aided by the insights of biometric research, could encourage retailers to design more powerful marketing campaigns and improve customer experiences, offering abundant possibilities for innovation and growth.