In their best-selling book “The Power of Moments”, Chip and Dan Heath profile “Moments that Matter” and how these have significant impacts on customer loyalty and how “elevating the positive moments” have 9-times the impact of “minimizing the negative moments”.

Moments are inherently emotional, and need to be both identified, measured and mapped to inform an on-brand customer experience that the organization can plan, design, train and act in alignment. 

However it is our experience that most research lacks the design to capture emotional insights on a systematic basis – using unstructured story-telling instead of rigorous analysis. 

Consider the feelings a husband has after arriving home with drive-through food for his sick wife, only to find that the order has been mis-prepared to the point that she can’t eat it due to dietary restrictions – and he has kids to manage, a hungry wife with nothing to eat and no ability to go out again. 

Several easy-to-use research methods can be used to not only capture emotional events in a shopper’s journey, but measure the degree of emotional intensity. 

There are several affordable and easy-to-execute ways of capturing and measuring customer emotions:

• Biometric monitoring – simply wearing a GSR-device on a finger to measure the intensity and positive/negative emotion of different stages of the shopping, buying or product use experience.
• Facial analysis – computer-analysis of their facial expressions as they watch a video, try a product or read packaging information. Very effective for digital journey analysis. 
• Video capture and analysis – capturing video of retail store movement and evaluating behavior patterns and actions, especially exasperation at key moments.
• Shopalong observation and interviews– walking with shoppers along their buying journey, observing their behavior and following it up with an in-person interview after the experience to have them share their emotional reaction on key moments
• Mobile ethnography – capturing video and audio recordings at key journey stages – that can be analyzed and scored for degree of intensity.  

Emotion is a part of every customer journey – build your research plan to capture and measure it with ease and precision. 

Call 1-800-549-7170 or send an email to nitin@goldresearchinc.com for a free consultation on this topic.

Gold Research is an award-winning Customer Journey Management firm with extensive experiences in B2C and B2B journey mapping, path-to-purchase research with a special focus in deploying “real-time” and behavioral/neuroscience research formats to gather in-the-moment customer insights.