At the Customer Experience Lab opening at the VCU School of Business in April, Brian Brown, Ph.D., sits in an adjacent room reading a document using eye-tracking equipment, while Jodie Ferguson, Ph.D., (left) shows her colleagues exactly where Brown is looking on the document.

Studying the customer experience

New lab allows researchers to track customer experience and its effect on behavior

Share this story

Jodie Ferguson, Ph.D., hopes the Customer Experience Lab launched this year by the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Business will help researchers understand what consumers experience and the outcomes those experiences produce.

“In experiential marketing, we talk about the five senses, so, as a consumer is experiencing things, whether they’re seeing things, smelling things, tasting things, how is that impacting outcome?” said Ferguson, associate professor of marketing in the School of Business. “Are they going to the store and buying? Are they spreading positive word of mouth? Are they using the product? Things like that.”

The CEL, a behavioral research lab, supports initiatives in research, learning and community engagement across multiple areas of customer experience, such as customer service, retailing, experiential marketing, consumer behavior and consumer well-being. The lab is equipped with hardware and software, including data collection and analysis software and physiological instruments such as eye-tracking equipment, which record and track objective and subjective measures of behavior related to consumer experience. 

Funding comes from a combined $50,000 research grant from The Kornblau Institute, the VCU Presidential Research Quest Fund and the VCU School of Business. Ferguson received the support for her research of the “Use of Heuristics in Consumer Judgments of Offer Fairness in Evaluating Mortgage Documents.” 

Ferguson conducted her research using eye-tracking methodology to understand how consumers use visual information on mortgage documents to evaluate loan offers. The “Consumer Judgments” project centers around the new loan estimate form implemented in 2015 that replaced the “good-faith estimate” for people getting mortgage information from different financial organizations. 

Heuristics involves a short cut in analyzing information to make decisions. 

“Some people are going to spend the time really looking at the fine print and thinking about things and taking their time looking at the terms of the loan,” Ferguson said. “‘Is it a fixed or variable rate?’ and that kind of thing. … Heuristics for a loan estimate would be things like, ‘What’s the monthly payment? If I can make the monthly payment, I’m going to do it.’ [It’s] short and sweet if there’s a piece of information that makes it easy for me to cut out all the clutter and make the decision well. 

“Thinking about consumer welfare, we want consumers to take the time to understand their loan so they don’t get themselves into a situation where they can’t afford the loan.” 

With the technology in the Customer Experience Lab, researchers can bring in consumers and track how they look at a document and where their eyes go on that document. What are they fixating on? How long are they looking at something? In what order do they view items in the document?

“I can look at things like their pupil dilation,” Ferguson said, “so it’s really an objective measure to say what people are looking at. … It might give some insight into how they are using information to help evaluate or make a decision.”

To help further understand what customers are experiencing in future projects, Ferguson hopes to incorporate other technologies — even something as simple as a heart rate monitor. These are more objective measures of consumer behavior than a survey because consumers have less control over manipulating their physiological behavior. For example, it’s hard for a person to speed up his heart rate on his own, whereas taking a survey gives him control over the results, which is subjective. 

“So maybe they’re not really telling us what they’re truly feeling because for one reason or another, maybe they are embarrassed or something,” Ferguson said. “So eye-tracking is more objective where there is less control over what the true measure is.” 

Beyond academic research such as “Consumer Judgments,” Ferguson hopes the lab can be used as a research teaching tool for students, as well as a resource for community partners and businesses that might need help, for example, with a website or developing a new app.

“The technology has really strong practical applications,” Ferguson said. “I’m hoping that the lab will be used for these other functions. I’m hoping that it might promote some cross-collaboration with some other areas in and outside the School of Business that might also have some kind of need for this research.”

 

Subscribe for free to the weekly VCU News email newsletter at http://newsletter.news.vcu.edu/ and receive a selection of stories, videos, photos, news clips and event listings in your inbox every Thursday.