The Neuroscience of Customer Experience

Thanks to brands like Sephora, Disney, Bass Pro Shops, and American Girl, consumers have come to expect extraordinary experiences — and companies are under increasing pressure to create them.1 Even the pros continue to up their game. Take Starbucks, where it has long been understood that a cafe is much more than a place to get coffee. Starbucks Reserve locations elevate the cafe experience to a new level. Patrons watch green coffee beans being roasted and then brewed onsite, while “mixologists” host coffee tastings and prepare unique cocktails. People can shop for local artwork and gifts with drinks in hand. They can also take tours, eat dinner, and attend classes.

Of course, extraordinary customer experiences are not always upmarket. For instance, low-cost airline Avelo flies only to and from small airports that are easy to navigate. It encourages passengers to check their bags in order to speed up boarding and deplaning, and it has eliminated flight-change fees. Avelo’s focus makes affordable travel easy and comfortable — major upgrades when you consider the treatment that budget-conscious passengers usually get.

While the variety of extraordinary experiences is wide, they do have a common objective: building brand attachment and customer loyalty. A single bad experience can drive away customers for life, but one that is fantastic creates a desire to buy again. However, trying to create something “mind-blowing” or “amazing” lacks the precision needed to consistently engineer the extraordinary.

Over the past 20 years, my research team has identified a set of brain signals that make experiences feel valuable and emotionally charged, rendering them memorable. Our work has shown that this combination produces a desire to repeat the experience.

Having measured people’s brain activity during thousands of experiences, both in my lab and in businesses, I have augmented widely used design thinking principles with neuroscience so that anyone can create extraordinary experiences. I’ll describe how, but first, let’s look at the science in a little more detail.

The Components of Immersion

Powerful emotional responses supercharge memories of experiences.2 Think about how easily you can recall where you were on 9/11, for example, or how vividly you remember a film that moved you deeply.

An emotional response is an unconscious one, so it cannot be reflected in consciously delivered user feedback such as survey scores and ratings. Indeed, such ratings have almost no predictive value for movie ticket sales, online streaming, sales bumps from advertising, or other product performance measures.3 The subjective poorly predicts the objective.

When people are asked to quantify their unconscious emotional responses, their brains do not give them access to that information with any degree of accuracy. Unconscious neural activity cannot be made conscious no matter how hard one tries. Without meaning to, people lie. They feel that they must conjure an answer because a researcher has requested one. Furthermore, the answer given is subject to a large set of biases, such as social acceptability, congruence with one’s self-identity, and framing effects, further degrading its veracity.

Self-report inaccuracy, a challenge that researchers continually wrestle with, can be avoided by measuring neurologic activity. After my initial research identifying neurochemical predictors of experiences was published, my lab received government funding to measure around 150 brain signals simultaneously to hunt for the neuroelectric signatures that provoke the brain out of homeostasis and compel people to take an action after an experience.4 Through this body of research, we identified a neurologic state I call immersion.5

Immersion has two main components. The first is the binding of the neurotransmitter dopamine to receptors in the brain’s prefrontal cortex. This alerts the brain to pay attention because something that may be of value is nearby.6 The second component is the release of the neurochemical oxytocin from the brain stem, triggering emotional resonance with the experience one is having. The electrical activity of these signals can be tracked second by second, and they provide a granular, physical measure of what consumers’ brains value and what gives people joy — that magic combination that makes experiences memorable and worth repeating.

In studies that used pharmaceuticals to turn up emotional resonance in the brain and analyze its effects, my research team found that immersion influenced spending decisions. For instance, it substantially increased the number of charitable causes to which people donated and the amount of money they gave after they viewed public service advertisements.7 Additional studies showed that the administration of synthetic oxytocin increased what people would pay for products, their perceptions of brand competence, and their use of emotional language when describing brands.8

When consumer experiences lack emotional resonance, the attentive brain does not value what is happening because the neurological “tagging” is missing. Essentially, physiologic arousal goes unchecked without the calming effect of oxytocin. This is a neurologic state I term frustration. Identifying immersion and frustration points can help businesses create extraordinary customer experiences and prevent unsatisfying ones.

Since conducting my early lab research, I have built an automated platform to gather and analyze data from hundreds of businesses. This data shows that immersion generates a mood boost in activities as varied as shopping for clothes, listening to music, and eating sweets.

Design Thinking + Neuroscience

Researchers and innovation teams studying consumer insights often use design-thinking principles to understand and improve consumer experiences. Critically, design thinking attempts to gauge people’s emotional responses. But, as discussed above, emotions are inaccurately reported by the conscious brain. Applying insights from neuroscience to design thinking allows us to bridge the gap between what people report and what they feel. This approach can help businesses empathize with customers more effectively, define problems to solve with new products or services, and prototype and test their solutions. No direct brain measurement is needed to apply the underlying ideas, although measuring immersion can help companies accelerate and refine the practice of creating the extraordinary.

Here, we’ll look at how all this can play out in three key steps of the design-thinking process.

Empathize. Design thinking starts with observing and interviewing people who are using an existing product or service or for whom no good solution exists. The goal is to empathize with customers to better understand their needs.

Neuroscience research shows that you will get a better result if you take steps to ensure that participants feel psychologically safe before they are observed. In the absence of psychological safety, norepinephrine, one of the brain’s arousal neurotransmitters, inhibits the release of oxytocin, a key source of emotional resonance during an experience. This thwarts people’s ability to immerse themselves in an experience and give observers useful feedback.9 Consumer insights teams often hurry participants into study mode in the name of efficiency, not realizing that they are degrading the quality of the information they acquire. Rather than rushing participants into observation or discussion, give them a chance to relax. Putting them in a familiar setting increases psychological safety, as does offering them a snack. Provide time for a bio break if you spend more than one hour with them to ensure that they remain comfortable. Making people feel safe is itself an act of empathy.

Research also shows that consumer ethnographers who are highly empathic more effectively elicit emotional responses.10 Hire interviewers who have this personality trait to get the most from customer interviews. In addition, interviewers should adopt an empathic style by asking open-ended questions to elicit emotionally revealing words rather than asking participants to do the impossible: rate their feelings on a meaningless numerical scale. Active listening allows one to explore aspects of an experience that cause pain and pleasure and encourages storytelling, the default style people use to describe experiences.11

Here’s an example to illustrate this: A midsized casino in southern Nevada that was planning to expand invited and incentivized a diverse set of customers to enjoy the facility while consumer ethnographers shadowed them to understand patron experiences. Before entering the building, each individual or couple was seated on a couch in a comfortable anteroom and offered soft drinks and snacks while the ethnographers introduced themselves by name and described the study. This put people at ease. Then participants were handed $50 and invited to explore the casino any way they wanted, giving them a sense of control during the observation and further enhancing psychological safety. Participants’ impressions were solicited, and as they explored gaming locations and restaurants, neurologic immersion was tracked with app-enabled smartwatches.12

After an hour in the casino, participants returned to the anteroom, where they could use the restroom and have more snacks and drinks. Only then did the ethnographers query them about what they would value in a new casino. The neurologic data and interviews revealed significant frustration when obstructions slowed progress as people tried walking toward gaming tables. Customers also had difficulty finding restaurants when they left the gaming areas, and older participants struggled to read menus. The most immersive parts of the experience were the interactions with dealers and servers. These insights informed subsequent stages of the design-thinking process and were incorporated into the expanded casino’s layout and employee training.

Define. The next step, defining the problem to be solved, involves identifying sources of frustration and deciding which ones to address. Frustration manifests neurologically as a stress response, producing physical indicators such as feet-shifting, head-scratching, and curt responses to questions. Product-use frustration can be seen in the repetition of steps to get a device to work or clumsy fumbling with buttons or knobs.

Tolerance for frustration varies substantially across individuals and contexts, so it’s important that researchers control for differences when analyzing pain points. Then designers can rank customer pains to identify the core problems to solve. Neurologic measurement allows for greater precision, but the physical indicators of frustration also provide valuable information.

A major point of frustration during many customer experiences — such as shopping for groceries, renewing a driver’s license, or spending time at a crowded amusement park — is waiting in line. To understand this problem, Walt Disney Imagineering, which designs the Disney theme parks, builds a variety of mock-ups, from storyboards to scale models to virtual reality simulations, so that designers can search for frustration points and reduce or prevent them. This is how Disney discovered that having guests snake into an attraction decreased the feet-shifting associated with standing still and that posting signs with wait times decreased stress responses associated with uncertainty, like finger tapping. The Disney team also discovered that they could prevent frustration by eliminating obstacles to traffic flow between attractions. For example, they smoothed out choke points by reducing the size of planters people needed to walk around.

My team tested Imagineering’s attention to detail in park design by collecting neurologic data at Disneyland from visitors we outfitted with smartwatches to measure immersion and frustration. The data showed that periods of neurologic frustration in lines were surprisingly rare. Attraction entrances are richly designed, giving visitors’ brains puzzles to solve. A full day’s worth of data showed that half the time, entering a ride was more immersive than the ride itself. We were impressed by the astute design insights and execution by Disney’s Imagineering team.

Across a variety of experiences at Disneyland and elsewhere, we also found that immersion is contagious — and pain points are diminished — when groups of people share an experience. Watching someone discover an “Easter egg” while entering the Indiana Jones Adventure at Disneyland provides enjoyment and excitement to others, reducing the frustration of a long wait.

Prototype and test. It’s essential to prototype ideas and give them a small-scale trial run before committing to production — and to continue testing and improving them after they enter the market. Conducting surveys and focus groups to gauge which prototypes and products people like the most is a flawed approach for several reasons. For starters, iterative design changes are typically only unconsciously perceived, so it is difficult for people to assess them during interviews or through ratings. Even if you explicitly highlight changes for people to rate, the ratings are still unanchored (that is, no two customers’ “10 out of 10s” or “likes” are the same) and are largely unpredictive. When prototyping and testing more innovative or unusual experiences, you’ll run into a different obstacle: People lack a reference point when trying to describe whether and, especially, why they like or dislike the offering.

Determining whether customers will buy a product requires data on the emotional value people derive from it; it is emotions that drive purchase decisions.13 As discussed above, the brain hides emotional responses from conscious awareness. As a result, intentions to purchase in the future poorly predict actual purchases of new products.14 One way to ground predictions in observation is to see how long testers engage with the prototype or product. When I ran tests for a new virtual reality product, time of use increased along with the number of positive emotional words people used to describe the experience. And measuring neural responses gave us time-linked objective data on immersion or frustration that were paired with videos of the prototype in use. Another observable measure is how many early testers ask to buy prototypes.

The global appliance maker Electrolux has a consumer science lab in Stockholm that looks and feels like a kitchen in a typical home but has 15 hidden cameras that capture how consumers use prototype appliances. Staff members also query study participants for usage insights as they try new gadgets. Some tests include the collection of neural data via smartwatches that enables emotional responses to be tracked in real time. For example, neural signals can distinguish peak immersion moments that produce joy from moments of frustration when a participant is spending more time than expected adjusting the controls on a dishwasher. Real-time neural data can also inform the questions consumer insights team members ask. Whether or not direct neural measurement is included, members of the insights team ask open-ended questions about what consumers are experiencing as they try new products, track the time spent getting each appliance to start, and take note of any physical indicators of emotional responses. The new-product team then reviews videos of the lab experiences to determine whether a prototype is ready to go to market or needs more work.

As customers in the marketplace use a product or service, behavioral feedback (such as adoption rates and usage times) can reflect immersion and identify the next set of feature improvements. Even without direct measurement of dopamine and oxytocin, examining the behavior of “superfans” can reveal whether this important, extremely enthusiastic group of customers is delighted or frustrated.

Superfans experience high levels of immersion while using a product or service, building neurologic tension that is relieved through social media shares. Because these posts positively correlate with immersion, companies can use them to gauge how effectively they are meeting superfans’ needs. Natural language processing software provides additional insights by quantifying positive and negative emotional words in posts. The ratio of positive to negative emotional words is a metric that can be tracked along with sales to assess whether a company should continue to refine a product or feature or kill it. If superfans complain about a feature, it should be investigated for improvement or elimination, since typical users will have much less tolerance for frustration.

Superfans can also participate more directly in the product development process, cocreating extraordinary experiences for themselves. For example, a mobile gaming company engaged its superfans to iterate on character assets for a new game release. After inviting them to participate in beta testing, the company used social media posts and direct immersion measurement to segment superfans based on their favorite characters. They were then microtargeted: Beta testers received a “share” link that included a cartoon rendering of themselves as their game character. The message asked them to replace their social media picture with the cartoon and to tell the world why their character was best. Characters and game play were then tweaked accordingly before the broad release of the game. This deep engagement of superfans enabled the company to improve its product and boost game adoption during its wide release.

Product and consumer experience teams are increasingly using neural insights to determine what consumers really value, what brings them joy, and what reduces or eliminates their pain and frustration. The payoff? Smart product design that provides extraordinary experiences, boosting customer loyalty and profitability. As technologies and devices continue to shrink in cost and size, more businesses can move away from consciously filtered self-reports and embrace brain-based measurement in their quest to innovate and better serve customers.