Neuromarketing for CX | Roger Dooley | Engati Engage

Roger Dooley is a world-renowned author, marketing professional, keynote speaker and recognized expert in the use of brain and behavior research to improve marketing, sales, customer experience, and corporate culture.

He has been a Forbes contributor since 2011, writing on simple, real-world strategies for improving marketing, sales, and advertising based on brain and behaviour research.

He’s also been the host of The Brainfluence Podcast since 2014 and his guests have included Guy Kawasaki, Robert Cialdini, Ryan Holiday, AI Roth and many others.

Speaking of Podcasts…

This article will contain a summary of our conversation with Roger. But, if you’d rather listen to the interview, here’s our Spotify podcast:

Summary of Interview with Roger Dooley on Neuromarketing for CX

This section will contain a summary of our interview with Roger Dooley. But if you’d prefer to watch the video, we have it embedded at the bottom of this page.

Why neuromarketing? What specifically piqued your interest in this field?

Roger said that it all started when he was in college. He was studying engineering, but he seemed to have an interest in psychology and in advertising.

Years later he got into a direct marketing business. And 15 years ago he started seeing neuromarketing gaining traction and got interested in it. He started writing about about it and the more he wrote, the deeper his interest (and that of his audience) grew. He started incorporating behavioral science into his writings to offer ideas that people could directly use in business.

How can the combination of AI and neuromarketing be applied to improving something as critical as personalization of customer experiences?

Neuromarketing studies generate massive amounts of data and it’s really difficult to interpret that data. AI can help crunch this data and develop interpretations that correspond with human behaviour.

AI is useful in Behavioural Analytics which generates massive amounts of data and find out where people tend to get stuck while dealing with tens of thousands of products and advertisements. Artificial Intelligence can dig through data, make observations and present them to a human analyst or decision maker who’d be able to take action based on those observations.

You authored the best selling book ‘Friction’. How do you think businesses can use neuromarketing to spot points of friction and alter them to create a customer-centric environment that results in loyal customers and engaged employees?

When you take friction out of customer experiences, you’ll convert more. You’ll sell more. And you’ll definitely get more customers. You can even add a bit a friction to steer behavior. Especially if you’ve got a lot of low-quality leads, you can add a few more fields to your forms, qualify the leads better by adding friction.

Neuromarketing can play in here by measuring facial expressions and analysing them. AI can play a large role here. If you can observe your customers’ expressions while using your app or your website, you can see what parts of your experience contain friction by seeing whether they look frustrated, confused or puzzled. And now it’s much easier to observe facial expressions from simple devices, You don’t need a complicated slow-motion camera anymore.

Eye-tracking used to require expensive devices. But with the user’s permission, you can use to a basic webcam to do some amount of simple eye-tracking to see where they are looking at your screen.

Do you think conversational agents are a good solution to eliminate the friction that consumers face in areas of customer support and retention?

Roger says that they definitely can. He says that personally, he always prefers an online chat option as opposed to calling a person to solve his queries. Chatbots reduce the friction involved in calling on a phone or taking the effort to hunt for an answer on a website.

Chatbots can answer a lot of queries, but if it can’t answer the query, it should quickly push it along to a human rather than making the human rephrase their query multiple times to the point of frustration.

Start reducing friction with a live-chat enabled Engati chatbot today!

Are conversational agents helpful during the pandemic?

Companies that were ahead of the curve and adopted automation early on are actually doing fairly well during the lockdowns. The ones that had low quality systems or didn’t have any system in place because not a lot of their customers were using it are now facing quite a lot of issues now.

The ones that invested early on and had a customer-centric approach are the ones that are faring well now. Customer-Centricity is where it’s all at.

Put the customer first…and all other concerns second

-Roger Dooley

He even said that employees will count as part of the body of customers. Your employees need to be engaged in order to create really great customer experiences.

Amazon has been facing issues, especially in the US where they have not been focusing as much on the customers. They then had a few stoppages of work.

But, as he mentioned in a recent Forbes article, H-E-B, a supermarket chain in Texas put customers and employees all in 1 category and focused on both. Now those employees are volunteering to put in extra time to help out during the crisis.

They had people who normally work in the office volunteer to go into stores to work cash registers and to go into warehouses to stock products.

What are the key aspects and focus areas when applying a neuromarketing and Conversational AI-oriented approach in making businesses better?

It’s all about finding those points of friction and solving the issues they’re facing. And not just for 1 customer. If it’s a common enough concern, consider making a change in the interface so that it’s not an issue anymore.

How do you think businesses could push their products/ services in a more targeted manner?

Unless you know your customer and know their behavior, you can’t target them with appropriate messaging. Amazon is great at measuring customer’s behavior- things they’ve purchased, things they’ve looked at, things on their wish-list. And then they use that information to send personalized marketing messages.

It’s also about understanding how customers respond to those emails. If you’re sending emails daily and see that the customer hasn’t responded to or even opened any of your emails for a while, maybe switch up the frequency or the subject line or sending a different kind of email.

Alter your behavior based on your customer’s behavior.

– Roger Dooley

You say that, “95% of decisions made are non consciously”. How can businesses leverage non-conscious decision making?

A lot of travel websites use non-concious cues to influence decision making. They use scarcity- only 2 rooms left at this price. They use social proof- 47 people booked this hotel in the last 2 days.

There are hundreds of ways of influencing behavior using non-conscious drivers.

He also says that a good way to influence decisions is to make it much easier to make that decision. Reduce the friction, essentially.

Jeff Bezos said, ‘When you make it easy for people to do something, they do more of it’

That’s why he makes it so easy for people to buy things on Amazon.

Amazon had patented the process of One-Click Ordering. When Barnes & Nobel implemented something similar on their own website, Amazon spent millions of dollars in legal fees just to get Barnes & Nobel to add one tiny click to the process. That’s how important it is to make things simple for people to do.

Steve Jobs didn’t bother fighting it- he just paid Amazon $1 Million to use One-Click Ordering. And that made it so much better for Apple.

What advice would you give someone on the leverage of technology at the startup level to build a winning business?

In the digital world, you can leverage technology in so many ways that even if you’re a single person operating out of your basement, it’s not going to be too hard to gain success. And since you can use technology to work remotely, startups can save money on real estate.

They can build a digital team with contributors from across the world. That means that they could gain some phenomenal talent that would be very hard to acquire in one single physical location.

What would it take to convince hesitant companies to adopt new technology?

It’s important to estimate the returns that they would gain from investing in the new technology. When it comes to Customer Experience, it’s hard to estimate the return you’d get by making an improvement. But, you might have to do what Jeff Bezos does. If the change is going to benefit the customers and it’s not going to burn a huge hole in the company’s pocket, consider doing it.

Take care of the customers and the investors will automatically be taken care of.

Any other thoughts that you’d like to leave our audience with?

Make the entire process as easy as possible. Eliminate not only the obvious friction points but even the hidden ones. Make it easy for customers to make decisions. That should bring you closer to being like Jeff Bezos and Amazon.

Make it easier

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Video interview of Roger Dooley on Neuromarketing for CX

Engati Engage

We hope you’ve gleaned a lot of insights on leveraging neuromarketing for CX from this interview. Engati Engage will be back with a new expert in a new interview soon!

Find Roger Dooley

If you’ve gained any value from this interview, imagine the insights you could gain by following Roger. Find him on LinkedIn or Twitter and get more information on making use of neuromarketing for CX in your business.

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