Behavior that increase your perceived value instantly

The only thing that matters is how fast you can react to changes and the results are much more important than what was originally planned” — Mark Zuckerberg There was an experiment conducted by some of the greatest minds in marketing where they asked participants for their perceived value in three distinct scenarios: receiving a promotion, being offered a discount at the expense of another customer and not. It turns out that people were able to make choices based on value instead of speed. The goal was to measure how much attention these participants paid to changing the timing of the offered behavio. If there is no discount or promotion in place, the majority of users have chosen the same time slot, but those who received the discount or promotional offer changed timing. They did so because it seemed most appealing to them and made sense to them. There is certainly an initial response to this change. However, when the timing becomes more complex, users react differently and start choosing alternative timing. Their choice starts becoming more strategic as they find new value in making sure the current offer has sufficient time left. This goes both ways. You may not want your customers to choose between two different offers. Or maybe you do not want to lose customers or worse yet your business. 

The point is that you need to know why your users choose something else. Maybe they just like doing nothing and are willing to accept any price it takes. So you need to get back to the root of your user and start looking at behavioral psychology. In order to understand better how our choices are linked to values, we can use Google Trends to analyze the search terms in our area. I’ve written about similar techniques before but only on this project because my focus is on using machine learning. One way to study user behavior is through heatmaps. Below are heatmaps for each user. Note: all heatmaps show search terms related to services. For instance, the term “trying for help” produces large spikes. Also note how much activity occurs when you see such terms as “helpdesk” and “helpseeking”. These will be used later in the post when discussing factors that influence user choice. Another example is to make heatmaps for keywords. Here we can see searches to the keyword helpdesk and try for help. Let’s try for a different approach. We can look at each individual’s interaction with service or product and analyze the search rate to see what words people use to find help. How does this process lead you to take the next step? Now, if you think of your company or organization, how might the search rates translate into the perception that your existing offering is helping your users? Perhaps it helps other businesses too? Maybe you noticed that your product is getting more traffic from small channels like social media. Or maybe you notice that sales are increasing and they seem to come easily too. Asking yourself questions like: What are the key search terms you see using? Why does your business appear to be doing well and the last one is perhaps about the quality of your offerings/service? It’s easy enough to see how many times someone searched for a specific term related to your business and get the answers they need to take them the further steps.