In the IIeX Behavior webinar, Microsoft’s Krista Bradley (Senior Market Research Manager, Research+Insights) and EyeSee’s Heather Graham (Business Development Director) sat down for a conversation on the award-winning online path to purchase project that brought us together. The expert tandem covered all the steps researchers should take when preparing and implementing complex studies – and how to then socialize the behavioral insights throughout the organizational ecosystem, past the initial presentation to stakeholders.

What does designing complex research projects look like at Microsoft?

A great place to start any project preparation is venturing out and getting input from a wide variety of stakeholders working in field teams, corporate teams or with partners and making sure everyone is on board and in line with the focus. However, the more the stakeholders, the higher the complexity of the project.

“It is really important when I am designing a study, to really understand each of those cohorts. I want to learn more about what are the big things they are thinking about this year or in the next three months” said Krista.

The next step is writing the research brief based on all the input – the who, what, where and why’s of the study – and getting all the stakeholders aligned with it. Ensuring this will provide a very clear and concise perspective, and ultimately solidify a good partnership with the vendors.

How should researchers approach a study with many moving parts and extract relevant insights across the board?

Keeping a global view in mind and streamlining things where you can is key. At Microsoft, most studies are conducted on multiple levels – from the high, corporate level to the local ones. The corporate level is all about consistency in branding and strategy, so planning more of a high-level deck that covers the different topics for stakeholders is crucial. When it comes to the local markets – don’t be scared of using templates! Think of the core of the study findings and adjust the rest of the deck to the nuances of every market.

But the insights truly come alive when sharing them with the customers and teams. Doing so while assessing how they react to the data produces very practical and valuable implications for any future research. In short – Microsoft makes sharing data into a workshop. This goes along with their approaches to innovations. With a constant effort to build on top of the quantitative studies they’re conducting and push the boundaries, they are able to unlock and tap into many new areas of research.

What was the role of behavioral methods in this project?

The project focused on Microsoft’s website with an aim to understand the effect of the home page, the search results page and the product detail page have on customers and their experience. By destructuring the online platform into separate pieces, Krista and her team were able to break apart all the learning into separate recommendations for each segment and for all of the retail partners.

Microsoft used eye tracking to gauge where the viewers were looking on the pages while assessing their engagement of what they click on as their areas of interest. To tie in all of the findings, the behavioral part of the study was topped with a customer survey. The combination of methods actually uncovered that one of the elements on the product description page, which was a true passion project for Microsoft, severely underperformed – only 34% of people were seeing what was put on the page – and only 2-4% actually click on it.

As Krista put it: “To be able to really utilize those three big bodies of information, we can understand on any given page are consumers even seeing the pieces of real estate that are on the page – and if they see it, do they even care about it.”

Can clients be confident when going into unexplored research areas, such as e-commerce?

The role of the research supplier is to always let the data tell the full story of consumer behavior – regardless of the area is something well-explored or completely new. The researchers represent the voice of the consumer – but a layer of business expertise needs to be added for the stakeholders. Apart from this, helping clients navigate complexity by taking every possible step when setting up extensive studies is critical – from desk research, talking with counterparts in different categories or countries to connecting dots from other research initiatives.

E-commerce is still an up-and-coming research field so with it comes a lot of uncertainty. More and more data-based solutions are being pushed out with an aim to simplify the complexity of these studies for clients and their stakeholders. The approach to the online path to purchase used in this study won the 2019 Global MR project award at the Marketing Research and Insight Excellence Awards by Quirk’s. Based on this successful collaboration,  here are the 3 steps for testing an online platform to make an actual impact:

Step 1: Choose the level of the study and invest in the bottom-up approach (start with tactical, and then address strategy), which will provide you with have quick wins that demonstrate impact to your stakeholders.

Step 2: Combine the right conventional (survey) and behavioral (eye tracking, virtual shopping) methods to increase the predictability by up to 30%.

Step 3: Test in-context on a (mockup of a) specific website  

Interested in our award-winning e-commerce solution? Check out the demo and make sure you watch the full webinar session!