South Africa’s telecommunication companies operate in a highly competitive market where players struggle to establish a competitive advantage.

 

So how can Telkom, one of the countries largest players, get customers to browse their website and turn it into the preferred contact point?

 

Telkom faced many challenges, on the one hand to retain voice and data customers’ loyalty and to increase spend, and on the other to entice new customers to the fold. Telkom’s website was more than just a contact point for reporting faults or displaying marketing material; by creating a website experience that builds rapport and trust with existing and potential customers, a good interaction would encourage them to use it regularly and to tell others about it.

 

Our task was to evaluate the consumer, business and industry leader user experience of the existing Telkom company website, so that these learnings could then be applied to the development of an entirely new site. This new site was then assessed further during a second phase of research to further optimise both the user interface and user journey against the benchmarks that were established during phase 1.

 

For each phase, our approach combined a multitude of neuromarketing research techniques to assess the users responses to web design, content and aesthetics.

 

Eye-tracking allowed us to draw conclusions about visual attention and behavior through visualization techniques (heat maps and gaze plots) as well as calculate statistics. We also integrated eye tracking data with other behavioral data, such as mouse clicks and key strokes, for a holistic view of user behavior.

 

For interactions that were designed to keep a user actively engaged and/or interested, Galvanic Skin Response and Facial Coding helped measure the intensity of their engagement and the type of emotions experienced. Those elements that caused frustration could be addressed, and those that resulting in positive emotional responses were enhanced.

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These findings shed light on both the visual and emotional experience of users as they engaged with the website during the completion of specific user tasks. The design and development teams could then validate their assumptions, test their hypothesis and optimise flow.