Does a swipe mean more than click?  Does a hover indicate indecision and a firm push mean certainty? As touchscreens begin to dominate internet interaction, can we learn more from a human gesture than we did from the click of a mouse?  And if we can, what are the benefits?

There’s now somewhere in the region of 4 billion touchscreen smartphones in the world. Some 80 per cent of the US population uses a smartphone. Add in tablets as well and it emerges that more web usage happens on a mobile device than it does on a desktop or laptop. And when you consider that many modern laptops also include touchscreen capability then it becomes very clear – we increasingly live in a touchscreen world. You could say that we now longer surf the internet but instead we touch it.

Touchscreen taking over

Touchscreen technology is also appearing in watches, on digital screens for all kinds of domestic devices and appliances, and even on Amazon’s Alexa product which we can now interact with by voice or by touch. Any child born in the last ten or so years will only know a world of touchscreens. These children are learning and understanding a new type of interaction and engagement – but it’s second nature to them while others of us are only just beginning to get to grips with the technology and to understand its advantages.

Of course, the use of a physical gesture to trigger an action is as old as mankind itself – whether that gesture was designed to welcome someone in or scare someone away. But those are human interactions which only now are being extended to the machine environment. But there’s little doubt, for example, that swipes in their various Tinder-style directions are very obvious indicators of intent – much more so than a mouse click which could be inadvertent. So too are multi-touch functions using one or more fingers in a way that requires specific rather than random intent. Even pressure gestures such as holding your finger in one spot for an extended period or slight pushing on the screens can trigger a specific interaction and cause your device to do something.  

Swiping to improve User Experience

So, the question is, what can we learn from this more human interaction to improve the experience? How can a marketer, brand or agency glean data from these gestures to improve their web content and supporting advertising? Can they use it to optimize their site – to turn readers into subscribers or viewers into customers. In fact, there are a number of ways designers and marketers can use touch and gesture information to build better sites and deliver better results. For example, heat maps are a great way to start to understand this information by clearly labeling where on the device, web page or advertisement a person is touching or swiping or pressing.  

It is accepted that our eyes scan print news pages in a clockwise motion, starting in the top left corner. Most web news pages are also designed with that basic premise in mind and even retail pages use a similar structure. But although sites can, and do, track mouse movements, if a viewer is simply scrolling down the page using the slider or a mouse wheel, it very hard to know where their eyes are scanning and what they might be reading when they halt their movement.  On a touchscreen, we have other signals that can help.

Where the finger is on the screen during that movement for example, and whether any text gets the pinch and zoom treatment which viewers often use because the mobile device screen is smaller. Also, if – as the viewer is flicking the page down – that movement is reversed by touching on one item and bringing it back into view – that would be a reaction you would not necessarily pick up from the movement of a mouse wheel. These touchpoints will not only help from a creative standpoint to learn what is actually grabbing the attention of someone, but also in terms of what actions they choose to do as well.

Mobile insights into consumer behavior

Beyond the creativity and attention lessons, we can also use categorization to segment and take this data to the next level. By breaking down and analyzing these various gestures by the device type (Smartphone, tablet, etc.), operating system (iOS, Android), the browser being used, location, app and even the time of day we can gain really valuable insights into our customers and visitors.  

These are all key data points that would provide incredible insight that can save marketing dollars by not placing advertisements in locations that clearly show a low level of gesture activity. With this data, marketers have exact insight into a market segment that really cares about their products or services.

Gesture data is also vital because it can help target key industry issues such as click fraud.  If marketers became focused and said they would only pay for more engaging, human, gestures like Swipe Thru’s – so that they knew for sure the consumer wanted to visit their site and it was not an accidental or a robot click – then the click fraudsters would become marginalized.

Furthermore, video view-ability is constantly being discussed in connection with Facebook video, YouTube and many other outlets. By using gesture data points, it would become obvious that your content was viewable because you would be able to know that someone literally touched, swiped or pressed on your advertisement, video or site.

These concepts and the data points that stem from understanding consumer gesture activity are the first steps in a movement away from 20-year-old reporting methods to a new touchscreen world.  It seems clear, a more informed marketing world is now literally at our fingertips.

According to research conducted by Capgemini, the lack of consumer analytics in commercial banks is proving to be a large impediment to their growth and success. The research shows that banks applying analytics to customer data have a four-percentage point lead in market share over banks that do not, and that banks investing in analytics to understand customer attrition have a 12-percentage point lead over their competitors.

Moreover, with only 37% of customers satisfied with their bank’s understanding of their needs and preferences, Capgemini’s research indicates how customer analytics could help banks increase their revenues and gain market share.

The global CEI index average (a score that measures customers’ banking experience across 80 different touch points) increased by 1.2% from 2012 to 2013, yet Capgemini noticed the following key findings in spite of this increase in customer satisfaction:

–       10% of customers globally say that they are likely to switch banks in the next six months, while 40% are not sure whether they will stay with their bank in the 6 months time.

–       The quality of overall service is the primary factor that determines whether a customer leaves their bank or not.

–       Positive customer experiences are strongly correlated with the trust customers place in their banks and with the customers’ belief that their banks have a good understanding of their needs

The research from Capgemini is based on a survey they conducted with more than 18,000 customers participating in 35 countries across six geographic locations. The results of the research, according to consulting firm, show that banks must invest much more money in customer analytics in order to retain their customers, or risk the chance of losing their customers to those banks investing in such activities.

Read a summary of the research paper here

Read the research paper here

(Image Credit: J J

We met Cormac Walsh, the CEO and Founder of Avansera at CODE_n contest in CeBIT, Hannover. Cormac gave us a fascinating insight into how Avansera is disrupting consumer analytics for FMCG companies and retailers.

 Who are you?

My name is Cormac Walsh. I am the CEO and founder of Avansera. Avansera is a Finnish big data start-up which was founded in February of last year.

What makes Avansera unique?

What makes this unique is that our users are exposing us to what they’re going to do.  This is the new data we are collecting.  They’re are indicating future intent through the use of a highly detailed and   very smart shopping list application. And while typically big data and statistical companies will apply modelling and mathematical techniques to predict the future, for us, on a seven day forward-looking model, we’re not making any predictions. We actually have demand figures by location. And that’s kind of cool and more importantly, extremely useful.

Could you tell us a little more about your product?

Sure – so the product is a service, an end-to-end service.  We offer applications which mobile app users use. These are personal productivity applications which help them save money on their grocery shopping or save calories on their product selection in terms of their grocery baskets. It helps them optimize what recipes are cheapest for them based on what they have at home because we have a view of their home food inventory. And importantly, all of these applications are free to use for our users.

 Now this is key.  As they use our applications, consumers expose a behavioral chain of events about various decisions they make, whether conscious or unconscious.  Just to name a few, these include how people make decisions about products, how people arrive at product choices, how brand loyal people are, how price flexible and how price-sensitive they are.  We can even see how people react to in-store geography.  We look at this information and then we take big data and turn it into small data.  In the process, we actively get rid of as much of it as we can and eventually, we sell tablet and smartphone tools, on a revenue paid basis, to the food production industry.

These are tools which crucially are easy for marketers, brand managers, and category managers to consult in near real-time with regards to how the market is reacting in their category, with their products, or with their competitors’ products. So, for example, if one of our customers, or if one of our industry customers, is in a grocery store just doing their own shopping and they see a competitor has a marketing campaign, they can take out their smartphone and query to see how this has campaign having an effect on their own product? Is the market changing size or is just their share changing size?

Sounds fascinating. How did you come up with this idea?

Personally, I have a background in telecoms.  Working for Nokia in the past, I frequently received requests from colleagues in Southeast Asia asking for information on their customers:  who should receive special offers?  Who should I keep as a valuable customer?  Which customers are nomadic?  In effect, all these answers can solidly be found in the data.  But, if you’re collecting massive amounts of information on a daily basis, there is no way to trawl through all of that while you are also trying to plan marketing campaigns and the like.  Relevant Answers to Simple Questions!

What then becomes necessary is a really, really easy and concise way to ask simple and direct questions and receive to-the-point answers.  What I realized from there is that all marketers, in any form of fast-moving consumer interface need access to this kind of data.  The big data industry needs to change the way it presents information and go beyond mathematical curiosity and move towards pure business benefit.

And that’s exactly what we’re doing in Avansera. We’re effectively dumbing down our big data.  We are making the data consumable and accessible. We’re democratizing it.  And in addition, what makes us unique is that you could compare us with legacy analysis companies such as Nielsen, who assemble a panel of people and talk to them to get opinions. The problem with this is that it is fraught with bad answers and extraordinarily expensive, so all-around inefficient. With our user applications, we’re providing something that is going to make their life better.  Then, we just sit back and passively observe what the users do.  This means that with regards to the behavioral information and the questions we’re essentially asking them, we’re getting absolutely honest answers. And, our cost of connection is orders of magnitude lower than our competition. So when the established industries sell a report for €100,000 about dairy in Scandinavia, we can sell the same report for €5000 and get a higher profit margin.

Are you looking for any funding or any special talents to hire?

We’re in a funding round at the moment.  And in terms of special talents to hire, I know exactly what I want:  translators.  And I don’t mean language translators, what I need are people who have an understanding of data, but also have an understanding of business and how to talk to stressed-out marketing executives. So I need people who have empathy, we need artists!

Where do you see yourself one year from now?

In a year from now, we’ll be present in all Scandinavian markets and we’ll also exist in Germany, in Poland, and in the Netherlands.  The reason we can do that is because our service is easy to internationalize. We call our hosting provider and we say, we need more capacity.  Then we localize the user applications and our commercial applications into local language variants. We get a local country list of all product barcodes, which are available to industry companies like us. And then we commence the collection of price information. And we’re in a funding round at the moment. We are VC (venture capitalist) backed in Finland.

How was your time at CODE_n, CeBIT?

I loved it.  It’s absolutely great because it’s very rare that you can be in a roomful of people who speak the same technical language.  And while there are companies here who I can honestly say are competition for me, the market is so enormous that there can be 100 times more competition and it doesn’t matter, we still have enough market. But the market itself is growing at a rate faster than new companies are coming into the space.  I think the biggest risk that this entire industry faces is lack of skills.

We met Cormac Walsh, the CEO and Founder of Avansera at CODE_n contest in CeBIT, Hannover. Avansera delivers the most advanced real-time action, location and performance analytics, and targeted digital marketing services to FMCG companies and retailers.