Customer Experience Labs

Customer Experience Labs is innovative and fresh.  When Dell eCommerce needed to understand how customers were really shopping, we hired Customer Experience Labs to conduct in home ethnographic site visits with our customers. From restaurant kitchens to manufacturing floors, from law offices and people’s living rooms, if our customers were there then they went there. Customer Experience Labs enabled us to see our customers in the wild, in their natural habitat and brought back deep insight to help change the business.

Jay has helped Expedia develop a disciplined focus on the customer experience. If a feature is intuitive and useful on Expedia, it’s probably due to the good work of Jay and his team.

By leveraging Jay and Steve’s unique skills I am able to optimize products by using eye tracking to gather insight, prior to the conceptual phase. This is critical. The best way to validate an opinion is to put it in front of an audience and monitor their experience. Time and again, working with Jay and Steve I was able to validate my customer offer prior to launch, and maximize sales. A 15-20% lift in campaign performance is common in concert with a strong A/B testing methodology. In my opinion, there is simply no better way to validate the likely impact of a visual message, than through eye tracking.

Their work was absolutely essential as we faced converting 400,000 customers to a new user interface. Their work isolated a usability issue that kept our call volumes to under 5%. That’s amazing. Their team was able to convert a usability study into hundreds of thousands of dollars of savings. One single issue that your team uncovered was absolutely essential to the success of our conversion. I would wholeheartedly recommend your services to organizations of various sizes as they seek to understand customer behavior and preempt customer issues.

The results from the eye tracking and usability study I did with Steve was extremely compelling.   When internal stakeholders see things learn what users look at vs. what they ignore, there is very little argument about what’s working.   Steve’s presentation style and materials are also very convincing.   Combining heat map, sound clips, screenshots, he tells the story, keeps the audience engaged, and listens to and answers every stakeholder question nicely.  Doing this research made my job easier since it helped to unify the team’s understanding of the customer and this helped us eliminate internal arguments and obtain buy-in without much selling.

Jay has a creative, almost real time approach to research. He leads his team to always be thinking about ways to outperform the competition, all with the rationale of solid, independent research behind them. I have never worked with someone who was more in tune with the market and its possible opportunities. Jay is a very tough negotiator, always pressing vendors for more performance as well.

Jay’s work was always top shelf and without question.  Jay is considered to be an expert in his field and was someone my teams relied on heavily. I would hire Jay without reservation.

Steve is a true professional with incredible knowledge of human factors and understanding how people use technology. His ability to solicit valuable and powerful insights from customers and potential users is incredibly powerful and key to any company. Through their research, we were able to quickly and extremely cost effectively include the a diverse range of potential customer input very early in our development process. This result in key areas for improvement before our startup launched. I would not launch a Web product again without using the types of insightful customer insights that Steve and his team provide.

We’ve always been able to rely on them to get to the essence of our business challenges.  Going beyond “research findings,” they provide valuable insights that lend themselves to both tactical and strategic issues at hand.  And working with them is easy, particularly as they have a track record of doing back flips to meet our needs. That makes my job (and my team’s) much easier.

Steve and his team consistently deliver customer insights that dramatically improve our customers’ user interfaces and designs. Their research know-how consistently uncovers “showstoppers” well before launch time. As a result of their recommendations, our user experience teams are able to create cleaner and more intuitive interfaces that minimize customer disruption and increase adoption on important/valuable new site features/functions.

Jay is incredibly knowledgeable in areas around user experience and psychology, ethnography, and usability. He is very proficient at getting the job done, and has been great to work with.

Steve Gissin provided the foundational user research for the integration of Web 2.0 technologies into Dell.com. Whether in a focus group or 1×1 interview, Steve easily bridged the communication gap between consumer users and the site development team. Steve’s familiarity with site technology and business objectives allowed him to anticipate questions the design team might have. Steve is able to synthesize a vast amounts of result data into crisp and actionable recommendations. Steve is a thought leader in user research and a dependable partner in executing time critical projects with enthusiasm and integrity, I highly recommend his work.

Steve’s insights and services provided some of the most meaningful input to Wegmans multi-million dollar web redesign.  Through strategic planning sessions and follow-up usability studies, Steve helped the team stay true to our brand and our customer, while still producing an exciting product.  He has the best facilitation skills of anyone I know which is especially helpful in sometimes charged political situations.

Customer Experience Labs was a pleasure to work with on a major research project. They provided great actionable insights that were able to improve our business. Additionally, the presentation of findings was excellent and gave everyone from executives to designers a better understanding of how our users interacted with our website.

Jay advanced the level of usability research at Expedia. He ran for the first time in Expedia’s history, ethnographic studies to enhance the Cruise Team’s understanding of the target ‘cruiser’. He led a cross-disciplinary effort to develop personas that identified the customer groups, which helped the cruise team better understand the major customer segments they were designing the product for.

Customer Experience Labs has many years of experience conducting and interpreting eyetracking studies. These skills have helped hotels.com improve overall site usability by detailing trouble spots and suggesting improvements based on their experience and usability standards. I will continue to use their services and would recommend them to anyone needing basic usabilty testing to in depth analysis with eyetracking and usability combined.

I worked with Steve on a number of research projects that focused upon web design concepts and usability.  We applied various methods to the projects, ranging from Online Bulletin Boards to In-Depth Interviews and Eyetracking Usability.  He is not simply a research vendor, but a partner who will gain a deep understanding of your business and your customers, to help craft the best approach and recommendations.  I have worked with other vendors in the past, and Steve has been the most solid resource for guiding me through the research process, while taking a collaborative approach to research plans that made a real impact to my projects.  If you want to make a solid investment in user research for your organization, look no further.

Jay is a pleasure to work with and is an expert when it comes to user interface design. I have enjoyed collaborating with Jay and discussing customer experience and online marketing strategy. He certainly knows the Web!

Customer Experience Labs mobile usability testing allowed us to quickly gain a great deal of insight into how our customers were using our early stage mobile product. Their research uncovered many barriers that we initially did not see on our own. As a result of their research and recommendations we made immediate changes which made our customers happier and our app easier to use.

–Brian Kalma, Former Senior Director of User Experience at Gilt Groupe

In May of 2011, as part of our ongoing efforts to make OneCall.com a site buyers love to shop, we engaged Customer Experience Labs to conduct a two day usability study. We found that Customer Experience Labs conducts usability testing in a professional manner and its management group to be reliable and engaged. More importantly, the post study recommendations and consulting led to changes on OneCall.com that increased conversion and average order size. We recommend Jay Eskenazi and Customer Experience Labs and plan to engage their services in the future.

–Dave Weissman, VP Sales & Marketing, OneCall.com