Real-Time Data Collection and Online Service Transactions: Matching Methodology and Marketplace

Many online service transactions, such as purchasing airline or concert tickets, are multi-stage experiences involving a series of webpages. This serial service presentation suggests that post-hoc survey measures of service experience and quality will obscure transitory thoughts and affect that are centered around individual segments of the service transaction. By using realtime data collection methods such as eyetrackers, mouseloggers, and digital voice recorders, affective and cognitive responses to individual segments of the service process can be captured, and the effects of manipulations more directly measured. In one example, real-time data in an online study showed strong differences between web novices and experts in their affective and cognitive reactions to varying marketing efforts within a service transaction; these differences were obfuscated in post-stimulus survey measures. Real-time measures were especially well-suited to exploring reactions to changes in segment order and questions of segment bundling versus contiguity.