Welcome to the DCX Podcast, where I interview leaders in the customer experience space about how digital is changing the landscape, and how you can leverage these changes for success in your business.
Today, I'm super excited to be talking with Rafal Ohme, and Victor Szczerba, co-founders of Response Time Analytics, and Mike Kennedy a strategy and business advisor to the team.
RTA has developed a neuroscience and AI application for response time analytics and filter responses. We're going to dig deep into what that means. It's been used for ultra-high-end surveys by consultancy companies to measure emotions. And this allows them to unlock emotions from digital feedback to detect more accurate feedback, which I think is something we're all looking for.
Here are the top 7 takeaways from the discussion:
First, RTA is about measuring hesitation.
With RTA, one can uncover sometimes small and sometimes significant insights previously invisible.
Cognitive psychology and social psychology say that when you hesitate, the likelihood that you will walk the talk and exercise your words into actions dramatically drops.
RTA was able to predict what the actual vaccine hesitation rate was almost a year in advance.
During COVID, only 80% of Italians who were asked, ‘Are you going to wash your hands for 20 seconds?’ said yes. However, only 18% said it without hesitation, vs. 61% in the US.
RTA’s tech is based on the Implicit association research of Anthony Greenwald and Mahzarin Banaji, authors of Blindspot, Hidden Biases of Good People.
Adding RTA to a survey system involves just nine lines of code.
Here’s an opportunity to try out RTA for yourself.
Scan the QR code, answer the questions and see how much of a Party Animal you really are!
For more information on Response Time Analytics, reach out to Mike Kennedy at mike@responsetimeanalytics.com
Transcript
Mark Levy
So, welcome to the podcast, guys.
Rafal, Victor, Mike
Thank you. Thank you. Nice to be here.
Mark Levy
Thank you and Rafal. You're coming to us from Warsaw?
Rafal
Yes, this is Warsaw, Poland, far away and Friday afternoon is just starting. So I'm getting into Friday afternoon mode.
Mark Levy
Wonderful. Wonderful. Well, thank you for taking the time to join us. Let's talk about response time analytics. What is it and why does it matter?
Rafal
Yeah, well this is all about me meeting, Victor, because I'm the guy who sits and reads books and does tons of research. And I witnessed cutting-edge scientific discoveries that can change the world as long as anyone from the business side will learn about it. And when I was showing Victor what I'm doing in the course of my academic work, he said, "Man, we need to bring it to the table because we're going to make a big change in what we call customer experience." Because what I'm referring to is something that is called Accessibility Theory.
But to put it in different words, we measure how much people hesitate. And by measuring this little thing that each of us experiences on daily basis, hesitation, we can discover, sometimes minor and sometimes major insights that are previously invisible. So together with Victor, we created a company and then we found a magnificent Mike, that is here today with us. And we tried to make some noise a little bit. This is what we do.
Mark Levy
So Victor, like how did what was your response when you started to hear about this and how you saw it as an opportunity to expand into customer experience?
Victor
So I was aware of Rafal's research on the periphery. and I also was aware that it kind of was always in the realm of really high end you know, surveys and you know that kind of a realm where the high-end survey company or a high-end consulting company got brought in to, you know, ask some really, really tough questions. And they would use the neural technology to kind of figure out what was going on. And I go in the world of digital transactions everywhere that was really accelerated through the world of COVID, I just felt that it was a great opportunity to democratize this kind of technology and create it so that it could be embedded everywhere. So not just measure and analyze and reanalyze and hyper analyze, you know, 70 answers from you know, really high-end projects, but analyze this everywhere and that the concept of response time analytics, we're democratizing this wonderful technology that Rafal has commercialized.
Rafal
And I give an example, through COVID. It was really a breakthrough for our research. For instance, we've been testing forty-eight countries, on how citizens perceive COVID and threats. And, and, and, for instance, we ask a simple question, are you going to wash your hands for 20 seconds? And the United States and Europe it was 30 seconds. And we got extremely optimistic results over 80% of all the countries said yes, we do. We're gonna wash our hands. However, when we check people in the United States 61% of them were really certain about it. We figure it out by measuring the hesitation that is expressed in milliseconds when you hesitate by giving a positive or negative answer. So the number was maybe not 80% but rather 61%. In the United Kingdom, it was 58% but in Italy, it was 18% So 80% of Italians declared, they will wash their hands whereas it was only 18% said it without hesitation. And, and cognitive psychology and social psychology say that when you hesitate there the likelihood that you will really walk the talk that you will exercise your words into actions dramatically drops when you hesitate. So with this knowledge, we have completely new insights because without this technology in Italy, then that the help of the government and then health officials, health authorities would consider their educational campaign wash your hands as the most successful because 80% of Italian say yes, you're going to do it whereas and similarly in the United States, but we said hey, the United States, everything is fine. You're doing a great job. But in Italy, you need to change the narrative. Because people are convinced on a rational level, which is this cognitive attitude platform. However, emotional attitudes and behavioral attitudes are neglected because people hesitate because they are not really passionate about it. So you need to change the narrative and in Italy, we were not very successful but in Portugal we were and then there were even newspapers saying hey, they've benefited a lot from this knowledge.
Mark Levy
When you say successful you mean that the feedback that you gave saying, hey, the hesitation is showing us that you've got a bigger issue here than you think.
Rafal
Yes. The health authorities in Portugal had additional insights to change or modify their narrative original narrative. Or we tested their willingness to get vaccination six months before the vaccination was invented. And, we knew that in many countries, including Poland, unfortunately, there would be a huge rejection of the vaccination and plenty of funny theories, about who's behind the vaccination in spite of what people declared.
Victor
I love this example. This is the one I use the most with customers. We were able to predict what was the actual vaccine hesitation rate almost a year in advance, not what the declared vaccination rate, but what the actual one was based on our models. That's amazing.
Rafal
And this all is based on a very fundamental psychological phenomenon. And it's called accessibility theory. The more time your brain needs to produce an answer, the weaker the attitude is because it has fewer neural connections and grows as a memory unit. The attitude is less elaborated. Therefore you need more time to give the answer and that means that the attitude is not closely related to eventual behavior. So and we experienced this on a daily situation There's this famous episode in France, where we're we're Rachel and Ross educating our educating Chandler on how to answer a question to his girlfriend Denice. She said, Do I look nice? And he looked at it. And then she said yes. And there was a big issue that and Monica said hey man, you give automatically Yes, you look beautiful. So whenever you ask honey, was the soup good at all? And if she says Ah, yes, you know that there's something behind? Yes. Always need to come up with an immediate Yes. So we measure this immediate Yes, with millisecond precision, and by the way, of course, it was not me who invented this. These were wonderful scholars, Tony Greenwald and Mahzarin Banaji. Right now this test sits on the Harvard University webpage. It's called the implicit association test. It was created in the mid-90s. To measure racial prejudice. They measure how much you hesitate by giving an answer to an intimate question or the questions that immediately trigger political correctness for instance, because initially it was created to measure racial prejudice. Do you think Afro-Americans are smart? The answer is yes. But how much do you hesitate? That made a difference. And it was this huge article. By Mahzarin Banaji. Eight-millisecond difference? Yeah. It's eight milliseconds. That is good enough to tell that there's some problem going on. And I was lucky enough because I was a Fulbright scholar, and I was a guinea pig at their lab, testing this implicit association test. And I was in a special condition because I was not a native speaker. So they wanted to see whether I can process whether I can think in English as quickly as in my native tongue and because of me and a couple of other guys, now we have 150 language versions of it because it's turned out that it has to be done in mother's tone because we see but this was a fundamental theoretical discovery that I was enjoying as a scholar. I was enjoying it because I had plenty of publications, but then we had a little business in Poland, but it was more boutique business. And then Victor came and said, man, we got to make something out of it, because this is really a game changer.
Mark Levy
Right. So how do we take this to the next step, you guys have worked with brands and uncovered what you believe is more accurate preference and brand perception feedback? So there you have an example of that work and how it’s moved from theoretical to academic to, I love this behavioral and humankind of experiences, but at a business level, how does it come to life?
Rafal
Well, I can give you an example of the recent study we did during this huge conference, one of the big software providers had this conference. And he wanted to see what people were thinking after the conference. Did they like the food? Did they like the venue? Did they like the speaker? Are they going to come back next year? And again, they use our technology and we always give the clients results and then on the top, the true results, the real ones, and on the declarative level, the conference was a massive success. Almost all the answers regarding the venue were good, and speakers and willingness to return were 80% plus. Yet, the technology showed that the food was great indeed, and the venue was great indeed. But the speakers and the amount of knowledge were good, but not excellent. And their willingness to return was not 80 plus percent but 30%. So, the good thing is that now we can realize what type of messaging we need to execute after the conference. All of the people are receiving the regular Thank you messages and come again, visit us next year. But this 30% of those are really passionate, offering special deals because they are open to it, they are ready for it. So again, thanks to Victor's, software team. We've managed to automatize everything so it's happening in real time, and is all an unmanned process. So it's totally scalable. We can run our test on hundreds of people or hundreds of 1000s of people. And it all takes seconds.
Mark Levy
So is it Victor? Is it just some code that gets added to the survey technology or how does it come to life?
Victor
Nine lines of code, really, they just have to embed nine lines of code and what happens is that takes the person over to our server, we run the same questions using just a little bit more of a measurement kind of technology. And then when the survey is done, they get the answers that they got before and get the insights from Response Time Analytics. Now, this is a little bit asynchronous. We're also working with a large brand kind of in the early days so they're still in the I would say experimental phase of how to operationalize this but as they are segmenting their customers into let's say, do something relatively simple. Here's a high yes customer and a low yes customer and a low no customer and a high no customer. And basically, they're saying you know what? The customers that are the high no, super convicted No, let's just leave them alone. There's no amount of money and time that we can spend on these guys that is going to really get them to change their minds. So forget it. And then the customers that are ready to strike the super yeses by conviction yeses, we're gonna give them a different message. Are we gonna sit there and same thing? We're friends. Here is the kind of amazing things that we could do for you. Because you're in our inner circle? So I'm not going to be a cheesy sales guy to you, whatever that is. I'm going to give you information and insider stuff. Right? But the interesting things are what can you do for the people that are like low conviction noes? They're like Oh, not really quite sure. It turns out that that is where you could spend so much of your money and actually get really amazing results. Because you can all of a sudden say, Hey, you had a bad experience. Why don't we give you another right here? Give us a try. Here you go. People are not lost. We kind of look like they're lost but they're not really lost
Mark Levy
And they're hard to find. They're hard to find today. Right?
Victor
It's hard to find. Yeah. And we see it everywhere we see it's we're almost like that that you know that kid in the movie of like I see dead people right now.
Mark Levy
I see prospects.
Rafal
But think of possible applications in political marketing. It's all about people who are not and who have not made up their minds yet. And look at American elections, it's all about swing states. See, this is the key to everything and our technology, RTA's technology. This is all about swing states. Maybe we need to change our name and towards sex like Swingers, you know, we're just bringing this is exactly what we do. And I am really surprised that no one else did it before us. Because we all experienced this daily because people hesitate. And when they hesitate, that means that something's going on.
Victor
Yeah. And I think really where the power of technology really lies, is not necessarily just finding this thing out. Because we're going to, we're going to tell you who these people are. The question is, what are you going to do? And, in many cases, what we can also do, I mean, usually right now, this is done as kind of high-end consulting projects, which it shouldn't be, is a here's an HR department? So let's just switch gears into you know, the EX world for a second. But there are a lot of similarities actually, in the high-end survey worlds and we actually anticipate that a lot of the stuff will eventually merge. And in the employee experience world, there's maybe you'd have money for one or two initiatives. And you have your employees are sitting there and you're measuring them on their willingness or the amount that they want, you know, 10 or 20 different things that you could do, and you're looking at the rank stack ordering of the things that you can do. So the answers you're gonna get are always biased? Because employees will always sit there and tell you kind of what you want to hear? You have a great boss, you know that kind of stuff. Whereas if you run this thing through response time analytics, that rank stack order of the things that you could be doing sometimes is drastically different. In fact, the top five are rarely the same in the implicit world and explicit world so that's actually kind of crazy.
Mark Levy
Is this something you work with, or want to work with, like the big survey companies like Medallia Qualtrics and others, or is this something that companies can stand up something directly with you or how would that work?
Victor
So we understand almost everybody is working with a large survey company like Medallia or Qualtrics. So we work with them? We're not trying to compete with them at all. We're a top kind of enhancement to the processes that they have. So that's, that's how we want it to work. The last thing we want is to create yet another survey company. So they have their regular surveys running in their regular web form. And then they just put in these nine lines of code, and then they run for specific questions. They, you know, go to us, and then it goes right back into the circuit. The other thing that I wanted to say is we've been working now most of us when we say we've been working with clients, most of these we've been working with actually as consulting projects, which is sad because but that's how these things start before they start operationalizing the software. But there's a great ability to use our software as an early warning system. So for example, if you're, I'm going to use an employee experience example, saying hey, listen, you know, how committed are you to working for this company for the next year and the number could actually be in an explicit survey 90% 90% 90% 90% 90% If you're doing these surveys once a quarter or once a month or whatever, it's kind of consistent at 90 and the numbers themselves are actually relatively sticky, it turns out, but then, if you run the same surveys through Response Time Analytics, you could actually start seeing, support wavering. Way, way before people are talking about it and willing to explicitly state that I'm not so happy. There already wavering. Right? So it's kind of a way that you can kind of keep a pulse on what's going on without being weird and creepy. So this actually gives you a way to kind of dive in into the results and give you a kind of an idea of where the softness is, without having to go raise the alarm bells.
Mark Levy
So the buyers of this type of service would be, you've got HR, maybe Mike you can talk about this, like customers, yeah,
Victor
Customer experience, managers, and anybody, who today is paying money to get insights from surveys.
Mike Kennedy
The exact plan, in terms of a specific example, like the hospitality industry has a very high attrition rate of over 90% And the example here is, with what Victor was referring to earlier, the not-so-strong yeses, and the not-so-strong noes. It can really act as a very early warning system so that you can improve that attrition rate. Talking to a Hospitality Group now about that application. And it's it sounds like it could be a very applicable area.
Victor
Yeah. And we're also starting a project and you know, results not made it all the way through but redesigning how NPS is done with using response analytics as a core. So not just as an add on top of the current process the way it is, but also how would you redesign NPS using response time analytics and, you know, right now, I just wanted to kind of plant that seed, you know, results are not there yet. But it's, it's, you know, you could just kind of expand your imagination and say, Wow, if I had this kind of insights, then a lot of these business processes that I run inside the company could actually be changed
Mark Levy
Rafa, Is it web based only like, or can I do this through a mobile phone? Can you track it?
Rafal
So it's very important how user-friendly our tests are because in our tests you always need to answer yes, or no, it's not hard to tell. Or no 10-point scales, no, just two-point scale binary scale yes or no. However, the algorithms produce a continuous 100-point scale. So we are extremely granular. But from the user perspective, it's just pressing one button, yes. Or the other button. No. That's it. So people allowing it and the dropout rate is dramatically lower than in regular research. And, this type of research can be of course dedicated to, to consumers, to employees, however, you can use it to learn something about yourself as well. And by the way, to all of you who are listening and watching us, we sent Mark, a little example, a little taste of our test. That is to measure your capacity to be a party animal. So you can just scan the QR code that we sent to Mark and then answer 10 or something questions and then on your screen, you will see your own result and you will see what you say. And then you'll see what you feel, what you really feel. And some people say yes, I'm a party animal, but then the machine says not so much. Maybe you used to be no more. See, but there are some people who say no, no, I'm not. I rather stay home, you know, on weekend, but the machine says hey, we see something else. So maybe you really take a look in the mirror and do something about it. So So of course this is on a funny note but on a serious note. This type of equipment has been used by one of the top athletes for the last two years and she's been using this. I mean, her mental coach is using it to see her mental power prior to the game. And she's the top champion. So she always says I am invincible. I am super heavy. I can take anything. But then her coach sees, well, you are invincible, but maybe today you'll have a break because you said that you're not tired, but you hesitated too much. And by the way, it's very difficult to fake it because the machine captures your individual way of answering, and then when you try to make some funny thing the machine says sorry, we cannot process your data. That means that you did some funky stuff. So there are huge opportunities, not only marketing-wise but also when we're talking about self-development.
Mark Levy
Yeah, yeah. Love it. Yeah, so for coaching for personal development. There are lots of opportunities. So what is, is that the future of RTA, or what are we doing five years from now?
Victor
I think the future is that everybody will assume that they get implicit insights and explicit insights. The idea is that we democratize it, we make it available. Everybody understands that this power exists and uses it.
Rafal
We want to set a new standard in the industry. We want to educate all end clients to ask their research providers. Okay, so this is what people say, but do I have an access to knowing what they really feel?
Victor
Yeah, the idea is to get it out there.
Mark Levy
Well, guys really appreciate you taking the time to join me and Rafal thanks for coming from Warsaw. And I will be sharing, that code where you can, party animal test yourself, and also I'll be providing information on how you can contact Victor, Rafal, and Mike in the transcript as well.
Rafal
And Mark, the good thing is that you will not have to share the results with anyone because people will get the results immediately on the screens. They just need to print screens because then they will soon disappear because we don't want to store the data garden. So so just take it like Snapchat and take it for yourself and enjoy it. And by the way, you can take it before the weekend and after the weekend and you check your attitude.
Mark Levy
I'll share my results then that weekend. Yeah. Exactly, exactly. But guys, again, thank you so much. I really appreciate it wish you all the best and love to see this come to life and in the customer experience world.
So thank you
Rafal, Victor, Mike
Thank you. Mark. All right. Thank you for having us.
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