The Future to Know Satisfaction?

Recently I heard the following criticism directed against online satisfaction surveys: "How do you really know that visitors' responses and commentary actually reflect what they are thinking?" The point the person was trying to make was that it's more useful to analyze empirical behaviors likes sales history rather than something more subjective and nebulous like a website experience.

It's something of a valid point, I think. After all, we don't administer polygraphs to visitors after their website experience, and the written word, bound as it is by the restrictions of language, is not always a perfect representation of thought and mind. Indeed, as T.S. Eliot so aptly put it: "between the idea and the reality...falls the shadow."

We're pretty adamant here in our contention that surveying online visitors regarding their website experience is the best way to dispel the shadow and gain access to their minds. Science, however, might soon make all our current methods look simple and antiquated.

Hitachi has developed a headset, which it calls a "brain-machine interface," that can analyze minute changes in the brain's blood flow and convert them to electric signals, which can them be used to issue commands to simple electronic devices like remote controls. Now, you can extrapolate the future uses of this technology in any way you like, but I can picture a future where these devices can interface with web browsers not only to surf from page to page but actually to transmit real-time cognitive feedback directly to website owners.

Until this happens, however, we will rely on this time-honored method of finding out whether or not customer are satisfied: by asking them!