August 2014 – Are Customers Really OK with Online Business Experiments?
Are Customers Really OK with Online Business Experiments?
Is messing with the minds of your customers sometimes OK, or is it mostly always wrong?
Last month the online matchmaking service OKCupid said it purposely manipulates data to “improve their matchmaking system and help users find love”. And that it’s justified because, “That’s how websites work.”
Or consider Facebook’s infamous experiment in which news feeds to users were filtered to show either more positive or negative content.
With all the data and web analytics tools available to businesses today, such experiments will likely become more and more common. But how will customers react?