Interview with Jeff Yasuda – Enhancing Customer Experience With Music
Different genres of music have varying effects on mood, and this can be powerful in shaping the customer’s experience. Music can be used to engage, entertain or energize customers. Mood Media’s survey of more than 11,000 consumers across nine countries found that music plays a significant role in the offline shopping experience.
I recently caught up with Jeff Yasuda, CEO of Feed.FM to talk about the world of background music and how Feed.FM is helping brands leverage on music to increase user retention, social engagement, and workout motivation.
Jeff is the CEO and Founder of Feed.fm – They help game developers, content publishers, and e-commerce retailers increase customer engagement, retention, and conversions by incorporating popular music into their environments– at the lowest possible cost.
Prior to Feed.FM, Jeff worked with numerous technology companies in software, hardware, computer services and telecommunications equipment companies.
Thanks for taking the time to share some insights on your experience working with music at Feed.FM. To start, can you tell us how music impacts on customer experience and engagement?
Music is a powerful engagement tool, but it’s been tough for companies to leverage because licensing and distribution have really been locked down. We handle all the curation, music licensing, and make it dead simple for our customers to integrate the tech.
What we’ve actually found when we do A/B testing is that, when people listen to music some pretty fascinating things happen, particularly around engagement. Most of our clients define engagement as either average session time – In terms of minutes or sometimes by sessions per period. For instance, how many times per week does somebody use an app?
What we find is that when people listen to music integrated into the experience (rather than a 3rd party streaming platform or no music at all), those users have 2-3X longer session times than users who do not listen.
We also see a massive impact on long term retention. Most apps lose upward of 70 per cent of new users after 90 days. And obviously, if people don’t come back to your app that’s a missed opportunity to monetize them since most of our customers are subscription businesses.
On average, our customers see a 2.3X lift in 90-day retention for users who listen to music that’s integrated. This becomes a huge factor for the bottom line and we’ve been able to prove music’s impact across 40+ different customers.
Is there a particular genre of music that works better than the others?
It’s really a context question. We work with a lot of fitness apps that are programming content for very specific audiences. The audience really drives the curation approach; e.g. a pop station for college students is very different from a pop station for suburban moms.
In fitness, it’s also very driven by the workout modality – for running and cardio you want uptempo and a consistent pace, whereas HIIT and strength are less about tempo and more about intensity.
Will this work for e-commerce websites? Could they also use background music to enhance the user experience of people who visit the websites?
It’s definitely possible, and we do work with brands like American Eagle. Because of the way browsers behave on mobile, the experience is typically better in mobile apps, which is where we’ve focused on with retail.
Music is the only medium that you can enjoy while you do something else. You can’t drive a car watching a video and you can’t go running looking at a picture. But with music you can drive a car, you can go for a run, browse a shopping app.
You can do anything while you’re listening, and we do find that users stay in-app longer and are more likely to convert when they are listening to branded music.
I’m sure you’ve called call centres and you were put on hold, with a hold music. I find a lot of them boring. Is there something businesses can do to enhance the caller experience with music?
We do power hold music, and it’s largely been about creating a consistent user experience for customers. Many retail brands want to have a consistent content strategy across every customer touchpoint. So whether or not it’s walking in the store, or calling on the phone, they are interested in conveying the same experience.
Can a particular genre of music be used in the call centre? I came across the UberConference hold song, and it’s pretty cool. If a business wants to get that sort of music via Feed.FM how can they go about it?
It really boils down to the brand and what is important to them. Do they want the freshest pop song that has just been released? Or, perhaps, something funny and quirky like Uber conference. Dialling in the approach is part of the onboarding process and something our curation team leads.
For business owners that want to get a grip of background music and don’t really know what they should do for their stores. Is there any book that you can recommend for them to start with?
I don’t know of any good books that summarize, but we’ve got a ton of great blog posts on our site that break down licensing use cases, approaches to curation, and the associated metrics.
Yeah, it definitely makes sense. I’ve seen some banks try to use background music in their banking halls. Do you think its going to work for banks?
I think ambient background music is very important If you walk into a bank and there’s no sound in the room it feels a little claustrophobic. You don’t want something crazy, shocking or jarring. You don’t go to a bank to be cool, you go in there to have your money in a safe place.
So what would the music experience be? Classical would be a safe choice here, but for banks targeting a younger demo, they could also go for carefully curated downtempo music.
What about the upcoming app developers? What advice would you give them about using music to enhance the user experience and get more engagement on their apps?
The biggest piece of advice is that if you want to use music, make sure you license properly. Because if you use music illegally and you’re not paying the rightsholders you will get caught and end up in court.
That was amazing. Thank you so much, Jeff.
Absolutely – thank you!
More brands should consider background music as an important component of ambience just like the lighting, layout or colour scheme of the business location. Background music can significantly improve the ambience in-store and enhance user experience on mobile apps.
Ensure your choice of music reflects the atmosphere, taste of your customer base and ultimately, your brand. If you need help getting the right background music visit Feed.FM to get started
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