In this edition we take stock of the developments the past year has brought us before looking forward to the innovations that lie ahead for our industry.

In my own article I discuss how we might address the challenges of multichannel customer experience, while introducing a number of key new faces arriving at Foviance. John D’Arcy brings us great news about Foviance’s recent accreditation with the Google Analytics Certified Partner programme. Pauline reveals why she was right all along to carry a torch for Amazon’s Kindle. Amanda hopes providers can bring more substance to the cloud. And finally Xavier underlines the importance of driving revenues from mobile cross-channel strategy.

I would be very interested to hear from you directly with any feedback.

Paul Blunden, CEO, Foviance

Sizing up to the multichannel customer experience challenge

We are firmly focussed on multichannel customer experience and developing our capabilities to support customer requirements. In 2010 we broke through the 50 headcount, enabling us to attract some of the industry’s thought leaders into the company and strengthen our ability to offer advice across multiple channels still further.
Read the full multichannel customer experience challenge article

Foviance becomes a Google Analytics Certified Partner

Foviance is delighted to have been recognised as a Google Analytics Certified Partner (GACP), achieving company level accreditation to package, sell and deliver analytics with Google’s trusted badge of certification.
Read the full Google Analytics Certified Partner article

Why the Kindle is burning bright

The Kindle was designed to do one thing and do it very well, and that is precisely what it does. Despite numerous journalists, analysts and industry observers writing it off as a one-trick-pony in a stable of multi-function thoroughbreds, the Amazon Kindle e-reader is now burning brightly as a popular, mature device in its own right.
Read the full Kindle article

Helping users get their heads in the cloud

How much do you really know about ‘cloud computing’? For cloud-based services to be truly successful it is vital that providers take on board industry and community concerns, design the right user experiences, and offer people something that will prove irresistible.
Read the full cloud article

Driving online sales through mobile cross-channel strategy

We start 2011 with the strongest team Foviance has ever had. We broke through the 50 headcount point last year and this scale has enabled us to attract some of the industry’s thought leaders into the company and further strengthen our ability to offer advice across multiple channels. Richard Sedley joined us in December as commercial director and is already having an impact. Richard set-up the Customer Engagement Unit at cScape and is a well-known speaker and commentator in the area of customer engagement and persuasion. He is also the social media course director for the Chartered Institute of Marketing and is already helping to redefine our social media offering. You can follow Richard on Twitter @richardsedley

Also in the area of social media but specifically focussed on how customer service teams can benefit from its use, is Guy Stephens who joined Foviance from Carphone Warehouse where he was instrumental in changing business practices and organisational structure to exploit the opportunity social media offers to customer service departments. Guy is an avid Tweeter (@guy1067), regular conference speaker, frequent blogger, founder of a LinkedIn Group – where social media meets customer service – and creator of a Squidoo lens on the topic. He is a trainer for Econsultancy’s Online Digital Marketing Master’s programme run in conjunction with the Manchester Metropolitan University, and for WOMMA-SOCAP’s (USA) Social Customer Care certification programme. To quote Dave Chaffey: “in my opinion, he is the one of the world’s leading thinkers on this topic [social media customer service]”.

Increasingly we are asked to help organisations develop their strategy and thinking in the area of customer centricity and multichannel customer experience and we were very fortunate to convince Simon Raistrick to join the team as practice director late last year. During ten years as an independent specialist, Simon has led many organisations through customer-centric change by improving measurement, process and strategy. He defined a multi-million pound customer-centric improvement programme for Canon Europe, and has also measured and improved customer experiences for British Airways, Thames Water, BT and Diageo amongst many others. I am really excited about the focus Simon brings to our strategic capability and we are already involved in some really interesting engagements such as mapping cross channel customer journeys.

We were also successful in luring John Dumas into our user experience team as practice director alongside Jonathan Culling who had joined earlier in the year. John joined us from RedEye’s Usability & Accessibility division where he was director of operations and has over 15 years’ experience in user experience research. Jonathan joined from DLKW where he was head of user experience and has deep research, testing and design capabilities. Together they are transforming the way our user experience team delivers multichannel customer experience research and design.

And, as if we didn’t have enough John’s in our team we also convinced John D’Arcy to join Foviance as practice director for the analytics and insight team. John joined us from MRM Worldwide and his analysis has been used for projects as diverse as the optimisation of Intel’s new online Hardware and Software Stores to the restructuring of Ford’s European dealer network. With over 15 years’ experience he is an authority on web analytics, data visualisation and statistical modelling and has used techniques such as segmentation, targeting and econometric modelling. As we increasingly provide integrated solutions that bring together user experience, customer analytics and insight data sources John’s experience and that of the team he has assembled is playing a pivotal role in delivering multichannel customer experience solutions.

So the year ahead promises to be exciting, with more multichannel engagements expected than ever before. The relationships between call centres, mobile, stores and online in delivering services to customers are evolving rapidly. Our clients are becoming increasingly demanding about the insights they want us to deliver and the actions we advise them to take. With the team we have assembled Foviance is better positioned than ever before to rise to these challenges and so I think 2011 is going to be our most exciting year yet.

There were various themes which resonated and I liked the idea of providing a deliverable that made “others feel smart” rather than yourself. I particularly liked the analogy with Hemingway’s The old man and the sea which was used to illustrate that clients are not looking for a mass of information they are looking for the relevant information. It is better to bring back a succulent fillet rather than a huge but empty carcass.

Agree? Disagree?

There has been precious little consolidation in the UX sector over the past few years with the few examples generally falling into the opportunistic rather than strategic category. I recall the sector being referred to as a cottage industry not that long ago because of the number of lifestyle and small businesses that operate within it. A few years on, it is a sector that has weathered the downturn well and is becoming populated by proper businesses that make money.

While our sector has started to drop the academic vocabulary that has defined it for so long and started to talk the language of business i.e. ‘conversion optimisation’ rather than ‘website usability’, there is still work to be done to ensure that businesses benefit fully from a customer centric model. The development of in-company UX teams is a great step forward and has driven us agencies to work harder to prove our value. However a ruthless focus on measurement is still lacking and we need to see an acceleration in the speed of change in this area.

This greater acceptance of the importance of UX should be recognised as our opportunity to provide deeper more strategically important business insights. This will demand a less tactical and responsive approach to UX and a more business guidance and analytical proposition. The Econsultancy/Foviance multi-channel customer experience report, published two months ago, amply demonstrates this with only 20% of companies admitting that they had a well or very well-developed measurement framework in place and only 22% having a well-developed strategy for improving customer experience. It is no surprise then that we are increasingly asked to help our customers establish a roadmap and measurement framework to help them move up the customer experience value chain.

With the changes in our commercial landscape on both in-house and in agency-side, do you feel that the UX industry is ready to meet the challenges of this more strategically demanding environment?

Paul Blunden

Foviance CEO

This bumper edition looks back to the best of 2010 and makes a few predictions about 2011. In my own roundup I touch on some of the key themes Foviance and its customers have been focusing on recently – multi-channel experience, mobile usability, customer retention, social media, and the drip-effect from paper to digital ink.

Elsewhere in this final issue of the year, Carina looks back on the entertainment and insights we gained from World Usability Day 2010, Jamie looks forward to next year’s ICE gaming event, I talk more about the language of customer-centricity, and Neil points us all towards the latest multi-channel experience research from Foviance and Econsultancy.

If you enjoy this latest newsletter, you might also enjoy reading and commenting on some of our consultants’ thoughts and opinions on our regularly updated blog page.

I would be very interested to hear from you directly with any feedback.

Have a great holiday.

Paul Blunden, CEO, Foviance

In this issue:

Another year over, a new one just begun…

Communication key to World Usability Day fun

Speaking the language of customer centricity

Living and thriving in an experience economy

Gaming sector warms up for ICE 2011

2010 seems to have been the year that mobile finally came of age, although I think a new term is needed – one that properly encapsulates what is really going on. Perhaps ‘new technology’ is a more inclusive way to think about it, as our work has shown that ‘mobile’ is too limited and remains lumbered with hand-held connotations. Now would be a good time to mention the iPad, and we certainly had fun with our iPad back in May, but I’m also thinking of the work we’ve done with utility companies around the use of smart-meters, and in the financial services sector with chip and pin.

2009 had witnessed a slowdown in the evolution of multi-channel customer experience due to the pressures of the recession and I had wondered whether it would receive greater attention in 2010. The good news for customers is that this certainly was the case, with plenty of research and events focussing heavily on multi-channel, and customers increasingly asking us about it. It is possible that a focus on customer retention spurred by the recession underlies this increased attention, but I also see a wider interest in customer centricity prevailing. The rise of social media has certainly had an influence here, and a professionalism of the discipline is starting to emerge.

Foviance’s own social media capability has greatly increased in 2010 with the arrival to the team of Guy Stephens and Richard Sedley.  Guy is expert at helping organisations leverage social media in their customer services departments and speaks and lectures widely on the subject. Richard is also extremely well known and even lectures for the Chartered Institute of Marketing, delivering its social media course. I fully expect that the Foviance social media proposition will evolve considerably next year, while in addition to customer service and social media strategy services we will also incorporate solid research and measurement.

So finally to 2011 and some predictions. Will it be the year the book and magazine dies? I wouldn’t go that far, but I think 2011, with the launch of various iPad lookalikes, will be the year when we start to work a little more paperless and make a mental leap from paper to digital ‘ink’. At least two of the magazines I carry in my bag each day are now available in iPad editions (although the subscription is for the printed version and the digital one comes free – when will they learn!). The ability to explore beyond the page is also exciting – I can certainly see myself commuting to work next December and not being surprised by all the people on the train and tube reading from handheld, digital devices.

Of course I will still be surprised if we arrive on time – some things technology seems unable to improve…

This article was written as part of the Foviance December 2010 newsletter

What should not have been a surprise, given the findings of the report, was how well attended the event was. Everyone I spoke to talked about the organisation they worked for struggling to get to grips with what they considered to be, a very complex problem. People attended from a range of organisations across the charity, telecoms, media, retail, travel and financial services sectors and all had or were starting to get to grips with how to deal with customers seamlessly across multiple channels. They spoke of challenges and barriers which were mirrored in our research and also supported the areas we have focussed on in the Foviance customer experience maturity model.

Our maturity model looks at the progress organisations are making across five important dimensions of customer experience. These are: leadership and culture; brand; customer insight; customer touch points; and systems and processes. Our work shows that if an organisation can capture these five areas in their roadmap, then they are likely to gain the business performance improvements they are searching for through the implementation of a multi-channel customer experience strategy.

In our research report, we also provided a definition of what the term ‘multi-channel customer experience’ means, as follows: ‘Multi-channel customer experience: the aggregated experience a customer has of a brand gained from all interactions across managed and unmanaged touch-points for the duration of that relationship.’

It is useful to work with a definition as it sets the boundaries for the subject area. Where multi-channel customer experience is concerned most people I speak to feel it is so big that it is hard even to find a start point. This is why for many people we suggest a simple touch-point audit to get started and to give them something tangible to work with, so that they might then consider their priorities and next steps.

The most encouraging outcome from the multi-channel research launch was that organisations on the whole are starting to focus on their customers and to talk the language of customer centricity. The term is still misunderstood but the motives are correct and that can only be a good thing. Clearly there is a long way to go, but with evidence becoming available that supports the business case, I see happy times ahead for all sorts of customer.

This article was written as part of the Foviance December 2010 newsletter

We have some exciting opportunities to share with you in this month’s issue, which revolves around the increasing importance placed upon customer-centric usability and customer experience strategy by today’s forward-thinking businesses.

Catherine has been communicating with the Great British public to capture their views for the forthcoming World Usability Day 2010. Pauline examines how to bring together user profiles developed by marketing and digital channels into cohesive customer personas – download and read the whitepaper. And I discuss Foviance’s new multi-channel customer experience research conducted in partnership with Econsultancy.

If you enjoy this latest newsletter, you might also enjoy reading and commenting on some of our consultants’ thoughts and opinions on our regularly updated blog page.

I would also be very interested to hear from you directly with any feedback. 

Paul Blunden, CEO, Foviance

P.S. How will the new EU ePrivacy Directive affect your business? Here’s a quick look at the Foviance “cookie recipe” to help you prepare for the new rules coming in 2011.

In this issue:

World Usability Day 2010: Communication

Uniting split personalities

Whitepaper: Segmented Personas

Customer Experience Maturity

The research, conducted in partnership with Econsultancy, indicates that most organisations see a direct relationship between long term business performance and customer experience and delves further to understand the barriers and opportunities they face.

The report will be available for download via the Econsultancy and Foviance websites or as a printed copy at the launch event to be held at the Hospital Club, Covent Garden on the evening of 4th November. The report will include exclusive interviews and comments from clients such as Barclays, Shop Direct and William Hill. It will also contain insight from key industry commentators including Russell Gould (formerly of Thomas Cook) and Richard Sedley of Cscape, as well as our own experts Catriona Campbell, Neil Mason and Simon Raistrick.

Multi-channel customer experience is a hot topic in business today as demonstrated by the oversubscription to Econsultancy’s JUMP event held just two weeks ago. It is an issue that impacts an organisation’s leadership, culture, brand, systems, processes, insight and customer touch-point strategies.

The report reveals that few organisations are currently getting it right and most are struggling with real barriers. Our launch event is a perfect opportunity to learn more and make new contacts with people struggling with the same issues.

If you would like a copy of the report when it is released on Friday 5th November, or wish to attend the launch event please get in touch with Charlotte Wilberforce.

This article was written as part of the Foviance October Newsletter

We’re getting social in this issue and offering you the opportunity to download our very latest Foviance whitepaper: ‘Social Media and Customer Experience: a perspective on the landscape’. Find out more about the evolution of social media, and its impact on businesses and customers alike.

In other articles, Pauline explores the concept of social media as a channel further, Guy examines the role of these emerging channels in customer complaint habits and Neil ties it all together by providing some valuable insight into multi-channel measurement.

I hope you enjoy this latest newsletter.You might also enjoy reading and commenting on some of our consultants’ thoughts and opinions on our regularly updated blog pages.

I would be very interested to hear from you directly with any feedback.

Paul Blunden, CEO, Foviance

In  this issue:

A Social Evolution
Complaining via your channel of choice
Multi-channel measurement
Social media and customer experience