Paul Blunden

Welcome to the Foviance ‘crossing the channels of experience’ March newsletter. I have taken over as editor this month, as sadly Marty has decided to leave Foviance after nine years. Marty is leaving the life of consultancy to set up a new online venture and we wish him the very best of luck and success.

In this issue we focus on cross-channel customer experience. I relay my own experiences from a recent practical master class with a number of senior marketers, Sean shares his views on information visualisation, Adam points the way ahead for mapping experience, while Guy rises to the challenge of cross-channel measurement.

If you enjoyed 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.

Paul

Paul Blunden, CEO, Foviance

In this issue:

Customer experience master class

Information visulisation

Mapping the experience

Conquering cross-channel customer measurement

A clear customer experience strategy is critical for modern service businesses. Recently I ran a customer experience master class for Marketing Week as part of the Customer Retention conference, in which I shared my thoughts and some practical models with senior marketers.

Most organisations seem to struggle with the balance between mass customisation and commoditisation of services. Although over ten years old now, I used a concept of progressing economic value introduced by Pine & Gilmore in their book ‘Experience Economy’ to explain why customer experience strategies can help businesses differentiate. (more…)

“Never try, never fail, those are the words I live by”, or so says Drew Carey’s character Crank in the animated kids film ‘Robots’. I heard these words coming from the back of the car a few days ago as I headed off on holiday with the family for a week in North Devon. You could run a business by that motto but I’m not sure it would last long or be an exciting place to work.

On the contrary,  it is the belief of both my team and I that we must try, that sees Foviance opening for business in China this quarter, with a new office in Shanghai. (more…)

I’m delighted to be able to share a recent conversation I had with Frank Ma, a close associate in China for the last two years now, and the man who will be responsible for ensuring the success of Foviance’s exciting new venture in Shanghai – Foviance Asia.

Frank, can you tell me a bit about your background and what attracted you to research?

I started out in research over 13 years ago right out of university. Like many fresh graduates I had little clue of what I wanted to do except that I wanted to get exposure to a number of different industries. This is what the research offers – a chance to work with a broad range of companies and learn how they do things. (more…)

Daniele Fiandaca’s opinion piece (NMA 04 Feb) raised the question of whether digital agencies were focussed on aesthetics at the expense of user experience.  I am delighted to see this issue being discussed because over recent years user experience (UX) has become “un-sexy” and the column inches that were dedicated to the subject back in the early 2000’s when it was new and exciting are all but forgotten. (more…)

In response to NMA article, 21 January 2010 Peter McCormack, co-founder of McCormack and Morrison, makes some interesting points in his opinion piece in published in NMA 21st January.

If brands are truly throwing away their traditional marketing campaigns in favour of third party channels such as Facebook then I would agree it is unwise – but only ‘today‘. Because today you cannot connect the dots and establish the identity of twitter’ers and other anonymous users of social networks, but that will not always be the case. There will come a time when total transparency exists online and your anonymity will be lost. (more…)

Blink and you might miss it – The Tipping Point for mobile customer engagement might be upon us quicker than we thought.If, like me you are reading Malcolm Gladwell’s brilliant new book ‘What the Dog Saw’ you will have come across the term ‘creeping determinism’, a concept attributed to psychologist Baruch Fischhoff who first came up with it thirty five years ago. The principle states that as time goes by we start to convince ourselves that what has now happened was in fact always going to happen. Furthermore, through this process of enlightened hindsight, we convince ourselves so entirely, that any doubt we may have had upfront diminishes and is lost from our memory. (more…)

If there is one word that sums up the year we have just been through it would be ‘unpredictable’. I have heard it said again and again in every area of our customers’ and our own business.

A year ago, when I put together my round up of the year for the 2008 year end newsletter, the recession was really gaining momentum on the back of the credit crunch and we already faced a very difficult outlook. In 2009 with the recession in full-swing, business was in constant flux – one day there would be no projects underway the next there would be a half a dozen urgent propositions. Like every agency and consultancy in our industry, we had to become masters at expecting the unexpected and delivering great experiences for our clients. (more…)