Customer Experience

…and you can’t opt out (unless you turn off your phone) you have been warned…

Imagine a world where on walking into a store at the mall you are greeted by a shop assistant who welcomes you by name, asks you how you enjoyed your last purchase of brand X and whether you would to go to your personalised changing room to (virtually?) try on a selection of clothes they have identified as possibly interesting to you based on your last purchases (in store and online) with the company. 

E-commerce sites gather data (now a controversial practice, if the EU is to be believed, and one that is newly regulated) that help them understand out how customers shop, which site they came from, and use this to target promotions and advertising even after they have moved on to another site (Visit Lands End for instance and you see ads from them everywhere else you go online: not a coincidence, in case you were wondering). In the bricks-and-mortar world, similar attempts are made through the use of loyalty cards and store credit cards as well as direct mailings but linking to foot traffic is a lot harder.

Footpath technology has now cracked part of the problem and promises to get retailers at least some of the best of both worlds, by leveraging mobile phone signals. The technology, created by UK company Path, monitors the signal (more specifically the unique ID for the phone – a bit like IP addresses for computers) and uses triangulation to track their whereabouts in the mall, providing insights into traffic patterns. Their analytics let retailers get a measure of, for example, how many people walked past an ad and then went to the store. In the words of the CEO, Sharon Biggar  “Now we can produce heat maps of the mall and show advertisers where the premium locations are for their adverts and perhaps more importantly, we can price the advertising differently at each location.” Similarly in larger retail spaces, as she explains, “We can now say, you had 100 people come to this product, but no one purchased it. From there, we can help a retailer narrow down what’s going wrong.”  

 (graphic from the Mail article)

Indeed. The analysis can reveal how many people went into, say, both The Gap and Monsoon, or how long the average visitor spends at Starbucks – or which areas get very little traffic. All of which is fascinating, but may not be to the taste of all the mall visitors.

The mall owner trialling this system posted a warning on its signage and stress the company does not collect personally identifiable data (in fact the system is not capable of doing so: carriers are very protective of their customers’ data), they just use the “signal fingerprint”. Personally I think the little notice below is unlikely to be noticed by everyone (do you even look at the map when you go to your local shopping centre?) and that there are some privacy concerns here.

The system does give an accurate enough record of the phone’s path. Mall owners could sell other available data such as CCTV footage (bearing in mind some and this could actually be matched malls actually use face recognition software as a preventative measure to deter shoplifting) which retailers could also match to credit or debit card transactional data – and then would be in a position to make very specific targeted offers to customers as they walk into the store.

In fact there seems to be some uncertainty over the legality of the system since although it does not identify individuals per se, it does provide the means to do so to some extent if matched with the right data. That in itself is a data privacy red flag, especially given recent developments in European data privacy and storage laws.

According to the company the system is already used in Europe and Australia and most shoppers do not opt out (though I would question whether the visitors are really aware of it?). Moreover malls have long been tracking shoppers through other methods – people counters, CCTV, and undercover researchers who will secretly shoppers around – which also generated heatmaps, albeit slightly less hi tech ones.

But what happens the day hackers break into the data store (as has happened to a number of high profile companies this past year – Sony, AT&T…)? Path says to protect information they scramble the data twice…which I would not put much faith in, personally. The last word belongs to Forrester analyst Sucharita Mulpuru, with whom I agree wholeheartedly on this: “I’m sure as more people get more cell phones, it’s probably inevitable that it will continue as a resource, but I think the future is going to have to be opt in, not opt out”

This advertisement using augmented reality by Volkswagen looks really cool. The only problem is you need to know about it and which ads it works with, or you’re waving your iPad about and looking a wally and nothing happens. It looks like the bus stop ones have a clue, but it might be harder with the billboard ones.

For this to reach the mainstream it needs to be so embedded in devices that you don’t need an app. I see two routes for this, either you need eyewear that augments the world automatically or (the less high tech approach) your phone buzzes or vibrates or in some way notifies you when near to an AR enabled location.

It’s getting there, the movement handling (so you don’t need to have a rock-steady hold on the device) suggest that the technology is just about ready.

If you are trying to view this video in Internet Explorer (IE)  and it is not showing, just click on this link: http://youtu.be/KRA0SZhKNyo

John Lewis have recently made wifi available throughout out their high-street stores. According to reports, the primary reason for this is to enable customers to compare the price of products before choosing to buy them. This is a very bold move from John Lewis, sticking by their longstanding price promise to be ‘never knowingly undersold’.

I’d be very interested to monitor the usage of this wifi. I wonder if customers will be more likely to whip out their mobile devices to check prices as they shop in store? Or, will this move of enabling wifi increase trust in the brand in providing great value products, so that customers don’t feel the need to actually check up on the prices offered? Is it instead going to be used by John Lewis customers to simply check Facebook or read their online copy of the newspaper in the John Lewis café?

Either way, it’s a great move to ensure that customers can make immediate decisions in store and complete purchases there and then, rather than having to do online research separate from their offline experience. The important thing for John Lewis to ensure in rolling this out, is that customers’ mobile online experience is fully aligned to their in store experience, to provide a fully joined up multi channel experience. Done well, this could transform shopping experiences and is a great step in the direction of ensuring that the digitally evolving needs of customers are met throughout the traditional shopping journey.

Recently a pair of cords caught my eye in a magazine spread. I duly noted they were from the Gap and at the next opportunity I hotfooted it over to Gap.eu, thinking I might just be tempted into a purchase.  Once I got to the site however…no search box!

Having happily purchased from Gap.com, though in a distant past (we are talking around the year 2000) – I was stunned. To me, search boxes are an essential element of a good user experience. For most sites I can think of, an included part of the landscape along with the logo top left and the privacy/contact us links at the bottom. Just to make sure I asked a colleague to take a look, thinking I might have missed it – but no. Not there. So to find those trousers I needed to click on Women, click on trousers and scroll down scanning dozens of images to try and find those cords. Needless to say I gave up.

Gap.eu – missing a search bar, top right.

It niggled though, as I was pretty sure the US site did have a search box. And lo and behold, there it is – top right, where there was a blank space on the .eu site. If anyone from The Gap is listening out there, you might want to put in that search box and close the gap?

 Gap.com – including a search bar, top right.

By Robert Brauer

Eating fast food is my most dubious habit. To me, it is neither a culinary delight, nor a tolerable source of nutrition. However, every once in a while and especially when I am enjoying my passion for travelling foreign countries and getting immersed into different cultures, the chances are high: I will end up in fast food shop. Most of the times, it will be a chain with stores all over the planet. The names are well known. In situations like that, when it comes down to choosing between exciting foreign cuisine and a trusted but maybe less exciting burger, the burger simply seems to be the most reasonable choice.

This choice of experience is no exceptional case for human nature. Albeit the awareness of possibly missing out on a remarkable experience, I am turning myself to a relationship of trust. Even though it might not be the best experience in the world, I know what to expect. In commercial terms, my need can be described as a customer experience of consistency, which is an important driver for the trust relationship between a customer and a brand.

Not surprisingly, the described experience is a major revenue point for international fast food chains, and the example can be related to almost every service or product. For instance, when deciding to try a completely new device experience, such as a tablet computer. For an appreciator of the functionality of an iPhone, it is straightforward to choose an iPad. Despite the significant monetary investment that it requires, a baseline user experience is shared among the devices. Overall this reduces the possibility of the new purchase to be a technologic gamble as well as a source of frustration.

Generally speaking, consistency within multichannel experiences is a design challenge that concerns a wide variety of brands and services. Multichannel experiences exist simultaneously among several customer touch-points. Online as well as offline, a coherent and integrated customer experience builds up trust by mediating competence and direction as well as generating perceived familiarity. Despite the broadness of the problem space of managing a trusted relationship between customers and services, almost all key issues and design requirements can be determined, investigated and revised. Consistency within multichannel experiences in this case is achieved though the following characteristics.

• Coherent – basic idea of the service is perceived as consistent across channels.

• Complementary – coherent service experience delights with specific benefits within chosen service channel.

• Simultaneous – benefits of service channel can be combined as needed.

• Shiftable – service adapts to customer flexibility and present needs.

• Synchronized – service allows shifting between channels and shared features across service a shared among channel.

Characteristics like these not only ensure that the service delivers consistently among websites, microsites, mail, social media, in-store and even call centre experiences. Familiarity and stability also improve the overall quality of the service beyond the perception of trust and allow design space to delight with innovation and significantly increase adoption rates of new features and services.

This article was originally published by the Customer Experience Magazine

By Simon Raistrick

We wanted to do something different for our holiday this year, so we decided to go to Belgium and Luxembourg; which by the way, is an underrated holiday destination if you like castles and forests. Since we have a baby, we decided to drive there, to reduce the hassle. But how would this compare to our usual experience of taking the plane? I’ll use this case study to highlight some important components of the multichannel customer experience as we crossed the channel.

The booking process was pretty simple, and pretty much matched the process for booking a flight. The best part, however, was when we arrived at the ferry terminal in Dover. This is a classic case of a “moment of truth” – the customer is under stress, and the way customers are dealt with at times like this makes or breaks a customer experience.

We pulled straight off the motorway, through a well-organised and signposted road system. A good example of how the customer experience before the customer arrives into a company’s property is important. The Port Authority of Dover and the Highways Agency played their part in making this a good customer experience.

Next came the really clever bit. I’d like you to imagine the most efficient possible way you could process people onto a ferry, and I bet that the way P&O do it exceeds this.

We came to an arrangement of check-in booths with barriers, like motorway toll booths, and as we pulled up to the barrier, the man in the booth said “Mr Raistrick, how many people are travelling with you today?”. I was shocked and delighted. This was like arriving at the Ritz.

A camera at the gate, connected to a car number plate recognition system had matched the plate to the booking record, and appeared on the screen in the booth within a few seconds. This is the most important aspect of the multichannel customer experience – touchpoints between channels, and what makes or breaks this is whether the channel you’re using (in this case face to face) knows about the last channel you used to interact with the company (in this case web).

We were processed extremely rapidly, which was good for us, and good for P&O – a great example of how customer experience and cost-saving can go hand-in-hand. We were then given a lane number, which we hung on our reversing mirror, and drove through a well-organised system of hundreds of lanes, until we found ours.  A man checked the number on the mirror as we drove onto the ferry, increasing their efficiency and reducing delays.

Once on the ferry, the first thing which improved the customer experience was the usability of the navigation. We were on deck 5, and took the orange stairs, a fantastic cross-referencing system to allow us to find our car again.

The food and seating on ferry were, I must admit, nowhere near as good as what I’ve experienced on other ferries recently in Scotland, the Baltic and New Zealand, but then again, it was a lot cheaper too, so I didn’t necessarily expect this. A good example of how a company’s customer experience strategy can focus effort on those “moments of truth”, whilst not needing to improve the entire Customer Experience to maximise the RoI of Customer Experience investment.

Whilst on holiday, we decided to move our return date forward a day, so I logged onto the website, because this is much cheaper and easier than calling when you’re abroad. This was one moment of truth where I was disappointed – there was no way to change it online, and no information on how to do it either. I was wasting time – I wanted to be visiting castles, and here I was fishing around a website (or “some stupid website” as I no doubt referred to it at the time). At least the website had a phone number, so I called up, and they charged a nominal £10 fee to move the day. Stress over.

Customer service is often neglected as it is not seen as ‘critical path’, or is managed by a different team with a different budget. However, it is a key part of the customer experience, and relatively cheap improvements could make a lot of difference (and, in this case, reduce costs too, as channel shift from phone to web usually does).

When we returned from our holiday in Belgium, feeling suntanned (yes, suntanned!) and full of chocolate, we arrived at the port a bit early. Having driven quite a way, we were not in the mood for any hassle, but the same efficient booth greeted us, and we were booked onto the next available ferry hassle-free. The airlines could learn a thing or two from this high level of consistency between the way the customer is processed in different countries.

Not having to take the plane was a breath of fresh air. I didn’t have to stand in a line, take my shoes off, remove my laptop, deny myself access to liquids, have my retina scanned, or have my luggage rummaged. The airlines have no control over this, but it’s an important lesson in how third parties can make or break a customer experience. ‘Verified by Visa’ take note.

Although not perfect, my experience with P&O helped us to have the most relaxing holiday we’ve had in ages. A superb cross-channel customer experience.

We have launched the follow up to our ground breaking Multichannel Customer Experience Report. Last year’s report provided insight into how businesses were thinking and acting in the area of multichannel customer experience.

The 2011 survey covers:

•         What attributes are important for delivering a great customer experience? 
•         How well does your organisation (or your clients) integrate different touch points?
•         With questions around organisational maturity, measurement and challenges

Last year we used our maturity model to look at the progress organisations were making across five important dimensions of customer experience: Leadership and culture, brand, customer insight, customer touch points and systems and processes

We believe if an organisation can capture these five dimensions in their roadmap, then they are likely to gain the business performance improvements they are searching for, to implement a multichannel customer experience strategy.

We will be using our maturity model to see if companies have changed their behaviours in these five areas, over the past year. To enhance the report further, we will also be running a second B2C survey alongside this one but we will keep you updated on that before it is launched in July.

Complete the Multichannel Customer Experience survey here, and receive a FREE copy of the full report in advance.

For the second year running, Foviance has worked with Econsultancy to produce the follow up to the 2010 Multichannel Customer Experience Report.

The 2011 survey is now live and takes 5 minutes to complete and is relevant for both in-house (client-side) and agency respondents.

Complete the Multichannel Customer Experience survey here, and receive a FREE copy of the full report in advance.