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Having read a fair bit about ‘Apple reinventing the textbook’  and having watched the launch, I don’t think anyone can say for certainty which way this will go; beyond those raised by the Econsultancy blog (which missed the bit about Apple’s publishing partners talking about iBooks)  There are a number of points to note:

• Anything that makes textbooks more interesting can only be a good thing. However, is it possible to turn every book into an amazing visual journey. I notice they only showed introductory science book examples. How complex can the topics become before the book reverts to mainly text? What about drier subjects like some branches of mathematics?
• Does this risk trivialising learning? They’ve taken the study questions and made them more interactive. Fine, but this is just like any web based learning environment, so not exactly revolutionary. And not everything can be represented as a multiple-choice question. It would have been great to see more innovative approaches to learning. Without this, there is a risk that the reinforcement of learning is only very shallow.
• Immersion. There are lots of potential distractions on an iPad. Just how effective will it be as a teaching tool.
• Reading experience. iPads are not e-Ink displays, which means that they will be tiring to read over time. People seem to cope with this, but if kids are looking at a screen solidly for 5 days a week, I’m not sure that’s amazing for their eyes.
• Typing. Nobody is going to claim that an iPad makes a great tool for typing for long periods. The problem is, if a school invests in iPads for each student, then they’re not going to provide laptops too. So what are students going to use to do coursework while at school?
• Exclusion. I echo the sentiment about this being too expensive for most schools/students. It would have been nice if the iBooks format was slightly more open, so it could perhaps work via a browser for those schools that couldn’t afford iPads. This is not in Apple’s interests though, hardware sales are where all their profits are (and why they can make the entire iBooks platform free software. You need an iPad to view it and a Mac to create it).
• Reach. As the article states, cost aside, not all schools will want to move onto an entirely Apple ecosystem. I’m not sure this matters to Apple though and I don’t think they’ll be worried if they only carve out a small niche in the education market. For one it’s great publicity for how socially responsible they are, it also helps to cement use of Apple products into the next generation of consumers and it will drive sales from those wealthy schools that can afford it. Now they’ve made the software, there are no major costs to supporting it (even interactive books are likely to be less costly to host and serve than apps, music or video as they will be smaller files prone to lower levels of demand).

So, there are limitations, but it is likely to see success within those schools that can afford to adopt it. Just don’t expect to see it revolutionise education overnight.

Infographic displaying results from the Multichannel Customer Experience Report – Consumer Survey.

Customers’ were asked to rate the most important areas that companies should focus on in order to provide them the best customer experience in the banking, gaming, mobile phone, retail and travel sectors.

By Simon Raistrick

Recently, many businesses are starting to wonder “what good looks like” for the multichannel customer experience. Of course the answer is slightly different for every company, depending on the sector, customers and strategy, but I’ve developed these ten indicators of multichannel performance which have proven reliable in most situations:

1. AVAILABILITY – Give customers a choice of channel based on their preferences.
2. AWARENESS – Make customers aware of all channels available, with channels promoted from other channels.
3. PULL - To drive channel shift, the channel shifting ‘to’ needs to have a better customer experience.
4. CONSISTENCY - Provide a consistent experience across channels, whilst utilising the benefits of each channel.
5. UNDERSTANDING - Regardless of channel choice, make sure customers gain the understanding they need to effectively engage with the products.
6. ENGAGEMENT - Pull customers into deeper engagement within their preferred channel.
7. OPTIMISATION - Optimise the customer experience of each channel.
8. INTEGRATION - Each channel is aware of previous customer interactions, regardless of channel.
9. PRODUCTS - Produce quality products which meet customer expectations and requirements.
10. MEASUREMENT - Get the right customer experience measures in place.

By Simon Raistrick

We recently released our 2012 Multichannel Report. It shows that companies are making some progress towards customer-centricity since last year, but still have some way to go. The graph on page 23 of the report shows a series of organisational indicators of customer experience maturity and illustrates this point very well.

(Reproduced with permission)

This one chart touches on all of the main themes which form the basis of customer- centricity:

• STRATEGY: Customer-centric organisations are focussed on strategy as determining customer experience outcomes (the first bar).
• PROCESS & GOVERNANCE: Customer-centric organisations design their processes around customer experience outcomes which result from them, and govern their processes on this basis (the last bar).
• REWARDS: Customer-centric organisations ensure that each individual is motivated to produce good customer experience outcomes (the third bar).
• SYSTEMS: The systems in customer-centric organisations are specified and implemented to produce optimum customer experiences, either directly or indirectly (the last bar).
• MEASURES: Customer-centric organisations measure and analyse the customer experience accurately and track it consistently (the seventh and ninth bars).
• CHANNEL EXPERIENCES: Of course, the result of all of this is that customer-centric organisations produce better customer experiences (the 2nd, 4th, 5th, 6th and 8th bars).

Strong on strategy, weak on operational delivery

The strongest performance is in the adoption of strategies, and it’s clear that customer-centric strategies are really taking hold now, but the operational changes needed to drive results from them are not yet in place. The operational customer experience really sets more CX-mature organisations apart from the rest, and is where many companies are currently stumbling.

How to measure it?

Customer-experience-mature companies recognise that strategy, process, rewards, governance and systems have a major impact on the customer experience, however, very few measure or monitor this impact. Almost all customer experience measures are focussed on measuring the channel customer experiences themselves, but not the operational factors which determine these channel outcomes. It’s hardly surprising then, that companies do not always make the connection between operational causes and customer experience effects.

I predict that the measurement of the impact of strategy, process, rewards, governance and systems on customer experiences will represent the next level in customer experience maturity over the next ten years. These measurements are needed to build the case for the strategic direction required to drive true customer-centricity.

These measures also allow a business case to be built which ties organisational factors to customer experience outcomes, and hence the case can be made, for the organisational changes which are needed for companies to become truly customer-centric. This is when customer-centricity really starts to deliver benefits.

Customer-centricity continues to grow

Over the next ten years, we can expect the economy to be fairly rocky. Increasingly, customer experience will be seen as the main USP and differentiator, especially in the service industries on which so much of the developed world’s economy is based. As channel-level improvements start to reach optimal levels for many companies, we will start to see greater focus on the connections between customer experience outcomes and deeper, organisational and strategic factors.

Earlier this year, Google chairman Eric Schmidt named Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon as the four companies which currently rule consumer technology. It’s not a coincidence that these four companies are among the most customer-centric around. As Amazon CTO Werner Vogels puts it “ We want to be the most customer-centric company on the planet ”. Where these 4 companies lead, the rest of us generally follow, so it’s time to sit up and take note of customer-centricity.

As you will see from the results of our Multichannel Report, it’s not easy, and most companies have some way to go. You can download the Multichannel Report here.

The following 8 minute video with Key Account Director, Sven Krause, explains some of the key benefits of measuring emotional engagement and the research techniques used to capture unconcious reactions of consumers. Ultimately increase customer engagement and experience and lead to increased revenue.

There has been speculation that Amazon is gearing up to launch a mobile handset next year. If true, this represents an interesting evolution in the aims of this e-commerce giant. So, is a mobile phone as good a match for Amazon’s business model as a content consumption tablet like the Kindle Fire.

Why Amazon won’t make a phone.

• Consumption: tablets are a great match for Amazon’s business, as they are geared up for content consumption. Mobile handsets are used to read books and watch videos, but it isn’t as rich an experience.
• It’s still a phone: the “phone” aspects of a handset sit well outside Amazon’s core business. Android provides this functionality as standard, but it still needs to sit within Amazon’s customised Android experience. An Amazon phone would still have to be good at calls, messages, email and critical third party integration like Twitter and Facebook. Reviews of the Kindle Fire suggest that the email client isn’t amazing. Given the goals of the tablet, this is an annoyance, but on a phone it could be a deal breaker.
• They’re there already: Amazon is already well embedded on mobile phones. They have their own appstore and custom apps. Do they really need to take the next step? They can’t use a mobile handset as a technology demonstrator in the same style as Google’s Nexus phones. Amazon have to push volume for this to be a worthwhile endeavour.
• Competition: the tablet space was much easier to enter, as there was no dominant Android tablet at the same price point. A phone at the rumoured price of $180-$200 will be up against every other Android handset. It will have to be very good to compete.

Why Amazon might make a phone.

• Customer experience: owning the whole customer experience could be very valuable. Mobile allows Amazon an even greater opportunity to build relationships with customers. For example, imagine a phone that is dedicated to shopping. Seamless product comparison and price matching (using a well implemented barcode scanner) in retail stores, together with Amazon’s great fulfilment process could be quite disruptive.
• Music: for many people, mobile phones have replaced iPods. A mobile handset would be a great match for Amazon’s music services.
• Platform: Amazon might need to have a mobile platform to avoid getting left behind. If the Facebook phone happens and has mass appeal, there is a risk that Amazon could be cut out, or find themselves having to reach customers through a Facebook experience. It would be much better to be the one in control.
• Appstore: a mobile handset would certainly help Amazon to expand their appstore and sell more apps.
• Data: if allowed to, Amazon could collect even more data about their customer’s shopping habits, down to the location level. Time and location based product recommendations, it’s certainly a possibility. If Amazon knows I’m more likely to purchase in a certain place at a certain time, you can bet they’d like to take advantage of that.

The Kindle Fire was a very logical step for Amazon. A mobile phone is a bit more of a reach. There are certainly ways in which it could support their core business and allow them to embed themselves further into the lives of their customers. However, I would argue that for a phone to be a success it will have to be really well thought through and executed. Given that Amazon tend to evolve products, rather than nail them first time out, this may make a phone success less likely. That said, they certainly have the scale and the vision to make the attempt.

…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”

Updated: December 1st – Jonathan decided to ‘go pink’ instead of green

Men are lucky. We don’t have to buy make-up – it simply grows out of our faces. Most men, like me, choose to remove this make-up every morning in a ritual of lathering and scraping. But could there be an easier way to raise money than to neglect the ritual for a month and “do a Movember”?

That’s what I thought when I began to ‘grow my mo’ on November 1. It was easy enough to grow a few days’ worth of stubble. You just have to be lazy, which is precisely how you end up looking.

Then it started to get more challenging. I decided that, for maximum impact and money-raising potential, I would grow a moustache and sideburns combo that joined to create the shape of a W. The only way I could think of achieving this was by shaving with a naked blade – any foam and I wouldn’t be able to see what I was doing. This resulted in the most uncomfortable razor burn, which has stayed with me through most of the month.

As the facial hair began to come thick and fast, so did the backhanded compliments. Neighbours in Ealing started asking my wife if I’d turned gay; she defended me (I hope). A colleague suggested that I should cultivate hairs on the tip of my nose by shaving there or sprinkling it with hair tonic; his argument that the W wasn’t complete without the apex in the middle.So it hasn’t been that easy. But it’s been worth it, since at the time of writing I have raised £140 for research into cancers affecting men. But I would like to raise more, and have decided that the only way to do this is to make myself look even more ridiculous. Here is my plan:

• If I pass the £200 mark, I will die my moustache and sideburns green on the 1st of December to celebrate the start of the Christmas season.

• If I get £300 in donations, I will hang baubles from them.

Please visit my Movember page here