Newsletter

This month we’re taking a look at where brand meets customer experience. In my column, I’ll explain why operations directors must be involved in rebranding exercises. Sean looks at the role intranets can play in reinforcing brand values internally, so that they are reflected in every customer interaction.

Paul asks whether the recession will drive integration, and ultimately improve customer experience. He also shares an interview he conducted with Jason spencer, managing director of Millward Brown in Shanghai. Find out how digital marketing differs in China.

As ever, if you’ve got any queries or would like to chat about how we can help you to align your customer experience and brand, feel free to email me.

Marty.

• Will the recession drive integration?
• Internal affairs
• Brand and the customer experience
• The Chinese Way

With a few exceptions, call centres are pretty awful. One reason is that customers aren’t pushing hard enough for improvement. They might complain bitterly about the lousy wait times, but they will consider that against a background of all the other poor call centre experiences and partition it off. If the value of a brand is truly a measure of ‘everything’ including all customer touch points then it seems there is an opportunity being missed.Ethnographic research has shown that customers compare online experiences between different brands, and even different sectors so they expect the same service from a white goods supplier as they do from one that provides consumables. So why haven’t customers started to compare experiences between different channels and demanded an improvement in the call centre?

There has been grumbling in customer service forums, but it’s had little effect. Businesses have been looking at improvements, but they have been focused on adding and optimising single channels. Integration has been a relatively recent phenomenon.

I believe the recession will be a catalyst for change, as it has been so many times before. The need to save money has placed business operations under a microscope and this will drive businesses to integrate previously disparate channels so that cross-channel service delivery becomes a reality.

Foviance has already seen a big increase in the number of organisations that are asking us to map out their customers’ journeys across all channels. We have then identified how the lower cost channels can be used to save money, without causing damage to the customer experience.

This is an area where co-creation is an excellent approach as the answers come from our consultants, customers and their customers working together, rather than in isolation. Indeed I would extend the group even further and include call centre consultancies. Many of these have already helped organisations identify a huge number of operational efficiencies. Without the constraint of a single channel, they could find new opportunities for further gains.

It is pleasing to see publications such as Customer Strategy, which has a long heritage in customer service and call centre strategy, embracing the change that is required and projecting itself as more cross-channel in its editorial approach and content. For example, the publication is currently running a series of masterclasses, the last of which in July is focussed on helping organisations establish a cross-channel approach to improving customer service and cutting costs. The masterclass will be run by RXperience. The course description includes the words “using a contact strategy that reinforces your brand”, and if organisations do start to take this approach, perhaps motivated by the recession, we will see a step change in the quality of customer experience delivery.

A brand is more than a logo: it’s a statement of what a company stands for, and what it won’t stand for; it embodies the company’s personality. But that personality is an amalgam of millions of tiny actions carried out by employees. Suppliers, customers and other stakeholders don’t judge a company by how shiny its emblem is: they judge it by how its employees behave when they encounter them.How can companies with diverse and dispersed workforces communicate their values consistently internally, to ensure that employees can always be ‘on message’?

The answer could be the intranet, but probably not as you now know it. Most companies invest a tiny fraction of their website budget in creating their intranet. Often the intranet software will be bought off the shelf, like the word processing and spreadsheets packages, rather than shaped to the needs of the business and its employees. If something is too hard to use (clue: if it needs training, it’s probably too hard to use), then it’s unlikely to communicate effectively.

By contrast, if an intranet is designed around the company and its employees, it can be highly effective in articulating the company voice, beliefs and values. Employees can be kept up to date about what’s going on in the business, and this can inform their behaviour and attitude when speaking to outsiders. Whether it’s the airline or the mobile phone company, we expect Virgin staff to be friendly, personable and efficient. Virgin’s brand experience is consistent across all its products and services, partly as a result of clear internal communications.

Some companies can benefit by tapping into the forums where their employees already share their knowledge and experiences, such as Facebook. While conservative businesses like law firms might be uncomfortable with the blurred line between formal and informal communications there, some companies can avoid reinventing the wheel by integrating the intranet with Facebook. Posts there can be reused in forums, and colleagues can see who’s online and communicate quickly in an informal atmosphere.

To create an effective intranet, companies need to ensure there is clear ownership and leadership for it. There needs to be a clear understanding of how the company’s brand is conveyed internally, and the impact that has on external perception of the company. In order to achieve that, companies should use the same analytics tools on the intranet that they already use for understanding how customers use the public website. Forums might look inactive, but could be performing a valuable service to the lurkers who are content to read posts without replying. An analysis of common search terms can also be used to identify company policies that need to be communicated more clearly. By phasing intranet growth, and building on what works well, it’s possible to achieve buy-in from employees.

Employee behaviour is the clearest expression of a brand. Isn’t it time companies devoted as much energy to helping the team understand the brand as it does to trying to convey it to end customers?

There’s a saying that beauty is only skin-deep, and for some companies, branding is only logo-deep. When they invest hundreds of thousands of pounds rebranding, the result is a new swirly logo to represent some re-imagined values. What goes on where the company meets the customer remains the same, though, so the customer’s perception of the brand is unchanged.

There can be a wide gulf between the brand promise, and the brand experience of the average customer. The website Brandtags invites members of the public to say what springs to mind when they see famous logos. The keywords entered rarely echo the company’s brand values, and all too often are a direct rebuttal of them.

Customers are more suspicious than ever before, with the latest Edelman Trust Barometer showing that more than half the customers surveyed trust brands less than they did a year ago. People are less likely to be influenced by marketing, and are more likely to trust their own experiences of a brand and those of their friends and influencers. With people densely connected online, the word of mouth effect is amplified, and that’s particularly true when there are negative experiences to share.

The investments that companies make in branding are important and should be sustained. They help to build trust with customers, and reinforce key messages. But they must be supported and reinforced at every customer touch point. You can’t be “innovative” if you make customers wait five minutes for a call centre agent, or if you can’t cope with customers moving between channels in a single transaction. You can’t claim to be a “luxury” product, if it’s a hassle to buy from you.

If companies are to ensure that their brand experience supports and enhances the brand promise, they must make delivering the customer experience a much bigger part of brand planning. They must involve operations directors in rebranding exercises, and ensure the performance metrics on the shopfloor reflect the company values, rather than just pushing for sales and conversions. They must strive to turn customers into ambassadors, and use word of mouth to build the business.

When companies get it right, the brand can be the business’s greatest asset, and its greatest defence against competitors. Without customers trusting that the company delivers on its promise, though, the brand is nothing more than a sugar coating on a bitter pill.

Jason Spencer is the managing director of Millward Brown in Shanghai. In the latest Foviance podcast, we discussed customer experience and digital marketing in China.

Hi Jason. Can you tell us a bit about yourself?

I’m originally from Brisbane, Australia, but I’ve been in greater China for the last 15 years. At Millward Brown, most of the work we do is helping our clients with their brand and communication strategies, predominantly in mainland China but also in Greater China, which includes Hong Kong and Taiwan.

I’ve heard differing stories of how digital plays a role in Asia: everybody uses mobile, nobody uses computers and all sorts of crazy ideas.

I can really only answer for China, because it’s very different across the Asia Pacific region.

Technology adoption in China has picked up and accelerated phenomenally in the last ten years or so. But it’s not so much blogging that’s big here, nor Twittering, and it’s not so much social networking in the sense that Facebook is a social network forum. What’s different about China is that when people go online here, their main activity is to go onto bulletin boards (BBS). It’s something I remember from 20 years ago when I had my first modem.

Bulletin boards are culturally and socially ideal for people in China using the internet. You can log on anonymously and have your say and air your complaints and participate in a dialogue with other web users about controversial issues. That’s something people are not able to do in real life.

What impact does the use of bulletin boards have on brands?

It’s very, very easy for a brand to make a small mistake and then have that mistake magnified by the level of discussion that goes online. Mercedes Benz about eight years ago had an issue with one of its customers. A dealership apparently didn’t want to take a car back and so the customer set up some cameras and took photos of himself bashing his Mercedes Benz to smithereens with a sledgehammer, and then published that online. Then other people started talking about the issues they’d had with Mercedes Benz, especially the after-sales service. Mercedes Benz, to their credit, responded quickly and staunched the level of discontent that was being displayed online. I think Ford have had some oil pump issues with the Ford Focus. It was only after Ford themselves were trawling and scanning what was being said online that they were able identify this as a significant issue and then address it.

Is e-commerce playing much of a role in China?

I don’t think there’s many retailers that have independently tried to capitalise on e-commerce in China, or been successful at it. Certainly not as much as you might see in the US or in Europe.

There’s a company here called Taobao, which started off as a B to B forum for people looking for components for machinery or manufacturing, and things like that. Recently they have moved much more towards the business to consumer model.

When people here buy their houses, they basically buy an empty concrete box, and then it’s up to them to go out and renovate that and put in all the toilet fixtures and the kitchen fixtures. Now people will join websites like Taobao and engage in group buying using the bulletin boards. Everyone gets together on this third party website and then goes and bulk-buys from a particular supplier to get a better deal. That sort of thing is very successful here.

What is your prediction for digital marketing in China?

Most of our clients still devote a single-digit percentage of their communications budgets to digital. I’m expecting this will grow exponentially in the next two to three years, especially as the price of advertising in China will become exorbitant, really. I think a lot of clients are being forced into a situation where they would like to look at digital as a more cost-effective platform, and then once people are forced to use that platform a little bit more, that’s when I think you’ll see the creativity and real maturity start to develop.

Thank you Jason for taking the time to speak to us. The full podcast will be available for download from the Foviance website next week.

At Foviance, our job is to help the world’s leading brands understand their customers better. That means uncovering who they are, along with their expectations, goals, behaviours and attitudes. We use this knowledge to deliver an experience that pleases end customers while ensuring commercial success for our clients.

Before we begin helping clients develop their websites, we try and learn as much as possible about the business, its objectives and its customers. This is because we are a user experience and research firm, not merely a design agency. Many companies will pay for a redesign that is essentially just a makeover that shuffles various content elements around to provide a new look and feel. This approach fails to measure the quality of the user experience when interacting with a website, and will miss even basic issues with navigation, such as inappropriate titles and taxonomy.

We take a user centered approach to design that examines exactly what a site needs to do to improve the experience of those who use it. We undertake benchmarking and user testing to see exactly how customers are interacting with a site. We look at competing sites in the same market as our clients, to see what they’re doing. We also study best practice sites, such as Amazon, or Flickr.

This is what we term the ‘discovery phase’. Sometimes we uncover content that a client didn’t remember it was hosting, or find long forgotten functionality that is no longer working. None of this is good practice. We conduct site audits and click on any and everything. If a site is particularly vast, we might suggest delving only as far as sections and sub-sections within the main site is the best use of time. Once we have gained a deeper understanding of what a client actually has on its site, we can begin building a site map, or an organisational chart that reveals whether all content is in its optimum place. We validate this with card sorting exercises to ensure customers are aligned with our thinking.

Think of this process as if we were taking all the goods from a supermarket out into a car park, then restack the shelves in the most logical way for customers. This is done by breaking content down into cards, Post-its, objects in online tools - it doesn’t matter as long as it makes sense when we show our thinking to a sample of real customers, this helps to establish trends of opinion. In this way we are able to either validate current structure or create a new recommended site map as a basis for the design phase.

In the design phase we use wireframes on Visio, PowerPoint or even whiteboards. At this stage we still work in greyscale, but we are able to define elements and inform navigation. A new recommended sitemap will reflect this as well as the improved taxonomy, enabling customers to find things more easily and enjoy their experience more. Multiple wireframe iterations and rounds of user testing refine the process before it is handed over to a graphic designer to lay on brand identity and image. The graphic designer benefits from the groundwork and has a purely design exercise, retaining all the navigation, organisation and content rationale of the wireframes while ensuring colour, palette and sufficient scalability.

So this is how we do User Centered Design. It’s a sound methodology that has been rewarded with many success stories. If a client comes to us with a site that isn’t performing and a set of targets, this is how we get them to where they need to be. Can a serious business afford not to do this? Well, we believe that it is vital to get user input into design and functionality of all services, otherwise redesigners aren’t informed, they are simply based on assumptions - a dangerous strategy. A business does know its customers, of course, but without user testing, these impressions can’t fail to be at least partly a reflection of internal opinions that require independent verification.

At Foviance we understand the complexities involved through experience, and know that user testing of services in the early stages will definitely save money and time - wireframes are cost-effective and easy to change compared to a finished site. Sometimes it pays to bring in a specialist. Everyone is a photographer, but can everyone take professional quality pictures every time?

We’ve all been there. Sitting round a conference room table discussing with our colleagues about the design of the website, the flow of a particular user path or the layout of a particular page. Opinions differ on what would work best, whether the call to action button should be red or blue, square or round, flat or bevelled. We all know best, because we’re experts. Aren’t we? In some cases it may not matter how expert we are, because the loudest voice will win or the most important person’s opinion will be the one that counts.

This is what happens in the absence of good data to guide decision making. It becomes subjective and vulnerable to interests, politics and personal preference. Good optimisation strategies are built on good data, coupled with an ability to drive through change. In the ‘red versus blue’ debate, what better way to find out than to try both of them and see which one works best? That’s the basis of a testing and experimentation programme. A/B testing and its more sophisticated cousin, multivariate testing or MVT, have been around for years as techniques in direct marketing and other analytical disciplines. These techniques allow you to test different versions of a page or different combinations of different elements on a page to see which one works best. Although the analytical techniques have been around for years, it is only relatively recently that they have begun to get adopted and gain traction in online marketing.

A/B testing is conceptually very simple but can be difficult to execute. To see whether the blue button would be better than the existing red button, two different versions of the page would be created, one with each different button. As visitors arrive on the website one set of visitors would be shown version A, and the remainder would be shown version B. The effectiveness of each page is measured according to whatever success criteria are the most relevant. Multivariate testing uses a more sophisticated set of algorithms to allow you to test multiple versions of different elements of a page at the same time.

Whichever testing regime is the right one, the challenges historically have been in implementation. It can be technically challenging to manage the process of setting up different versions of pages, splitting the traffic between them, setting up the measurement and then analysing the results. This heavy lifting has now largely been addressed by the availability of specialist testing and experimentation platforms such as Omniture’s Test & Target, Autonomy’s Optimost or Google’s Website Optimiser. Whilst the implementation of these services is not trivial, they manage the whole testing and experimentation process from deployment through to results.

The challenge for organisations then, still remains “What to test” and “How to test”. Analytics, survey data and usability evaluations can all help to identify the priorities for a testing programme. Start at the greatest pain points but also sort out the operational processes around the initial deployment on pages that are not too complex or mission critical. Marketing landing pages are often a good place to start. The question then becomes how should the page be tested? The challenge here is to ensure that you come up with a good test design. In our ‘red versus blue’ debate, are these the best options to test? What about green or orange? You could test those as well but in reality the number of variants that can be tested is limited. It’s important to ensure that you’re testing the right things in the right way. For me, this is where user experience expertise adds value to an analytical testing programme. Customer experience experts can identify which variants are likely to be the most effective and ensure that the test is as efficient and as effective as possible and the analytics experts can run the experiments and do the analysis.

Testing is a powerful tool in the site optimisation toolkit but it’s important to test the right things in the right way.

Recently we have been using a sophisticated participatory design technique in a number of our user-centered design projects, known as scenario-based design. A more familiar approach in academia and software development, it’s still quite new for creating web user experiences. It’s proving to be an invaluable tool for exploring user activities and potential solutions to an audience’s diverse requirements.

A scenario tells a story. It has a plot with characters that do things and have things happen to them. It relays rich detail about the characters’ goals, attitudes, behaviours and aspirations. Naturally the story features the use of the system whose user experience we are designing. But it also crucially involves the wider context of this use, extending into areas of the characters’ lives that don’t explicitly involve the system. In this way, scenarios capture a broader range of factors influencing a system’s use.

We depict scenarios visually using a storyboard or comic strip. We create scenarios that are fictional, but based on real-world situations discovered through research conducted with our target audiences. We conduct one-to-one interviews supplemented with further primary research, such as surveys and diary studies. The data is then analysed for common themes from which scenarios are formed.

These scenarios are modified to include ideas for potential content, functionality and information architecture that best meet the needs of the characters while alleviating any issues they might encounter. We call these ‘augmented scenarios’. These design solutions draw upon suggestions gathered during the various streams of user research, as well as Foviance consultants’ own creativity and craft knowledge.

We take the augmented scenarios back to our original research participants for feedback. The visual storyboarding of the scenarios comes into its own at this stage as it enables the participants to rapidly understand the concepts being described. We want to check if audience members identify with the scenarios and the rough design solutions they incorporate. They are asked to identify the ‘break points’ of each scenario; the places in which they feel it doesn’t work and the reasons for this. Feedback is provided and alternatives are explored.

The scenarios contain very little detail about how a particular design concept should work or what it should look like at this stage. We use the scenario to work with the participants to start filling in this detail in the way that is most appropriate to them. Finally, the scenarios are amended to reflect the changes deemed necessary in light of the user feedback, and to include the more detailed descriptions of functionality, content and information architecture. Often scenarios spark other ideas and additional scenario suggestions from participants.

So what is the deliverable? The outputs are visual and engaging descriptions of the core user journeys the system should support, with rich detail around the unique requirements of the different segments of the target audience. They are prescriptive, in that they describe the content, functionality or information architecture needed to meet these requirements. These can then form the basis of further development of the solutions through prototyping or wireframes.

We have found the approach to have many benefits:

• Allows users to participate in the design process
• Communicates complex concepts quickly and easily to both users and stakeholders
• Generates creativity from participants, stakeholders and consultants due to the immersive nature of the communication style
• Takes the whole context of the interaction into account (is not simply concerned with on-screen interactions)
• The attractive visual deliverable engages stakeholders at all levels within the client organisation and engenders buy-in for the user experience project from the wider organisation as a whole
• Particularly suitable for intranets and other organisational systems thanks to buy-in and that ready access to captive, unpaid participants!