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

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

In our last newsletter you will have read all about Foviance’s plans for World Usability Day 2010. This unique collection of more than 150 events organised across more than 43 countries was held on 11 November in an effort to create greater awareness for designs, products and services that help to improve and facilitate communication around the world.

You’ll remember that we had been busy hitting the streets to discover and video what the event’s main theme of ‘communication’ really meant to the people we engage with each day. On the day itself we collated all our most interesting video response and uploaded them to our podcast section to share the wide range of opinions with the rest of the World Usability Day (WUD) community.

The greatest consensus of opinion among our interviewees was that on the whole they still preferred face-to-face communications over any other forms, however sophisticated. They concurred that just one poor example of communications could taint a business relationship indefinitely. People also generally agreed that the internet would only become even more pervasive in our future communications, but that progress wouldn’t stop there – our imaginative audience definitely fancied the idea of thought transmission before too long!

But the videos weren’t the end of our Usability Day fun here at Foviance. We also devised a communications game involving a large number of our consultants across the whole company. We split participants into groups, each comprising a ‘director’, a ‘runner’ and a creative team. Each team director was allowed a sneak-peek at a ‘top-secret’ Lego model before answering questions on the design put to them by their runner. The runner was allowed to go between the director and creative team in an effort to get an accurate copy of the top-secret model built.

Our gaming debrief threw up some interesting points. When asked, every team said that if they’d had more time to prepare, they would have liked to have put together some sort of coherent communications strategy for everyone within their team to follow. This would have helped establish the kind of information they wanted their director to share, and what format it would be passed on to the creatives by the runner. In the actual game, the teams rushed around for just 20 minutes and discovered just how clueless a lack of clear communication and vision can leave any team of individuals under pressure!

Foviance Communication Game for World Usability Day

Overall Usability Day 2010 was a great success. We advertised the Foviance activities on the WUD website and have been sharing feedback with lots of other event organisers across the community. We even took part in other group events, such as sending a video letter to Design Ltd. In Tokyo, a firm collecting video communications of the shared WUD experience.

Together, all participants learned a lot about how we communicate internally, externally, how we value the communications of others and how we all strive to make everyday communications more valuable.We’re now looking forward to discovering the theme of next year’s World Usability Day and hatching new plans to ‘make life easier’ one step at a time.

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

So how are businesses coping with the need to deliver a multi-channel, integrated customer experience? Well the evidence from a recent report conducted by Foviance in association with Econsultancy here in the UK, suggests that whilst organisations recognise that is something they need to do, they are a long way from delivering on that need.

The report is based on a survey of over 500 businesses. It conforms that the majority of organisations do recognise the link between business performance and customer experience but are struggling to develop a strategy for multi-channel customer experience management and then delivering on that strategy…

A more in-depth version of this article has  been republished with permission by ClickZ on the Foviance website if you’d like to read more. Also, please download your own copy of the Multi-channel Customer Experience Report today.

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

For the session, we have chosen to conduct research using a panel of more than 200 players and punters in order to better understand how they think organisations should be focusing their efforts in order to deliver improved CRM and loyalty.

On a similar note and to ensure that our clients get the best out of the research, we have chosen to let them set the agenda and tell us what three questions they would like answered by the players and punters, so that we can include them in the research.

We will collate all the questions, group them appropriately and then build them into a survey which our gaming consultants will then conduct among our panel of players and punters.

The research will form a significant piece of work, comparable to that which we would typically carry out for our gaming clients. Therefore we encourage our clients to put some real thought into what they’d like to gain from the research that might help with the shaping of their CRM strategy.

At ICE we will be presenting the generic results from the survey, however as a follow up we will also be the offering the opportunity to all our clients to sit down in a one-to-one meeting to understand what players and punters said about their organisation specifically, and to understand how that feedback compares to our averages.

So, if you’re representing the gaming sector why don’t you send across your three burning questions that you’d like answered to help to inform, design and assess your CRM/loyalty strategy to Jamie Barnett Or if you wish to discuss it in ore depth, call contact me on 0845 054 6500.

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

Each year World Usability Day serves to remind the general public and industry professionals of the many issues that are central to good usability research, development and practice. The day’s tagline, ‘making life easier’, underlines the ambition of everybody working in usability and customer experience today to ensure technology is developed first and foremost in a way that make the every day lives of people that use it simpler and more user-friendly.

As an active member of the Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA), Foviance will also be marking the day in its own way. Since 2006, World Usability Day has proven a great opportunity to promote what we do, not only to our existing customers and prospective clients but to our peers and the usability community as a whole.

Inevitably the majority of events will focus specifically on the use of new technology – innovative methods of simplifying daily communications that place the emphasis on efficiency and effectiveness rather than gadgets and services themselves. With so many varied events taking place, the theme of communication is very much left open to interpretation, so this years we decided to communicate ourselves – talking directly with the public in order bring their views to a professional usability audience.

Foviance consultants have taken to the streets to see what ‘communication’ means to the people we engage with or pass by on a daily basis. We decided that the candid reflections of everyday people would provide a fun and interesting balance to the considered views of industry figures, while revealing the practical nature of the individual relationships we have with each other and the devices and channels that connect us together.

To keep public responses focused and straightforward, we decided to ask each person just five key questions about their own communications:

• What is your favourite way of communicating and why?
• Describe your best experience when communicating with others
• Describe your worst experience when communicating with others
• How has communication changed for you in the past ten years?
• How do you see communication changing in the next ten years?

In tandem with technological progress, face-to-face communication continues to play and invaluable role in all our daily lives. In order to provide a genuine reflection of opinions, we left the structure of the conversations entirely open, and have received some extremely varied opinions. We took our Flip video camera out to the pavements, in to coffee shops and even on stage at the Comedy Club to capture responses. We hope you enjoy the results!

You can see the results for yourselves uploaded to our website and if you would like us to send you the link when all the videos are live,  just drop us an e-mail and we’ll be happy to send it to you on November 11th.

This article was written as part of the Foviance October Newsletter

Personas are fictional characters that communicate the primary characteristics of groups of users to enable businesses to design better user experiences for customers at all touch-points – an essential requirement in the modern business environment. Traditionally, personas distil large amounts of qualitative data into a more usable, representative character – a typical or archetypal user – that all stakeholders across a company can relate to more easily. Ideally they are created at the beginning of any design process. They ensure that all members of a development team understand their target users and work towards the same objectives – satisfying their requirements in order to create a great user experience.

Of course personas can have issues of their own. If they are developed with no reference to real customer data, for example, they can be hard to defend when bottom-line driven decisions have to be made around features. They also run the risk of being oversimplified and compromised by senior executives’ personal preferences. The more ‘real’ personas are therefore, the more believable and effective: so it is truly very important to use the right data to create them. In fact some recent academic research has been exploring the use of statistical methods applied to traditional quantitative and qualitative user research (including ethnography and contextual research) to develop personas.

At Foviance we believe that segmented personas are key to bridging the divide between marketing and design. In combination with more traditional qualitative research sources, including ethnography, segmented personas can be built to act as a reference for designs across businesses, supporting operational alignment on customer-focus.

We go one step beyond our expertise in developing traditional personas: we also select and incorporate rich segmentation data into the persona development process. This results in strong, believable personas that also truly represent our clients’ key segments. We also create visual representations to help our clients’ key stakeholders keep their main users top of mind. In a multi-channel, customer-centric world, segmented personas reconcile marketing and digital channel customer profiles while supporting the growth of businesses as customer-centric businesses, committed to improving and enhancing customer experience across all touch-points.

This article was written as part of the Foviance October Newsletter