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. Later on you might even influence the way they do things. That is exactly what I found and still exciting and motivating about research. In terms of specialism, I have always tried to train myself and build my research career into a multi-disciplinary one. When I first started I did both qualitative and quantitative research and even stretched into macro economic / industry research. I have covered a wide variety of topics including communications, branding and retail strategies both online and offline. Of course I do find certain areas of research much more interesting, particularly new product development and digital research. After all, I believe the future of our global society lies in the online world.

You’ve been working with Foviance for a few years now but what interested you about opening up ‘Foviance Asia’?

My interests in digital research first attracted me to working for Foviance. Once I started I found the experiences more and more enriching, especially Foviance’s innovative approaches to cross-channel user experience. I see real potential for Foviance in Asia. Let us just look at Mainland China alone: by the end of 2009, the fixed internet subscriber count had already reached 384 million, with mobile subscriber count at 633 million, of which over 100 million are expected to be 3G subscribers by 2011. Not only that, based on our on-the-ground research in China, we know that internet users spend an average of at least five to six hours a day online, doing anything from playing games, searching, reading up on information, watching entertainment programs, or shopping. Knowing this, many companies and brands we provide research services for are already in the process of exploring new ways in which to reach target consumers online. However, they have yet to truly understand the impact online has on their offline offerings, and just as importantly, how to achieve balanced online and offline offerings that yield real benefits without over-spending on one or the other. As such, they have a genuine need for consultancy in the area of cross-channel management (online and offline) and this will significantly increase in the future.

Can you comment on the current competitive landscape in China (or wider Asia) for user experience and data analytics consultancy? Do Chinese businesses focus much on the customer experience in developing their web presence or in any other channels such as call centre or mobile?

While I foresee a significant increase in the need for cross-channel management consultancy by businesses in China, this area of consultancy is still relatively embryonic at the stage. I am referring to the successful incorporation of online offerings to businesses’ traditional offline offerings, which also includes user experience and data analytics. There are very few companies specializing in this area of research, and those that do are not very well known in China. As far as I know, the big research agencies have not yet devoted much effort into developing research solutions in this area either. I believe this has a lot to do with businesses themselves not paying a great deal of attention in this area of research. They have devoted budget to developing online offerings, but this has largely been based on gut feelings rather than hard research data. Given this, our biggest challenge in launching Foviance Asia, particularly in China, would be educating our clients on the value of implementing regular research effort in this area, thereby ensuring that each step they take along the way is the right step for them in order to yield significant results. I believe regular research effort is particularly important here, since the online landscape changes so rapidly.

Where do you think the greatest immediate and long-term opportunities exist for Foviance?

I believe the biggest immediate opportunity for us here in Asia, particularly China, is also our biggest strength, cross-channel management consultation. Clients here are already implementing online offerings but have yet to find an effective way to incorporate their online offering into their offline offerings to ultimately enhance their profit potential. This is where we can come in. Besides that, I believe our immediate opportunity lies in web experience consulting. To date very few companies have conducted research in this area, mostly because they do not see the value in devoting budget to this type of research. Again we can come in and show our clients its true value. In the current online environment, the web front-window of a company does serve a purpose for common consumers, whether it is about providing information, marketing, or even selling the product directly. It ensures ideal online experiences for consumers that yield significant benefits in maintaining customer loyalty and acquiring new customers. As for longer term opportunities it is quite hard to say at the moment, given the rapidly changing landscape of the online arena. However, I do believe that we will continue to move from the fixed line world into the mobile world, while consulting our clients on how to successfully incorporate a mobile internet strategy into their already existing online offerings.

Finally, how do Foviance customers in Asia or the West get in touch with you?

I would love to talk to any clients who are interested in what we offer here in Asia. It would be wonderful for me to hear from anyone interested either by telephone, e-mail, online chat engines, or even face to face if they find themselves in downtown Shanghai!

Here are our Foviance Asia contact details:

29/F Kerry Center
1515 Nanjing Road
East Shanghai
Telephone: (86 21) 6103 7190
Email: frank.ma@foviance.com

This article was written as part of our February newsletter

The excerpt is just a summary of what we discussed. For more, listen to the full podcast.

Paul, can you tell me a little bit about yourself and the work RXP does?
PW: RXP is a contact centre consultancy, which means we help end user organisations who want to improve their customer contact. Our customers increasingly ask us to look at ways in which a multimedia contact centre can support that strategy.

And Penny, you are customer service manager at Arsenal Football Club.
PD: My role is very much hands on management of our multimedia contact centre.  We provide a completely cross-channel customer experience, from the old man that still wants to come up to the desk to buy his tickets over the counter, through to those that have every application on their iPhone and would like everything fully technological and ready to go.

And what initially made Arsenal decide that the contact centre needed to evolve?
PD: When the new Emirates Stadium was built in July 2006, it became apparent that it is a truly world-class facility in the world for football. So we had to look at the infrastructure that sat behind it in terms of how we worked with our customers. We had been working in silos, taking all sorts of different approaches, with different objectives, and all of these silos reported into different line managers, so there was no joined up way of thinking.

And what did RXP advise you?
PD: One of the key aspects was having a proper telephony system, then multi-skilling the staff so that they were able to answer all sorts of questions and queries across the different silos.  The call volumes under the banners of different products were vastly different. So, for example, during the summer closed season we ramp up on Emirates tours and season ticket enquiries, then we prepare for a football shirt launch, then suddenly home shopping goes shooting up, and so on.

Paul, tell me more about your recent webinar that discussed your work with Arsenal and the role of multi-media contact centres in customer strategy.
PW: We recognise that we’re still in the depths of a recession, and we were keen to understand what role the online channel and the multimedia contact centre can play in overcoming that. The latest research from IMRG Capgemini said that in May 2009 there were online sales of £3.7 billion, which sounds a large number.  However, online sales growth was only 8.2% compared to over 30% a year ago, so the research is telling us that the recession is having an impact on the growth of online.

And who is this of interest to?
PW: Our traditional audience consists of operational people who have to manage the contacts that arise from the website, whether that comes in as additional telephone calls, or as emails. But I think the marketing audience needs to understand this too because there are things that their colleagues in the contact centre can do to help them to drive higher conversion levels through the online channel.

Paul, what were the findings of the research?
PW: We talked with the audience about three or four different areas in which a multimedia contact centre could support the online channel. Beyond just simple email, more modern approaches could include offering call-back buttons in case people get stuck in using the site, offering web chat with a contact centre agent in real time, providing collaboration tools that enable a screen to be shared with an agent, and lastly providing chat moderators that work within a community to ensure that the conduct of users is acceptable and business outcomes are actually achieved.

If moderators are sitting in contact centres, will that increase overheads, or is this seen as a business generation opportunity?
PW: From the contact centre side, research showed that if those companies put a chat moderator into a virtual online bingo gaming hall, then players were more likely to stay longer and spend more. We looked at what attributes those chat moderators needed to have, and how they could manage the quality aspects.

And did the research cover measurement, ROI?
PW: Absolutely. We looked at virtual halls that didn’t have a chat moderator and compared them with those that did, and they found a competitive advantage by actually focusing on the development of chat moderators. The findings play well to the advent of social networking.

I was particularly interested in the difference between what people perceive their organisation’s channel’s responsiveness to be, versus what it actually is. What did you discover through the research?
PW: We knew the organisations that were going to participate through the registration process, and we went out and actually mystery shopped them before the webinar. We went to their websites, we clicked on ‘contact us’, we saw whether they offered an email function and how that worked. With the live poll, we asked the audience whether they thought their organisations gave a good email service or poor email service -  53% said yes, they thought their organisations gave good service.  We had found using mystery shopping that only 29% of those organisations were giving good service, and slightly more staggeringly, 51% of these organisations had failed to respond to our email within three working days. It illustrates that a company’s perception about the service it provides online is often far different from what a customer is actually able to achieve.

So Penny, where do you go from here?
PD: We’re still very much at the start of the journey. The statistics are impressive (e.g. complaints down 60% year on year), but we need to introduce and deliver more quality. Over the course of the next year we need to revisit all the points that a customer touches, and really understand where we’re losing our customers, or where customers lose interest in us.  We also need to have a look at the data management side of things.  We have to understand how we can do more in terms of profiling our customers, and then developing products that actually match those profiles. There’s no room for complacency at all.

Listen to the full podcast.

Back to September newsletter 

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.

Foviance has already conducted a range of multi-channel research, but this was the first work we have carried out in conjunction with a call centre consultancy. RXP is interesting because it focuses on the experience the call centre provides rather than simply performance metrics. I found that surprising, given the loathing the vast majority of consumers have for call centres. This was reason in itself for us engaging with RXP.

Most call centre consultancies appear to provide expertise in the areas of throughput, call centre staff motivation and operational infrastructure and management. These are all worthy causes but are all supply side and perhaps explain why service in call centres is considered so shoddy. To an extent this was supported anecdotally when I availed myself of a free massage provided to speakers at the conference. The young lady who took on the challenge of un-knotting my shoulders revealed that she finds call centre work fascinating – mainly because she can now see what goes on from both sides of the call. That moment when you are put on hold for some inexplicable reason becomes clear when you see the call centre operative using the self same moment to gather their thoughts and use the stress relief of a quick curse!

What surprised me most about the research was how utterly incompetent 90 percent of the companies we looked at were. Before we even examined whether the multi-channel experience worked – did the experience join up? did the call centre operative have the same view that the online customer did? – we had to get over the basics.

The usability issues were amazing. We found architectural and navigational problems that may not have surprised me seven years ago, but today, after so much education and such improvements in understanding, beggar belief. Some of the functionality failings were also staggering: instant messaging functionality that never got answered; call back technology where no call ever came; email facilities that in one case, nearly nine months later, has still to generate a reply (a major high-street supermarket, before you ask!).

Once we got our teeth into the call centre it was even worse. In quite a few cases I wondered why the organisation was providing a call centre at all. It must have been on someone’s list: “Website? Check. Call centre? Check. Okay, we’re done here.” The service offered no value add to the customer at all. The organisation itself often had even less access to information than the customer. Staff were not trained to up-sell, cross-sell or handle difficult calls. What purpose could any of this serve?

The recurring nightmare that the research revealed time and time again was that organisationally, many call centres, websites, and any other channels for that matter, are on the whole, managed by entirely separate functions. In many cases the channels actually compete with each other and the customer is in no way the centre of attention. If you want to find out more you can download the white papers from either the RXP or the Foviance websites.

As the economy tightens I cannot see how organisations that fail at the basics are going to survive. If spending is tightened, improvements won’t be made and customer loyalty and conversion will suffer. My hope is that this economic slow-down, like many before it, will force organisations to make dramatic changes and that ultimately the customer will benefit.

We wanted to find out how well virtual agents would be accepted as frontline substitutes for actual call centre staff. Our studies showed that the majority of helpdesks have noticed an ’80/20 rule’, whereby 80 percent of the calls they field are very similar and frequent, while only the smaller volume of calls requires more personal attention.

If implemented intelligently, taking into account the emotional and intellectual reactions of consumers, virtual agents can fill a round-the-clock, on-demand, self-service help role for busy organisations. They can help maintain genuine customer relationships, while freeing up the valuable time of real-life support staff who can then step into the fray if and when enquiries are escalated to a more hands-on channel.

One project conducted in conjunction with the Royal Mail caused us to look at prototype assistants as part of a more general study into customer awareness and acceptance of virtual agents. As well as being a pleasing visual element for a support page, virtual agents give customers the impression that there is someone actively helping them. They add a human feel to any website, providing a business with a consistent face.

Participants in our studies responded very positively to virtual agents, despite the fact many people remained unsure as to whether the characters were simply a rich help feature, or a genuine live chat session. (We recommend businesses clarify that the agent isn’t live with text close to the agent’s image.) A number of respondents simply enjoyed the virtual agent concept, judging it to be “cool” as well as a useful tool for secondary help and for “weird or exceptional” enquiries they couldn’t find answers to elsewhere on the page.

Once implemented, it’s vital that any virtual agent is populated with sufficient relevant support information to be of genuine help to customers. On average, respondents in our study said they would attempt to use the virtual agent two to three times before abandoning the feature.

As you would expect, choosing the face for the agent is very important. Faces need to look trustworthy, helpful, informal and cheerful, but not dishonest, false, unprofessional or stern. Model looks and fake smiles were big no-nos with our sample, while a certain amount of maturity was considered a bonus.

Perhaps less obvious were the reasons given for choosing the right name for an agent. Unusual or old-fashioned names were given the boot, as were names considered “upper class”. Simple, common names were thought of as far more friendly and helpful sounding. From this feedback we quickly realised that smiling, smart, approachable faces named Sarah, Laura or Kate were going to prove far more popular than sharp looking characters in business suits (or overly casual dress) named Olivia, or Polly. It can be surprising what characteristics appeal or don’t appeal to a test sample, but given a broad range of feedback and provided with the explanations behind choices, a clear picture of general preferences quickly builds.

On the whole, customers are perfectly willing to suspend belief and cooperate with a virtual agent, but they have to believe in and want to like the virtual person they are faced with. Royal Mail’s web-based self-service virtual agent ‘Ask Sarah‘ is integrated with the organisation’s other online services as well as its parcel tracking system and delivery status updates. Revealingly, Sarah has helped to raise Royal Mail’s web site hits from 3.5 million in 2007 to 4.5 million in the first half of this year alone.

The screen behind the stage rotated the logos of the top 50 companies, and there was a cheer from each group every time their logo appeared. The auditory Mexican wave was something to behold and went on throughout the dinner until the awards ceremony proper began. After an hour or so of continued, and increasingly enthusiastic cheering, I began to realise how little positive recognition the call centre operatives receive and also how competitive they are.

Eamonn Holmes hosted the evening and presented the awards and was an excellent speaker. He particularly enjoyed congratulating the team of nine very attractive ladies and one ‘fella’ from Holiday Express who won the best overall in the Entertainment, Leisure and Travel category. He even took the trouble to visit their table after the awards had ended and congratulate them personally. What a martyr!

The awards are the brain child of Claudia Hathway, Editor of CCF magazine who opened the event with a rousing speech about how call centre operatives were unrecognised for the good work they do. She set a challenge for all companies to achieve an average of 95% satisfaction next year, which looks like a tough target if you ignore how competitive these people are. The data was pulled together by mystery shopping partner GFK NOP who carried out the biggest ever survey of its kind gathering real customer experience data based on real consumer feedback. And the competition was very close with only 1 1/2% separating the top 5 call centres.

So finally, here are the winners:

* 1st was First Direct, who were also 1st in the Financial Services category. They achieved an overall satisfaction score of 91.73%.
* Denplan were narrowly beaten into second place with 91.32%
* 3rd was F&C Investments with 91.26%
* 4th overall was Lloyds TSB Insurance with 91.02%
* 5th and also best in the retail category was Laithwaites with 90.36%
* 6th Prudential with 89.33%
* 7th with 89.29% Charles Tyrwhitt
* 8th ING Direct with 87.89%
* 9th was Specsavers with 87.57%
* 10th and also winners in the public sector category were Cambridgshire County Council with a customer service rating of 87.13%
* Holiday Extras won the best in Entertainment/Leisure and Travel category with a rating of 85%

Given our recent study in to the travel sector the low overall score and lowest category score is of no surprise and clearly, for all the celebrating last night, this sector has a lot to do.

Travel is one such sector which similar to retail has a multi-channel tradition. Before the advent of the Internet the travel sector relied on call centre, travel agents, Teletext and intermediaries as channels to market and we wanted to learn whether this experience has proved as valuable in travel, as mail-order has been to retail. Our research has shown that the travel sector is on a par with the average level achieved by retail in online execution but failing when it comes to call centre and multi-channel customer experience. Only one of the organisations researched provided an acceptable level of call centre service. To help address these failings, this white paper gives recommendations that travel companies should adopt to improve their overall Customer Experience ratings.

In any fast-moving industry, it’s usually possible to get a glimpse of the future by studying the past. The foundations of the modern usability and customer experience industry were built from the principles of HCI, or human-computer interaction, an area of study which kick-started ongoing investigation into the interface between technology and people across a broad variety of platforms and channels.

When the HCI industry gathered momentum in the 1980s, it was primarily concerned with making desktop software easier to use. By the time the mass-market leapt online in the 1990s and branches of HCI had begun evolving into usability, its proponents were employing ‘discount usability’ methods that made some headway to improving usability but were not allowed to slow down development timescales.

During the 1990s web design methods and agency productivity centered on technology itself rather than the eventual consumers of the information, and this attitude dictated the design process. By 2001, a more user-centric approach had begun gaining currency within the web design community and we were ahead of the pack in recognising the value of usability testing. We believed it was important to conduct usability studies in the early stages of web design, helping to create sites that were more in keeping with the needs of end users. We understood the importance of the bottom-line needs of businesses, but argued successfully that aligning design with what was best for its users would ultimately be good for business too.

Back to the present day: I believe it is time that similar user-centric design techniques used so successfully for the web are now applied to a wide range of other services across multiple channels. The experiences customers have with different channels are summed to make up the customer’s impression of the whole brand, and forward thinking companies need to be thinking about customer experience holistically. It doesn’t matter that the web experience is great if the call centre keeps people on hold forever, for example. Similarly, it doesn’t matter that goods are shipped immediately if they’re poorly packaged and arrive smashed into pieces.

We are applying the same rigour with which we approach webdesign across all other customer ‘touch points’, to establish where there are breakdowns. We have found that when we take this user-centric design approach, our clients improve their customer experience, boost retention and satisfaction
of calls, increase customer ‘lifetimes’, and the whole business is impacted positively and profitably, just as it was with the earlier days of user-centric web usability.

Some people say that unlike time and turnover, customer experience is intangible and impossible to measure. We disagree. With the right metrics, and the processes to record them, you can measure the quality of the customer experience. The Apple Store, which offers customer support surgeries and training, shows how a good customer experience can be an important part of the brand. While there are many companies that see customer experience as a cost, those that thrive will be the ones who choose to see it as a worthwhile investment.