(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.

I often don’t have a clear picture in my mind of what I want, just generally two specific things; what type of item (skirt/top/dress…) and what I need the item for (work/daytime/evening…) I do know what styles I like (classic/glamorous/urban…) and possibly thanks to Gok Wan, my shape (hourglass/apple/athletic…)

However, when I arrive on most fashion websites I feel overwhelmed by the choice and generally find myself trawling through endless pages of unsuitable items, and then giving up. Part of the reason for this, is that the filters provided do not help me narrow down the items using criteria that I actually have in mind. This is because, more often than not, the filters are based on the direct properties of the item (colour, brand, size) as opposed to the personal categories that users search by (purpose, style, shape.)

Adapting the filters like this could help users to find suitable items more easily, and, once reading about the items, I think that there is also scope for additional product information to help inform the buying decision. This could be things such as:

• Different ways to wear the item
• How the item looks on different sizes/shapes
• What others who previously bought the item think of it.

One website that takes a novel approach to shoe retail is stylistpick. Users are asked a series of questions about their fashion preferences before they are presented with a selection of shoes each month that the website thinks will suit them. I actually found that this narrowed the choice too much as there is no way to see all products, or re-do the style quiz if you need something for a different type of occasion. Although it’s not perfect it’s great to see new approaches being used.

The lack of customer centricity generally seen, surprises me given the size of the market, physical diversity of  people shopping and disposable incomes that many people have these days. Whilst I know that people’s clothes selection is very personal, I’m sure that there are others out there who wouldn’t mind a few more recommendations to help find the right thing. So, come on fashion websites, help me spend my money!

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

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

In a multi-channel, customer-centric world, its vital that business are able to reconcile two equally important but overlapping sets of customer profiles – those identified by their marketing teams, and those targeted by their digital channel.

Foviance segmented personas enable these marketing and digital teams to work together with greater focus to align their customer focus more effectively. They also serve as a communication tool, enabling stakeholders across various departments and senior management to be aligned behind the same set of customers.

Used throughout every project, personas support the growth of the company as a customer-centric business, focusing on improving and enhancing the customer experience across all touch-points.

In our latest Foviance whitepaper, we look at ‘Segmented Personas: bridging the divide between marketing and design’. We examine how accurate personas informed by real-world data can help businesses effectively bridge the gap between marketing and digital channels, delivering a sharper focus on customer-centricity.

Download your copy of ‘Segmented Personas: bridging the divide between marketing and design’ today.

This article was written as part of the Foviance October Newsletter

From the start, social media applications were ‘C2C’, as it were – interactive, collaborative and user-centric. Consumer generated content creation and networking were fundamental to early players such as Facebook, which when it was first unleashed all of six years ago held no promise for the enterprise. It was primarily used for sharing holiday snaps and anecdotes with remote family members while avoiding the complexity of bulky e-mail attachments. Social media platforms weren’t about business, they were about people – enabling users to connect across communities sharing similar interests while pointedly leaving big brands out of it. The buzz was about corporate blogs, RSS and VoIP. ‘Viral’ still referred primarily to e-mail, not YouTube.

In recent months, however, social media applications have morphed – or perhaps been high-jacked – into fresh corporate communications and sales channels. Whereas Twitter used to be handy for telling your friends which watering hole to meet at without having to send a text message to a dozen people, today it is being ‘leveraged’ by forward-thinking brands like Carphone Warehouse to solve low-level customer service issues – and successfully so. Businesses have realised that merely dabbling in social media can prove as useless – and in some cases more damaging  than staying out of the game entirely. Major brands are now taking social media seriously, deploying enterprise-class applications that hook them into the leading social platforms in a more intelligent and rewarding manner.

Today Facebook has become just another platform (albeit one with 500 million users) through which brands such as Starbucks attempt to ‘engage’ with their customers (and flog a few more coffees). And why not? Analysts believe the opportunity for online retailers is huge. In its 2010 Social Media Report, research firm ForeSee claims that 60% of online shoppers use social media sites regularly, while 56% of that group ‘friend’ or ‘follow’ retailers that choose to engage on their networks of choice. From a business perspective, it is becoming obvious that social media is conjuring up exciting new touch-points between the retail world and consumers that talk to customers on a level they enjoy.

In his recent blog post ‘The Rise of Social Commerce’, acclaimed social media and business author Brian Solis said: “What’s clear is that the 3F’s (friends, fans, and followers) are not created equal. Those brands who examine the composition of their existing community will find that many are simply seeking access to exclusive specials and content.” It is clearly increasingly important for companies to develop social media research programmes, in order to understand what their customer base is up to in this new medium.

In fact, ‘social media’ has evolved into just another channel, adding to the lengthening list of channels all companies must keep track of, market to, measure and integrate data from – not to forget, of course, create great user experiences for.

This article was written as part of the Foviance September Newsletter

A year ago, when I put together my round up of the year for the 2008 year end newsletter, the recession was really gaining momentum on the back of the credit crunch and we already faced a very difficult outlook. In 2009 with the recession in full-swing, business was in constant flux – one day there would be no projects underway the next there would be a half a dozen urgent propositions. Like every agency and consultancy in our industry, we had to become masters at expecting the unexpected and delivering great experiences for our clients.

And the economy is by no means out of the woods yet. 2010 will continue to be a difficult year with unemployment continuing to rise in the UK until we witness sustained GDP improvement, hopefully by the summer. We’ll probably see a few more businesses closing over the same period too; maybe even more household names – although a lot will depend on their customer strategies as well as their balance sheets.

It’s worth noting some startling statistics surrounding those business closures in 2009. For example, Real Business reported that 10 percent of UK retailers went bust between January and September 2009. When I look down the names on that list one thing strikes me – none had a particularly differentiated customer experience strategy, even the more familiar names like Woolworths, MFI, Principles or Adams. I’m certainly not about to argue that had badly managed businesses had a better customer experience strategy they would still be trading today – nothing is that clear-cut in a recession – but certainly companies with an unswerving customer focus are now better positioned to survive than those concentrating purely on ‘value’ above all else.

This time last year I predicted a reverse of the progress organisations had made in developing multi-channel customer experience strategies. By June I was wondering whether we would see increases in cross channel-integration, largely driven by the need for cost savings. These observations now appear to have been borne out by cScape’s Online Customer Engagement Survey Report 2009, which I was lucky enough to get a sneak preview of.

The challenge for business now looking ahead to 2010 with a little more optimism is to get their online experience right, and then mirror that customer-centric approach across all channels and customer touchpoints. Companies that benefit from picking up the scraps of failed businesses in the short-term, but also have a long term strategy to appreciate their customers in new ways. This approach will prove as important on the High Street as it will through innovative new channels such as social media platforms.

So, 2010 won’t see an immediate end to tough times, but it will see new opportunities emerge for businesses willing to learn new rules of engagement. Social media will help businesses to make their customer service channels more web-centric while driving down the overheads of physical call centres. Engaging with customers in different ways will save businesses money while also appealing more to those customers and fitting in better with their communications lifestyle. True cross-channel progress may have to wait for some time, but social media can pick up the slack in an attractive and economical way, which can only be a good thing in the current climate.

There’s a lot of learning to be done as we move into a new year. Businesses will need to embrace new ways of thinking and Foviance will be here to help them by launching a whole bunch of new services around the use of social media research to ensure these platforms can be controlled and used as strategic tools for recovery and future success. I look forward to a better experience for everyone over the year ahead.

Back to December newsletter

The key thing I think is to recognise that just in the same way that organisations can no longer afford to develop “one size fits all” approach to their online channel, they also need to recognise that you can’t have a “one tool fits all” approach to understanding and measuring the online customer experience. For far too long businesses have been reliant solely on web analytics tools to track and measure what is happening on their websites. When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail and part of the frustration that organisation sometimes have with web analytics tools is that they trying to use them for tasks which they are not very good at. In terms of understanding the user experience at its simplest level the questions you are trying to answer are:

• What happened?
• When did it happen?
• Who did it happen to?
• Why did it happen?

I’m not suggesting that these are the only questions that need to be answered but they form the foundation of most analytical enquiries. It’s also as important, for example, to understanding why things’ don’t happen, a point I’ll come onto later.

Web analytics tools are great for answering the “what” and the “when” questions but less great for answering the “who” and the “why” questions. To answer these questions we need other tools in the toolbox, some quantitative in nature and others more qualitative. For me, some kind of survey or direct user experience feedback tool is really important. This is the true “Voice of the Customer”. A basic approach is to be able to answer the questions:

• Who comes to the website?
• Why are they there?
• Were they able to do what they wanted to do?
• If not, why not?

The last two questions are the pivotal ones – were people able to do what they wanted to and if not, why not? We are not talking here just about questions of site functionality but about the whole experience, or importantly the user’s perceptions of that experience and what it should be like. This may have nothing to do with the functionality of the website itself. The last question is where they may invite users to comment in words rather than just tick boxes or provide scores or ratings. This is a rich vein of information that truly get’s the heart of the customer experience. These days you can get text mining tools to help shift through these written comments and to pick out the main themes and patterns in what people are saying. They can be good but frankly the best text mining tool is the human brain and by quickly scanning through the various comments that people have left you can get a real sense of what the issues are. These may be nothing to do with the website itself but may be around the product offer or availability for example. One travel company I’ve worked with used had a major problem with customer satisfaction whenever it sent out customer direct mail. The problem was that the offers being advertised in the letters were not easy to find or replicate on the website, mainly due to a lack of communication between two departments. The customers were expecting a seamless experience that wasn’t being delivered. I think reading and taking notice of these user comments is so useful that I set up scheduled reports for clients to drop the comments into their email inboxes every Monday morning.

Another useful diagnostic tool is the breed of so-called “customer experience management” tools that allow you to capture and analyse the individual users’ session. The capability to track and replay an individual’s actual session on the website has been around for a while. Tealeaf is probably the most established provider in the market but other players are also emerging, albeit from different start points. The challenge with these types of tools can be the sheer mass of data that is captured and available for analysis. It can be like looking for a needle in a haystack. The trick is to have some way of uncovering potential customer experience issues and then diving in to the session replay data to see what actually has been going on. A useful development is the integration of these systems with other measurement systems such as web analytics tools or voice of the customer programmes. This allows the analyst to start at a higher level and then drill down into the detail, for example, by isolating all the sessions where the overall satisfaction score was less than 5 and then reviewing a selection of them in detail to see what exactly seemed to be causing the problem.

Most of the techniques covered in this article have been quantitative in nature or have started from a quantitative approach. Quantitative methods are necessary but rarely sufficient to understand the user experience. Next time I’ll take a look at a selection of qualitative approaches to understanding and optimising the user experience.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been exploring the use and applications of maturity models to help organisations understand where they are in their analytical capabilities and developing strategies and roadmaps for moving forward. In my own simple maturity model the third stage is customer centricity where the organisation moves from a focus on the site to a focus on the customer. It’s a move from process optimisation to customer optimisation. But why is customer centricity important, what does it means from an analytics perspective and what are the challenges involved?

In the “site-centric” world we don’t really recognise visitors and customers as individuals, we see them as a number, hence the title of this piece taken from a cult TV programme from the 1960s called The Prisoner. In one famous scene the hero of the piece pushes back against the authoritarian environment that he finds himself in with the line “I am not a number, I am a person“. The sentiment is clear that over 40 years later we have to recognise that people are individuals with different aspirations, wants and needs and that we can no longer develop websites with a “one size fits all” user experience.

The problem is that we still get it so very wrong. When running workshops, seminar and speaking at conferences I often ask a simple question: “Who here hasn’t had a poor experience on the internet in the last couple of weeks?” No one ever puts their hand up. Either people they don’t understand the question…, or more likely because we all routinely suffer from poor online experiences. This might not be surprising; after all, digital marketing is still a relatively young industry. Brand marketing is over 100 years old, direct and catalogue marketing is well over 50 years old. Digital marketing is at best 15 years old and the reality is that whilst companies generally think that they deliver a decent service to their customers, their customers don’t. In our digital world the consequences can be disastrous. In their 2008 Customer Experience Impact report Right Now cited that 84% of people who’ve had a bad customer experience and tell others and claimed that 87% of people who’ve had a bad customer experience have stopped doing business with that company. Bad news travels fast.

So what’s the solution? I would argue that developing a customer centric view of the world is a massive step in the right direction. Customer centricity enables organisations to build better customer experiences and there is increasing evidence that links customer’s perceptions of their online experience with their loyalty and advocacy. In their report “Customer Experience Correlates To Loyalty“, Forrester found that across 12 different industries in the US that there was between a 65% to 76% correlation between a customer’s perception of their experience and the propensity to buy again. The evidence also suggests that this correlation is becoming stronger with the results generally up on the same study done the previous year. So customer experience is becoming more important and in this day and age we need to move away from the “one size fits all” approach and focus on developing better customer experiences through an understanding of who the key customer segments are, why they visit the site and what do they do when they get there.

The first thing to do is to work out where the organisation is currently in terms of understanding the current experience. Organisations at this stage may need to accept the hard truth that the baby is ugly, figure out where they need to be and then how they are going to get there. We’ve developed a framework to help organisations improve the quality of the customer experience along the following lines:

• Step 1: Understand
• Understand fully who your customers are
• Understand the nature of the current proposition
• Understand what data you have and what it is telling you
• Step 2: Define
• Define the experience(s) that you want to deliver
• Define the processes that will underpin that experience
• Define the measures by which the quality of that experience will be assessed
• Step 3: Improve
• Improve the quality of the experience
• Improve the effectiveness of the experience
• Improve the efficiency of the experience
• Step 4: Assess
• Assess the impact of the changes
• Assess the ROI of the changes
• Assess the learnings that have been made
• Step 5: Optimise

Obviously data and analytics are key to this process from understanding what needs to be done to determining whether it’s been successful or not. But it’s not all about “ones and zeros”, there’s a range of quantitative and qualitative techniques that are needed as part of customer experience toolkit. I’ll take a closer look at them next time. Till then…

When is a visitor not a visitor? The answer is… “when it’s a cookie”.
The controversy surrounding one of the core metrics of web analytics, Unique Visitors, has raised its head again. In a recent blog post Eric Peterson, the web analytics consultant and author, called on the web analytics industry to stop using the term Unique Visitors because it doesn’t accurately reflect what is actually being measured. The issue stems from a set of proposed definitions from the IAB on audience reach metrics, including Unique Visitors. The definition of Unique Visitors from the IAB is different to the definition commonly used in the web analytics industry which is cookie based.

I agree with Peterson’s sentiment (if not entirely with his style and approach) as I have been saying for a long time that the Unique Visitors metric from a web analytics tool is potentially very misleading. I have spent a lot of time in workshops and client engagements over the years explaining what is actually being measured by a web analytics tool when it reports on Unique Visitors. It is fundamentally different to the way that the Unique Visitor metric is defined in an audience panel such as Comscore and Nielsen NetRatings. For a lot of people this is highly confusing. For publishers and other sites that depend on being able to demonstrate the size of their audiences, it’s a bit of a nightmare.

Web analytics systems define a “unique visitor” based the presence of a cookie. If I visit a site using three different devices in a week (say a PC, a laptop and a mobile phone) I will be recorded as three different “unique visitors”. If I also regularly delete the cookie then I can appear to be a new visitor to the site and I’m therefore not counted as being “unique”. Audience measurement panels define a Unique Visitor based on the activity of an individual member of the panel. Web analytics tools measure all activity on a website (a so called census-based approach) whereas a panel measures a proportion of the activity on a site (a sampling approach) and then uses that to estimate the total.

So with two different definitions and two different data collection methodologies, it’s hardly surprising that people can get confused and debates rage about which numbers are right and which numbers are wrong. It would certainly be helpful if the Unique Visitor metric was called something else in a web analytics tool and that’s a massive issue for the industry to address, hopefully in a collaborative manner but I don’t think it’s an issue that’s going to get solved any time soon. For site centric measurement, cookie-based tracking is the closest that we get to the notion of a visitor. There are some specific instances in which it becomes possible to link cookies to real people to get a proper unique visitor count, but it generally involves massive amounts of processing and massive amounts of sensitivity to privacy issues.

However, what this debate reinforces for me is the need for “information consumers” to understand how any of the data they use for business decision making is put together. That means it’s important that the web analytics industry continues to educate users of this data on its “provenance”, warts and all. One of my biggest concerns about the Unique Visitor metric from a web analytics tool is not actually its “technical efficacy” but more the messages that it sends out. The implication from reporting on visitors from a web analytics tool is that you can fully understand your website visitors using clickstream behavioural data. Because we call this metric “Unique Visitors” it lulls us into a fall sense of security that we are actually tracking “visitors” rather than “devices” and therefore we don’t really need to understand anything else. However, clickstream data doesn’t tell you anything about who is visiting the site, why they are there and what they thought about the experience.

In my last column I talked about a simple maturity model. The final stage of this model was “customer centricity”. Customer centricity involves having a 360 degree view on your customers and being able to answer the “who” and “why” questions, as well as the “what” and the “when”. Web analytics is just one tool in the tool box. Absolutely necessary but rarely sufficient. So the Unique Visitor debate will go on. As I said I doubt it will be resolved any time soon but if the discussion reminds us of what we’re measuring and how we’re measuring it, then it’s a useful debate to have.

Disclosure: Neil is a Board member of the Web Analytics Association (WAA), the industry association concerned with setting standards and definitions of measurement in web analytics. The views expressed here are Neil’s personal views and are not, in any way, an official view of the WAA.