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

What was our senior exec. blogger’s problem? He was just too damn perfect. My client was carefully crafting his copy, working through his arguments and presenting such a complete and well-rounded case for his opinions that no one felt confident enough to engage with him in debate or add their thoughts.

Engagement requires more than providing a feedback form or a Facebook ‘Like’ button.

The role of errors, mistakes and incompleteness in Customer Engagement is often underestimated. Anyone who has ever been involved with customer service will already know that a problem solved is often more powerful in driving customer satisfaction than initial perfection. Indeed I know of one major Telecoms Company that instigated rolling network ‘downtimes’ in order to be seen fixing them quickly. Intentional service disruption like this is a risky approach and I certainly don’t recommend it, but I do think that there is a role for lack of perfection in some well-chosen customer interactions.

For example, did you know that one of the best indicators of engagement in an online customer community is that a customer has completed their community profile page? To encourage people to provide information on their interests I have experimented with pre-populating text like ‘I’m a supporter of Chelsea Football Club’, or ‘Model railways have always been a passion of mine’. And you know what? More people provide their details when you offer them this incorrect information than when the form has no default text. After all who can resist correcting someone when you know they have made a mistake?

Cultivating Customer Engagement requires more than providing a feedback form, a Facebook ‘like’ button or even a customer community to join. It means triggering our audience’s imagination, encouraging their ideas and tickling them enough for them to want to scratch or laugh.

Like my C-suite blogger we could all learn that a little imperfection provides us with the opportunity to engage with our audience. He’s now spending less time crafting his blog posts and more time engaging with the people who read his shorter and more open thought pieces – he’s also enjoying it more.

This opinion piece was originally published in the 2011 Annual Online Customer Engagement Survey Report and republished here with permission.

London, UK –15 December, 2010 – Foviance, the UK’s leading customer experience consultancy and usability specialist, has appointed Guy Stephens as senior social customer care consultant, and Richard Sedley as commercial director. Both will be based at Foviance’s London headquarters.

Paul Blunden, CEO of Foviance said: “We’re delighted to have both Guy and Richard on our team here at Foviance. Both appointments are indicative of the company’s growing emphasis on providing more strategic value to all of our clients.”

In his new role as senior social customer care consultant at Foviance, Guy Stephens is already exploring how social media is changing the way companies and customers work and communicate with each other. Fundamental shifts in how customer service is provided over the last two years as a result of social media, are presenting businesses with a new and very different set of challenges. Guy will use his considerable experience and expertise in this field to ensure Foviance is able to help clients undergoing this transformation. Before joining Foviance, Guy was customer knowledge manager for The Carphone Warehouse where he began use of social media within customer service, primarily through Twitter, blogs, YouTube and Facebook.

As Foviance’s new commercial director, Richard Sedley will oversee the expansion of the company’s client development team as well as working to increase the value of the multi-channel services that Foviance already successfully delivers for its clients. Additionally, as course director for social media at the Chartered Institute of Marketing, Richard will ensure that Foviance clients are always best placed to take advantage of developments in the social web. Prior to joining Foviance Richard worked at cScape where he launched its Customer Engagement Unit, creating bespoke customer engagement strategies comprising audience research, metrics, analysis and segmentation, multi-channel engagement campaigns and communication optimisation.

Paul Blunden said: “Foviance is recognised as a leader in the field of customer experience consulting. Guy and Richard’s considerable experience of customer engagement and customer service within social media complements and extends our existing analytics, research and user experience skills to offer our clients an unrivalled customer service offering.”

For further information please contact:

Paul Blunden, CEO

Tel: +44 (0)8450 546 500
Fax: +44 (0)8450 546 501

Alfred Dunhill, the mens luxury retailer identified that their online channel is increasingly important not just as a direct sales channel but also as way to create more engagement with its customers.

As part of their ongoing development of their site, Alfred Dunhill commissioned Foviance to undertake some independent research of its online audience to gather quantitative data on what visitors thought of the current customer experience. This would help them identify strengths and weaknesses of their main site and start to build a much richer idea of what their online audience wanted from an Alfred Dunhill site.

Methodology

Foviance developed an opt-in survey from the Alfred Dunhill homepage that recruited visitors with specific objectives for visiting the site. They then completed their journey and were asked a series of questions once they had completed their intended goal.

The survey was launched during the busy run-up to Christmas and was live throughout the festive period itself to capitalise on the increased traffic rates. In addition the exposure rate of the survey was controlled so that is was unlikely someone returning to the site that had declined to participate in the past would be shown the participation message again on the homepage.

Results

Over 200 responses were gained throughout the duration that the survey was live. Overall over 84% respondents said they would visit the site again and a net promoter score benchmark was captured. The survey captured user feedback on the look and feel of the site and allowed Alfred Dunhill to see if these were inline with its brand guidelines. In addition it highlighted several areas where the site could be improved. This has helped develop the business case for additional development work. Alfred Dunhill intend to use this methodology again at regular intervals to help measure site performance and get regular customer feedback as the site develops and grows.

Guy Stephens, Senior Consultant, Foviance will be speaking about:

Managing customer complaints in social media

Guy will draw from experience setting up Carphone Warehouse’s customer service social media strategy to highlight how best to manage complaints online. In addition, Guy will focus upon the need for close working across company departments, and how best to manage social media complaints on this basis.

Even if you’re not a Facebook addict or regular Twitter user, you’ll know how difficult it is to escape social media. Why? Because social media is revolutionising the way that people consume content.

Social media is opening new channels of communication between brands and customers and there is a lot of potential in the social web that marketers can tap into. For example, a study earlier in the year by Penn State University showed that 20% of all tweets mentioned a brand name. Sales and marketing professionals need to be aware of these significant media consumption trends so they can tailor and target their messages as effectively as possible across a changing landscape.

However, with all the hype around social media it can be difficult to understand where to start. So here is an outline plan of action to dip your toes into the world of social media:

• Set clear aims and objectives.
• Listen to the social world; understand what is going on out there and find out who your audience is.
• Use all the information you have at your fingertips to build up a picture of the social landscape.
• This information will show you how to work with your audience to achieve your goals.
• Then simply measure, refine, repeat.

More businesses should focus on developing social media campaigns relevant to their customers. The days of pure brand ‘broadcasting’ are long behind us. Successful campaigns are now being supported by an online social media component, or taking place exclusively in social media.

As you get to know more about your customers and their social media presence, you will develop a strategy that not only enables you to influence conversations about your brand and win more brand advocates, it will also recruit them as willing foot soldiers in your battle for brand supremacy.

Note: *A Report detailing this subject was written by Jonathan Culling and Billie Andersen for Evaluation Centre. To read this article please go to the crm software, contact centre software and marketing software section of the Evaluation Centre.

There’s probably very few people who would have missed the travel disruption caused by a certain misbehaving volcano grounding planes in the northern hemisphere and turning airports into ghost towns or hotels. Thrown into the mix there are confusing accounts of which flights have and have not been cancelled and when airports will be closed, all being made worse by a second eruption. Due to the high volume of people trying to reschedule travel arrangements, websites have been breaking left, right and centre and call centres have been inundated, making the whole process an administrative nightmare.

However, Swiss Air has proven that it doesn’t need to be like this. The company is very familiar with the use of social media even dedicating a part of its site to the various social media channels the company use. The company have utilised its Facebook page to communicate updates to fans (all 7000 of them) and interacting with the Twitter community to address individual queries. This is a mutually beneficial engagement strategy. Swiss Air are able to broadcast to a sizeable proportion of their customer base, and are able to service them individually at a lower cost than by phone. Customers have access to the latest news and are able to communicate with Swiss Air, alleviating a lot of site traffic for the less socially-minded. With such satisfying customer service, which airline do you think these customers will think about first when booking their next flight…?!

Johannes Leonardo has launched a mysterious and (potentially) engaging social advertising campaign around New York and it will be interesting to see how New Yorkers respond to it.

Fragments of an advertisement have been appearing all over the city, containing a Twitter hashtag. People can either search the city for the images or respond to clues provided via the company’s twitter account. The idea is then that people take a picture of the fragment and upload it to Twitter revealing the advert (a supposedly explicit image) and the brand behind it.

So will people join in the game? As an indication of popularity, from looking at Twitter people are definitely talking about the campaign, but it will be interesting to see how many people actually take part. While the vast majority of those following the campaign will probably take a passive interest, it will only take a small number of those engaged enough to participate for it to be a success (although with the amount it is being talked about it arguably already is). In any case, the campaign is truly social, requiring collaboration and clashing together the online and offline worlds.

The User Experience Design team here at Foviance is evangelical about taking a holistic approach to design. Because we are increasingly engaged in projects that span multiple channels, a holistic approach enables us to understand the wider context in which a particular project sits. Understanding how and why people move between channels during their interaction with an organisation allows us to identify pain points, overlaps and opportunities for improvements or efficiencies. The big picture view of a problem allows us to spot and tackle causes rather than symptoms that may be manifesting themselves in individual channels.

Even projects that focus on a single touchpoint – such as an organisation’s website, or even one component of its website – benefit from approaches that take account of the broader context of people’s interactions with it. This broad view of interplay with a particular system allows us to identify opportunities to engage with individuals earlier and more often in their journey through a problem space, meeting more of their needs and increasing their level of engagement with the organisation.

For example, while using a holistic approach to redesigning a science information website, we discovered that many science teachers use YouTube to find demonstration material to liven up their lessons. It turned out that the client already produced information videos and that simply putting them on YouTube was likely to increase their engagement with a key portion of their target audience.

We have talked in previous articles about methodologies in our toolbox that can be considered holistic in their approach (for example scenario-based design; mental models). User journey mapping is another such technique that we find very useful (and complementary to these other techniques). A user journey map visually represents the experience that a person has with a system. I have noticed some user experience consultancies using this term to describe the mapping of a user’s experience within the limits of a single system, such as a website. For example, the journey map starts with the homepage and ends when the user exits the site. We prefer to explore the much wider experience that a person has. Our journey maps include all customer touchpoints while also capturing the decision points, mental processes, motivations and emotions of the user as they travel along their journey of interactions with the organisation. They extend to include the events leading up to the awareness of a need, consideration of options for fulfilling that need, selection between competing services and so on.

The creation of a user journey map is, of course, a people-focused process. We draw on an array of user research techniques determined by particular requirements, such as the problem space, the client, and the target audience demand. For example, recent projects have employed combinations of ethnography, contextual interviews, diary studies, surveys and web analytics. This demonstrates one of the attractions of user journey mapping (and indeed other visualisation techniques): they can make a large amount of disparate data easily digestible.

The user journey map is a tremendously valuable tool. Firstly, the actual process of researching and visualising the map gives the team or individual responsible an in-depth understanding of the problem space. But more importantly, the output makes this level of understanding accessible to all who view the finished map. As with our other visualisation techniques, the map then becomes a key design tool that can be used throughout the project and by the whole project team.

This article was written as part of the crossing the channels of experience March newsletter

This is the first Foviance newsletter of 2010; a year we believe will be remembered for the true emergence of the mobile internet as a mature, ubiquitous, mainstream technology.

I offer my reasons for this optimism with a round up of the key factors which will be driving mobile internet adoption and development in the year ahead. Paul suggests that the signs all around us indicate that mobile customer engagement is already gathering impressive momentum. Xavier looks at the shape the evolving mobile internet will take and offers some insight into for businesses planning their own strategy in the light of instantly popular app technology. And finally Clare looks at the impact all this will have for more traditional content publishers and how they are evolving to embrace rapid mobile innovation and adoption.

You might also enjoy reading and commenting on some of our consultants’ thoughts and opinions on our regularly updated blog page.

I’d also be very happy to hear from you directly with any feedback.

Marty

In this issue:

• 2010: The year of mobile
• The ‘Determined Creep’ of mobile customer engagement
• Mobile websites versus mobile applications
• An all-consuming interest in mobile content