Customer Experience

Could understanding what triggers emotional engagement in your customers make the difference for your brand?

London, UK, 12 October, 2011 – Today, a new website was launched on Emotional Engagement, uncovering a ground-breaking technology that enables businesses’ to understand if they have engaged with their customers on an emotional level.

Foviance, the expert in customer experience, worked with SensoMotoric Instruments (SMI), a world leader in computer vision applications and developed their Emotional Engagement Measurement™ (EEM™)  service, which is a fresh approach to customer experience research. The Emotional Engagement Measurement™ service combines a variety of Foviance’s user research methods, eye tracking data collected with SMI solutions and brain data on emotional states collected with a specialised neuroheadset.
Measuring emotional engagement has always been a challenge for customer experience professionals because emotions are largely driven by unconscious processes.

Electroencephalography (EEG) data provides a view on how the brain responds to different experiences, revealing unconscious emotional states. Foviance’s expert consultants are able to use this brain data to offer clients actionable insights on how to increase the effectiveness of marketing and improve customer experience.
In a pilot project with Foviance UK, SMI developed a special interface to integrate the Emotive EPOC neuroheadset with the SMI Experiment Suite 360 ° eye tracking software and the SMI RED eye tracking device, which successfully delivered a service to analyse home, product and landing pages, as well as banner and email content.

By adding eye tracking to EEM™, each emotional reaction can be objectively associated with the focus of visual attention at a certain time. Or in plain words: “In an EEM™ study, we get deeper knowledge on the process of information processing because we know where someone was looking when the brain reacted in a certain way”.

Foviance is really excited to have this resource available, which will become the knowledge base of emotional engagement worldwide.

Explore the Emotional Engagement website

About Foviance 
Foviance is a leading customer experience consultancy that helps some of the world’s best known global brands to deliver better customer experiences that drive improvements in customer satisfaction for increased customer loyalty and better financial performance.

About SMI
SensoMotoric Instruments (SMI) is a world leader in dedicated computer vision applications, developing and marketing eye & gaze tracking systems and OEM solutions for a wide range of applications.

Recently a pair of cords caught my eye in a magazine spread. I duly noted they were from the Gap and at the next opportunity I hotfooted it over to Gap.eu, thinking I might just be tempted into a purchase.  Once I got to the site however…no search box!

Having happily purchased from Gap.com, though in a distant past (we are talking around the year 2000) – I was stunned. To me, search boxes are an essential element of a good user experience. For most sites I can think of, an included part of the landscape along with the logo top left and the privacy/contact us links at the bottom. Just to make sure I asked a colleague to take a look, thinking I might have missed it – but no. Not there. So to find those trousers I needed to click on Women, click on trousers and scroll down scanning dozens of images to try and find those cords. Needless to say I gave up.

Gap.eu – missing a search bar, top right.

It niggled though, as I was pretty sure the US site did have a search box. And lo and behold, there it is – top right, where there was a blank space on the .eu site. If anyone from The Gap is listening out there, you might want to put in that search box and close the gap?

 Gap.com – including a search bar, top right.

By Robert Brauer

Eating fast food is my most dubious habit. To me, it is neither a culinary delight, nor a tolerable source of nutrition. However, every once in a while and especially when I am enjoying my passion for travelling foreign countries and getting immersed into different cultures, the chances are high: I will end up in fast food shop. Most of the times, it will be a chain with stores all over the planet. The names are well known. In situations like that, when it comes down to choosing between exciting foreign cuisine and a trusted but maybe less exciting burger, the burger simply seems to be the most reasonable choice.

This choice of experience is no exceptional case for human nature. Albeit the awareness of possibly missing out on a remarkable experience, I am turning myself to a relationship of trust. Even though it might not be the best experience in the world, I know what to expect. In commercial terms, my need can be described as a customer experience of consistency, which is an important driver for the trust relationship between a customer and a brand.

Not surprisingly, the described experience is a major revenue point for international fast food chains, and the example can be related to almost every service or product. For instance, when deciding to try a completely new device experience, such as a tablet computer. For an appreciator of the functionality of an iPhone, it is straightforward to choose an iPad. Despite the significant monetary investment that it requires, a baseline user experience is shared among the devices. Overall this reduces the possibility of the new purchase to be a technologic gamble as well as a source of frustration.

Generally speaking, consistency within multichannel experiences is a design challenge that concerns a wide variety of brands and services. Multichannel experiences exist simultaneously among several customer touch-points. Online as well as offline, a coherent and integrated customer experience builds up trust by mediating competence and direction as well as generating perceived familiarity. Despite the broadness of the problem space of managing a trusted relationship between customers and services, almost all key issues and design requirements can be determined, investigated and revised. Consistency within multichannel experiences in this case is achieved though the following characteristics.

• Coherent – basic idea of the service is perceived as consistent across channels.

• Complementary – coherent service experience delights with specific benefits within chosen service channel.

• Simultaneous – benefits of service channel can be combined as needed.

• Shiftable – service adapts to customer flexibility and present needs.

• Synchronized – service allows shifting between channels and shared features across service a shared among channel.

Characteristics like these not only ensure that the service delivers consistently among websites, microsites, mail, social media, in-store and even call centre experiences. Familiarity and stability also improve the overall quality of the service beyond the perception of trust and allow design space to delight with innovation and significantly increase adoption rates of new features and services.

This article was originally published by the Customer Experience Magazine

We wanted to do something different for our holiday this year, so we decided to go to Belgium and Luxembourg; which by the way, is an underrated holiday destination if you like castles and forests. Since we have a baby, we decided to drive there, to reduce the hassle. But how would this compare to our usual experience of taking the plane? I’ll use this case study to highlight some important components of the multichannel customer experience as we crossed the channel.

The booking process was pretty simple, and pretty much matched the process for booking a flight. The best part, however, was when we arrived at the ferry terminal in Dover. This is a classic case of a “moment of truth” – the customer is under stress, and the way customers are dealt with at times like this makes or breaks a customer experience.

We pulled straight off the motorway, through a well-organised and signposted road system. A good example of how the customer experience before the customer arrives into a company’s property is important. The Port Authority of Dover and the Highways Agency played their part in making this a good customer experience.

Next came the really clever bit. I’d like you to imagine the most efficient possible way you could process people onto a ferry, and I bet that the way P&O do it exceeds this.

We came to an arrangement of check-in booths with barriers, like motorway toll booths, and as we pulled up to the barrier, the man in the booth said “Mr Raistrick, how many people are travelling with you today?”. I was shocked and delighted. This was like arriving at the Ritz.

A camera at the gate, connected to a car number plate recognition system had matched the plate to the booking record, and appeared on the screen in the booth within a few seconds. This is the most important aspect of the multichannel customer experience – touchpoints between channels, and what makes or breaks this is whether the channel you’re using (in this case face to face) knows about the last channel you used to interact with the company (in this case web).

We were processed extremely rapidly, which was good for us, and good for P&O – a great example of how customer experience and cost-saving can go hand-in-hand. We were then given a lane number, which we hung on our reversing mirror, and drove through a well-organised system of hundreds of lanes, until we found ours.  A man checked the number on the mirror as we drove onto the ferry, increasing their efficiency and reducing delays.

Once on the ferry, the first thing which improved the customer experience was the usability of the navigation. We were on deck 5, and took the orange stairs, a fantastic cross-referencing system to allow us to find our car again.

The food and seating on ferry were, I must admit, nowhere near as good as what I’ve experienced on other ferries recently in Scotland, the Baltic and New Zealand, but then again, it was a lot cheaper too, so I didn’t necessarily expect this. A good example of how a company’s customer experience strategy can focus effort on those “moments of truth”, whilst not needing to improve the entire Customer Experience to maximise the RoI of Customer Experience investment.

Whilst on holiday, we decided to move our return date forward a day, so I logged onto the website, because this is much cheaper and easier than calling when you’re abroad. This was one moment of truth where I was disappointed – there was no way to change it online, and no information on how to do it either. I was wasting time – I wanted to be visiting castles, and here I was fishing around a website (or “some stupid website” as I no doubt referred to it at the time). At least the website had a phone number, so I called up, and they charged a nominal £10 fee to move the day. Stress over.

Customer service is often neglected as it is not seen as ‘critical path’, or is managed by a different team with a different budget. However, it is a key part of the customer experience, and relatively cheap improvements could make a lot of difference (and, in this case, reduce costs too, as channel shift from phone to web usually does).

When we returned from our holiday in Belgium, feeling suntanned (yes, suntanned!) and full of chocolate, we arrived at the port a bit early. Having driven quite a way, we were not in the mood for any hassle, but the same efficient booth greeted us, and we were booked onto the next available ferry hassle-free. The airlines could learn a thing or two from this high level of consistency between the way the customer is processed in different countries.

Not having to take the plane was a breath of fresh air. I didn’t have to stand in a line, take my shoes off, remove my laptop, deny myself access to liquids, have my retina scanned, or have my luggage rummaged. The airlines have no control over this, but it’s an important lesson in how third parties can make or break a customer experience. ‘Verified by Visa’ take note.

Although not perfect, my experience with P&O helped us to have the most relaxing holiday we’ve had in ages. A superb cross-channel customer experience.

We have launched the follow up to our ground breaking Multichannel Customer Experience Report. Last year’s report provided insight into how businesses were thinking and acting in the area of multichannel customer experience.

The 2011 survey covers:

•         What attributes are important for delivering a great customer experience? 
•         How well does your organisation (or your clients) integrate different touch points?
•         With questions around organisational maturity, measurement and challenges

Last year we used our maturity model to look at the progress organisations were making across five important dimensions of customer experience: Leadership and culture, brand, customer insight, customer touch points and systems and processes

We believe if an organisation can capture these five dimensions in their roadmap, then they are likely to gain the business performance improvements they are searching for, to implement a multichannel customer experience strategy.

We will be using our maturity model to see if companies have changed their behaviours in these five areas, over the past year. To enhance the report further, we will also be running a second B2C survey alongside this one but we will keep you updated on that before it is launched in July.

Complete the Multichannel Customer Experience survey here, and receive a FREE copy of the full report in advance.

We have launched the follow up to our ground breaking Multichannel Customer Experience Report. Last year’s report provided insight into how businesses were thinking and acting in the area of multichannel customer experience.

The 2011 survey covers:

•         What attributes are important for delivering a great customer experience? 
•         How well does your organisation (or your clients) integrate different touch points?
•         With questions around organisational maturity, measurement and challenges

Last year we used our maturity model to look at the progress organisations were making across five important dimensions of customer experience: Leadership and culture, brand, customer insight, customer touch points and systems and processes

We believe if an organisation can capture these five dimensions in their roadmap, then they are likely to gain the business performance improvements they are searching for, to implement a multichannel customer experience strategy.

We will be using our maturity model to see if companies have changed their behaviours in these five areas, over the past year. To enhance the report further, we will also be running a second B2C survey alongside this one but we will keep you updated on that before it is launched in July.

Complete the Multichannel Customer Experience survey here, and receive a FREE copy of the full report in advance.

For the second year running, Foviance has worked with Econsultancy to produce the follow up to the 2010 Multichannel Customer Experience Report.

The 2011 survey is now live and takes 5 minutes to complete and is relevant for both in-house (client-side) and agency respondents.

Complete the Multichannel Customer Experience survey here, and receive a FREE copy of the full report in advance.

It can be all too easy to fall into the mindset that user experience just applies to the digital field. However, on a recent trip to Delhi I was reminded how much UX and IA principles really do apply to so many other areas of interactions in life.

Whilst there, I travelled around the city using the metro system and being unfamiliar with the city, I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to navigate where I wanted to go to. Being thrown into this new environment highlighted how additional details in the communication of a metro system, allowed a much clearer understanding of location and route. This led me to reflect on the London transport system, I wonder if visitors to London struggle with the way that information is presented on the London underground and other transport systems?

So what was different in Delhi? One thing I noticed was the tube map on the platform. London underground platforms have a map of the line, however, it only shows stations in the direction which you are travelling towards. Whereas the Delhi metro maps show the entire line and greys out the stations that you are travelling away from, using an arrow to confirm direction of travel. I found that this gave much more context to my location, made me confident that I was on the right line and going in the right direction!

In London, the line on the underground map is displayed as a poster. Long term closures of stations are indicated on the maps but otherwise you mostly have to rely on the tannoy, or watch out of the window to determine where you are, and if there are any issues. The Delhi metro maps also have a poster but use an LED system, where a red light indicates what stations the train has already passed. It also shows a green light for the next station coming up and indicates which ones are closed. Meaning at a glance, I could see where I was on the route, how far I had to go to my station and if I might encounter any issues with closed stations. It also meant that I didn’t have to attempt to decipher a crackly tannoy in another language as I was already confident that I had all the information I needed.

These are just a couple of small differences that I felt positively impacted my journeys on the Dehli metro. There are so many more touch points, both online and offline, where a user of a system like this requires additional information. This highlights how the attention to detail in the way in which information is presented really does effect the usefulness of  information, and therefore usage of the system. It also shows the importance of user research for offline experiences such as these, as the decision about how something so simple is communicated, really can impact the lives of millions on an everyday basis.