Customer Research

To explore ‘web stress’, CA partnered with Foviance to see if application performance had an impact on buying habits and consumer behaviour online.

Using an EEG (Electroencephalography) cap and sophisticated neurological and physiological testing equipment, volunteers were wired up during the study and had their brain wave activity monitored. Everyday tasks online such as finding and buying items were tested by the volunteers.

The results revealed that search and checkout were the two most stressful points of everyday processes carried out online, resulting in the volunteers exhibiting a heightened level of ‘web stress’. This type of stress results in more than three quarters of customers abandoning websites before they have completed the task that drove them to the site in the first place. To download the whitepaper a valid e-mail address is required, however Foviance will not contact you unless you specifically request it.

By Chris Holmes

Facebook turned six recently and celebrated the milestone by giving its homepage yet another makeover, this time to “improve navigation to and discovery of commonly used features”. Six years is a long time on the interweb but, even still, Facebook has made impressive and significant gains in that time. It currently sits at number four on the list of biggest names on the web (behind Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, respectively) and with over 350 million users (and growing fast) it is poised to very soon become number three. It’s become the “face”, as it were, of the social media space, if not the brain. Read more…

By Marty Carroll

Customer experience is not a fad. Yes the terminology is bandied about much more than before but before customer experience we had customer satisfaction and customer engagement. Using the words ‘customer experience’ implies that an organisation is looking at how consumers experience the brand in a more strategic way. Indeed we’ve been gratified to see a large number of organisations really grasp the concept and value of customer experience. Some initiatives have delivered excellent returns on investment and have proven very effective, but we now believe such initiatives are no longer enough in themselves, and here’s why.Modern customers and consumers have an unprecedented ability to communicate with each other. As a result of the comments, interactions and opinions of customers published across every digital channel, there now exists a vast knowledge pool of insights into every business, and almost complete transparency in every marketplace.

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By Billie Andersen

Social media adoption promises plenty of positive benefits to modern businesses. It is simple, quick, cost-effective, and can help organisations to reach out and collaborate with wide audiences in a variety of interactive forms that simply can’t be achieved through direct communications. Forrester Research analysts predict that by 2010, 82% of all companies will be using social media marketing. Unfortunately there are now too many companies trying their hand at social media without a well thought through strategy. They are blindly jumping on the social media bandwagon without any clear understanding of how to implement it. Companies need to take a step back and plan sound social media strategies as they would any other projects they choose to undertake.
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 By Clare Mitchell Crow

Many multi-channel businesses are now convinced that making an investment in tailoring their customer experience strategy is time, effort and money well spent. They’ve seen for themselves that improving the experience of customers has a demonstrable impact on engagement, as well as commercial activity if that is part of the goal. So what should be the next step for these businesses? Should they simply maintain the measurement, analysis and improvement of experience for the broadest possible range of customers? Or is there potential for some of those businesses in focusing their efforts on their most strategically important customers?It would be naïve to believe that some companies aren’t already identifying segments of their customer base that represent the largest proportion of commercial profit, in some form or another. It’s a relatively simple process to isolate and track customers by certain criteria – their postcodes perhaps, their membership of a loyalty scheme, their past purchase record, or a particular behaviour they display during their interactions. These triggers could be used to deliver an enhanced, or at least different, customer experience. Perhaps they should be guided towards particular offers or incentives that have been selected to appeal to their profile? Or maybe their interactions should be monitored so that they can be contacted by virtual or human agents if their purchasing journey is aborted for any reason? These are intriguing possibilities with plenty of potential.
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Is there a direct correlation between your customer experience and your revenue? Can we talk about the ROI of customer experience with any hard evidence that will back up our perceptions and justify business expenditure on customer experience work?

Rather than treating your customer research investment in isolation, identifying where your business has to pay for research, analysis and testing, it’s possible to view your investment from the opposite angle – if your business chooses not to work on customer experience, what problems will you experience, what dropouts will you see on your website, and what value is being lost as a result of you not conducting any research?
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Ashley Friedlein is founder and CEO of Econsultancy. In the latest Foviance podcast, we discussed the development of customer experience outside the UK.

Ashley, can I first ask you to tell me a little bit about how things are going with Econsultancy? I know you’ve set up recently in the US, possibly at the worst possible time during the recession?

Yes, it’s an interesting one. New York probably feels it particularly keenly, and it felt a lot bleaker than the UK. It was a pretty miserable economic situation, but the good thing is that it means you can get good people for less money than you normally can, it means that estate agents are very nice to you for a change, and you get decent property for less money. When we set up Econsultancy in the UK, we did it in the dot.com crash period, and everyone said then that we were crazy to be doing what we were doing, but as a result we had a kind of clear run and no competition for about three years, so actually as a time to build a brand, arguably it’s a good time. It’s effectively a start up for us. It wasn’t projected to make any money this year, and I think we’ll achieve that, and it’s going well in terms of raising the traffic, the links, the brand, recruitment, so we’re pretty happy.
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Oracle commissioned research by Foviance, which was conducted to better understand online security measures and their impact on customers.

Foviance conducted consumer research between April and May 2009 into people’s attitudes, behaviours and understanding in the context of online security. Oracle used Online Survey, Diary Study and Focus Group methodologies in this research. 

The results were announced in July 2009 and are now available for downloaded

If you have any questions in connection with this research, we’d be happy to hear from you.