Customers’ were asked to rate the most important areas that companies should focus on in order to provide them the best customer experience in the banking, gaming, mobile phone, retail and travel sectors.

Customer preference for multi-channel customer experience is transforming big business in the UK

British businesses struggle in quest for “holy grail of single customer view”, as the number of brand touch-points on a customer’s journey continue to grow

More than two-thirds (69%) of UK businesses are just beginning to develop a multi-channel customer experience strategy, despite the increasing number of online and offline touch-points in a customer journey, according to research published today by Econsultancy and Foviance.

The new study finds that only 22% of companies have a well-developed multi-channel customer experience strategy in place, while nearly one in 10 companies (9%) admit to having no strategy in place at all. Organisational structure is cited as the greatest obstacle to change.

Companies recognise the importance of a multi-channel customer experience but are typically failing to adopt a strategy or framework to enable a single customer view. Survey respondents were asked how close their own organisations are to having a single view of the customer. A mere 32% of companies questioned claimed to have the integrated systems and processes required to give customers a joined-up experience.

This is despite the fact that almost half of company respondents (49%) say that a multi-channel customer experience is “very important” to their organisation, and a further 41% say it is “quite important”. More than two thirds of companies (68%) recognise a strong link between long-term business performance and customer experience, the research found.

The ‘Multi-channel Customer Experience Report’, published by Econsultancy in association with customer experience consultancy Foviance, is based on a survey of more than 500 companies and agencies. The research found that nine different online and offline touch points are relevant for at least half of the companies surveyed.

Linus Gregoriadis, research director at Econsultancy, comments: “It is clear that while the vast majority of companies understand the impact on business performance, very few organisations have integrated, cross-channel processes and systems in place, or a strategy to help them to achieve this.”

Paul Blunden, CEO of Foviance, adds: “The rise of social networks has put the power with customers and it has never been more important for organisations to create an environment where customers notice a positive difference. Customers are no longer prepared to accept that businesses are still learning and view their multi-channel interactions through a single lens, sharing their experiences widely and candidly.”

Gregoriadis added: “An increasing number of online and offline customer touch points are making it even more difficult for organisations to ensure a consistent cross-channel customer experience based on the holy grail of a single customer view.

“Companies are typically trying to integrate systems and adopt a customer-centric approach, but haven’t yet reached the stage where they have properly managed to harness these different processes in a way which allows for seamless cross-channel engagement.”

Respondents were asked to indicate the most significant barriers which prevent them from improving the multi-channel customer experience.

• The greatest barrier is organisational structure, which is one of the three greatest barriers for 41% of respondents.
• The next most significant issue is complexity of customer experience, cited as a major barrier by 38% of respondents.

According to the report, many organisations are lacking an individual or department to take responsibility for the customer experience within the business. For some companies, the problem is compounded by a lack of budget. 

• More than a third of companies surveyed (38%) say that ownership of the multi-channel customer experience lies with a mixture of different departments, and less than a third of companies (31%) have a budget which is dedicated to improving the customer experience. 
• More than a quarter of companies (28%) say there is no budget at allfor improving the customer experience, while a further 41% say that they use budget which was assigned for other things.

REPORT URL
http://www.foviance.com/what-we-think/multi-channel-customer-experience-report

Photos from Foviance report launch event at The Hospital Club
http://www.flickr.com/photos/30246835@N08/sets/72157625317585590/

Noted behavioural psychologist specialising in this field available for comment. Bio: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catriona_Campbell

Notes to Editors
Press contacts
Wendy McAuliffe
wendy@populatedigital.com
07900 886791

Charlotte Wilberforce
charlotte.wilberforce@foviance.com
+44 (0)8450 546 500

About Foviance

Foviance is a leading cross-channel 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.

Founded in 2000 and with a heritage in usability research and data analytics, Foviance delivers research and analytics-based consultancy to its clients about the effectiveness of their individual channels, such as mobile, web and call centre and how they combine in a cross-channel environment. For many clients, insight is provided not only in their home market, but also internationally through Foviance extensive alliance network.

Foviance engages with its customers wherever they are in their product lifecycle, and provides insight so they understand how to improve, create and deliver excellent customer experiences.

Foviance boasts 43 of the UK FTSE 100 companies among its client roster, including Barclays, BSkyB, and Sainsbury’s. In addition Foviance works with International brands such as AstraZeneca, Dell and Nokia. Foviance has offices in London and Shanghai.
For further information:
Tel:+44 (0)8450 546 500, e-mail: info@foviance.com, web: www.foviance.com

About EconsultancyEconsultancy is the leading source of independent advice and insight on digital marketing and e-commerce. Our reports, events, online resources and training programmes help a community of over 85,000 registered marketers make better decisions, build business cases, find the best suppliers, look smart in meetings and accelerate their careers.
Join Econsultancy today to learn what’s happening in digital marketing – and what works.
Call us to find out more on +44 (0)20 7269 1450 or contact us online.
http://econsultancy.com

Fragmentation, optimisation and integration. Those were the themes that stood out for me at last week’s Emetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in Washington DC. First of all I was reminded that “web analytics” is not was it used to be, it’s an increasingly complex space. Secondly, I was shown some great evidence about what’s really required to be an optimisation orientated organisation and finally we’re beginning to see some case studies from organisations that have made the investment in multi-channel data and the benefits they’re accruing from that.

A strong theme from the conference was the search to understand the value of social media. I got the impression that, if you were a speaker on track then you were in trouble if someone else had the words “social media” in the title of their presentation. Social media analytics is now definitely part of the landscape but its’ hard to define what it really is. Everybody is coming at social media from a somewhat different angle; online brand reputation management, fostering innovation or customer service, so it’s inevitable there is a disparity of thinking about how to measure its impact. So it was useful to see people like John Lovett from Web Analytics Demystified talking about the framework that have put out there with Altimeter. I think Lovett would agree that the framework itself is not rocket science as it’s essentially about linking metrics back to objectives but I think it’s exactly what’s needed at the moment in the space at the moment to take some of the “mystery” and “fluff” out of social media analytics. As one of my colleagues would say “at the end of the day, it’s just data”.

Optimisation has been another hot topic for a number of years now. Before we used to be treated to presentations that espoused the benefits of using approaches like A/B and multi-variate testing and the kinds of uplifts that could be achieved. What we saw this time from the likes of Dell and eBay was what’s actually required from an organisational and technological perspective to actually implement an optimisation culture in a business. Ed Wu and the team from Dell demonstrated the size and scale of the investment that’s required. They doubled the size of the testing team, bringing on an additional 10 hires in a 2 month period. They described the challenge in finding enough of the right kind of talent. In addition they established a project management office to help facilitate the execution of tests and introduced project management tools to manage the whole process. The Dell story just underlined that analytical success is as much, if not more, about people and processes than it is about technology.

That’s not to say that technology isn’t important and Bob Page from eBay outlined the type of investment that they’ve been making in getting their data architecture right to support the various analyst communities in the business. Initiatives included getting rid of the various datamarts that had sprung up around the company and creating centralised virtual datamarts that were able to flex and meet the shifting demands of different analytical groups across the course of the day. Technology is also used to connect different analytical groups together. A networking site joins together the various analytic communities together where initiatives can be shared, knowledge can be captured and best practices can be developed.

Finally, we began to see some of the benefits that accrue from data integration strategies. Adam Greco from Salesfroce.com outlined how web analytics data and CRM data can be used together to improve the effectiveness of the lead generation process. Lead data given to sales people can be enhanced with not just what’s on the contact form but also with the prospects previous browsing behaviour on the site, highlighting the products and services that the prospect might be interested in and scoring them in term of their levels of interest and stage in the sales cycle.

This type of data integration requires planning and for data from different sources to be matched together. Allen Crane from USAA showed how they had been doing this integration across multiple channels. Over a two year period they have been bringing data from the different channel into their centralised warehouse and analytics tool. They created a data schema that focussed around the customer and built out around that. In what I think was probably one of the best case studies around multi-channel data integration I have seen in a conference, Crane showed how they had developed the notion of a “conversation” to encapsulate the interactions between USAA and a member across multiple channels around a single event like taking out a personal loan. That conversation might start online but end up offline, or indeed end up online again. Their data integration allows them to track these conversations and to understand the true costs associated against these different events. It allowed them to develop new metrics like ‘containment rate’ (the amount of the conversations that happen online) that enables them to prioritise their site and channel optimisation efforts. For me this is where web analytics is heading. It’s about taking that data, adding the multi-channel perspective, and then deploying the right people and processes to change the way the business does things.

I don’t know whether the number is right or not but a while back I heard that sophisticated marketing companies such as the world’s leading brands spent about 10% of their marketing budget on research and measurement. Irrespective whether the number is accurate or not, it’s a good benchmark I think – 10% feels about right. These leading companies have been marketing brands for over a 100 years and so over that time they have come to understand the importance and relevance to their business in investing in understanding the effectiveness of their activities.

I wonder what the equivalent proportion is for leading online businesses? How much do online businesses invest in measuring and tracking the effectiveness of their online activities? I don’t know the answer to that question but my suspicion is that the answer is generally “too little, too late”. We all know of companies that have a reputation for using analytics as part of their strategic armoury and have invested heavily in analytical technologies and also have built up formidable analytic teams. These are the companies that people travel to see and hear from at events like Emetrics and Exchange. However these companies are the exception rather than the norm.

What I write in these articles is often triggered by recent events in my consulting activities with clients. Customers and potential customers are a rich source of content! I went to visit one company last week where they had recently appointed a user experience manager and given him responsibility for web analytics and site optimisation. The client had been busy over the past six months implementing a solid and robust web measurement tracking programme. This had involved completely re-implementing their web analytics tool, hiring in a web analyst, revisiting all the business requirements and producing new reports and dashboards. He had also hired someone to specifically focus on site optimisation and to run their testing and experimentation programme. They had been busy laying the foundations and investments had been made in people, processes and technology. I could see how quickly they would begin to reap the rewards.

At the other end of scale I’ve also been working with a client who is developing a brand new site. New sites don’t come cheaply but all the way through the senior stakeholders in the business have been reluctant to invest in the appropriate measurement and analytics. The new site is close to launch and we’re now trying to shoe horn in the analytics requirements into the tail end of the development process. They use one of the free tools which can cope with most of their needs but not all of them and despite the significant investment in the new site itself, getting a relatively modest budget released to develop the data collection specification and the reporting configuration has been difficult. For me these two experiences highlight the difference between companies that “get it” and those that don’t.

For those companies that struggle to recognise the value of investing in decent measurement and analytics, I’m reminded of one of my favourite quote from A C Nielsen. Arthur Nielsen used to say that “The price of light is less than the cost of darkness”. The point is elegantly made – it’s not a question of whether you can afford to invest in measurement, it’s a question of whether you can afford not to. For me the point of measurement and analytics is to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of decision making and to reduce the risk of failure. It also leads to better accountability, which is possibly why sometimes it’s not welcomed with open arms!

Determining or justifying the return on investment in analytics can be hard. In some cases, like multi-variate testing, the ROI can be very explicit and indeed that’s how the technologies are often sold. However, working out the ROI on an analytics team and general analytics technologies can be harder, particularly in non-transactional environments. But there is always “a cost of darkness” and the trick is to try and work out what that cost might be. For transactional environments it might be not knowing how to improve the conversion ratio, for media environments it might be around not understanding how to monetise the traffic more effectively and for service environments it might be about not understanding which content is helping to deflect calls from the contact centre.

Although hard to prove I believe that even small investments in measurement and analytics can return a significant ROI particularly in the early days of adoption. Perhaps “The price of light is less than the cost of darkness” should be in the footer for every business case for investment funds for measurement and analytics.

According to recent figures from the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), the trade body for digital marketing, the total spend on mobile phone advertising in 2009 rocketed by 32 percent year-on-year to a new high of £37.6 million – and all that despite an overall contraction in the advertising sector in 2009.

Two of the biggest names driving this hike in interest in mobile advertising are Apple and Google. Apple launched iAd, its mobile advertising platform, following the acquisition of Quattro Wireless for $275 million. Google is similarly bullish, investing $750 million in its own AdMob. So that’s more than $1 billion investment by these two giants of the marketplace, and a pretty good indicator to potential advertisers that this isn’t a fleeting opportunity.

Before joining the mobile advertising bandwagon, potential advertisers need to try to understand mobile better as a platform. If possible they should gauge the value of applications by tracking their usage. Before the iPad was launched, a firm called Flurry Analytics – a developer of a leading smartphone application analytics and monetization platform used by more than 30,000 applications across iOS, Android, Blackberry and J2ME – enabled developers to include code in their iPhone apps to track usage. With this help brands could breakdown exactly what users were doing within their apps and how often. A bit like Google Analytics on the desktop, this data wasn’t personally identifiable but was very useful as guidance.

Unfortunately for Flurry and app developers alike, Flurry’s analytics were blamed by Apple CEO Steve Jobs for ‘outing’ IDs of new tablet devices on the Apple campus that turned out to be the secret iPad in testing. Jobs said at the time: “We learned some company called Flurry had data on devices that we were using on our campus. It was getting developers to put software in their apps that sent info back to this company! So we went through the roof. It’s violating our privacy policies! So now we’re only going to allow analytics that don’t give our device info.”

Apple felt obliged to change its terms and conditions for tracking software. Developers must now sign up to stringent restrictions of third-party tracking libraries unless tracking is explicitly obvious to end users. What does this really mean though? Most websites already use non-personal tracking. Are our mobile phones considered to be more personal devices, with more questions raised over tracking of information on them, especially any locality information?

If rich information capture from mobile devices was permitted, either specifically through raw cell tower information or by other boundaries, advertising networks could undoubtedly put it to good use. The Apple iAd platform can already enable developers to put targeted interactive ads into apps, that with permission can look through iTunes histories and study behavioural information to enable tighter targeting. Google’s own ad model can employ Google maps to present ads to users depending on their location. Theoretically all of this would be ‘opt-in’ from a customer point of view, but it isn’t impossible for permissions to be bound up in general terms and conditions. Regardless, Apple currently believes its apps should be explicit about intentions to track behavioural information, using location-based services and permitting targeted advertising.

2010 is already the year of mobile, and that’s largely because mobile manufacturers and service providers are getting so much better at understanding what consumers really want. Debates will certainly be raised over what is good for them – do we all want targeted business ads while walking city streets, and shopping vouchers sent to us as we walk through the doors of a shop? Arguably the offline world is moving this way anyway, thanks to pervasive loyalty and travel cards. Even Facebook has been in hot water for targeting ads based on profiles at one time, but it’s obvious to most that this is a trend on the cusp of acceptance by many, so long as an acceptable balance can be struck between benefits and privacy.

This article was writtern as part of the Foviance July/August Newsletter

So when I think about my world of marketing, brand and user experience, I often look at him and consider that he is somewhat absolved from the matter, almost that he is not capable of being understood as an individual or won over as a customer on the grounds of such squandering.

All this changed in the past week when I saw him placing his bets on his new iPhone. I have spent many years listening to him pass through the layers of telephone security necessary before he can place his next winner at Windsor, Ascot or Wolverhampton. So to see him with an iPhone was somewhat of a surprise – almost as if someone from the back-roads of Dudley shouldn’t be seen using such shiny new technology!

So far I have used plain English speaking, guessing that not all of you will understand ‘Yam Yam’, the language of the Black Country. But knowing there are only few bookmakers who have launched an iPhone application I asked him who he was betting with, and he told me. “Why is that?” I asked. I asked the question because I knew that for many years he’d used a different bookmaker who he’d always raved about and to whom he is very well known through its call centre. Both bookmakers already offer good iPhone applications.

I found his response somewhat interesting and thought that it really demonstrated how, if an organisation considers user experience as truly cross-channel, it can really begin to gain competitive advantage and win customers.

He said: “I’ve recently started a new job which keeps me out of the office or on the road half of the time. This means that after doing my homework on any given day’s races, I am ready to place my bets from around midday, where I’ll either be sitting in front of my PC or on the mobile in the car.” “OK”, I said, “but why are you not using your usual bookmaker that also has a good iPhone app?” Because, he said “ just recently I’ve started playing poker too, and this new bookmaker is the only company that will allow me to switch funds between sports and poker easily on the mobile. I can bet in the day on the horses on the PC or on the iPhone, use my winnings on poker at home in the evening and in the morning I will have the same funds accessible on my iPhone to bet on sports again. What’s more, if I win on either I can walk into the bookies and collect the cash over the counter and have it in my hand. I can’t do that with my old bookmaker.”

That last line really struck a chord, “a penny dropping” moment as I heard it described this week. Invariably the projects in which Foviance has traditionally been involved in tend to be in silos, and I believe this is commonplace amongst the majority of our gaming clients where the different businesses think and operate as such. What we are finding more and more however with people like Luke and other customers, is that they become loyal to a particular operator not just because they have the best sports book or the best casino, but because the experience of using the different betting methods and administrating their funds is seamless, particularly across multiple channels.

Being able to move money between different betting accounts, having single sign-in security, talking on the telephone about an individual’s account rather than just sports book or just casino, collecting money from the High Street – these are all important to any player or punter. Brands getting this right can make the difference between having loyal customers with healthy cross fertilisation across games, or a few customers using a single game now and again.

This article was writtern as part of the Foviance July/August Newsletter

Today, apart from being Friday 13th, is also National Complaints Day. Research conducted by ComplaintCommunity suggests that over the course of today more than one and a half million complaints will be lodged across the UK.

Against this backdrop, I was fortunate enough to bring together a variety of people from the public sector, retail, financial services, customer experience and social media monitoring to discuss the impact of social media on complaints specifically, and customer service more generally.

What was interesting from the discussion, was that whether you were a large enterprise living social media, through to one yet to take your first tentative step, the journey was clearly more about mindset than toolset. There was also a need for organisations to understand that the rules of engagement were changing, and with it a different type of lexicon was being defined. Customers were now shaping the service they wanted, and whether companies liked it or not, the bottom line was: get used to it!

Echoes of one of the theses from The Cluetrain Manifesto, written some 11 years ago, still ring true today: “If you want to barter with us, get down off that camel!”

Some of the other common themes that ran through the conversation were:

• ROI – return and investment doesn’t have to be financial
• At what point does a company engage with its customers?
• How do you identify where your customers are?
• How do you define ‘complaint’? Negative sentiment, direct issue or poor experience
• How best to establish internal procedures?
• Social media becomes engagement media
• How do you manage customers’ expectations?
• Identifying ways to best ‘handle’ customer complaints? Who is responsible? 
• Localisation of social media for online customer service

It became evident as the discussion progressed that what we were all really talking about, in the words of Rob Skinner (Head of PR, PayPal UK) was the ‘re-invention of the corporation’, with perhaps social media and smartphones, the catalysts of this business change.

I was nervous going into this roundtable with the calibre of people sitting round me, and the thought of ‘what happens if no one says anything?’. But by the end of the discussion it was absolutely ‘affirming’, not only at the level of discussion that took place, the breadth of topics covered, the openness with which BT, PayPal and the Ministry of Justice shared their insights, experiences and concerns, that this thing we white-label ‘social media’ is here to stay, signals a change for the good, and requires an honesty in approach that customers not only deserve, but are finally experiencing as well.

So to those who took part, I thank you, and to those who are yet to start your journey, I encourage you to do so now. If your children are already ‘doing social’ now via sites such as Club Penguin isn’t that a telling insight into their future and the future of your business?

For a summary of the discussion on the impact of social media on complaints please click here

If you would like to be notified when the audio and video are available from this event, or for more information about the the impact of social media on complaints or customer service, please feel free to contact Guy Stephens by email or on 0845 054 6545.

The Summit, now in its fifth year, is the place where operators, game developers and providers come together to learn, debate and discuss all things bingo. It’s a great event with some fantastic speakers, panel debates and networking opportunities.

Foviance’s session, entitled ‘Player Perspective’, was aimed at:

• Finding out what real players make of the various online bingo websites out there
• Discovering what really brings them back time and time again
• Understanding what they search for when opening a new account with an online bingo website

And how did we do it? Well how else? In the usual Foviance way, we involved the customer.

Assembling five regular bingo players (four female and one male), Mariana Da Silva, Foviance’s Head of UX Gaming  led a forty minute focus group.

Focus groups are great for extracting perceptions, opinions, beliefs and attitudes towards a product, service, concept, advertisement or idea. Questions are asked in an interactive group setting in which participants are free to talk with other group members. Each session seeks to bring out rich information that couldn’t otherwise be gained from other forms of research. However, given the small number of participants, it’s important to note that not all findings are necessarily representative of the entire market but instead seek to show true intent.

To say there were some surprising, if not extraordinary, observations from the focus group, would be an understatement. The first surprise was the players themselves, who had been randomly chosen by a third party recruitment company based upon a profile of ‘playing bingo regularly’. Foviance had not met the participants, they had not been informed about what they’d be discussing, and of course Foviance had no idea what kind of responses they would provide.

So it was a surprise to many that none of the bingo players were ladies over forty, none professed to watch Emmerdale or Jeremy Kyle, and all of them came across as extremely well informed and quite savvy. Two of them bucked the anticipated trend of betting by sportsbook, with both preferring the more sophisticated Betfair site which allowed them to be more ‘analytical’ in placing their bets. The participants had an average of between five and six bingo accounts, each with a good spread across many of the more well known brands. Their average spend was approximately £150 per month.

The first theme – exploring expectations, preferences and habits – revealed that bingo offered a chance for both mothers and those in full time employment to switch off, relax and forget about day to day pressures. For many, the ‘automatic’ feature which strikes off the numbers without human intervention is almost permanently switched on – perfect for mums whose jobs are never finished, whatever time of day or night. For the sophisticated sportsbook punters it offers the chance of playing ‘without having to think’.

The second theme was an opportunity to explore specific aspects of bingo sites – promotions, cross sell, banners, chat and more. What works for them, what doesn’t, what they like and so on.

Rather unsurprisingly, all participants were seduced by cash promotion – the key incentive to open an account with any operator. That said, there must be a clear route to redeeming cash promotions. If it is too complex or seemingly unattainable, then they shy away. Once they have opened an account it is important for them to be able to play for free and get used to game play before committing any spend.

None of them paid any attention to the stories of other winners, which didn’t necessarily instil confidence in the site. They “weren’t bothered” if somebody else had won – our participants are there to win for themselves. Although everybody on the panel switched off the chat functionality, the existence of chat was still important as it gave them a sense of community. Above all, the ability to customise the site and allow the player to switch functionality on and off was extremely important.

The attraction of playing bingo on a mobile received a mixed reception. Those that didn’t like the idea thought that they already spent so much time in the house on the computer either playing bingo or on other types of gaming that they didn’t wish to be glued to the mobile doing the same. Those that did like it enjoyed the freedom to play during spare time; on the bus, the train and so on.

The final theme gave the participants a chance to view the homepage of all the award nominees and express their opinions on look and feel and how likely they would be to sign up and play. Interestingly none of the participants were that keen on the glitzy sites clearly targeted at females. This extended to the “somewhat cheesy” TV adverts which proved annoying (though later they admitted to opening accounts with such operators).

Big winners were clean, simple, uncluttered sites which were sympathetic to the eye and easy to use as a newcomer. ‘Tea and Bingo’ was a firm favourite. Another relative newcomer, ‘Caesar Bingo’ had the thumbs up for its classy look and feel. On the flipside, the childish cartoony sites lost credibility and were a strong no-no across the group. The bigger brands did well largely due to the fact they were well known and trusted rather than what was happening on the site.

The session enlightened many of the top level audience members as it enabled them to listen to their customers first hand. Very often at Foviance we see that many gaming companies tend to make important decisions by intuition and assumption without real insight from the customer. This is beginning to change with some adopting the mantra, “data trumps intuition”. Real insight, whether it be analytics on the site or qualitative research relating to a site or game play, is one of the most important stages in the development cycle.

The focus group, one of a number of research methods adopted by Foviance, ably demonstrated how involving customers throughout the development stages of a Bingo site can deliver real competitive advantage simply through better understanding and by more closely matching expectations.

This article was written as part of our June newsletter

Just think for a moment how complex modern business channels have become. What we now think of as a traditional transactional business would have a single real-world store-front. A customer would come in and buy products or services, the business owner would talk to them in an attempt to understand their needs, and they would leave. Perhaps the experience next time would be slightly more tailored to their liking based on that conversation. Today a customer may still walk in to a store, but they would just as likely order online, or via a call centre. That’s three different channels without thinking too deeply about it, and as Paul mentions in his article, if we think about touch points there are hundreds. And how does that business owner now know how many of its online customers also use the call centre or the store? How many store customers checked stock online or usually prefer to use the call centre?

An effective unified view of customer behaviour is the ultimate goal and one that is very hard to surmount. What is required is a truly representative customer perspective in order to join that data up and make those sources integrated. So, why isn’t everybody doing it? The answer is that on the way to the ultimate goal, come some fairly tricky challenges. Understanding what those challenges might be is a great way to prepare for those challenges, and the first question any business must ask itself is “Are we ready for cross-channel?” How would broader business strategy adapt to the intelligence resulting from cross-channel data? What would we do with a greater understanding of the combinations of roles each channel plays in customer journeys and ultimately in business success? Can the business afford to find out? Can it afford not to if it is going to de differentiated?

Culturally, organisations are not always structured adequately for measuring cross-channel behaviour. Most take a ‘silo’ approach to building their channel capabilities. Who ultimately owns the customer experience? Every business must ask itself this before even thinking about cross-channel measurement. Buy-in and full cooperation is needed from all channels to create a cross-channel picture of a customer base. The repercussions of leaving this question unanswered will hugely affect success. There are real people responsible for each channel’s success who own their own data and understand customers in their own way. If those channels are to be blended together, who then owns that responsibility, that data, that customer insight? Perhaps they won’t want to relinquish that control. Education and joint effort must be called upon to make such a transaction without a good deal of obstructive politics.

Organisations often find it hard to clearly understand customer behaviour and most importantly to yield business value through one channel, let alone combining a number of them. Where do they begin? It’s a good idea to start looking at combinations and weightings of each channel’s value to a business in different areas. Each channel has its own set of touch-points of interaction that need identifying. A business may feel its success relies on its website and the people who discover the business through the website, but if that site isn’t transactional and brings no actual bottom line value to the business, then attributing the value of that channel is very difficult. Do customers go to the website five times then place an order by phone or in-store? How does the business put a figure on that value to the customer journey? Indexing helps those businesses to look at that the bigger picture by monetising or scoring certain touch-points according to each transactional effect on the bottom line, helping to overcome this problem.

Every business must have its cross-channel measurement strategy formalised before it thinks about execution. The alternative is a Frankensteinian monster of great ingredients thrown into a framework without being properly joined up or disseminated in a way that enables the business to make clear decisions. A clear cross-channel strategy is essential before a plan can be executed successfully.

Cross-channel technologies are actually very few and far between currently. Those that do offer a competent cross-channel approach do so at a price. This market is so advanced and leading edge that it isn’t yet economically viable for mass market business. However, even popular desktop productivity suites are beginning to offer customer database blending and other functionality is slowly emerging for the mass market.

An appropriate balance of technology and people is required to achieve success, and the most pressing variable that affects both is financial resource. Should a business integrate its customer data into its web analytics tool or create a bespoke solution? Who is the person best positioned to look at overall customer needs? Is a web analyst the best person to measure cross-channel behaviour? Maybe even when the best person is found to start the effort, they will need help and support as the task continues.

For many, cross-channel measurement will prove extensive and expensive, and it’s not just a matter of combining the costs of measuring individual channels. This challenge isn’t a little side project, it’s a serious endeavour that demands financial backing. Considering the above will help many businesses begin their journeys of cross-channel measurement. And the first step must always be to evaluate where they are now and what form that strategy might take, before they strike out for the summit.

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

In the previous two columns I have been looking at different types of segmentation strategies, mainly dealing with what segmentation is, the different types of segmentation strategies and the role each type can play in building up a core understanding of your customers or prospective customers. So once you’ve decided what to create the segments on, the question then becomes about how to create the segments. Remember with segmentation what we are trying to do is to create groups of people who have something in common.

When it comes to creating segmentations, there are two main alternative approaches:

• Deterministic segmentation strategies
• Discovery segmentation strategies

With deterministic segmentations, the user or customer segments are based on some kind of hypothesis and then the data is analysed to see whether the segments are interesting and useful. For example, demographic segmentations often tend to be “deterministic”. You may segment your customers on the basis of gender and age in the belief the criteria are useful and interesting. Also most segmentation on web data that’s done at the moment is done this way. Most of the web analytics tools that people are using have some kind of segmentation capabilities built into them, allowing you to start to create hypotheses about what might be useful segments to analyse, understand and track. For example you might be interested in looking at the differences in behaviours based on the number of times people visited the site, or the channel they came in on, or the search terms used. Deterministic approaches can be successful but they can also involve a lot of time in analysis, particularly when dealing with large and complex data sets. Many iterations might be required in order to indentify segments that are meaningful, interesting and useful. This is where the power and functionality of your analytics tools becomes vitally important. If it takes you ages to create a segment and to see the results, then this will inevitably mean that you won’t arrive at an optimal solution.

Discovery based segmentation approaches use statistical and data mining algorithms to look for differences in user behaviour. Typical methodologies used here in segmentation studies include cluster analysis, neural networks and decision trees. Methods such as cluster analysis look for statistically meaningful differences between different users groups based on the data that fed into the analysis process. This is a massive area as there are many different types of segmentation techniques. Even when talking about cluster analysis, there are many different variants of cluster analysis such as k-means, hierarchical, two-step and so on. Each approach has its strengths and weaknesses and even within a single variant of cluster analysis there are many different ways that the analysis can be run. Although these solutions can be viewed as very technical, they is as much analytical “art” behind a successful outcome as there is “science”. Once those groups have been determined further analysis is done to profile the groups to understand what those differences are and whether they are meaningful or not. Just because something is statistically significant, it doesn’t mean that it is necessarily commercially significant!

Discovery based methods can yield user segments that may not be immediately obvious from the data. This is one of the benefits of using this type of approach. Quite often in the work that we have done using these types of techniques on web data we find that some of the more interesting and valuable segments are quite small, and this is because web analytics data typically contains a lot of noise from people who only ever visit the site once or twice and do nothing of any value. However, discovery based approaches require specialist skills and are highly iterative and consequently are more likely to be more costly in terms of both time and money.