International Customer Experience

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. Read more…

By Marty Carroll

We’re looking at the global picture in our latest issue – the international customer experience scene.

Paul kicks off proceedings by confirming our intent to expand Foviance into new territory. Find out more about our ambitions for our latest venture – Foviance Asia. You can also read the thoughts of Frank Ma, the man that will be heading-up our exciting new Shanghai office. Staying on the global theme, Amanda Roach provides an insight into the mechanics of international surveys, while Mariana cautions businesses thinking of taking short-cuts on the road to online localisation.

We also regularly update our blog with our consultants’ thoughts and opinions which you may enjoy reading and commenting on.

As always, I’m also very happy to hear from you directly with any feedback.

Marty

In this issue:

Do, or do not. There is no ‘try’

Surveying international opinion

Localisation is required when lost in translation

Introducing the Asian Experience

“Never try, never fail, those are the words I live by”, or so says Drew Carey’s character Crank in the animated kids film ‘Robots’. I heard these words coming from the back of the car a few days ago as I headed off on holiday with the family for a week in North Devon. You could run a business by that motto but I’m not sure it would last long or be an exciting place to work.

On the contrary,  it is the belief of both my team and I that we must try, that sees Foviance opening for business in China this quarter, with a new office in Shanghai. Read more…

There are obvious attractions to conducting international surveys as conduits of quantitative research.

Not only will they extend your reach and influence geographically, but they also expand the size of your potential samples, while reducing costs considerably compared to securing a similar scope of respondents locally. Surveys do have obvious limitations against one-to-one qualitative studies, but with skilled questioning and efficient organisation, excellent results can still be gained for far lower overheads. Read more…

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.
Read more…

Part 2 of Paul Blunden’s interview with Ashley Friedlein, CEO of Econsultancy. We discussed the development of customer experience outside the UK.

You can listen to Part 1 of the interview where Ashley Friedlein talks about Twitter in our Expert Interview section.

• Episode title: Ashley Friedlein on Customer Experience
• Episode number: 6
• Series: on Customer Experience
• Duration: 25 minutes

Listen now:

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Or, Download the Ashley Friedlein on customer experience podcast (MP3, 11mb)

An abridged version of the conversation between Ashley Friedlein and Paul Blunden can be read in our October Newsletter.

Alternatively you can also read the Podcast transcript.

Jason Spencer is the managing director of Millward Brown in Shanghai. In the latest Foviance podcast, we discussed customer experience and digital marketing in China. Read more…

By Arthur Moan

Global brands that are serious about establishing and maintaining a worldwide online presence, must undertake international customer experience research to ensure regional credibility. It’s that simple.

It’s all too easy, even for high-profile commercial brands, to assume that a website which has proven to be highly successful in their native country, will make a seamless transition to other regions. A common pitfall for many firms is to build a global template site and then simply translate languages, currency and legal notices to comply with local markets. Without practical insights into local market attitudes and buying behavior, firms can be left bewildered by a poor reception and response to a site that has prompted positive feedback and results back home.

Part of our role in international customer experience research, is to inform global redesign and help to communicate brands in ways that are better understood by specific local audiences. One of my first tasks in this field was to assist with a global review of Adidas.com, identifying usability issues and brand perception across disparate international audience segments. We conducted usability evaluations in the UK, US, Germany and China before combining the findings into a single report containing market specific insights, similarities and differences and recommendations. In this way we helped to shape the global Adidas online re-design strategy.

Research like this is the bedrock on which global brands should build their regional confidence and international reputations. Another client of ours, who is a global technology & computer manufacturer, operates ecommerce sites in a vast number of countries around world. I’ve personally been to China, Japan, India and numerous EU countries to help refine its customer experience in diverse regions. Like most global organisations, they created a global site in the US which it rolls out in other countries. But before it can do that, it knows that that it needs to understand that people have different ways of purchasing goods and engaging with content depending on where they live. China has a history of cash on delivery and business invoicing for technology purchases, for example, and so many accepted western transactional models simply wouldn’t translate into sales. The overall trend then is one of global branding with localised content and practices. We also helped this same client understand their business customers worldwide by creating a set of personas for each of their mature markets. These were informed by quantitative data in the form of online survey responses and web analytics data insights. This was then enriched with qualitative local on-the-ground research to examine the different job titles and roles within their business, which would help shape the content and functionality they would need from a technology & computer supplier.

Customer Experience research in these circumstances is best conducted as a one-to-one, end-to-end process that is task oriented, allowing time to understand offline habits in order to pinpoint the stage at which local customers choose to engage with your website. It’s important to witness how customers like to navigate, how they read, how they like their screens organised and copy arranged, what terminology they use that may be different from other regions, and more. The next stage is to use focus group discussions to talk through concepts, ensure imagery and icons mean what they are intended to mean, and then recommend an accepted look and feel. Ethnographic research reveals a real understanding of cross-channel interaction with websites, and discovers what drives potential customers online or even offline. Reasons can be as diverse as cultural landscape or attitudes to security, but they need to be identified.

Of course operating a bespoke web presence in each country can cost businesses a lot of money, so customer experience research needs to be as efficient as possible. Foviance took the decision five years ago not to open offices around the world. We have in place a global network of local trusted usability consultancy partners with the same standards and values as Foviance, who are skilled at recruiting local representative demographic line-ups. This provides us with increased flexibility to deliver research in the locations most appropriate to our clients and their target markets. Moderation is always conducted in local language and translated real time for the client in attendance. We also deliver an English dubbed video of all the sessions for the stakeholders who could not make the travel and can even provide web streaming of the sessions around the globe – anything that they feel helps them deliver against their globalisation and localisation strategies.

Due to our years of experience and knowledge in conducting this type of research, our clients generally rely on us to manage the entire research programme using one of three main methods:

• Foviance Consultants can deliver the research in each individual location (if timelines allow) using our partners’ facilities. We employ French, German and Portuguese consultants.
• We manage the research remotely, carefully briefing our international partners who deliver the research and complete the analysis and reporting. This is then consolidated by us into a single overall report.
• Finally, with a Foviance Consultant attending the research sessions, we manage the research remotely, carefully, completing the analysis and preparing the report.

In essence we can conduct customer experience research anywhere; I have yet to be tasked with a location we could not reach. Equally importantly our business focused approach to customer experience research ensures that our global clients receive the insight they require into local markets as easily as if they conducted the research in the US or UK.