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…?!

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

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.

Our plan is a fairly simple one. Foviance is pretty good at international work and as a result we do a lot of it, mostly for western clients that want to test things in Asia. As a result we have gained quite a bit of knowledge and a fair few relationships in the Chinese market. If we could also generate some business in the local market for Chinese companies looking to market to the west, we should have a nice little business plan. Sounds simple doesn’t it? I thought so and yet the planning has taken nearly 18 months and we are only just ready now.

Initially we are focusing our efforts on core user experience services in web and mobile, which is where we believe the largest initial opportunity is. Usability is a growing discipline in China with a large and expanding UPA membership and an ever-increasing acceptance of the benefits. If everything I have read about the Chinese market is true, I believe that we will soon be providing our measurement strategy, customer insight and strategic customer experience capabilities. Initially though, we are staying focused to ensure we keep a handle on the quality of delivery and the market differences.

We know there will be plenty to learn. We have experienced the differences first hand testing various web and mobile services in China for western clients. There are differences in the way people use devices and the web of course but most startling are the cultural variations. It is little wonder that the field of usability is dominated by behavioural psychologists given the need to match interaction design with user behaviour.

International culture differences will add a completely new dimension to the work we conduct developing personas to help organisations design with their audience in mind. Some years ago we carried out work for a gaming company that was looking to launch a Mandarin website. One of the most surprising findings was that there was no translation for ‘lucky dip’. The term simply doesn’t exist and is a perfect illustration of the challenges western organisations face going to China. The reverse is true of course for Chinese businesses wishing to market their services in the west.

In the Star Wars film ‘The Empire Strike Back’, the character Yoda tells Luke Skywalker after he has tried and failed to move an impossibly heavy object (his space ship), “Try not. Do, or do not. There is no try”. I think his point was that if you approach something in a half-hearted way you stand a fairly good chance of failing. At Foviance we trust that our planning and steady execution will enable us to be successful in China but we are not naïve. It will be hard and we will have some success and some failure, but we will do it, because we believe it is important to the future of Foviance.

This article was written as part of our February newsletter

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.

Of course there are also numerous challenges involved, not least the logistics of recruiting a panel provider that can operate successfully in the desired region. In most countries this isn’t a problem, but in some it does tend to take a little more time and effort – notably Indonesia, Kenya and strangely enough, Foviance’s latest locality, Singapore. Determining and recruiting the right type of respondent can be tricky. A particular type of user or segment will have differing criteria and often, screening questions must be country-specific. When recruiting segments defined by the client, screening questions should be adapted to suit the differences between countries.

Is it possible to recruit an English-speaking panel? In some countries such as USA and Australia, there shouldn’t be much of a problem, but what about countries like France? It’s certainly possible to define an English speaking panel in a non-English speaking country but this has a cost implication as these people are more difficult to recruit. This cost may be offset if there are a number of free-text entry fields as there is no necessity to have comments translated. In addition, there would be no cost for translation both for the survey script and the verbatim comments. In some regions such as India, many different languages and dialects are spoken and English is often the ‘lingua franca’ that allows all the people to have a voice. Of course, there are disadvantages of using English speakers as they would most likely have a high level of education and a higher social economic status. They may also work for a multi-national country and so be more ‘western’, or they may be urbanites (rural communities in many countries may not take part due to the unavailability of a computer).

When it is deemed necessary to use a local language for the survey, original questions must firstly be translated. This may sound easy but it can often prove problematic due to the quality and nuance of the translation. A translator must be trusted to deliver exactly what you need.

More often than not, an English person who is fluent in another language will not be able to conduct a translation in a meaningful way. They may not be aware of the everyday (as opposed to the academic) translations for certain sentences and terms. It can prove to be very off-putting providing opinions to a non-national who seemingly hasn’t bothered to ask you properly. Also, they may not be aware of the translations for technical terms such as ‘battery-life’, jacks, HDMI and so on. Also, from a more practical point of view, translations of an English sentence which fits very well into the survey design will often be too long when translated into a language such as Russian. A conversation with the translator is then required so that a better sentence can be constructed.

Screening by socioeconomic status might simply not be possible in some countries in which those people in the lower categories do not prove literate either in English or in their own language. It is always necessary to consider from the outset whether it is feasible to fulfil certain screening criteria in particular countries of interest. For instance, in areas of India, smartphone and laptop usage will not be prevalent in those aged 55+ but will be more representative (and consequently, more weighted) for those in a younger age bracket e.g. 25-34.

With experience and endeavour, excellent results can be gleaned from international surveys. I usually split survey results in four ways:  by overall results, by region, by age and by gender. I don’t generally drill down deeper than this, by region then by age for instance, unless something really interesting crops up in the data. To give you an example, in one survey I conducted there were some really strange results within the USA. On further inspection, over 70% of responses had come from those aged 65+, providing a very biased view on mobile phone usage. To restore balance we had to re-recruit those in the younger age ranges and weight the responses appropriately so that all ages were represented equally. It just goes to show the trust you have to place in your panel provider.

Organising, conducting and analysing the results from international surveys can be a time-consuming but very enlightening process. It genuinely brings to the fore the often stark differences in attitude, usually between Western and non-Western countries, towards modern devices like smartphones as well as emerging technologies.

This article was written as part of our February newsletter

Originally written by Amanda Roach

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.

And are you finding many differences in the way the US market thinks about digital marketing?

Yes and no. I think the perception is that the US is 18 months ahead of the UK, and in some ways that’s true, certainly the levels of internet penetration and broadband penetration happened in the US at a kind of mass level before they happened in the UK. The whole social media thing, again I think, probably happened there earlier. Equally a lot of all the core technology, the Googles and the Microsofts of this world, are still all based in the States really, so part of the reason for having an office in the States is to try and get that on the ground insight into what’s happening at the cutting edge in terms of innovation. But more broadly than that, I don’t think it’s really that different to the UK market in terms of key developments. One of the things we’re finding an interesting challenge is that our site apparently “feels quite British”, which is interesting, even if you change ‘s’ to ‘z’ and things like that…

Have you got plans to go further afield, Asia perhaps?

Yes, we already have a global traffic base and indeed a global customer base. It is English language because we only have our content in English at the moment, but for example India is our third largest source of traffic, although we don’t have an awful lot of paying customers from India because the price is prohibitively high because it’s priced according to the sterling rate. We’re just about to launch pricing at a country level, so for India, for example, we can experiment with charging less in order to see if we can then get an uptake in the number of paying members. We’ll see.

The Usability and Accessibility Buyer’s Guide – you’ve renamed it this year to the User Experience Buyer’s Guide, I just wondered what was behind that change?

Due to the semantics of our industry we now talk about digital marketing, it always used to be online marketing. In the States I think they seem to call it internet marketing or online marketing, but they don’t call it digital marketing. I think in the case of digital marketing, presumably it’s because it happens not just on line, but also on phones, TVs, everywhere. Probably a more accurate description would be something like ‘interactive marketing’, but the particular reason behind the change from the Usability and Accessibility Buyer’s Guide to User Experience Buyer’s Guide is, I suppose, part of the journey. Maybe four or five years ago, usability in itself was an evolution from academic HCI, human computer interaction. It was slightly dry, and had a ‘researchy’ kind of feel, but actually what we were talking about was involved with interactions ,with customers as very much a business, commercial, experiential thing, and therefore HCI didn’t really do that justice. To the same degree, even usability now feels like it’s obviously a specific discipline and set of skills which is perfectly valid, but risks sounding a little bit too dry to encompass the kind of richness that a word like ‘experience’ encapsulates.

What else are you seeing in your travels to the US or in the UK that excites you at the moment?

Some of the things which are quite interesting at the moment are new business models. Things like Kiva, which is that sort of microfinancing idea, for example. Combining the global social nature of the internet to allow in this case financing to happen in a way that it couldn’t possibly otherwise have done. Also Zopa, person-to-person lending, is an interesting concept. So yes, I’m excited by the interesting and innovative business models which are coming out. Experiential things too. An mobile, and the new iPhone of course, are also obviously pretty impressive. I think it’s a bit like the advent of broadband, that once you have these innovations to hand, there’s no going back.

Thank you Ashley for taking the time to speak to us. The full podcast is now available for download from the Foviance website.

Back to October Newsletter

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: Download audio file (ashley_friedlein_on_customer_experience.mp3)

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.

Hi Jason. Can you tell us a bit about yourself?

I’m originally from Brisbane, Australia, but I’ve been in greater China for the last 15 years. At Millward Brown, most of the work we do is helping our clients with their brand and communication strategies, predominantly in mainland China but also in Greater China, which includes Hong Kong and Taiwan.

I’ve heard differing stories of how digital plays a role in Asia: everybody uses mobile, nobody uses computers and all sorts of crazy ideas.

I can really only answer for China, because it’s very different across the Asia Pacific region.

Technology adoption in China has picked up and accelerated phenomenally in the last ten years or so. But it’s not so much blogging that’s big here, nor Twittering, and it’s not so much social networking in the sense that Facebook is a social network forum. What’s different about China is that when people go online here, their main activity is to go onto bulletin boards (BBS). It’s something I remember from 20 years ago when I had my first modem.

Bulletin boards are culturally and socially ideal for people in China using the internet. You can log on anonymously and have your say and air your complaints and participate in a dialogue with other web users about controversial issues. That’s something people are not able to do in real life.

What impact does the use of bulletin boards have on brands?

It’s very, very easy for a brand to make a small mistake and then have that mistake magnified by the level of discussion that goes online. Mercedes Benz about eight years ago had an issue with one of its customers. A dealership apparently didn’t want to take a car back and so the customer set up some cameras and took photos of himself bashing his Mercedes Benz to smithereens with a sledgehammer, and then published that online. Then other people started talking about the issues they’d had with Mercedes Benz, especially the after-sales service. Mercedes Benz, to their credit, responded quickly and staunched the level of discontent that was being displayed online. I think Ford have had some oil pump issues with the Ford Focus. It was only after Ford themselves were trawling and scanning what was being said online that they were able identify this as a significant issue and then address it.

Is e-commerce playing much of a role in China?

I don’t think there’s many retailers that have independently tried to capitalise on e-commerce in China, or been successful at it. Certainly not as much as you might see in the US or in Europe.

There’s a company here called Taobao, which started off as a B to B forum for people looking for components for machinery or manufacturing, and things like that. Recently they have moved much more towards the business to consumer model.

When people here buy their houses, they basically buy an empty concrete box, and then it’s up to them to go out and renovate that and put in all the toilet fixtures and the kitchen fixtures. Now people will join websites like Taobao and engage in group buying using the bulletin boards. Everyone gets together on this third party website and then goes and bulk-buys from a particular supplier to get a better deal. That sort of thing is very successful here.

What is your prediction for digital marketing in China?

Most of our clients still devote a single-digit percentage of their communications budgets to digital. I’m expecting this will grow exponentially in the next two to three years, especially as the price of advertising in China will become exorbitant, really. I think a lot of clients are being forced into a situation where they would like to look at digital as a more cost-effective platform, and then once people are forced to use that platform a little bit more, that’s when I think you’ll see the creativity and real maturity start to develop.

Thank you Jason for taking the time to speak to us. The full podcast will be available for download from the Foviance website soon.

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.

When Foviance is tasked with conducting international customer experience testing, we are usually responding to a client’s natural concerns over the different languages and linguistics, commercial practices, or aesthetic preferences customers might have in the different regions around the world in which they wish to operate commercially.

While scoping or developing interest for their brand in new markets, global companies will nearly always consider developing e-commerce before any other channel. Understandably, online payments preferences that secure sales are usually one of the very first considerations. Consumers and businesses around the world often have varying conventions when using payments systems, and you don’t have to travel far to find significant cultural differences. In the UK on the whole, we are happy to enter personal details into secure websites, and so credit cards have become the norm. A short hop to Romania though sees cash on delivery as the usual method of online payment, while in Germany bank transfers are still common place, and some of the very biggest German brands continue to run thriving catalogue stores, with their website acting as only a front door.

Something as seemingly straightforward as filling in address details can quickly provide customers in some regions with unsurpassable problems if they are expected to use generic ‘international’ websites. Many countries have no concept of postcodes or zip codes, for example, while others have developed convenient methods of putting entire addresses on a single line. If a business adopts a ‘standard’ payment screen and doesn’t see any value in localisation, it’s inevitable that it will lose a large percentage, if not all, sales from some regions. Even if this is changed at a later date, that decision to initially ignore local practices can inevitably lower trust and brand expectations for years and affect returning custom.

Of course customers in some countries actually assume that businesses will ask them for a lot more information. How would you feel if a UK mobile phone company asked for your National Insurance number, for example? It’s a common practice in Romania, and consumers in this country might even lose trust not to be asked such a level of information.

We find that another invaluable way to engender trust in potential customers is to ensure all online content is translated by someone who lives and deals with businesses in each region. A UK or US citizen may have fantastic academic Spanish, but that doesn’t mean that their skills would be appropriate in a Mexican, Puerto Rican or even Spanish sales environment. I recall one example when an excellent Polish speaker from the UK found their translation ridiculed by local Polish focus groups because of an extreme formality in their style that just wasn’t suitable for the casual nature of the website. The site required a different tone, that was understood by the target market – local Polish speakers.

When developing expansion plans, some companies are unsure whether to launch the full offering of their core site in the new markets, or to develop slimmed down versions. Will local customers be annoyed that they don’t have access to a company’s full stock, or will there be demand for more? The only answer in these circumstances is for those companies to do their research and to make sure, rather than make assumptions. Look at the uptake of social networking among children, for example. It’s not at all unusual for kids in the UK to have phones, email addresses and online community logins at ages as young as 11, but businesses cannot simply assume that this is acceptable in other countries. Whatever the market, companies must develop the right online environments for the right regions if they want to produce successful sites.

You’d be surprised to hear some of the diverse considerations people have in the many countries in which Foviance and its partners conduct experience testing. What about something as fundamental as a URL for example? Sure, consumers in some countries prefer to trust a local URL suffix, but others feel safer with a .com, while still other countries may have restrictions on registering local URLs dependent on demonstrable local investment. Nothing, not even a website address, should go without some analysis. Pictures, graphics, colours even – some are perceived to be the right fit for products in some markets but not in others. Does a red and yellow banner promise value or just look cheap?

Ultimately, international user testing is all about caring enough about local customers to establish brands soundly and develop the best environments possible in which to encourage repeat business, sales conversion and site stickiness. There’s little point getting the marketing push right if the customer experience is impractical or simply engenders the wrong reaction. Global brands encountering some of the pitfalls discussed, soon see the economic effects through analytics, site traffic numbers and sales figures. We would never recommend that even the strongest brands extend their reach until they have conducted thorough local research with a team of customer experience experts.

If you’re still in doubt, let me remind you of Travelocity’s first attempt to launch in France with no local research. When the numbers failed to add up, the company finally asked local focus groups for a reason why this might be so. It turned out that customers just couldn’t get past the ‘local’ translation of the company’s name – Travelo. French consumers were apparently put off by the idea of booking their holiday through a ‘Drag queen’…

Our global examination of the varying regional customer experiences with netbooks is a great example of what can be achieved, and avoided, with thorough usability testing. Netbooks are compact, portable laptop computers designed primarily to power web browsing, electronic messaging and wireless communications. They are extremely desirable objects, especially when coveted from afar, but as we discovered, the actual user experience of these devices varies wildly depending on the country the consumer comes from.

I was part of team tasked with evaluating four different brands of netbook with end users in the UK, US and Japan. We allowed each group of individuals to gain an initial impression of the devices, by providing them with the level of look and feel insight you might gain in a shop environment. Following this introduction, we then allowed our international test groups to get to grips with the netbooks so that they could evaluate usability through a series of tasks. The idea was to see how likely they were to buy a netbook before and after assessing their practicality. By the end of the testing, a clear picture emerged that on the whole, netbook usability doesn’t live up to initial impressions.

Keyboard entry proved a problem in Japan in particular, where users were completely turned off by the idea of netbooks in just an hour and a half. Of course different cultures had different impressions, depending on their country’s level of design centricity and emphasis on usability. Our Japanese testers enjoyed the modern slick looks but found the devices unusable, whereas our US group thought the devices worked okay but didn’t like the fingerprints left on the shiny surfaces.

This close-up and personal testing is logistically hard to perform. We used our usability partners to ensure we had two testers with each individual, monitoring reactions and engaging with the testers on a personal level. We needed to buy each product locally to ensure language and layout compatibility of keyboards and screens, and we had to rely on the knowledge of local agencies to recruit from the most appropriate customer segments. At all times we tried to make the testing interactive and fun, allowing testers to sit down, pick the things up, use them as they would hope to in their own lives, and role-play. We found the most effective testing embraced a combination of ethnography and lab testing, whereby testers may not have been in their own environment, but were certainly at ease.

As a result, our manufacturer clients were blown away by the results, and were stunned by the dramatic swings in opinion before and after usage – particular with regards our Japanese group. These testers simply couldn’t get used to the keyboard, which made Japanese style data entry – focused largely around the enter key – feel clumsy, slow and impractical. It was a critical issue that our manufacturers hadn’t really considered at all.

Our product testing unlocks problems arising from cultural or regional differences and makes them transparent to vendors and designers. We provide a level of expert local insight in diverse markets that manufacturers simply can’t replicate adequately themselves. With our help, clients can re-evaluate products so that they fully live up to user expectations in different countries around the world and secure the sales returns that the core technology truly deserves. Companies that invest in their customers, inevitably reap the greatest cultural and economic rewards.

Originally written by Amanda Roach