International Customer Experience

 By Clare Mitchell Crow

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’…

In addition to international customer experience testing for websites and ecommerce stores, Foviance is also involved with global projects that evaluate the suitability of and reactions to products across multiple regions.

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