International

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…

As geographically separate regions of the earth are brought ever closer together by the pervasiveness of the World Wide Web, it is only natural that businesses attempt to extend their reach beyond national boundaries via their online presence.

However, ‘internationalising’ a site is a far more involved process than merely translating it, and without intelligent international research with native users, it is not possible to truly localise a site. Read more…

Several years ago, I was involved in an international project that focussed on security when using mobile devices and how trust could be enabled in users. At that time, very few users were accessing the mobile internet on a regular basis and consequently, it was very difficult for them to envisage the dangers posed by hackers, malware and unauthorised access to both personal and business data stored on their mobile device.Things have changed since then in terms of mobile internet usage as a boom seems imminent, fuelled by the rise of 3G, smartphones and affordable data package tariffs. Indeed, all around us smartphones are becoming ubiquitous with a spike in smartphone adoption predicted as users come out of contracts and seek a better deal for their money. 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.

I am finally on the last leg of my usability tour of Asia having reached Japan. Japan is an amazing country with great people but I have really struggled with going into shops, ordering food and generally moving around the place as everything is written in Japanese (not surprisingly as I am in Japan!) Read more…