Multi-channel

Guy Stephens joins as senior consultant in social customer care, while Richard Sedley becomes commercial director, overseeing expansion of client development

London, UK –15 December, 2010 – Foviance, the UK’s leading customer experience consultancy and usability specialist, has appointed Guy Stephens as senior social customer care consultant, and Richard Sedley as commercial director. Both will be based at Foviance’s London headquarters.

Paul Blunden, CEO of Foviance said: “We’re delighted to have both Guy and Richard on our team here at Foviance. Both appointments are indicative of the company’s growing emphasis on providing more strategic value to all of our clients.”

In his new role as senior social customer care consultant at Foviance, Guy Stephens is already exploring how social media is changing the way companies and customers work and communicate with each other. Fundamental shifts in how customer service is provided over the last two years as a result of social media, are presenting businesses with a new and very different set of challenges. Guy will use his considerable experience and expertise in this field to ensure Foviance is able to help clients undergoing this transformation. Before joining Foviance, Guy was customer knowledge manager for The Carphone Warehouse where he began use of social media within customer service, primarily through Twitter, blogs, YouTube and Facebook.

As Foviance’s new commercial director, Richard Sedley will oversee the expansion of the company’s client development team as well as working to increase the value of the multi-channel services that Foviance already successfully delivers for its clients. Additionally, as course director for social media at the Chartered Institute of Marketing, Richard will ensure that Foviance clients are always best placed to take advantage of developments in the social web. Prior to joining Foviance Richard worked at cScape where he launched its Customer Engagement Unit, creating bespoke customer engagement strategies comprising audience research, metrics, analysis and segmentation, multi-channel engagement campaigns and communication optimisation.

Paul Blunden said: “Foviance is recognised as a leader in the field of customer experience consulting. Guy and Richard’s considerable experience of customer engagement and customer service within social media complements and extends our existing analytics, research and user experience skills to offer our clients an unrivalled customer service offering.”

For further information please contact:

Paul Blunden, CEO

Tel: +44 (0)8450 546 500
Fax: +44 (0)8450 546 501

Welcome to the latest edition of your Foviance newsletter.

This bumper edition looks back to the best of 2010 and makes a few predictions about 2011. In my own roundup I touch on some of the key themes Foviance and its customers have been focusing on recently – multi-channel experience, mobile usability, customer retention, social media, and the drip-effect from paper to digital ink.

Elsewhere in this final issue of the year, Carina looks back on the entertainment and insights we gained from World Usability Day 2010, Jamie looks forward to next year’s ICE gaming event, I talk more about the language of customer-centricity, and Neil points us all towards the latest multi-channel experience research from Foviance and Econsultancy.

If you enjoy this latest newsletter, you might also enjoy reading and commenting on some of our consultants’ thoughts and opinions on our regularly updated blog page.

I would be very interested to hear from you directly with any feedback.

Have a great holiday.

Paul Blunden, CEO, Foviance

In this issue:

Another year over, a new one just begun…

Communication key to World Usability Day fun

Speaking the language of customer centricity

Living and thriving in an experience economy

Gaming sector warms up for ICE 2011

In the last newsletter issue of the year, it has become a tradition to round up the events of the last twelve months as well as making a few predictions for the year ahead. It’s a useful process that provides an opportunity to take a step back from the business and evaluate how we have done and whether we are still on track. It is also an opportunity to test my assumptions about the market and to think about the trends we are seeing in our customers and whether we are ready to support them.

2010 seems to have been the year that mobile finally came of age, although I think a new term is needed – one that properly encapsulates what is really going on. Perhaps ‘new technology’ is a more inclusive way to think about it, as our work has shown that ‘mobile’ is too limited and remains lumbered with hand-held connotations. Now would be a good time to mention the iPad, and we certainly had fun with our iPad back in May, but I’m also thinking of the work we’ve done with utility companies around the use of smart-meters, and in the financial services sector with chip and pin.

2009 had witnessed a slowdown in the evolution of multi-channel customer experience due to the pressures of the recession and I had wondered whether it would receive greater attention in 2010. The good news for customers is that this certainly was the case, with plenty of research and events focussing heavily on multi-channel, and customers increasingly asking us about it. It is possible that a focus on customer retention spurred by the recession underlies this increased attention, but I also see a wider interest in customer centricity prevailing. The rise of social media has certainly had an influence here, and a professionalism of the discipline is starting to emerge.

Foviance’s own social media capability has greatly increased in 2010 with the arrival to the team of Guy Stephens and Richard Sedley.  Guy is expert at helping organisations leverage social media in their customer services departments and speaks and lectures widely on the subject. Richard is also extremely well known and even lectures for the Chartered Institute of Marketing, delivering its social media course. I fully expect that the Foviance social media proposition will evolve considerably next year, while in addition to customer service and social media strategy services we will also incorporate solid research and measurement.

So finally to 2011 and some predictions. Will it be the year the book and magazine dies? I wouldn’t go that far, but I think 2011, with the launch of various iPad lookalikes, will be the year when we start to work a little more paperless and make a mental leap from paper to digital ‘ink’. At least two of the magazines I carry in my bag each day are now available in iPad editions (although the subscription is for the printed version and the digital one comes free – when will they learn!). The ability to explore beyond the page is also exciting – I can certainly see myself commuting to work next December and not being surprised by all the people on the train and tube reading from handheld, digital devices.

Of course I will still be surprised if we arrive on time – some things technology seems unable to improve…

This article was written as part of the Foviance December 2010 newsletter

November has been a busy month for Foviance. We released our multi-channel customer experience research report in the first week of the month with a launch event at the Hospital Club in Covent Garden and were surprised to find we were sandwiched on the 3rd floor between Kim Cattrall on the 2nd and Stella McCartney on the 4th. Illustrious company indeed for what proved to be a very successful launch.

What should not have been a surprise, given the findings of the report, was how well attended the event was. Everyone I spoke to talked about the organisation they worked for struggling to get to grips with what they considered to be, a very complex problem. People attended from a range of organisations across the charity, telecoms, media, retail, travel and financial services sectors and all had or were starting to get to grips with how to deal with customers seamlessly across multiple channels. They spoke of challenges and barriers which were mirrored in our research and also supported the areas we have focussed on in the Foviance customer experience maturity model.

Our maturity model looks at the progress organisations are making across five important dimensions of customer experience. These are: leadership and culture; brand; customer insight; customer touch points; and systems and processes. Our work shows that if an organisation can capture these five areas in their roadmap, then they are likely to gain the business performance improvements they are searching for through the implementation of a multi-channel customer experience strategy.

In our research report, we also provided a definition of what the term ‘multi-channel customer experience’ means, as follows: ‘Multi-channel customer experience: the aggregated experience a customer has of a brand gained from all interactions across managed and unmanaged touch-points for the duration of that relationship.’

It is useful to work with a definition as it sets the boundaries for the subject area. Where multi-channel customer experience is concerned most people I speak to feel it is so big that it is hard even to find a start point. This is why for many people we suggest a simple touch-point audit to get started and to give them something tangible to work with, so that they might then consider their priorities and next steps.

The most encouraging outcome from the multi-channel research launch was that organisations on the whole are starting to focus on their customers and to talk the language of customer centricity. The term is still misunderstood but the motives are correct and that can only be a good thing. Clearly there is a long way to go, but with evidence becoming available that supports the business case, I see happy times ahead for all sorts of customer.

This article was written as part of the Foviance December 2010 newsletter

These days we live in an experience economy. Many organisations look to compete through some kind of service or product differentiated strategy rather than purely on price. But it’s a complex landscape – organisations have to work across multiple channels and deliver a joined up experience – across the web, the call centre, stores and other touch points. Consumers are no longer tolerant of organisations that don’t.

So how are businesses coping with the need to deliver a multi-channel, integrated customer experience? Well the evidence from a recent report conducted by Foviance in association with Econsultancy here in the UK, suggests that whilst organisations recognise that is something they need to do, they are a long way from delivering on that need.

The report is based on a survey of over 500 businesses. It conforms that the majority of organisations do recognise the link between business performance and customer experience but are struggling to develop a strategy for multi-channel customer experience management and then delivering on that strategy…

A more in-depth version of this article has  been republished with permission by ClickZ on the Foviance website if you’d like to read more. Also, please download your own copy of the Multi-channel Customer Experience Report today.

This article was written as part of the Foviance December 2010 newsletter

Sometimes I’m pretty spontaneous and buy stuff straight away after a single website visit (a single customer journey). Sometimes I prevaricate, make selections online, change my mind and leave, come back, add to basket, get distracted, check out another website, check my bank account, leave the website, a week later return and then finally buy something completely different from the high street store of the original company I was visiting the website of (a customer odyssey across both managed and unmanaged touch-points). Read more…

Stuck in horrendous traffic in London, I switched on ClassicFM thinking it would be soothing. It was, and after a while there was rather nice piece, which I thought I would want to listen to again. Of course I didn’t quite catch the name of it at the end, the presenter having rushed it somewhat. So I looked at the time and made a note to go to the website later to find out from their playlist (I assumed there would be a play list). Read more…

This article, written by Neil Mason, was originally published on Clickz.com on 23/11/10 and is republished here with permission.

In my last column  I talked about some of the challenges faced by organisations in developing a stronger multi-channel customer experience strategy based on a recent report published by Foviance in association with Econsultancy. I ended the article with the comment that “Data and insight are two of the greatest enablers to developing an improved customer experience. Organisations that invest in managing data across channels will be well-placed for success.” As statements go, this one definitely falls into the “easier said than done” category. There are many challenges in creating an integrated approach to data and insight in organisations that are organisational, cultural, and technical. Read more…