The experience of shopping with a tablet PC is much less satisfying than with your desktop computer. Although the iPad reinvented the tablet computer, unfortunately it appears that the actual surfing experience does not live up to expectations. In a survey of nearly 5,000 people undertaken by Foviance, a global Customer Experience consultancy, it’s clear that the customer experience of tablet computing is relatively poor – customers are up to 18% less happy with their tablet experience compared to their desktop PCs.

The study, which looked at what customers thought of customer experience in the retail, banking, travel and mobile phone markets in the 2nd Annual Customer Experience survey, commissioned by Foviance in association with Econsultancy.

Whilst companies are rushing to create apps on Apple, Android and Nokia stores it seems that they are not delivering for customers. The Apple store now has more than 200,000 apps, far more choice than the 40,000 products in a branch of Tesco but apps are not delivering the experience of their full-blown desktop cousins.

According to the survey, people are looking for efficient customer service (51%) and high-quality products (39%) at a low price (49%). Apps don’t appear to be robustly designed and have service issues. One customer, Muir MacDonald, explained that his new Skype app for iPad2 stopped working when he updated iTunes and he said “I delete a lot of apps that just don’t work as suppliers tend to ignore complaints and don’t fix them”.

Foviance also surveyed 650 companies and asked them about their commitment to customer experience. Only 10% felt that apps were ‘integrated’ with their overall customer experience, as compared to 48% with their website experience.

Companies are also failing to keep pace with the changes in technology. 40% of companies said that the major barrier to improving customer experience was ‘complexity of customer experience’.

Other findings:

1. In general, people seem to be fairly happy with their customer experience, for example, 87% of people thought their overall retailing experience was good or excellent
2. 69% of people will recommend a company based on a good customer experience
3. Customers are increasingly moving online, however, the face to face experience is still important, with the call centres and brochure being relegated to less important ways of buying
4. Mobile customer experiences are generally weaker – even if you’re a mobile phone company!

Download the report from the Foviance website

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

The impact of poor experiences on customer attraction, retention and cross-buying has been well documented over the past decades. But today, more than ever, ‘Customer Experience’ has become the hot topic in business circles.

In a recent (June 2010) Foviance / Econsultancy survey, 92% of businesses said their organisation recognised a link between long-term business performance and customer experience – two thirds reporting a strong link . So what makes customer experience so relevant today?

To download the whitepaper a valid e-mail address is required, however Foviance will not contact you unless you specifically request it.

Alfred Dunhill, the mens luxury retailer identified that their online channel is increasingly important not just as a direct sales channel but also as way to create more engagement with its customers.

As part of their ongoing development of their site, Alfred Dunhill commissioned Foviance to undertake some independent research of its online audience to gather quantitative data on what visitors thought of the current customer experience. This would help them identify strengths and weaknesses of their main site and start to build a much richer idea of what their online audience wanted from an Alfred Dunhill site.

Methodology

Foviance developed an opt-in survey from the Alfred Dunhill homepage that recruited visitors with specific objectives for visiting the site. They then completed their journey and were asked a series of questions once they had completed their intended goal.

The survey was launched during the busy run-up to Christmas and was live throughout the festive period itself to capitalise on the increased traffic rates. In addition the exposure rate of the survey was controlled so that is was unlikely someone returning to the site that had declined to participate in the past would be shown the participation message again on the homepage.

Results

Over 200 responses were gained throughout the duration that the survey was live. Overall over 84% respondents said they would visit the site again and a net promoter score benchmark was captured. The survey captured user feedback on the look and feel of the site and allowed Alfred Dunhill to see if these were inline with its brand guidelines. In addition it highlighted several areas where the site could be improved. This has helped develop the business case for additional development work. Alfred Dunhill intend to use this methodology again at regular intervals to help measure site performance and get regular customer feedback as the site develops and grows.

JUMP 2010 will focus on how we can make our marketing more effective by having a joined up approach.

Foviance’s Paul Blunden will be presenting research findings on the Multi-channel user experience.

Gordon Brown’s recent leetspeek (mp3 podcast) leading up to the Global Investment Conference (GIC) has sparked renewed calls for tax breaks for the UK computer gaming industry. The PM stated that the UK games industry was “the most important in Europe”, and that UK developers are “by far the biggest producers of computer games in Europe”, going on to promise that there would be “new commitments of investment off the back of [the GIC] conference”. Interesting words, encouraging perhaps for some, but is it just more talk? Considering The Digital Britain report was full of high praise for the industry but so far has yielded few tangible initiatives, and a previous request from the industry for tax breaks failed to get a mention in the Chancellor’s December 2009 pre-Budget report, one could be forgiven for (quite skeptically) thinking “the cake is a lie”.

Thankfully, the industry has its very own Super Mario in Tom Watson, Labour MP for West Bromwich East. Watson, known for his advocacy of the local gaming industry, set up a Facebook group called Gamers’ Voice which attracted 15,000 members in it’s first two weeks. More recently, he has taken the PM at his word by tabling an Early Day Motion (EDM) calling on the Government to implement a tax break for game production in this year’s budget. In an interview with gamebiz.com, he describes how he gathered support from “Labour, the Lib Dems, the Tories and the SNP to support a motion calling on the Chancellor of the Exchequer to introduce tax relief for the video games industry”. Read the full interview at gamesbiz.

The pressure is on the Government to act, with an election looming and an electorate jaded with pretty words and empty promises. The Tory Shadow Arts minister, Ed Vaizey made similar noises at the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts event ‘Playing the Game’, saying his party would “look seriously” at support for the industry should they get in this May. Typically though, this was tempered with warnings that nothing may be possible if they were to inherit an economic mess…which, sadly, seems fairly likely.

The UK currently leads the way in revenue from game sales (£3.3billion in 2009) despite a 20% dip during the recession. But other European countries such as Germany, Portugal, Sweden and The Netherlands weathered the recession far better with software sales staying fairly constant or even increasing, and the gap is narrowing. Clearly the Government relishes the revenue which the gaming industry brings in and are making all the right noises about support, but the economic crisis cut deep and all rational economic models say that the worst way to pay off a deficit is with tax cuts. So from where will the quid pro quo come? Is this simply a case of “You scratch my back, I’ll pat you on yours”? Or perhaps more accurately, “You scratch my back, and I’ll treat you like a cash cow and do nothing while you hemorrhage talent to Canada and the USA”.

Facebook turned six recently and celebrated the milestone by giving its homepage yet another makeover, this time to “improve navigation to and discovery of commonly used features”. Six years is a long time on the interweb but, even still, Facebook has made impressive and significant gains in that time. It currently sits at number four on the list of biggest names on the web (behind Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, respectively) and with over 350 million users (and growing fast) it is poised to very soon become number three. It’s become the “face”, as it were, of the social media space, if not the brain. Facebook is sitting on a veritable gold mine of highly detailed and often intensely personal information about its users; things they would never dream of telling anyone but their closest confidants, let alone a market researcher, making Facebook a veritable marketer’s wet dream. But much like war, “woah woah woah, what is it good for?” What do users actually “use” Facebook for?

Marketers claim to be reaping the benefits, as evidenced by the explosion of ads in Facebook recently, but is it to users’ benefit or their detriment? What are We getting out of the bargain? Is it enriching our lives or just making it easier to sell us stuff? Where social media succeeds over other media is by convincing its users to do the advertiser’s work for them. Every time we click a link or join a group, we might think we’re engaging in solidarity (support single sex marriage) or activism (RATM for Xmas No.1) or showing off our pop culture cred (Invader Zim), but what we are really doing is posting ads in our friends’ news feeds and sharing ads with them. As Facebook UK’s Commercial Director, Stephen Haines, puts it: [P]otential customers can directly engage with your business by clicking on the “Become a Fan” link or the “RSVP to this Event” link…this action automatically creates a story on the person’s profile page and possibly in their friends’ home page “Highlights”, generating free distribution for you.” Facebook “fan” pages are never going to replace a corporate presence on the web, but social media offers an interesting way for marketers to gather data on users’ opinions, behaviours and preferences by allowing them to consciously identify themselves with brands they like without ever feeling like a corporate stooge. And chances are they’re spending a flip of a lot more time on Facebook than they are on the corporate site. Marketers know this and they get it, but I’m not sure users do. The distinction for users is that they’re not part of a brand, they’re part of a community which identifies with that brand…but for all intents and purposes it’s an online focus group.

Similarly, market researchers are getting in on the action with Facebook Polling. Next time you click on one of those seemingly innoculous polls at your friend’s behest, thinking you’ll get to see how closely your opinion ranks against your cyber-buddies, you’ll effectively be clicking on a banner ad. You’ll also be giving the marketer who paid USD$50 to set it up the poll a candid view of your opinions, behaviours and preferences in context with the 99 other people who clicked it in your geographic region. Ray Pointer of Virtual Surveys told utalkmarketing.com: “These polls are clearly not going to replace U&A or ad-trackers, but they could spawn new ways of working. Traditionally, we have expected everything to be designed before the research begins, but often the basic assumptions were wrong.” Any one else reminded of the opening lines of HG Well’s War of the Worlds?

“No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.”

I wouldn’t go so far as admit to the intelligectual superiority of our marketing bretheren, but they sure are some clever people.

 In the UK, Econsultancy has released their latest overview of the Web Analytics market and there are some interesting findings and trends that I’m sure are being replicated in other parts of the world. It also highlights though that in some areas that there is still a lot of progress to be made.

One of the findings that immediately caught my way was that “UK plc” is spending 12% more on web analytics in 2009 compared to 2008. So despite the trading conditions the market continues to grow and investment levels are rising. But of more interest was the way that that money is money spent. Accosting to Econsultancy’s research more companies are spending more of that money on internal staff than on the technology itself. At last! The figures showed that the proportion of the total investment in staff had gone from an average of 36% in 2008 to 42% in 2009 compared with a spend of 38% of the budget on the technology. Spend on consulting and other services remained steady at around 18% of the web analytics budget. OK, it’s still a long way from Avinash Kausisk’s famous 10/90 rule he proposed over 3 years ago. Kaushik argued that organisations are spending $10 on their technology, then they should be spending $90 in “intelligent resources and analysts”. I also thought it was a great point as often I’ve seen organisations implement expensive measurement technology without putting in any resources in terms of people to extract the value from the investment in that technology. The result is usually disappointment and dissatisfaction with the return the organisation is getting from their investment.

So from the investment perspective, things are looking up and this trend has undoubtedly been helped by the increased use of free measurement tools such as Google Analytics. Nearly a quarter of organisations in Econsultancy’s research claim to use Google Analytics and no other web analytics tool. The signs are also that people are using it more frequently but I do worry at times about the quality of the data that is being reported and as I wrote in my last column organisations need to ensure that they concentrate on getting good quality data to work with by following some simple processes. Just because the technology is free, it doesn’t mean that you don’t need to invest in it in terms of time and effort to get the right numbers right.

One of the more worrying statistics in the report was the fact that less than one in five companies claimed to have a measurement strategy that was tied to their business objectives. Admittedly 60% of organisations said they were working on it but the number actually claiming to have implemented a coherent measurement strategy is worryingly low. I’ve written before about a simple framework to creating a roadmap that links objectives to metrics. It’s interesting to note from this report though how many organisations still implement measurement technologies first and then worry about the business impact of what they want to measure second. In some ways I can understand this. Organisations know that they need to measure more effectively the effect of their marketing activities and therefore know they need measurement systems to do that. However, the tendency to implement the technology in the hope that it fixes the problems without thinking about the problems that need fixing can still be seen.

The other worrying statistic that came out of this report is the fact that only 23% of respondents said that their web analytics definitely provided actionable insights. Why is that I wonder? Is it because the right things aren’t being measured in the right way or is it because companies can action the insights that they get from the data? Having actionable insights requires both the right data and the ability to execute on the data.

So I think the results from the Econsultancy report on the state of web analytics in the UK are a bit of a mixed bag. There are some good signs in terms of the way money is being invested but the worrying aspect is that it still often done in isolation of the main business objectives. As my teachers used to say on my reports “Could do better”…

Foviance runs Google Analytics training, check here for our next training date.

I’m increasingly convinced that the issues that most businesses face around the successful deployment of analytics in their business are not to do with their technologies but to do with their businesses processes. That view was reinforced this week when I was running a workshop with a group of students studying on a Masters Programme in Internet Retailing.

As part of the session I asked the class what they thought some of the key ingredients were in executing successful internet optimisation. They started off by throwing out items like “good data”, and “technology”, and then moved on with things like “flexibility”, “willingness to fail”, “good hypotheses”, “risk culture” and “strong business model”. I then asked the class how many of them worked in organisations that had those characteristics. No hands went up.

Often organisations are happy to spend money on new campaigns or large scale product development on their site without thinking or being explicitly clear about how they are going to measure the effectiveness of the campaign or the new piece of functionality. So how do they know that they have done a good job? The measurement piece also needs to be built into the campaign or product development process as well. Here is a simple framework to use as part of that process.

• State the objectives
• Define the success indicators or KPIs
• Perform a gap analysis
• Create the measurement roadmap

State the objectives

Before you start, be very clear about what you are trying to achieve. State your objectives and make sure that they are not what I call “marshmallow objectives”. Marshmallow objectives are ones that are soft and squidgy. They are not firm and they don’t hold up to scrutiny. These objectives are difficult to measure. People often talk about making objectives “SMART Objectives”. SMART objectives are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time bound. You should try and make your objectives as SMART as possible. If you come up with objectives like “to improve the user experience”, force yourself to be Smarter and ask yourself questions like: “why?”, “which users?”, “in what way?”, “by when?”

Define the success indicators or KPIs

Next define the measures of success or the Key Performance Indicators. These should relate directly back to the objectives. If the objectives are SMART then the definition of the success metrics should be relatively straight forward. Constantly ask yourself “What does good look like?”. If your are achieving your objectives, what will be happening in the business or on your site? Sometimes it can be difficult to measure objectives directly with significant cost (see below) then you may need to come up with other success metrics that are indirect measures of success.

Perform a gap analysis

Once you know what it is you want to measure, perform and analysis of what you can measure now versus what it is that you ideally want to measure. Where are the gaps? Do you have the right measurements systems in place already and are they configured the right way? For example, f you want to improve likelihood of someone booking a holiday once they have done the research on the site, you might set up a success metrics that is something about visitors propensity to book at a later date. You may need a survey in place to be able to measure one. So do you need to set up a survey from scratch or do you just need to ask a specific question on an existing Voice of the Customer programme?

Create the measurement roadmap

The final stage is to create the measurement roadmap. This is effectively the plan of how you are going to measure the things that you need to measure, or as I like to say, “Count the things that count”. A key part of this is prioritising the work that needs to be done, being clear which gaps you are going to plug in your measurement systems and then how that work is going to get done. This could range from just ensuring that there is a specific custom report developed through to the implementation of a new piece of software or the adoption of a new service.

The process I have outlined can take days to complete or it might just take a matter of minutes. It might be a very strategic piece of work looking at the business overall or it might be quite tactical, for example running an A/B test on a landing page. Whichever it is, it’s a way of putting measurement and analytics at the heart of your business processes. So anytime you’re planning to do something, ask yourself (or your colleagues): What does good look like? How will we know we’ve done a good job?