User Experience

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

NMA Live will be introduced by Foviance’s Head of Gaming User Experience, Mariana Da Silva – From usability to user experience. What user-centred techniques can bring to businesses.

User experience is the evolution of usability. Adopting a user-centred approach has moved on from making web sites easier to use and become a crucial part of understanding customer behaviour and developing digital strategy. The NMA Live event will look at the benefits of adopting a user-centric approach and how to go about doing so.

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…

This article, written by Neil Mason, was originally published on Clickz.com on 09/11/10 and is republished here with permission.

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 compete on price. But these days 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 recognise them across these various touch points and are better equipped than ever before to drop something about it when things aren’t right. Read more…

I have owned an espresso machine for close to 10 years now, and until recently did not find the ordering process for capsules that tedious. However this has now changed, in part due sto a site redesign (gone wrong, in my opinion) to the point where when my machine finally clonks out, I will be getting a Lavazza.

The other day, when landing on the nespresso.com website, I was greeted by a large “welcome to your new website” banner. Well, to start with it’s not my website, it’s Nespresso’s. And although the photos are extremely high quality (the coffee cup here for example  the back-lit look and fade out when mousing over the selection at the bottom is not great – the whole site is quite dark too. But, let’s get over it and try to order some capsules, the reason I was there in the first place. Read more…

Marketers and product development executives in businesses with both offline and digital channels face a difficult problem – how can they reconcile two or more different customer descriptions? Customer profiles derived by market segmentation will differ from the user profiles produced by digital teams, since they are drawn from different sources and have a different purpose. Yet it is vital that this gap between marketing and design descriptions be bridged. At stake is the creation of a design tool that is grounded in market reality (as are the quantitative, somewhat abstract segmentation derived profiles) and yet granular enough (as is richly descriptive, qualitative user research) to inform designers of user needs when interacting at a touch-point.

Personas are fictional characters that communicate the primary characteristics of groups of users to enable businesses to design better user experiences for customers at all touch-points – an essential requirement in the modern business environment. Traditionally, personas distil large amounts of qualitative data into a more usable, representative character – a typical or archetypal user – that all stakeholders across a company can relate to more easily. Ideally they are created at the beginning of any design process. They ensure that all members of a development team understand their target users and work towards the same objectives – satisfying their requirements in order to create a great user experience.

Of course personas can have issues of their own. If they are developed with no reference to real customer data, for example, they can be hard to defend when bottom-line driven decisions have to be made around features. They also run the risk of being oversimplified and compromised by senior executives’ personal preferences. The more ‘real’ personas are therefore, the more believable and effective: so it is truly very important to use the right data to create them. In fact some recent academic research has been exploring the use of statistical methods applied to traditional quantitative and qualitative user research (including ethnography and contextual research) to develop personas.

At Foviance we believe that segmented personas are key to bridging the divide between marketing and design. In combination with more traditional qualitative research sources, including ethnography, segmented personas can be built to act as a reference for designs across businesses, supporting operational alignment on customer-focus.

We go one step beyond our expertise in developing traditional personas: we also select and incorporate rich segmentation data into the persona development process. This results in strong, believable personas that also truly represent our clients’ key segments. We also create visual representations to help our clients’ key stakeholders keep their main users top of mind. In a multi-channel, customer-centric world, segmented personas reconcile marketing and digital channel customer profiles while supporting the growth of businesses as customer-centric businesses, committed to improving and enhancing customer experience across all touch-points.

This article was written as part of the Foviance October Newsletter

By Lis Shorten

It didn’t occur to me until recently that a blind person would even contemplate using an iPhone. After all, it’s a touchscreen interface that requires interaction between a finger and an onscreen image and lacks any sort of tactile or sensory feedback.

If I turn my phone off, then close my eyes and try to turn it back on, I fail at the first hurdle (slide to unlock). Even though I’ve turned my phone on hundreds, possibly thousands of times, with my eyes closed I never seem to get my thumb in the right place to accurately swipe the slider. Read more…

As User Experience consultant I often recommend, if it is appropriate, that a website promotes a richer browsing experience by enabling users to customise certain areas of the website, for example the homepage, user account pages etc. The main argument is that customisation can encourage repeat visits (as well as gathering lots of lovely customer data for the website provider). This is because the user feels a sense of ownership by choosing factors such as layout and appearance. In addition where appropriate, users love the option of being able to prioritise what content they either receive in their e-mail inboxes or what they view when visiting a website. To further the argument, allowing customisation creates a website that is constantly changing, fresh and a source of endless entertainment. Thus users will prefer the website over competitor websites. Read more…