Angus Cormie on Online Customer Experience

 By Clare Mitchell Crow

This is an abridged version of a conversation between Angus Cormie, head of e-Business EMEA Consumer for Dell, and Foviance Lead Consultant, Clare Mitchell Crow. This is the latest in a series of regular interviews with senior figures from the world’s most respected businesses, focusing on the ways organisations manage their customers’ experience.

Angus, please tell us a little more about your experience and role at Dell?
Sure. I previously worked for Phillips and 02 in a variety of commercial roles, getting into the online space around 11 years ago through the 02 mobile portal venture Genie. I ran the 02 online portal for a couple of years before leaving to gain some practical marketing and retail experience. Since then I have been back in the corporate world, initially with T-Mobile and then with Dell, where I manage its website and the online team for the consumer division within EMEA.

Foviance has been working for Dell for around two years. Could you talk about the work you have done with customer experience?
With Dell and in previous roles I have done a lot of work with usability, largely broken down into two areas. Firstly, testing new concepts and ideas from a web experience perspective, and secondly, ongoing usability activities, setting up regular robust reviews of customer experience and usability analysis. Regular reviews give us enormous levels of feedback that are very different from ad hoc research for new product concepts and so on, but both activities are extremely valuable. With both Foviance and with our in-house teams we tend to look at path analysis and general usability. Ad hoc testing helps us see things we may not be focusing on, but the only way to make customer experience testing part of the culture and ethos of the company is to make testing regular, consistent and measurable. A quarterly programme of activity allows us to ask the same questions over again and track responses and analysis from one quarter to the next with measurement. It’s a big ask, and it is time consuming and expensive, but gives us the biggest return.

Dell recently reorganised its business focus with regards to customer categories. How does this affect your own role?
When I first joined Dell the European organisation was very much a sales organisation. Consumer was the first division to become a global business unit and it’s only now that the other segments are doing the same. Despite this globalisation, Dell has actually managed to give the regions more focus and more engagement with our global colleagues. The online team within Europe has had plenty of opportunity to influence and drive change and to be key players in what actually goes on with the way we manage our business. We’re positive these changes are a force for good. Within consumer we had some concerns about how we would make that transition from a business focus to a consumer path, but we’ve worked to adapt the whole experience of entering our site, selecting products, and customising them, so that it is much easier for consumers. We drove change that brought more consumer focus around language, tone of voice, and specifically the online path and navigational elements, and these changes were successful and adopted globally. The next stage will be to make it more end-to-end and journey driven through all the different customer experiences and touch points.

Dell is very active in social media with Twitter, Facebook and more. Are you seeing big growth for Dell in those areas?
Well, the UK certainly needs to catch up, with the US being very much the pioneer in this. They’ve done huge amounts in building the blogs and the forums and online activity generally – everything from IdeaStorm, the Dell online forum where customers can post their ideas, to our very active Twitter account in the US, which promotes our Dell Outlet returned and refurbished products and has helped us pass our first million dollars on that. We’re doing the same now and have set up five or six Twitter accounts in EMEA to promote certain things. So we’re very much getting into social media activity here, but it is also at the heart of what Dell had been doing very well for several years. We’ve benefited hugely as a business by using social media tools to join in on the conversations our customers are having about Dell. It’s a strategic imperative to do more in this space.

What innovations have you see during these tougher economic times?
We are actively exploring customisation and personalisation technology, certainly in terms of the products, but particularly regarding the web experience, enabling behavioural targeting. We’re also placing a greater emphasis on testing generally at the back end. This includes both beta testing and multi-variant testing. I’d rather spend time with my team looking at lots of smaller parts of the overall customer journey and get a greater gain, than spending a year conducting a single major redesign. We’re also, like other companies, moving away from being a purely transactional company. Social media tools and content will help with this and allow our customers to engage with us about what they really need and make the right decisions. Overall I’d say don’t get too complicated – simplicity is a model that works well.

What relationship does customer experience have with financial success?
Clearly a lot of what you do with customer experience is very tacit knowledge driven, based on experience you have in figuring out the best solution for individual customers. Sometimes we want to make changes that take us out on a limb a little bit, but having a discussion with finance teams about the possible impact of that is always going to be a difficult decision. So we work hard to find ways to test and measure stuff before we actually do it. However we have found that our own personal experience does count for a lot.

As you move more into social networking and in-store as well as online, is there someone who will take overall charge of customer experience?
There’s certainly no single owner of customer experience. It’s a diverse responsibility spread across the business. That includes teams and centres of expertise in the US that are globally responsible for online, but there are also very strong lines for day-to-day management on the ground in the regions. It would be great if there was a single owner, as that would help with the development of a customer experience focused culture, and that comes from leadership down. We’ve definitely become more consumer focused than ever before and think a lot more about it.

Who offers a great customer experience, in your opinion?
A hard question! From a telco background, I think companies have to learn that it’s not just about selling a product, it’s about developing and building a relationship and keeping those customers and engaging them post-sale. We’re certainly going to take some learnings from the telco side. Me personally, I like those ‘wow moments’ – going through the web and finding some functionality, or copy on a website, or a thank you screen, or anything that makes you think: “You know what? That just made that whole process so much simpler; exactly what I needed.” A passion about the detail of experience along the whole journey through a website will ultimately result in a web experience which is very strong indeed.