Customer Experience: Econsultancy

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.

And are you finding many differences in the way the US market thinks about digital marketing?

Yes and no. I think the perception is that the US is 18 months ahead of the UK, and in some ways that’s true, certainly the levels of internet penetration and broadband penetration happened in the US at a kind of mass level before they happened in the UK. The whole social media thing, again I think, probably happened there earlier. Equally a lot of all the core technology, the Googles and the Microsofts of this world, are still all based in the States really, so part of the reason for having an office in the States is to try and get that on the ground insight into what’s happening at the cutting edge in terms of innovation. But more broadly than that, I don’t think it’s really that different to the UK market in terms of key developments. One of the things we’re finding an interesting challenge is that our site apparently “feels quite British”, which is interesting, even if you change ‘s’ to ‘z’ and things like that…

Have you got plans to go further afield, Asia perhaps?

Yes, we already have a global traffic base and indeed a global customer base. It is English language because we only have our content in English at the moment, but for example India is our third largest source of traffic, although we don’t have an awful lot of paying customers from India because the price is prohibitively high because it’s priced according to the sterling rate. We’re just about to launch pricing at a country level, so for India, for example, we can experiment with charging less in order to see if we can then get an uptake in the number of paying members. We’ll see.

The Usability and Accessibility Buyer’s Guide – you’ve renamed it this year to the User Experience Buyer’s Guide, I just wondered what was behind that change?

Due to the semantics of our industry we now talk about digital marketing, it always used to be online marketing. In the States I think they seem to call it internet marketing or online marketing, but they don’t call it digital marketing. I think in the case of digital marketing, presumably it’s because it happens not just on line, but also on phones, TVs, everywhere. Probably a more accurate description would be something like ‘interactive marketing’, but the particular reason behind the change from the Usability and Accessibility Buyer’s Guide to User Experience Buyer’s Guide is, I suppose, part of the journey. Maybe four or five years ago, usability in itself was an evolution from academic HCI, human computer interaction. It was slightly dry, and had a ‘researchy’ kind of feel, but actually what we were talking about was involved with interactions ,with customers as very much a business, commercial, experiential thing, and therefore HCI didn’t really do that justice. To the same degree, even usability now feels like it’s obviously a specific discipline and set of skills which is perfectly valid, but risks sounding a little bit too dry to encompass the kind of richness that a word like ‘experience’ encapsulates.

What else are you seeing in your travels to the US or in the UK that excites you at the moment?

Some of the things which are quite interesting at the moment are new business models. Things like Kiva, which is that sort of microfinancing idea, for example. Combining the global social nature of the internet to allow in this case financing to happen in a way that it couldn’t possibly otherwise have done. Also Zopa, person-to-person lending, is an interesting concept. So yes, I’m excited by the interesting and innovative business models which are coming out. Experiential things too. An mobile, and the new iPhone of course, are also obviously pretty impressive. I think it’s a bit like the advent of broadband, that once you have these innovations to hand, there’s no going back.

Thank you Ashley for taking the time to speak to us. The full podcast is now available for download from the Foviance website.

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