Sizing up to the multichannel customer experience challenge

At Foviance, as with many businesses, the start of a New Year brings with it an opportunity to take a step back and determine our focus over the coming twelve months. This industry offers so many opportunities that I sometimes think the hardest choice is in deciding what not to do. One thing we have learnt though, is that progress comes through focus rather than trying to be all things to all men. For this reason we are firmly focussed on multichannel customer experience and further developing our capabilities to support customer requirements.

We start 2011 with the strongest team Foviance has ever had. We broke through the 50 headcount point last year and this scale has enabled us to attract some of the industry’s thought leaders into the company and further strengthen our ability to offer advice across multiple channels. Richard Sedley joined us in December as commercial director and is already having an impact. Richard set-up the Customer Engagement Unit at cScape and is a well-known speaker and commentator in the area of customer engagement and persuasion. He is also the social media course director for the Chartered Institute of Marketing and is already helping to redefine our social media offering. You can follow Richard on Twitter @richardsedley

Also in the area of social media but specifically focussed on how customer service teams can benefit from its use, is Guy Stephens who joined Foviance from Carphone Warehouse where he was instrumental in changing business practices and organisational structure to exploit the opportunity social media offers to customer service departments. Guy is an avid Tweeter (@guy1067), regular conference speaker, frequent blogger, founder of a LinkedIn Group – where social media meets customer service – and creator of a Squidoo lens on the topic. He is a trainer for Econsultancy’s Online Digital Marketing Master’s programme run in conjunction with the Manchester Metropolitan University, and for WOMMA-SOCAP’s (USA) Social Customer Care certification programme. To quote Dave Chaffey: “in my opinion, he is the one of the world’s leading thinkers on this topic [social media customer service]”.

Increasingly we are asked to help organisations develop their strategy and thinking in the area of customer centricity and multichannel customer experience and we were very fortunate to convince Simon Raistrick to join the team as practice director late last year. During ten years as an independent specialist, Simon has led many organisations through customer-centric change by improving measurement, process and strategy. He defined a multi-million pound customer-centric improvement programme for Canon Europe, and has also measured and improved customer experiences for British Airways, Thames Water, BT and Diageo amongst many others. I am really excited about the focus Simon brings to our strategic capability and we are already involved in some really interesting engagements such as mapping cross channel customer journeys.

We were also successful in luring John Dumas into our user experience team as practice director alongside Jonathan Culling who had joined earlier in the year. John joined us from RedEye’s Usability & Accessibility division where he was director of operations and has over 15 years’ experience in user experience research. Jonathan joined from DLKW where he was head of user experience and has deep research, testing and design capabilities. Together they are transforming the way our user experience team delivers multichannel customer experience research and design.

And, as if we didn’t have enough John’s in our team we also convinced John D’Arcy to join Foviance as practice director for the analytics and insight team. John joined us from MRM Worldwide and his analysis has been used for projects as diverse as the optimisation of Intel’s new online Hardware and Software Stores to the restructuring of Ford’s European dealer network. With over 15 years’ experience he is an authority on web analytics, data visualisation and statistical modelling and has used techniques such as segmentation, targeting and econometric modelling. As we increasingly provide integrated solutions that bring together user experience, customer analytics and insight data sources John’s experience and that of the team he has assembled is playing a pivotal role in delivering multichannel customer experience solutions.

So the year ahead promises to be exciting, with more multichannel engagements expected than ever before. The relationships between call centres, mobile, stores and online in delivering services to customers are evolving rapidly. Our clients are becoming increasingly demanding about the insights they want us to deliver and the actions we advise them to take. With the team we have assembled Foviance is better positioned than ever before to rise to these challenges and so I think 2011 is going to be our most exciting year yet.