Angus Cormie podcast transcript
Transcript of Interview with Angus Cormie on customer experience
Speaker key:
CMC: Clare Mitchell Crow
AC: Angus Cormie
CMC: Hi, I’m Claire Mitchell Crow from Foviance, and welcome to our second on Customer Experience podcast. This podcast was recorded in April 2009.
There’s a great deal of talk about customer experience in the business world right now, as traditional sources of differentiation are quickly disappearing, brands are realising that it is the overall customer experience offered that can really set them apart. For those organisations that can reorient themselves around the customer, the opportunity is significant, generating customer loyalty, increasing brand equity and advocacy, and capturing market share, but becoming a truly customer-centric organisation is not without its challenges.
The on Customer Experience podcast series is a set of regular interviews with senior figures from some of the world’s most respected businesses, focusing on the strategic importance of customer experience. We’re hoping, through these podcasts, to shed some light on the way some organisations manage the customer experience.
Today I’m joined by our second guest interviewee, Angus Cormie, Head of eBusiness for EMEA, Consumer for Dell. Angus, I really appreciate you coming in to take the time to talk to us today. First of all, I wanted to ask you if you can tell us a little bit about your background, what you do in Dell in your current role.
AC: Sure, no problem. So I’ve been in the online space for about 11 years, and I worked within Philips and O2 throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, various different roles in product marketing and functions and commercial roles, and then got into online in the back end of the ‘90s in O2 when the company created a corporate venture called Genie, which was a very new concept within the mobile space at that time, it was a mobile portal, it proved very successful, and was very much the first venture for O2 at that time into the online space, and helped to build that up from starts for the next few years, and then that became O2 Online, and I stayed running the O2 online portal for two or three years, and then left O2 in 2005, tried a couple of different things since then, I was a managing director of a small gift retailer for a year or so, which was very different to a corporate environment, and then more recently, in 2007, I joined Dell, managing their websites, and actually more recently, since the last few months, I’ve been running the online team for the consumer division within EMEA.
CMC: OK, excellent, and so it’s a fairly new role?
AC: Fairly new, yes indeed.
CMC: So I look forward to hearing a bit more about it. In terms of the work Foviance has done with Dell, we’ve been working with you for about two years, and I know you work with other suppliers – I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the work you’ve done in the customer experience space?
AC: Yes, sure, certainly in Dell and in the previous experience I’ve had, I’ve done a lot of work with usability across all sorts of different subjects, I think probably from my perspective, largely broken down into two areas: one is testing new concepts, testing new ideas from a web experience perspective has largely been what I’ve been involved in, but also just ongoing activity, usability activity as well – when I say usability, that’s predominantly what I’ve been involved in. So in that context, we are certainly one organisation where we set up regular, ongoing, very robust quarterly reviews of customer experience and usability analysis, which was great, because that gave a very high level and enormous amount of feedback on an ongoing basis, which is very different to ad hoc kind of research, which you would generally use with the kind of testing new ideas and testing new product concepts and so on. And yes, with the kind of stuff that we know we’ve done, is very much along path analysis and in general usability and concept out testing, and it’s proven to be extremely useful.
CMC: Excellent, so in terms of the projects that you feel maybe have been most beneficial are the ones that measure across time?
AC: Yes, definitely – I mean, that’s something that, I think with usability, ad hoc’s great, because it makes you step back and helps you see things that you’re not seeing, is come up with a general concept of possibly why you want to do something like that, but I think frankly it needs to be part of the culture, it needs to be part of the ongoing ethos of what you do in the business from a customer experience perspective, and I think the only way you can do that, if you actually make it regular, you make it consistent, and you actually make it measurable.
CMC: In terms of the business and the customer experience, do you play a part in encouraging the business to take a joined up view?
AC: I try, it’s very hard actually within the business which, as you know, Dell is, it’s very much a direct model. In recent, and in the last year or so, we were actually getting into retail, so that’s a new angle for us, a new channel. So trying to get that alignment between whether it’s the direct sales channel, online, or whether it’s the sales queues, or whether it’s the sales centres, or whether it’s retail itself, trying to get consistency around that customer experience is very hard, particularly as we’re new into the retail side.
CMC: Dell was recently in the press in regards to reorganisation, reorganising the business focus of the customer categories, and I know you’re in charge of Consumer – can you talk about how that might change your role? – I think you focus on the EMEA EA regions?
AC: Yes.
CMC: Has it changed significantly, or it’s still changing?
AC: Well interestingly, I think it’s safe to say that when I first joined Dell, it was a couple of years ago, the European organisation was very much a sales organisation, and I think Consumer was the first division within Dell to actually become a global business unit, and it’s only now that the other business units, the other segments, are actually splitting into global divisions. So we’ve had the experience for the last couple of years, we’re ahead of the game, as in the Consumer time side, and it’s been great, and what I’ve noticed is that we have got – although Dell is creating these divisions to be more globally-focused, that actually gives the regions more influence, the way they’re doing it is actually opposite, in terms of the effect, as you might think – you might think with globalisation, or creating a global-orientated segments, that actually the power will become very central, and because of the way they’ve done it, it’s actually the opposite, the regions have had much more engagement with our global colleagues than we’ve ever had as a business, particularly as, in Consumer, it’s a new segment for Dell in the last couple of years, and strategically it’s very key, Michael Dell has been making it very clear that Consumer is a critical part of his strategy, and the growth in that area is critical. So we’ve had plenty of opportunity within the online team, for example, within Europe, to influence and to drive change and to be key players and key influencers in actually what goes on, online and with the way we manage our business, so I think tremendous, it’s very positive, tremendous positive attitude within the company, that these changes are a force for good within the company.
CMC: Excellent. Would you give me any examples of what you’ve done for the consumer that maybe you’re trying to impress upon outsiders?
AC: Sure, yes absolutely – I can certainly quote examples where, within Consumer we’ve had some concerns about, particularly we’re emerging out of the old regime in the new consumer world. We had big concerns in EMEA around how some our paths worked, our journeys for consumers specifically, because of course our heritage of being within a very corporate image kind of environment, it was a small business, home and small business kind of division, and we weren’t a consumer-focused business, so a lot of work has been done globally around, how can we change that, but within EMEA we’ve pioneered a couple of path changes which made the whole experience, from entering the site to being able to select your products, being able to get through to the product choice and customise, much easier and much more consumer-focused, around language, tone of voice, but specifically the path and navigational elements as well, and we drove that, and we drove it very successfully, and that was then adopted globally as well, so it was that kind of influence that we were able to have as an example.
CMC: So by paths, you purely mean online paths at this stage?
AC: The online paths at this stage, yes absolutely.
CMC: Hopefully you’ll join it up as a team effort.
AC: Well, that will be the next step, make it more end-to-end, and make it more journey-driven through all the different experiences and touchpoints, but yes, it’s just a path at the moment.
CMC: But on the website, there’s principles that are stated of Dell, and it talks about, “discover and learn, select and acquire, support and see our aim” – I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about those, I’ve got them down as KPIs, whether they are or not, but whether they impact how you manage or measure?
AC: Sure, well we do treat them very differently, they are different parts of the journey that we manage and treat separately within the business, and we measure them separately as well; so in the context of discovery and learn, if you look at the Dell website, you actually have a two part experience when you go through the journey – you’ll have a browse, general discovery, kind of environment, where you’re learning about the product families, you’re selecting, trying to define which product family is suitable for you, within which kind of price bracket, and then you’ll get to a page for a specific product, and you’ll be able to then choose which configuration of product you want to buy in the context of a computer system.
And then there’s a second part, which then takes you into the personalisation world, which of course is one of Dell’s core tenants, or brand tenants is, is customisation, personalisation of your product, and that’s something that is very important, very much at the heart of the Dell brand, so we manage that experience as well through what we call the configuration, so you go through the site, and you choose what you want and then you move into the configuration and customise and so on, and we measure those two different journeys with our own measurement tools and our own different KPIs, we have what we call consideration, which is the equivalent of conversion, but only to the point of getting into the configurator, so it’s like a conversion number, but just for the first part of the journey; we’ve then got the store conversion, the configurator conversion, and then we combine the two together, to give what is traditionally known as a conversion number.
So from a metrics perspective, we deep-dive very much into the waterfalls and the conversions of individual paths and product lines within each of those different journeys, and at different stages through the configurator as well, so Dell’s known obviously for being very metrics-driven, and in that context, with the amount of data that we have available, very true, but we also have other metrics – CSAT is still very important for us; we use third-party companies to take on site surveys, and we analyse that feedback on a regular basis, and we track and measure output from that, one of the metrics of which is CSAT, and also net promoter score, and the net promoter score, in fact, is becoming even more important for us, particularly within the consumer world, in the context of success within the consumer space, we’re recognising that net promoter score is a really good measure of consumer feelings and attitudes towards your brand and your product – more than anywhere else, you would research your product these days by speaking to your friends on your social network and your environment, and you do, I think, it’s the statistics tell you, within the context of buying online, you spend 99% of your time browsing and searching, and looking around, you actually spend 1% of the time actually making the purchase, and so net promoter score is a good reflection of how you’re willing to say to a friend, or your family members – “Dell’s really good, I’ve got one, it worked really well and it was a great buying experience”, and so we work very hard on that kind of activity as well.
CMC: OK, on the website again, I notice Dell is very active in lots of different forums, especially in the UK, getting a lot of traffic at the moment – Twitter, Facebook and the like.
AC: Indeed.
CMC: So you’ve seen a big growth in those areas for Dell, or is that something you’ve had bubbling along for a while, and it’s just the UK’s catching up?
AC: Well, the UK certainly needs to be catching up in terms of the EMEA operation, the US have been the pioneers on this, and they’ve done a huge amount in building the blogs and the forums and the online activity generally, everything from something like Idea Storm, which is the Dell online forum for customers being able to post ideas; we have a very active Twitter account in the US, which actually is promoting our Dell outlet products, which are the returns, refurbished kind of products, and we passed our first million dollars on that recently, through Twitter, and we’re doing the same now, we have five or six different Twitter accounts in EMEA that we’ve been setting up to offer our deals and to promote certain things. So we’re very much getting into that social media and that kind of activity, but it’s very much at the heart of what Dell’s been doing for several years, it does it very well, there’s a lot of stories around what originated Dell’s venture into this online social media kind of world, and we’ve benefited as a business, we’ve benefited from it hugely, and we’ve got a very active strategy to continue our investment in that space, to get more into working with social media, social networking partners, using these social media tools, to really join in on the conversation that customers are having about Dell, rather than us being a standard website where we’re just telling people about us, we need to be joining in where they’re having the conversations, and I think from that perspective, it’s a strategic imperative that we have to be doing more in that space.
CMC: So Dell operates in a fast-moving space, currently the industry is probably suffering as many are – I was wondering if you’ve seen any innovations recently, maybe in Dell or outside of Dell, that are helping to move the industry along?
AC: Sure, there’s a lot happening in the space, online, lots of different developments coming functionally within the online technology world. One of the things that we’re very keen to progress is personalisation and customisation, particularly from an online experience perspective, and obviously behavioural targeting is a tool which is, we think it’ll prove to be a little bit of a merchandising Holy Grail with the way you present stuff online, so in that context behavioural targeting will become a very important part of what we do. Multi variant testing and beta testing is also another part of the toolset within a very similar suite of tools that we have available now, and that is again, the ability to constantly test small things for ultimate greater gains is proven as a model within Dell time and time again, and actually that’s a really interesting point generally, because I’d rather spend my waking hours with my team looking at lots and lots and lots of very small parts of the overall customer experience journey, because they’re easy, they’re fast, and you’ve got the tools available to test different things, about whether that button should go there or whether that button should go there, what should it say, and so on, and if you do lots of small things, I’ve found that, over the course of the last couple of years in Dell, that actually you get a greater gain than maybe spending a year doing a major path site, or a site redesign. So lots of attention to detail, lots of attention to those small things that are important from a customer experience perspective.
Other stuff would be, I think innovation-wise, Dell and probably other companies probably need to move away from being completely transactional, to being more engaging with customers. Clearly the social media tools will help with that, content will help with that as well, helping customers engage more with being able to decide what it is that they need for the solution that they’re trying to find in their homes, so it’s not just about buying a PC, it’s clearly changing the language, it’s more about you being able to listen to music, move your home networking capabilities and so on, and being able to provide the right content for them to make that decision about what product, or set of products, that they want to be able to meet their requirements, is probably going to create different demands of the Dell online experience.
So that’s something that we’ll work on, but I think generally, just in summary, there are lots of technologies out there, but I would say that, don’t get too complicated, is a piece of advice I would give, simplicity is a model which works well, and Dell’s learned this lesson, and can still take lessons from that model. If you make something more simple – I don’t know how many tests we’ve done where we’ve said, “Why don’t we remove these options?”, or “Why don’t we not do this?”, and we get better performance, and time and again we see that, and that’s something that is very much a proven way forward – don’t over-complicate it, keep it simple.
CMC: And also, from what I’ve been hearing you say, it’s coming back to measurement as well, so when you do the changes, so that you can measure, and then now whether its…
AC: Yes, and the testing tools that we have available absolutely enable that, and we measure everything from the revenue units, margin, average margins per sale and so on, right through conversion, and all the site metrics, and so we’re very very aware of every little change that we make, what potential impacts it could have. And of course in a business like Dell, every small tiny fractional percentage change that you might make to a conversion number has a massive impact over a long period of time, so we’re very cognisant of that.
CMC: Sure. I was going to ask about the customer experience, and the relationship with financial success – you’ve already answered it partially, but did you want to expand on that?
AC: Well, it’s an interesting world, because clearly what a lot of what you do within customer experience is very tacit knowledge-driven, and it’s based on experience that you have as an individual and as a team, in trying to figure out what is the best solution for an individual customer, and, for example, my team is employed because they are generally people who come from the online space, and have got a depth of experience, of working with customers through online experiences, so they kind of know what’s right and what’s wrong from that experience, and sometimes we want to make changes which really does take us out on a limb a little bit and we don’t really know what the impact is going to be, and having a discussion with finance teams about the impact of that change, and whether that investment is worthwhile, is always going to be a difficult decision, so we work very hard to try and find ways of testing and measuring stuff before we actually do it, but sometimes I’ve found in my experience that that experience counts for a lot, your own personal experience, your team’s experience, does count for a lot, and so regardless of what you think you might be able to measure or not measure, sometimes the right decision is obvious.
CMC: OK, and this podcast series is about customer experience – speaking to different organisations about not only the web, but broader, and I realise Dell’s focus is mainly on the web, but do you think, as you move more into social networking, and more into in store, will there be someone that will take charge of the customer experience? – or is there someone already, but it’s all focused on the web?
AC: Well, there’s probably across multiple segments within Dell, certainly no single owner of customer experience, I mean it’s very much a diverse responsibility spread across the business, and that includes – there are teams in the US, for example, who are globally responsible for online, and there are some very good experts and specialist centres of knowledge and expertise to drive changes to the global online experience, but I think there is also very strong alliance for day-to-day management and the existing experience on people on the ground in the regions to help manage and optimise that experience. So, no single owner – I think it would be great if there was, because that would help with the development of the customer experience focus culture within the business, and I think that comes from leadership down, it’s very important that we get that kind of state of company aim to be a customer-focused business, and when it’s from leadership down then you can ingrain it into the culture of what people do on a day-to-day basis. So I think that that is something that I think would be great to have, but we’re not quite there yet, but I’ve certainly seen, in the last couple of years, being a more consumer-focused business now, the part of the business I’m in, we’ve definitely become much more consumer-focused than we ever have before, in thinking through the consumer, the mindset and how they buy, and where they buy, getting into retail, and that overall experience – we’re starting to think a lot more about it.
CMC: OK, and finally, I wanted to ask – who offers a great customer experience, in your opinion?
AC: That’s a really hard question: I think there’s probably – I come from a telco background, and one of the things I’ve found from a telco background, again moving from telco into a manufacturing business, is one of the things that I think we can take great learning from in Dell, is looking at the way that a company like a telco has to manage an experience based on the fact that there is a customer life cycle; it’s not just about selling a product, it’s about developing and building a relationship with the product, and telcos do this very well, because their model is – yes, just sign up a customer, but then they have to keep that customer, and if you look at their website experiences, they’re very different to a manufacturer who’s just selling products, they are very much about, yes, the sales and the acquisition side of it, but there’s very much tools and functionality in content and my account kind of functionality, and certainly very rich in deep help, to engage customers post-sale in being able to get more out of their product, and I think that’s a lesson that lots of companies can take, when it comes to what is the perfect customer experience, the perfect customer experience is engage customers – don’t just sell to them, and I think there’s lots of things that we can do there, so we’re going to take some learning from the telco side certainly, we’ve been discussing that very heavily in the last year or so.
And then the rest of the time, there are no specific examples; from me personally – I love those “wow” moments, I love going through the web, and then just coming across occasionally a piece of web functionality, or some copy on a website, or a “thank you” screen, or the Amazon tradition of, “People who bought this also bought this”, through to anything which just creates that extra kind of, “You know what? – that made that whole process just so much simpler”, again the simplicity model coming through, that was just so easy, that was just exactly what I needed, and I know that I’ve certainly come across, when talking about a great experience, I remember one particular example where I was chatting about the same topic to someone in an interview, and he said, he got very excited and very animated, about changing the way from a customer experience was better if the pointer – what would happen to a pointer when you click on something, but then because of some back end functionality, or technical functionality, there was a wait – what actually happened when you clicked the pointer? – and he got very animated, but he said, “So what we did, we changed the pointer to do this”, and he described what happened to the pointer on your mouse, and it’s that kind of passion about the detailed experience, which I think is, if you’re thinking that through your whole journey through a website, I think ultimately, with that kind of mentality, you’ll end up with a web experience which is very strong indeed.
CMC: Excellent, thank you, thanks very much for talking to me today, it’s been great.
AC: OK, it’s been a pleasure.
CMC: Thank you. And thanks to you all for listening. Please do come back to Foviance.com shortly, and download the next podcast in our Customer Experience series.