Ashley Friedlein podcast transcript 2
Interview with Ashley Friedlein of Econsultancy on Customer Experience
Speaker key:
PB: Paul Blunden
AF: Ashley Friedlein
PB: Hi, I’m Paul Blunden from Foviance, and welcome to our podcast on customer experience. Today I’m joined by Ashley Freidlien, founder and CEO of Econsultancy, a community for digital marketing and e-commerce professionals that provides training and events. Ashley, I really appreciate you taking time to talk with me today, and 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, probably at the worst possible time during the recession – how are things going?
AF: Yeah, it’s an interesting one, as you say, when I was, specifically for the US, when I was last over there, it struck me, and this is New York, which I think probably feels it particularly keenly, it felt a lot bleaker than the UK, it was a pretty miserable economic situation, so the good thing is though, of course, 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, and actually it’s quite interesting that, when we set up Econsultancy in the UK, we did it in the kind of dot.com crash period, and everyone said 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, because there’s less noise in the market, and if you are investing and growing, you’ve got a good story to tell against a kind of miserable backdrop. So yeah, it’s tough, and travel budgets in particular in the States have been slashed, which means that events in particular or any physical thing is hard to do outside of a particular location, but actually, as I say, we’re finding, some might say competitors, but people that might be semi-competitive are much keener and happier to talk to us and work with us now in the States than they might otherwise have been, so they’re finding getting awareness, doing contradeals, finding people is all much easier than it would otherwise have been.
So yeah, the US start up, it’s effectively a start up for us except for its subsidiary company, it wasn’t projected to make any money this year, and I think we’ll achieve that, but no, it’s going well in terms of raising the traffic, the links, the brand, recruitment, so we’re pretty happy.
PB: Good, and are you finding much differences in the way the US market goes around thinking about digital marketing?
AF: I don’t know – yes and no; I think the perception is that the US is 18 months, I think is usually what people will say, 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, and certain things, the whole social media thing, again I think probably happened there earlier. A lot of all the core kind of technology, the Googles and the Microsofts of this world and Yahoo, it’s still all based in the States really, so yes, we do, and that’s part of the reason for having the office in the States, and the presence there is to try and get that on the ground insight into what’s happening at the cutting edge in terms of innovation and things. But more broadly than that, I don’t think it’s really that different really to the UK market in terms of the key developments and things. One of the things we’re finding interesting as a challenge for us is the, I think there is, just in terms of US users using our site, say that it “feels quite British”, which is interesting, even if you change “s” to “z” and things like that, there is a way of talking, or a way of, even just from a design point of view, that you see those cultural differences, and that it’s a kind of a bit of a cliché, but the European sites or British sites might be more sort of graphically rich, or creative designery, whereas the US sites are more brash and upfront, less graphics, and if you look at their newspapers, Wall Street Journal or whatever compared with UK newspapers, you see that difference, and it’s reflected in the websites as well, so that’s actually a challenge for us, is how to be global and take the best of things around the world, and yet be local at the same time, which is a challenge for anyone running a multinational website, and an interesting one, particularly from, as I say, the user experience point of view.
PB: Indeed. You mentioned global there – have you got plans to go further afield, Asia perhaps?
AF: Yes, we already have a global traffic base and indeed a global customer base; it is, because we only have our content in English at the moment, it is English language speaking, but for example India is our third largest source of traffic, but we don’t have an awful lot of paying customers from India, just because the price is prohibitively high, because it’s priced according to the sterling rate at the moment, but something like Australia, for example, we actually have quite a lot of paying customers. So what we’re experimenting with, and we’re just about to launch, is the ability to do better, do pricing at a country level, so that for India, for example, we can experiment with charging different amounts of money, less money basically, in order to see if we can then get an uptake in the number of paying members, so we’ll see. We still only price in three currencies at the moment, which is dollars, euros and sterling, so it’s not quite all in the local currency, but even just playing with that kind of price point – South America’s another interesting potential market, South Africa, the Far East, the Middle East, and so yes, we are sort of present there, but in a virtual kind of way, so the kind of model is to go to just try and play with the pricing, then start to do more local content, and if that picks up then we start with a physical presence and start moving up the events and training side of things.
PB: Interesting. Now, I want to get on to talking about the main reason for speaking to you actually, which is the Twitter experiment, but before we get there, I just wanted a brief comment on the, what used to be called 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?
AF: Yes, it’s interesting, the semantics of our industry, in fact we now talk about digital marketing, it always used to be online marketing. In fact, even culture, in the States you mentioned, they don’t, I think they seem to call it internet marketing or online marketing, but they don’t call it digital marketing, so again that’s one of these strange things, that it’s not always clear why that’s happened. I think in the case of digital marketing, presumably it’s because it happens not just on line, ie on the web, but also on phones, TVs, everywhere increasingly, but a probably more accurate description would be something like “interactive marketing”, but anyway, the semantics are an interesting thing, but the particular reason behind the change from the Usability and Accessibility Buyer’s Guide to User Experience Buyer’s Guide is, I suppose it’s part of a journey that maybe four, five years ago, usability in itself was an evolution from probably HCI, sort of human computer interaction, so it started off in what some might see as a bit too academic, slightly dry, researchy kind of feel, but that actually what we were talking about was something which was to do 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 is, feels like it’s obviously a specific discipline and set of skills which is perfectly valid, but it feels like it belongs in a broader context, which is experiential, that again usability to me risks sounding a little bit too dry to encompass the kind of richness that a word like experience encaptures.
So there are so many elements to that kind of experience, and I wouldn’t be surprised if, I mean another word that’s come up a lot recently, as I’m sure you’re aware, is “engagement”, and we could talk for hours, no doubt, about what one would understand by that, so it might become the Customer Engagement Buyer’s Guide for all I know, but I suppose the broad thrust of it is trying to broaden things a little bit, to try and make sure that it’s rooted not in something which people might see as a sort of dusty academic discipline, not that it is, but that it might be seen that way, into something which is a little bit richer, a little bit broader, and captures the whole of the experience rather than specific usability disciplines or practices.
PB: Does it worry you, I mean there are so many of these social networking distribution channels available, that because it’s easy to put them on, more and more brands will put more and more on, and you’ll be faced with a blog post and 15 different buttons for doing different things? – or is that just part and parcel of the way this stuff works?
AF: Yeah, I think it is the paradox of too much choice, and as you will know, this has always been a tricky user interface challenge, that on the one hand people supposedly want choice, and power users want dashboards and big long lists and things; on the other, some people want the extreme simplicity, and if you look at the whole Web 2.0, a lot of the whole Web 2.0 sites are examples, I think, part of their success was the fact that they typically did only one thing, but they did one thing very well, but it was extremely simple. In the same way, Google I think did very well, at least in its early days, about being very simple, it’s just a search box, that was it, and compared with Alta Vista as it was at the time, which was just full of stuff everywhere. So I think you have to balance the two, and that’s just a tricky user interface challenge, that yes, you want to probably make prominent the things which people most use, or are most likely to want to use, but you don’t want to not have the other options, so it’s just a question of how you do that within a page, and that’s tricky, so it needs to feel to the user very clear and simple and easy, so the interface needs to mask the complexity that actually sits behind it, and that is hard, but you look at something like, well I’ve recently been using Google Analytics quite a lot, but some of what that does, and some of the charting and the ways that you can slice and dice data and reorder it and export it and what’s happening with HTML 5 and things, I think it’s now interfaces can be very rich and application like, so they appear simple when you first, on the outside, as it were, but actually there’s an awful lot of complexity and intelligence built into that, but it’s still hard to design them.
PB: Indeed.
PB: Very much so. Are there any other innovations you’re seeing, I think the innovations around Twitter are fascinating, but what else are you seeing in your travels to the US or in the UK that excite you at the moment?
AF: Some of the things, I think, which are quite interesting at the moment are around, some of them are just sort of business models, in fact, and what the internet is doing, so things like Kiva, which is that sort of microfinancing idea, so people in the west typically are sending small amounts to people say in India and entrepreneurs to start a business and things, so I think combining the sort of 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, and things like Zopa, the sort of person-to-person lending, are all interesting things, interesting business ideas, that are coming up. So yes, the sort of interesting and innovative business models which are coming out.
There’s some specific ideas, there’s one I saw recently which I liked, which was, we have a report called our Innovation Report, which collects together all these interesting ideas, but was done by, it was on the Kiddicare website, and was one of the challenges with, if you’re a retailer or got lots of products, is the categorisation and the navigation which goes with it, the sort of taxonomy and things, which again I remember being involved in the launch of Argos’s website, and having three days’ worth of brainstorming to try and figure out how on earth the catalogue would move online, and would the classifications be the same in print as online and things, so it’s quite a hard problem, and there’s fixed navigation stuff, but then there’s tagging as well, which people experimented with, but one of the things that Kiddicare have done is take the feedback that they’ve got for their reviews and ratings on a product, and looked at the language that’s been used to describe those products, and use those as tags essentially to group products, using kind of phrases or terminology which are clearly customer-centric, because they’ve come from the customers, and I think it’s really interesting, because it partly, it taps into that whole customer-centric thinking, it’s social media notionally, it’s customer feedback, it also means though that they create clusters or group navigational groupings, which they might never have thought about, which probably will rank well in a search, because they’re the ways in which people will actually search for those products. So for example, you might have, I was looking at, obviously they sell children’s products. Now most retailers might categorise by brand and price, or colour or all sorts of standard attributes, but they had categories like “travels well”, or “easy to clean”, or “it can’t be swallowed”. Now, if you’ve got a young child, a young baby, and you’re worried that your child’s going to swallow something, you’re trying to buy a small present or something, this is actually quite an important criteria potentially, or “difficult to break” – these are not standard classifications that come as part of a standard product description probably, but they’re taking things like that, and you could group products according to those kinds of tags. So that to me was just a really clever and interesting thing to do, which I hadn’t seen done anywhere else yet, and it’s not quite the same as the customer tagging thing.
Other things, as I say lots of specific bits, Thomas Cook now for, if you’re selling cruises for example, they’re very, unbelievably expensive, these things – tens of thousands of pounds, so you can afford to invest a lot to acquire a customer, so it can be a very high end, personalised experience. They’ve already been doing quite a lot of clever destination marketing just for their holidays generally, because they’ve got loads of TV footage, so lots of video and audio. They’ve then started doing lots of e-brochure stuff, so now they’ve taken that to the next level, where they can create – you can say, well here are my criteria for what I want out of a cruise, and they actually create a personalised brochure with a video in it for you, with a person talking to you, so using your name and everything, so it’s like a kind of completely customised, multimedia, personalised presentation to you for your cruise, all online. So I think there’s again nice, interesting kind of experiential things like that. People like mydeco, 3D environments kind of pushing the boundaries of interface and what you can do there, some very rich immersive environments which I think are very interesting.
Mobile obviously is, I keep saying I’m going to buy the new iPhone, and I will get round to it eventually, but it’s pretty impressive, some of the applications and once you see that, I think it’s a bit like with broadband, that once you have it, there’s no going back. The reality is that not many people actually have an iPhone at the moment, so in the great scheme of things, most of our customers do, but as a percentage it’s still quite small.
And then again, everyone always mentions Amazon, but then again this is a sort of personal experience to some degree, but what I think, lots of the areas of innovation for online may become actually offline, or at least in the whole experience, so the way in which online and offline work together, and the thing that impresses me most about Amazon at the moment is actually nothing to do with the website and is everything to do with the delivery bit, so I now have the Amazon Prime thing, for which I pay a fixed amount per year, what is it – £47 or something like that, but which pretty much guarantees free next day delivery, so the other day someone sent me a link to something on Amazon, I clicked on the link in the email and then clicked on another thing, and that was it, I’d bought it, because I had the one click ordering turned on, and within, well I’d bought it in kind of late afternoon and it arrived at 8 am the next morning for free, was just still experientially, just the slickness of their operations, was amazing, and I think that for a lot of online businesses the challenge actually is that bit of the experience, so the whole delivery – it’s the same with returns as well, I managed to return stuff to Amazon twice by printing out my own labels and sending it, never talked to a human, and it all worked magically well, and the point is they just execute so flawlessly, and most people don’t, and it’s hard.
PB: I think you may have just answered my final question, because I was going to ask you who you think offers great customer experiences, and obviously Amazon is an excellent example – is there anyone else you’d like to point to?
AF: Yes, well as I say, I have been continuing to be impressed by them, and they still seem to set the standard in a lot of those just operational excellence. I’m just trying to think about again, any particular personal experiences … I mean, there’s some interesting ones, like there’s a “do the green thing”, which is a charity or kind of cause to encourage people to live in a more environmentally-friendly way, which was set up by James Alexander, who’s behind Egg, and Andy Hobsbawm, who’s at Agency.com, but it’s an experience, as in a creative online experience to try and get people to live in a slightly different way, I think’s very compelling and engaging and uses actually quite traditional notions of compelling storytelling, but with an interactive element and the social media stuff they do extremely well, so I think is an interesting example of a charity or a cause using creativity online to a very powerful effect.
There’s another one which I’ve never, well I just find strangely compelling, but it’s a site called Wonga.com. The reason I guess I find this interesting is because the world of financial services doesn’t tend to be ablaze, be super innovative and different, but this site, it does feel like that, which has got, even from an interface, and it’s basically loans, short term loans, but the nice thing about it is, if you look on the home page, the interface has just got kind of two sliders which are saying, “How much money do you want?”, I think it’s three things, so “How much money do you want?”, “How soon do you want it?” and “When do you want to pay it back?” and you slide these things up and down and then it comes up with a, “OK, this is going to cost you this much”, and obviously the more you want or the longer you decide to pay it back over, the more interest you’ve paid, but that’s it, and you kind of hit a button and they can put it in your bank account within about, I don’t think it’s something as little as 30 seconds, but it’s less than ten minutes, and I still struggle to understand how our banks are so incredibly useless that I can’t even do an international payment on line still, except via PayPal, and yet this site seems to be able to get money in my account within 30 seconds or whatever it is with a couple of sliders, and whack it in, and that to me is very refreshing in an area which feels so kind of backward and clunky really. I’m sure there are other examples, but those are the kind of couple that come to mind.
PB: Well Ashley, thank you very much for giving up your time to participate in the interview today. It’s very much appreciated and I’m sure our audience will have enjoyed hearing your views and getting your insight.
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