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Hello,  Well, this is a tricky blog post to write, but let's cut straight to it. After May 31st 2011, I will no longer be at EMC Consulting. I've decided that after 18 years of working, and 12 years at EMC Consulting (Conchango and OS Integration) that it's time for a bit of a rest! This company, its people and clients, have been a ...

Over four years ago I posted ‘Buy Cheap, Pay Later’, which warned of the perils of purchasing from discount retailers that sell cheap and support their low profit margin by a ‘sod you’ customer services policy. After 4 years of mostly positive online shopping experiences, it’s easy to get complacent and start drifting away from those online ...

I’m taking a respite from my recent glut of multi-touch posts and jumping back in to the web paradigm with one of my favorite ecommerce topics – the online checkout process.  An online retailer has asked me to solve the mystery of why a high number of shoppers are going AWOL during their checkout process. My concern is that I am ...

It's a few weeks now since I got back from the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in LA. This was a different conference for me. Normally, I would be at a conference to present on topics like Experience Design, Digital Innovation, or some user interface related technology / design topic. And this would be to a mixed audience of ...

Empire Direct demonstrate how a solid online experience can be undermined by failure to address the total customer experience. Customers may come but get the experience wrong and they won’t come back.    As part of my customer service frustration therapy here is how the story went ...   The colours on our CRT TV had seen better ...

Ok, I've been meaning to post this for a while, so sorry it's late... but I talk a lot about 'experience' and user-centred design, and occasionally, I stumble across someone who doesn't come from my universe and isn't as keenly aware of what some of this means. So here begins, hopefully, a small series of blogs on the basic principles of ...

The report on the top 50 UK retailers customer services proposition is still in progress.  By progress I mean that all the criteria for evaluating their proposition has been recorded and I now need to review the findings to make some sense of it.   In the meantime as a light aperitif here's a preamble around the all-important Customer ...

Momentum is building for self-service technologies in the real world.  Consumers are adopting these self-service interactions and interacting less with in-store customer services.  Online it's a different story as online shoppers want someone to talk to. In Future Now's 2007 Retail Customer Experience Survey, they recommend ...

From user research and other customer insight I create the primary persona, Siobhan, a fictional portrait of a customer for a high street retailer I am currently working with.  As she slowly comes to life I create a vivid image of this fictional character . It isn't easy sourcing the right photo to reflect the age, gender, and ...

  My good pal Steve Clayton posted tonight about my session at MIX and referenced an audience member, who was indeed from Otto, the company who own the Oli brand. Yes, he said that the LookBook functionality we invented and then built for them has double the conversion rate from a standard non-LookBook user on the website. And I agree with ...