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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 ...

If you’re a fan of Nick Lansley, Head of R&D at Tesco.com (yes, he does have quite a following), then you’ll know from this post on his techfortesco blog, that we are helping Tesco bring together a rather unique event. In the spirit of customer-led innovation set by people like Dell, with their Ideastorm, and our other client Virgin Atlantic, ...

I was lucky enough again to be able to present at MIX this year (you can see some slides from it scattered in this post and the video link is here). MIX09 for me was the first time I’ve really seen design be the major talking point and a key focus for the Microsoft organisers. A lot of this boiled down to one man: Bill Buxton. Bill is Principal ...

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 ...

In my last post on Microsoft Surface, I mentioned that some of the business and brand people we spoke to about Surface didn’t immediately see the opportunity. Or rather, they didn’t see a cost-justifiable opportunity when set within the current environment of the Surface ecosystem. The latter is particularly true in the media business. A Brand ...

Microsoft Surface in Europe is out in the open, and we’re now allowed out and about to talk to people and show them Surface in action. So, the last few weeks have seen us out and about a lot with our Microsoft Surface devices. A lot of communication internally to help our own teams understand the medium, and its unique interaction paradigms; as ...

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 ...

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 ...