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Paving the way for a new insurance norm
Implementing the golden rule of marketing
Leveraging the world’s largest focus group
so-sure explains how it is revolutionising the insurance industry by focusing on ease, trust, and transparency.
Oxfam explains how it has transformed its digital relationship with its supporters.
Joe Rice from Twitter on the power of digital communication and how brands can utilise the platform to create lasting relationships with their customers.
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UNDERSTANDING THE CUSTOMER: THE KEY TO CX SUCCESS
VIEW FROM THE SUMMIT CHAIR 05 Martin Hill-Wilson Shares his highlights from the event.
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Improving customer experience through meaningful content
The art of making a restaurant a destination
Unilever discusses how it navigates the ever-progressing world of marketing whilst prioritising value for the customer.
Anna Fenten discusses Searcys’ brand truth of excellence and progression.
Published by
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We are a global brand strategy, design and experience ďŹ rm committed to building brands through elegantly simple, unexpectedly fresh strategies, stories and experiences. siegelgale.com
CX MARKETING EDITORIAL Elizabeth Akass Editor lizzie.akass@ebm.media 01932 302 113 Steve Hurst Editorial Director steve.hurst@ebm.media 01932 506 304
MARKETING Katie Donaldson Marketing Manager katie.donaldson@ebm.media 01932 506 302 Sophie Smith Marketing Executive sophie.smith@ebm.media 01932 302 112
Dominic Stone Sponsorship Sales dominic.stone@ebm.media 01932 506 303 Dale Ayliffe Sponsorship Sales dale.ayliffe@ebm.media 01932 302 110 Dan Moran Sponsorship Sales dan.moran@ebm.media 01932 506 303 Pascal Van Huffel Sponsorship Sales pascal.vanhuffel@ebm.media 01932 506 308
Jamie Ross Delegate Sales jamie.ross@ebm.media 01932 506 306 Michael Duckham Delegate Sales mike.duckham@ebm.media 01932 506 307
FINANCE Sabrina Clarke Finance Manager finance@ebm.media 01932 500 103 Jenna Pollard Accounts Executive accounts@ebm.media 01932 428 542
We are delighted to welcome you to this year’s CX Marketing Summit’s Industry Report. We hope you enjoy what’s inside!
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Welcome t has been a pleasure to put this Industry Report together as we have had the brilliant opportunity to speak to experts from a variety of industries in the customer experience marketing space and share their insights. From the world of social media, Joe Rice from Twitter discusses how the platform can be a powerful tool for brands to build trusting and lasting relationships with customers through enabling effective and authentic communication. Anna Fenten from Searcys delves into the world of luxury hospitality, and describes how Searcys found a brand truth of excellence that underpins everything that they provide for customers. From one of the largest charitable organisations in the world, James Sutton from Oxfam explains the recent restructure the company has undergone to improve communication with its supporters, and the importance of multichannel campaigns that hit emotional touchpoints. Providing a look into marketing in the education sector, Philippa Scudds from Canford School talks us through the process undertook in rebranding and redesigning the school’s website to give equal weighting to all of its stakeholders. Katherine Brown invites us to learn about the disruptive insurance model so-sure provides, and how it is intended to revolutionise the insurance
MANAGING DIRECTOR Nick Rust nick.rust@ebm.media 01932 506 301
industry by returning focus to ease, trust, and transparency. From the global consumer goods company that encompasses over 400 brands, Charlie Clinton tells us how Unilever works to ensure that value is always provided to the consumer in its marketing content, and how it navigates the marketers’ ‘ever-leakier bucket’. Furthermore, our fantastic Hall Chair, Martin Hill-Wilson, shares his thoughts from the Plenary and Hall 1 of the summit, and you can find the delegates’ feedback from the day inside as well. In addition, we have included some key recent news stories from the marketing field that may spark your interest. In the ever-developing world of customer experience marketing, it is essential that companies across all industries evolve alongside advancements made in this space. Shared knowledge and success stories from brands excelling in this area and paving the way for new norms can be invaluable, and we hope that you find the insights included helpful, informative, and interesting.
Happy reading! Elizabeth Akass, Editor
CxMarketingSummit.com Engage Business Media Ltd, Nicholson House, 41 Thames Street, Weybridge, Surrey, KT13 8JG. Disclaimer: While every effort has been made to ensure accuracy in the compilation of this publication, the Publishers cannot be held liable for errors and omissions. ©COPYRIGHT: Engage Business Media Ltd. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior consent in writing to the publisher.
Attending Europe's largest customer experience event provides a unique experience 11-12 NOV I WESTMINSTER PARK PLAZA I LONDON
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CX MARKETING NEWS
Hall of retailers are not ready for authentication requirements coming into force in September PSD2’s Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) requirements, set to set to go live in Europe on 14 September this year, will do much to improve the security of online transactions and increase consumer trust in eCommerce. However, new research suggests that the implementation of SCA will have a huge impact on retailers, with the possibility of a loss of £50 billion in economic activity in the first year. According to digital commerce consultancy Tryzens, online retailers must take action now to streamline and optimise their payment processes to prevent the new regulations from impacting the user experience. PSD2 came into force in January 2018, bringing with it wide-reaching implications for companies across Europe that deal with payments, ranging from the regulation of Third-Party Providers to consumer payment protection. SCA, a key element of PSD2, will require merchants to introduce two-factor authentication for transactions with a value of over €30, forcing customers to take extra steps to prove their identity, potentially relying on biometric methods or one-time codes generated by the payment provider. However, customers have the option to “white list” trusted beneficiaries to streamline the payments process. While these regulations will give added security to customers shopping online, data gathered by 451 Research has revealed that just 44% of retailers surveyed will be ready in time for the full implementation in September. Although retailers have had over a year to prepare for these changes, this data suggests that many have not yet invested in the correct software or processes to transition to SCA. Commenting on the implications of the SCA requirement for retailers, Andy Burton, CEO of Tryzens, said: “Anything that helps to bolster security in eCommerce transactions should be welcomed, and we know that fraud is a real concern for shoppers today. A recent report indicated that UK consumers lost £261m in online fraud last year, and that 78% of all remote purchase fraud took place online. When we consider these figures, the enforcement of PSD2’s Strong Customer Authentication requirements can’t come soon enough. “However, the data from 451 Research suggests that many retailers have made a worrying lack of progress in preparing for the new regulations. With consumers increasingly expecting a smooth,
seamless experience when they shop online, the sudden demand for two-factor authentication may come as a shock, and perhaps even put them off purchasing from retailers who have not integrated the authentication process effectively into their platform. “As a first step, retailers need to talk to their Payment Service Provider and find out when they will be PSD2 compliant and understand how this will impact customers. Once retailers understand how the update will impact their customers, they should start signposting on their payment pages and informing existing customers that this added authentication process is coming. Contacting customers will prepare them for the implementation of SCA and reduce the shock factor. Finally, it is imperative that customer service teams are trained before the update in September so they can inform and assist those who need help,” Burton continued. “The regulations are only a few months away so it’s critical that retailers get on the front foot and start optimising their sites and payment processes now so they can keep the customer experience as seamless as possible when the requirements are introduced. Getting customers onto a website is one thing, but making them stay is another. If eCommerce retailers are not PSD2 compliant by September, they could be seeing a lot of empty baskets at the checkout,” Burton concluded.
Samsung profits tumble as it warns of ‘challenges’ ahead Samsung Electronics saw profits plunge in the second quarter as its key chip business faltered, and the firm also warned of “challenges” ahead. The world’s biggest smartphone and memory chip maker said operating profit fell 56% from a year earlier. The results reflect a broader industry slowdown, weighed down by the US-China trade war. The firm also faces more possible disruption to its chip business due to a trade row between Seoul and Tokyo. The South Korean firm posted operating profit of 6.6 trillion Korean won ($5.6bn; £4.6bn) for the three months to June, a 56% drop from the 14.87 trillion Korean won posted in the same period a year earlier. The result was in line with company estimates. In a statement, Samsung said weakness and price falls in the memory chip market continued “despite a limited recovery in demand”. “The company is facing challenges from uncertainties not only in business areas but also from changes in the global macroeconomic
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environment,” it said. Japan recently imposed export curbs on certain industrial materials that Seoul needs to make semiconductors and display screens. The move has raised concerns over the risk the trade spat presents to global technology supplies, and could affect Samsung’s future earnings. The company also said it would focus on the launch of new products in the third quarter including its first folding smartphone, which got off to a shaky start. Samsung had to delay the launch of its new foldable smartphone earlier this year following reports of broken screens. The defects with the device proved a source of embarrassment for the firm, which has seen declining smartphone sales and faces growing competition from rivals including China’s Huawei. Last week, Samsung said the Galaxy Fold will go on sale in September after improvements were made to the smartphone.
Google owner Alphabet and Amazon post double digit revenue growth
Google-parent Alphabet and the online retail giant Amazon have both reported a near 20% rise in revenues for the latest quarter. Alphabet said advertisers were spending more on its search and YouTube services. However, Amazon reported profits that were lower than expected, as it invests to speed up delivery times. Both firms are under scrutiny from authorities in the US over their market dominance, alongside other tech firms. Amazon, which is shifting away from buying and selling products itself, and focusing on its role as a marketplace for other merchants, reported revenues for the latest quarter of $63.4bn (£51bn). “Customers are responding to Prime’s move to one-day delivery – we’ve received a lot of positive feedback and seen accelerating sales growth,” Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and chief executive, said in Thursday’s news release. Amazon’s profit for the quarter, at $2.6bn, were below Wall Street’s expectations and the firm said profits would slip slightly in the current quarter. After-tax profits at Alphabet, the firm that owns YouTube and Google, tripled compared to a year ago to $9.9bn, beating analysts’ expectations. Alphabet’s revenues rose 19% compared to a year earlier, to $38.9bn. Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, said both its traditional services and new technology such as artificial intelligence were fuelling the firm’s growth. “From improvements in core information products such as Search, Maps and the Google Assistant, to new breakthroughs in AI and our growing cloud and hardware offerings, I’m incredibly excited by the momentum across Google’s businesses,” he said. But the strong financial performance comes at time when regulators are beginning to flex their muscles around the tech giants. The EU has imposed three fines on Google over the last two years over competition issues, totalling more than $9bn. Brussels has also just launched an investigation into whether Amazon’s use of data on its marketplace breaches EU competition rules. The US Department of Justice (DoJ) announced earlier this week it was opening a broad investigation of major digital technology firms in what one analyst described as a “major shot across the bows” of those companies. While the DoJ did not identify specific firms by name, the scope of the investigation is widely believed to include Alphabet and Amazon as well as Facebook and potentially Apple. The DoJ said its review would consider “whether and how market-leading online platforms have achieved market power and are engaging in practices that have reduced competition, stifled innovation or otherwise harmed consumers”.
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Tiktok owner ByteDance developing mobile phone The creator of a hugely popular video-sharing app has announced it is branching out into making smartphones. TikTok is the fastest-growing social media app, with about 500 million regular users. The app, which lets people post 15-second videos, is estimated to have been downloaded more than a billion times on app stores. TikTok developer ByteDance is making the move after acquiring patents and employees from device-maker Smartisan. Besides TikTok, ByteDance owns several popular AI-based video and news apps, such as Slack alternative Lark, video-chat app Flipchat, and news aggregator Toutiao, but TikTok is by far its most popular offering. The app has done so well with both Western and Asian audiences that it recently unseated Uber to become the world’s largest privately backed start-up, with a valuation of $75bn (£61.4bn). According to Chinese financial magazine Caijing, the new phone has been in development for seven months. ByteDance is not the first developer to capitalise on a popular app. In 2013, Chinese selfie-app-maker Meitu started making phones tailored to consumers who really like to take photos of themselves. Meitu’s phones, promoted by popular Chinese social media influencers, feature dual pixel cameras with faster auto-focus as well as artificial intelligence to select the best customised photoediting filters for each user. But China has become a very competitive market for smartphone-makers and there are doubts yet another device will be able to stand out. “It’s extremely difficult for any new entrants to break into the smartphone market profitably, particularly at a time when big brands such as Apple, Samsung and Huawei are carpet-bombing consumers with millions of pounds worth of marketing,” Ben Wood, technology analyst at CCS
Insight, told BBC News. “There are always niches that open up in the smartphone market but they tend to be ‘firework products’, starting with a big bang and quickly disappearing.” Technology giants such as Facebook, Google and Amazon have also branched out beyond their primary businesses but with varying success. While Facebook is successful in social networks and communication, acquiring popular apps such as Whatsapp and Instagram, it failed to branch out into mobile with its own Android launcher app, Home. Similarly, Google’s Pixel phones have been a winner but its social network, Google+, was finally shut down earlier this year after gradually declining use of the service. Amazon’s tablets and e-readers have been popular with consumers, but its Fire Phone saw a frosty reception after it launched in May 2014. Within five months, Amazon reported it had suffered a $170m writedown (£110m) due to the product. And it laid off smartphone engineers before pulling the product off the shelves in September 2015.
Ryanair hit by air fare battle and Brexit uncertainty Ryanair has reported a sharp fall in quarterly profits as it reduced fares to drive up passenger numbers. Profits fell 21% to €243m (£219m) for the three months to the end of June, as the average ticket price fell 6%. The airline was also hit by higher costs for fuel and staff. Chief executive Michael O’Leary said the two weakest markets were Germany, where they faced competition from Lufthansa-owned Air Berlin, and the UK, where there were Brexit uncertainties. Mr O’Leary said that in Germany budget airline Air Berlin was “selling excess capacity at below cost prices”, while in the UK, “Brexit concerns weigh negatively on consumer confidence and spending”. He added that “the current weak fare environment has continued into the second quarter and we expect [first half] fares to be down approximately 6%”. Earlier this month the company said it was adjusting its schedules due to the grounding of the Boeing 737 Max family of jets. It confirmed on Monday that it expected to have 30 new Max jets in time for next summer.
Just Eat agrees to combine with Takeaway.com in £8.2 billion deal
Fortnite competition attracts 20 million viewers
Just Eat has agreed a deal in principle to combine with Dutch rival Takeaway.com to form one of the world’s largest food delivery firms. The joint group would be valued at about £8.2bn, and bring together businesses that process 360 million annual orders worth €7.3bn (£6.6bn). Just Eat is considered by analysts to have a market leading position in the UK food courier business. However, it is involved in a battle with rivals Deliveroo and Uber Eats. Just Eat was founded by a group of five Danish entrepreneurs in 2000 and launched a year later. It employs 3,600 staff globally. As well as the Just Eat brand in Europe, it trades as Skip The Dishes in Canada, iFood in Mexico and Brazil, and Menulog in Australia and New Zealand. Just Eat is listed on the FTSE 100 stock exchange in London, where its shares opened up almost 25% on Monday, at 785p. If the deal goes ahead, Just Eat shareholders will own just over half of the combined group, while Takeaway.com shareholders will take a 47.8% stake in the new company. Just Eat chairman Mike Evans will maintain his existing role at the combined group, while Takeway.com chief executive, Jitse Groen, will also retain his title at the new, larger company, which will have its headquarters in Amsterdam.
Fortnite cemented its position as one of the hottest properties in esports with its inaugural World Cup attracting 19,629,975 total viewers on Twitch between July 26-28. According to Esports Charts, which collates esports viewers across multiple platforms, viewers watched a total of 22,705,809 hours across Mixer, Facebook, OpenRec.TV, Twitch and YouTube. The overall viewing peak saw 2,334,826 simultaneous viewers for the Grand Final at 9pm BST on July 28. Kyle ‘Bugha’ Giersdorf emerged as the Solos winner, picking up US$3 million (€2.66 million) in the process. The competition, broadcasting from the Arthur Ashe Stadium at Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens, New York City, saw 100 solo players and 50 duos compete for a prize pool of US$30 million (€26.6 million). Over the weekend, 20 hours of competitive gaming was broadcast from the event. In 2018, the continued success of Fortnite helped publisher Epic Games gross US$3 billion (€2.66 billion) in profit. Chinese giant Tencent acquired approximately 40% of Epic in June 2012 at a valuation of about US$825 million (€731 million). However, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney has insisted that the investment firm does not direct the publisher’s creative and business decisions.
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The deal is being arranged as a takeover of Just Eat by Takeaway.com, and the Dutch firm has a deadline of 24 August to make a firm offer. Earlier in the year, Just Eat was put under pressure by a shareholder to merge with a rival. Activist shareholder Cat Rock, which owns 1.7% of the firm, has been pressing for a merger with Takeaway.com, in which it also has a stake. In May, Amazon announced a £575m investment in rival Deliveroo, hitting Just Eat’s share price. That investment has been blocked for now by the competition watchdog, pending an inquiry.In March, Just Eat said a fifth of the adult population in the UK used its services, while its delivery business in Canada – Skip The Dishes – was growing rapidly after the introduction of a bilingual service. Peter Duffy, the interim chief executive, said four million new customers joined the business last year. Despite this, US fund manager Cat Rock said it “believed that a merger with a well-run industry peer is a very attractive avenue for securing world-class leadership, delivery expertise, and a premium”. The firm saw its group revenue grow by 43% in 2018 to £779.5m, while pre-tax profits were £101.7m, compared with a £76m loss in 2017.
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CX MARKETING VIEW FROM THE CHAIR
2019 CX Marketing Summit Chair Report This was the second year of running the event and it proved even more popular judging by the packed rooms and refreshment zone. I thought the range of speakers and topics especially strong this year. So, a quick nod to Steve Hurst for all the great work he does behind the scenes to hunt down and persuade such folk to offer up their time to present.
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The plenary sessions were excellent.
First up was the remarkably sprightly, 83 years young, Malcom McDonald who really is a living legend for anyone in marketing. In fact, I witnessed several delegates introducing themselves to him afterwards in order to recall which of his many books they had read during their marketing degrees. Malcolm’s message this time was simple but important. Marketing should be playing a C level role in identifying profitable growth opportunities for their organisations. This rests on the ability to accurately identify needs-based segments. Malcom was particularly caustic about the modern habit of confusing personas with segments. I can still hear him pronouncing ‘Millennials are not a segment!’ One senior marketer tweeted afterwards that he intended to revert to ‘classic marketing’ as a result.
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Marketing should be playing a C level role in identifying profitable growth opportunities for their organisations
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A final gem from Malcom which made me chuckle was:
Martin Hill-Wilson, Founder, Brainfood Consulting
The good thing about being mediocre is that you are always at your best! The second slot during the plenary was filled by an equally charismatic character. Someone who embodies the uniqueness of the brand he evangelizes for. Tom Rainsforth from giffgaff landed some great points about trust and transparency. He explained this was the standard now needed to build enduring relationships which in turn lays the foundation for loyalty and value. As such Tom pointed to the growth in purpose driven businesses and the role this plays in attracting customers. The last plenary speaker was Colin Shaw. This is someone who has been at the coalface of CX from the very beginning. He had a few things to say that lie outside the common wisdom and are all the more valuable to hear as a result. The first is to understand that uncritically listening to customers can be a mistake since they are not always accurate in how they understand their needs.
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Colin gave an example of feedback from a doctors’ surgery. Patients felt that they were not being given enough time and that their one to one consultations were too short. They wanted to extend them which would obviously impact costs and eventually the surgery’s ability to offer competitive pricing. On further investigation the real need was uncovered. Doctors were not listening! It was the quality of interaction not the length that really mattered. Missing the real cause could become an expensive error that still left customers frustrated. Another point I picked up was Colin’s tip on how to remain a growth stock. Typically, brands leave it too late to reinvent themselves. The optimal point is at the height of success rather than when it
becomes clear that momentum is running out. In other words, invest early. Wise words. After the break, Katherine Brown from sosure returned to the issue of trust. In her view, this is in particularly short supply in the insurance industry. Hence so-sure’s stated mission to restore trust in insurance. As they see it, the problem boils down to insurance being too expensive and hard to action when claiming. Their response is to financially reward customers who do not claim and for those who do claim make it fast and painless. An NPS of 73 suggests they are nailing it. Mike Hominick then took to the stage. He is Shell’s UK Marketing Manager and showed what can be achieved in terms of service
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innovation with enough determination. Shell’s new smartphone based rewards programme (Go+) learns about purchase preference and customises recommendations as a result. This means members have a reward experience that is reacting and responding in real time to their shopping choices and frequency. Of course, the real magic is in what happens behind the scenes to orchestrate multiple brands and legacy systems and deliver smart real-time responsiveness. An impressive achievement! Gerry Brown from IDC brought fresh research to his presentation that showed how marketing is extending its interests and collaborating more broadly with CX and Sales teams. He had some important advice to offer. Don’t let the simplicity of journey mapping fool you into believing customers behave in such predictable linear ways. Aim for reducing cognitive overload and make journeys as easy as possible. Blow up the sales funnel. It’s an archaic inside view. Move to real-time ‘sense and respond’ customer journeys instead. Finally follow the logic of customer journeys and merge more deeply with Sales and Service in terms of systems and data. Solid advice. Lucian Camp took another swing at low trust while on stage. This time at the banks. He provided a wonderful list of things that have been eroding our trust over time. These include 1970s DJs and TV entertainers, the food industry, bishops (esp Catholic) social media companies, Tour de France winners, faceless bureaucrats (esp in Brussels), oil and energy companies, disaster relief charities, diesel car makers, ad agencies, football coaches, politicians, aircraft manufacturers, big pharma, the medical profession, the metropolitan elite, film producers, experts, white people, men. As I said an evocative list that stirs up memories. He then pointed out how banks continue this erosion by going the extra mile in many ways.Baffling T&Cs in tiny type. Punishing customers for their loyalty. Exorbitant charges on “free” banking. Selling customers many products they can never use (it’s not just PPI). Rafts of hidden charges. Endless rip-off charges for incidental extras.
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Gerry Brown from IDC brought fresh research to his presentation that showed how marketing is extending its interests and collaborating more broadly with CX and Sales teams
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His remedy was pragmatical and even potentially achievable – give customers no new cause to distrust you! We shall see. Darlington Building Society began in 1856. Caroline Darnbrook told us the story of how the brand is being refreshed for today’s market. Before the transformation, the building society was increasingly unnoticed even in the localities it operated in. It was also unconsidered as a place to place savings or take out a mortgage. On top of all that consumer engagement preferences are changing which questioned the future role of the branch network. They started by listening. Research showed where consumers saw the value – a mix of ‘local’ community driven by the underlying values of membership and mutuality. This then crystallised into the following purpose. Improving the lives of our members and communities through supporting home ownership and encouraging saving. And the rest of the story Caroline told demonstrated the brand has done just that: engaging with the local community in all sorts of imaginative way. Even producing a wellloved children book in the process. The results speak for themselves. Year on year increases in assets and the value of their mortgage book. Unsurprisingly Csat hovers at 97% while NPS is a very healthy 89 with a stack of awards over the last few years to validate the value they are now delivering to members and the wider local communities they support. They are standing out by standing for something. Inspiring stuff. So, there you have it. A flavour of CX Marketing 2019. Can’t wait for the next one.
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Combining Channels to Create a Seamless CX Discover How the Marketing Function is Playing an Increasingly Important Role in CX SUMMER 2019
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Paving the way for a new insurance norm so-sure explains how it has broken the mould in the realm of insurance and developed a brand based on ease, trust, transparency, and prioritising the customer.
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raditionally, insurance companies haven’t always provoked the most positive reactions from customers; in 2016, so-sure was founded to change this. Its vision was to revolutionise the insurance industry through its fair, reliable, and rewarding service for customers, and by providing social insurance that is significantly cheaper for groups of family and friends. Katherine Brown, Head of Marketing at so-sure, explains this further: “We offer simple insurance, premium claims, with premium cover, and you even get money back if you don’t claim”. She summarises: “We’re amazing if you need us, you get rewards if you don’t.” She explains the traditional insurance design that so-sure was built to disrupt. “Traditional insurance models have underwriters who decide what the policy wording is, the pricing, and the claims experience. It means that they create a policy to serve their needs and not the customers’ interests. They are maximising returns for themselves, which is normal business, and they try to sell as much as possible and pay out as little as possible as they can.”
This collective ‘pot’ structure is based around the origins of insurance where, in the 17th century, communities would all contribute to insure their ships together. If no one claimed, everyone got their money back, and if a ship was damaged or destroyed, the whole group chipped in to help. Brown explains that this “allows customers to get up to 80% of their money back every single year when they and their friends don’t claim.” She states that this referral structure has proven successful, and so-sure’s customers are “referring in droves, which historically in insurance very few people have done. We’re truly trying to change the market from that perspective as well.” This is part of so-sure’s dedication to making its policies customercentric. “There’s no small print, customers have transparency on policy, and we’re really up-front about what’s covered and not. If our customers do need to claim with us, the experience is designed to be easy.”
“Distribution is typically outsourced, and of course everyone’s incentivised to sell and not really inform the customers. This means customers don’t really know what’s covered and what isn’t, and what’s included in their cover and what’s excluded in their cover. The terms and conditions in the process are done to serve the insurer which means everything is made a little harder.” However, so-sure has been built differently in order to “disrupt” the current insurance market. Brown says: “We’ve taken control of the customer experience from purchase right the way through to claim, and we’ve outsourced our balance sheets which means our policies are actually designed for customers, and not the underwriters balance sheets; the customers have transparency on policy; we’re really upfront about what’s covered and not, and the claim experience is designed to be easy and customer-centric. Which is revolutionary really when you think about the current insurance market.” She continues to describe so-sure’s social insurance model, in which customers are able to refer other customers to so-sure and be rewarded for doing so. “Historically, it’s been illegal for insurance companies because of regulations, but the way we do it is perfectly legal. Every referred friend, and the person who refers them, gets £10 put in their pot.”
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Katherine Brown, Head of Marketing, so-sure
We’re really upfront about what’s covered and not, and the claim experience is designed to be easy and customer-centric
“Did you know that there’s an extra charge on most mobile insurance policies for loss of phone, and most people aren’t covered? We include that as an absolute standard across the business for no extra charge. We expect our customers to want that from us, and we want to give our customers the best possible policy. We’re one of very few companies that replace or repair your phone within 24-72 hours, which is absolutely market-leading, and in the current world we’re living in, I think 24 hours without a phone for some of us is quite a scary prospect!”
fulfilled without human intervention. “This is possible because we looked back again at the customer, identified the issue, and tested the solution, and then implemented the technological solution, which is quite rare. In our case, taking a selfie on your phone shows us as the insurer that the phone is in great working condition when you buy a policy. It reduces fraud so we can offer great pricing across the whole business, and it reduces excess to the customers because we know exactly what condition their phone is in when they come to us.”
Furthermore, so-sure has developed antifraud technology that allows claims to be
Brown explains that, although so-sure has started in mobile insurance, moving forward
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it will be broadening to include other markets, such as home insurance in 2020. She says this will follow a similar structure to the social mobile insurance structure already in place. “Home insurance will be one of our next steps, where we will be able to give up to 40% of customers’ money back each year if customers or their friends haven’t claimed.” She states that so-sure is also looking to expand on a global scale as well. “This kind of insurance is so disruptive and appealing worldwide that we know international expansion is one of the next logical steps after our home insurance launch.”
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Implementing the golden rule of marketing Oxfam, a globally renown aid and development agency founded in 1942, explains how it has recently undergone a company restructure to transform its relationship with supporters.
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xfam, a confederation of 20 independent charitable organisations focusing on the alleviation of global poverty, partners with around 90 countries around the world, and at any one time can be working in around 20 or more global emergencies.
emotional touchpoints in order for it to “inspire, entertain, and emote”. Sutton explains this further: “We’ve moved to an approach where we’re not selling, but we’re actually speaking and engaging with our audience.” He mentions that, in the digital age, people can feel drained by the constant calls to action they receive. This new, more emotive approach can be a welcome change for supporters. “As you get through to that deeper engagement, you should be thinking at every single stage: how are you tapping into that person’s emotions, or inspiring, or entertaining them?”
James Sutton, Audience Planner at Oxfam, describes the key issue Oxfam worked on in 2018 to improve the experience for its supporters. “We were very product-led. In the organisational side of Oxfam, you can imagine lots of different teams wanting to talk to our audience about different ways that they can support Oxfam. What that meant was the more supporters talked to Oxfam and the more interested they were in our work, the worse their experience was because we had lots of teams competing for their attention.” He says this is why a restructure was decided. “We needed to really be thinking about our audiences’ needs and meeting our audience where they are.” This idea became Oxfam’s “golden rule”, and now underpins all interactions with its supporters. Sutton lists the three key ways in which Oxfam tries to “meet its audience where they are”: • Emotionally: “What’s going on in the world around them?” • Their life stage: “Think about their emotional state, and the issues they might face in their world at the moment.” • Their device: “What are they using? How do they like to enjoy their media?” “There are lots of underlayers to the golden rule, but we try to ask these questions with all of our campaigns and messages.” Another element to the restructure was moving from a “push” to a “pull” marketing approach. This required Oxfam’s content to be “emotional, personal, and engaging” – hitting the audience’s
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James Sutton, Audience Planner, Oxfam
He continues: “Normally, the bestperforming content is content that’s fun, and gets people talking. That might be a little more difficult for some sectors – for Oxfam it’s quite easy to be personal and emotional when we’re a charity and have such great stories.” Furthermore, this restructure also entailed moving to an “insight-led” marketing approach. “Insight decided everything that we were doing, and should be pulling all the needs from the audience in order for us to make our decisions on how we market to them.”
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Asking simple questions can be an essential way to achieve an “insight-led approach” successfully, and helps to “tap into the audience’s emotional state to try and get them to know, think, feel, and do”
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He says this involved Oxfam moving its “insight and data teams together”, “really thinking about how we would meet our audience’s needs, going back to that golden rule”, and “asking really simple questions to our audience”. Following on from this, Sutton notes that, although collecting big data about audiences is important for deciding how to deliver multichannel campaigns, it is essential for marketers to not get “lost” in this and consequently “move away from what it actually is that would meet your audience’s needs”. He says asking simple questions can be an essential way to achieve an “insight-led approach” successfully, and helps to “tap into the audience’s emotional state to try and get them to know, think, feel, and do”. Oxfam utilised their “supporter community” throughout the entire process of the organisation’s change, testing their objectives and progress continually and repeatedly and collecting feedback. Sutton says: “We have developed a community of around 1,000 of our supporters; we recruited them via e-mail, and most likely the fact that they offer to do this is because they are our most engaged audience. Every month we send them e-mails and ask them simple things; it might be what we’re
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thinking of doing next year, it might be asking what they think of the brand, or it might be testing simple creative with them.” He continues: “They give us a great insight into whether what we’re doing is working, if we need to go back and make changes, or if it really doesn’t work with our audience at all. We make sure that we test all of our objectives. That links back to the pull approach, making sure that we’re sensechecking everything that we’re doing.” “It’s a great chance to bring a closer connection with some of our supporters, and make them feel like they’re the ones building Oxfam.” Moreover, Sutton highlights the need for a multichannel approach in marketing. “Within Oxfam, we roughly know that it takes about four touch points with our supporters for them to either convert or do something with us. When we’re just talking to someone through one channel it is easy for them to switch off or not be as engaged. We know that we need to be serving them across every single channel, and this goes back to both the golden rule and the push and pull approach where you are there at every single stage of your audience’s life cycle or how they use and interact with devices and media.”
He continues: “We have such a large, diverse audience that we need to make sure that we’re thinking about anywhere that they might be. It’s crucial at the very start of planning to be thinking: ‘is this going to be a multi-channel campaign?’ and if not, then it should go back to the drawing board.” Sutton says that Oxfam has had a “really exciting last couple of years” with the restructure, and Salesforce is currently being implemented across the organisation. “This is an exciting time. We’re really going to start living our values of this audience-led approach, and we’re very excited to see that come into action, both in terms of a restructure of processes and how we work, and also the technology around it.” He finishes by emphasising the fact that supporters are Oxfam’s main priority, with a focus on building lasting positive relationships with them. “We want to make sure our supporters get the best experience with us, and they’re deeply engaged with what we do and feel very closely involved. We want to make sure we give them the best possible journey. Over the next couple of years, we’ll start to see that roll out and we’ve got some fantastic campaigns to bring that to life.”
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CX MARKETING SURVEY RESULTS
CX MARKETING STATISTICS Which speakers were your favourite?
8%
Average
How would you rate the organisation of the day?
37% Good
Michael
James Sutton
Hominick
55% Excellent
Charlie Clinton
Tom Rainsford
Abigail
Jamie Thorpe
Tan-Giroud
How useful to your company was the information presented at the event?
Phil Durand
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37%
36%
26%
Extremely Useful
Very Useful
Moderately Useful
Colin Shaw
Malcolm
Hayley
McDonald
Brooksbank
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64%
Would you attend the Summit again next year?
How did the event compare to what you expected? 50%
36%
45% 40% 35% 30% 25% 20% 15% 10% 5% 0% Much Better
Somewhat Better
About What is Expected Yes
If you had to encourage a colleague to attend, what would you say to them?
Maybe
Please describe your event experience in one sentence:
The thoughts and effort of multiple experts from across the marketing spectrum distilled in to a day.
Both enjoyable and incredibly informative.
I hardly go these because it's usually the same repeated content but this brings the customer to the forefront on various levels.
Insightful on the various people, companies and teams involved. Absolutely amazing Chair in Helen! It's been a long time since I've stayed an entire day but the questions posed by her opened the talks to new realms.
A good diverse set of sector experience means that you get some great cross pollination of ideas that wouldn't always be the case at sector specific conferences. Oh! And Malcom is always a great speaker - worth a trip to see him in action. Go with an open mind, a large note book and a capacity to absorb and utilise the information to your advantage! A good day and good range of speakers. It's a great CX insights day and for changing the way you think about CX. A great opportunity to step outside the office and get external opinions. Great experience and useful information across a range of business.
SUMMER 2019
Excellent keynotes, some really interesting sector presentations, good choice of speakers. The majority of the speakers were interesting and informative with helpful information that can be taken away and utilised for my own working environment. Great mix of speakers. Malcolm McDonald and Tom Rainsford in particular were great! Great day.
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CX MARKETING FOCUS ON
Leveraging the world’s largest focus group Twitter explains how it has transformed the way in which brands and customers can communicate with each other, and how both sides benefit from the instant nature of feedback enabled by the platform.
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n the age of global online platforms at our fingertips, instant communication and feedback has become the new norm. Utilising this continual insight to benefit both customers and brands alike has become increasingly essential in recent years to keep up with the ever-progressing nature of customer experience marketing and customer engagement. Joe Rice, Developer and Enterprise Solutions Sales Lead for Twitter, introduces the social media site. “On Twitter, ‘live’ comes to life every day as conversations unfold, showing you just about every side of the story – from breaking news, entertainment, to sports, politics, and just about every interest. When things happen, they happen first on Twitter,” he says. “Twitter is what’s happening in the world and what people are talking about right now.” He discusses why he believes Twitter’s greatest strength is in the mundane. “There are hundreds of millions of tweets every day on the platform, and anything and everything is shared as part of that. We see people’s preferences emerge, their considerations, moods, mindsets, as well as their interactions with product services and brands.” “Some of these tweets might not have huge engagement or show up in your timeline, but when looked at over time they highlight a wealth of insights into human behaviours; we see emerging trends, the rhythms of life, come through. It’s these ordinary tweets from people going about their daily lives which reveals so much about us and offers such insight into the world.” As participation rates with surveys are in decline, it can generally be difficult for brands to get immediate feedback from their customers. Rice says: “Brands would like to know what’s happening with their products and services and how they are perceived, but they are struggling to get that feedback in real time when the consumer is actually having that experience.” He says this is where Twitter can help, as it provides “that authentic, unfiltered, in-the-moment feedback” that surveys and focus groups can lack. “We’ve always talked about Twitter as the world’s largest focus group, and our message is that it should be leveraged in a way to provide a better understanding of what’s happening. It truly is the voice of the customer.” Attitudes towards relationships with brands have also changed in the digital age, as customers now expect brands to respond efficiently and authentically to their enquiries over social media.
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Rice says: “This real time expectation means that Twitter has become the epicentre for how brands build out the customer service model of the future. We know how important it is to take customer experience to the next level.” He explains how leveraging this form of communication can lead to creating revenue potential. “We ran a study a few years back to understand consumers’ willingness to spend, and we found this increased from 3% to 20%, depending on the specific industry, if that brand responded to their questions in a timely fashion – in that study, it was within two hours.” This communication builds customers’ trust in brands, and as a result they are more likely to become loyal customers. He highlights the three main parts of this approach: listening, engaging, and analysing. “That’s why we talk about brands starting by listening first to those audiences; that conversation could be indicative of a problem or an opportunity, and so by listening and stepping in quickly, a brand can help identify something useworthy, or remedy an issue.” “Following on from that is the act of engagement with the audiences through the brand voice, marketing campaigns, customer service, and more. Lastly, analysing the conversation can provide a better understanding of what these specific audiences are talking about doing, which is where solutions like trend analysis comes into play, and even what we’re seeing now in terms of innovations and predictions.” However, Rice notes that a key part of effectively utilising the data and feedback Twitter provides is to pair it with traditional brand tracking studies and NPS measurements, rather than substituting them. “I don’t believe that Twitter data is a replacement for traditional research methods, but rather a compliment to them.” “We talk about Twitter for product discovery; it can
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“ Joe Rice, Developer and Enterprise Solutions Sales Lead, Twitter
be a great way to test hypotheses, gather insights, and understand if there is a demand, and then allows you to complete traditional routes such as a full survey, a panel review, or a focus group. It’s also helping to reach audiences that are more difficult to connect with via typical methods, such as Gen Xers, for example, who we find are not completing surveys at the rate of other groups.” Furthermore, he discusses the balance between speed and reliability of feedback that Twitter can provide, and how it compares to traditional research methods. “In many cases, Twitter data can provide potentially accurate insights in hours, as opposed to the weeks or months it could take if you went the route of a panel or a survey.”
Twitter data can provide potentially accurate insights in hours, as opposed to the weeks or months it could take if you went the route of a panel or a survey
To finish, Rice talks through one of the company policies, ‘the health of the conversation’, which underpins Twitters’ work to stop spam and abuse happening on the platform, and encourages kindness for its users. “There are amazing stories of kindness shared on the platform every day. We want to help people see high quality information and feel safe on Twitter; therefore, we offer people a lot of control to see more of the information that they want to see.”
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“There are trade-offs in accuracy in this. As a brand wanting to understand a specific issue with a product or service, you can get a significant answer with a 99.5% confidence interval if you took six months and a spent a lot of money. The question is, if you could get an answer with a 90% confidence interval and do so within a day at a mere fraction of the cost, would that not be better in some use cases?” Development in this area is continually progressing at Twitter. “One of the things we’re always thinking about is ways to make it easier to get insight from Twitter data, so that’s always going on in the background. Helping researchers with social listening tools, and helping voice of the customer platforms make more sense of the corpus of human thought. There’s a wealth of data that can be extracted from Twitter for customer service teams and beyond, which enhances customer experience and drives a better understanding of the customer across the organisation.”
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CX MARKETING FOCUS ON
Improving customer experience through meaningful content Unilever explains how it navigates the nuanced and ever-progressing world of marketing whilst ensuring that trust and quality remain its top priorities across all products and content.
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ounded in 1929, Unilever has grown to become the parent company to over 400 brands across a wide range of sectors, and thus is one of the world’s largest consumer packaged goods companies and one of the world’s biggest advertisers today. Charlie Clinton, the Data and Innovation Manager at Unilever, summarises: “It’s a company with a very broad footprint, including all sorts of brands that you would see on your supermarket shelves.” Clinton explains the two main problems many marketers face regarding their relationships with customers in the inter-media digital age. The first is fragmentation: “A study released a couple of years ago by the IPA has shown that fundamentally we still need to reach all of our category buyers to drive the most effective advertising, but we live in a world where consumers are increasingly fragmented.” He continues: “Those consumers have access to products that deliver against very specific needs for them.” He gives some examples, such as vegan or sustainable products, or products that leave out certain ingredients. “The challenge for brands is maintaining the scale in your advertising while making sure that the different consumers are seeing the messages or the products that are most relevant to them, which just adds a new layer of complexity to the media planning process.” Clinton says the second main issue marketers face today is the “ever-leakier bucket”. “There’s a common metaphor which is that our brand is a leaky bucket that we are trying to fill with consumers, and through just everyday life consumers are filtering away. Whether it’s their life stage that changes; they move; the shops near them starts selling different products – whatever it might be – it’s inevitable that the bucket will eventually empty if the brand doesn’t keep filling it back up.” “The new reality though, with the fragmented media landscape, the vast increase in advertising, the existence of Google and ‘search’ in general, allowing consumers to find things when they want them, the existence of e-commerce, which allows access to a vastly wider range of products than they ever could have reached before – all of these factors mean the drain away from this bucket is happening faster than ever before.”
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Charlie Clinton, Data and Innovation Manager, Unilever
So, how does Unilever navigate these hurdles? Clinton explains: “It’s about making sure we have new activities in place which are maintaining the brand’s visibility in those channels and competitiveness in those channels between campaign bursts.” Clinton works in the beauty and personal care category of Unilever; specifically, within the hair sector. He describes the publishing website Unilever created, All Things Hair, that features all of the company’s hair brands within the context of “genuinely helpful content” for its visitors. “It is primarily about making sure that we are visible and we are competing in searches, so when consumers are looking for information on anything to do with hair styles or particular hair needs, they are finding All Things Hair.”
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CX MARKETING FOCUS ON
He emphasises that the advice provided on All Things Hair is intended to be sincerely useful to consumers. “This is not just about inserting our brand into conversation; it’s about genuinely supporting the consumers’ new behaviours and helping them find what they are looking for in a way that is beneficial to them and is beneficial for us.” He notes that this approach has proven successful in increasing the company’s “general level of visibility” between campaign bursts. “On average, last year we were getting around 1.5 million visitors per month on our different All Things Hair sites around the world.” Clinton relates this approach to Byron Sharp’s How Brands Grow, in which Sharp discusses the need for brands to have physical availability, being present on as many shelves as possible so the consumer can physically access your product as easily as possible, and mental availability, being at the top of your customer’s mind, traditionally through mass advertising. However, Clinton says that in today’s media landscape, brands have had to navigate fulfilling a new availability need. “This is digital availability: it’s a blend of being findable on the shelf, and being discoverable in ‘search’ whenever the brand might be relevant. It is a new focus
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area for brands that cannot be ignored, or you will find that there is a gap in your marketing efforts.” Furthermore, Clinton highlights the need for brands’ approaches to marketing to focus on improving trust and transparency with customers. “I think we all know that as the digital revolution has gained pace and data has become more and more available to brands, there have definitely been some major missteps. The statistics released at the beginning of this year by Credos showed that since 1992 trust in advertising has dropped from 48% to 25%. This shows the significant problem we now have.” He continues: “Given that context, it’s more important now than ever for brands to hold themselves to a very high level of accountability in terms of what they do with consumer data: how they gather it, how they use it, and how transparent they are with what they’re going to do with it. If we want to get consumers’ attention again then we have to start by being honest with them, though we also have to go further.” Clinton references research conducted by Havas, a global communications group, and the six pillars of content they defined: “Inspire, entertain, educate, inform, help, and reward”. He says:
“Havas has shown that content that does one of these six things drives better business performance and provides a better experience for the consumer. We have to start adding value to consumers’ lives in a way that we haven’t necessarily always been doing.” He says that he is implementing these pillars at Unilever to ensure that the content produced is “fit for purpose” and “has meaning for the consumer”. Clinton finishes by explaining that Unilever has recently launched a new tool to continually develop and improve its customer service and engagement. “This is a digital hair profiler, in partnership with tech start up Helloava, which is the first one we’ve created in Unilever driven by machine learning to ensure that when a consumer answers a certain number of questions on the All Things Hair US website, the programme will search through hundreds of Unilever products to find the right combination for their specific hair needs.” “That’s just the first step in terms of building that relationship and helping the consumer with their hair through personalisation, and ensuring that we are adding value into the consumers’ lives.”
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2 Tickets ÂŁ995 13 FEBRUARY 2020
Thursday 13 February 2020 Victoria Park Plaza, London Contact centres are ideally placed to become the beating heart of an organisation’s customer engagement strategy. Rapid advances in customer and employee facing technology have created a digital world in which contact centres have to adapt and change if they are to successfully deliver a consistent and joined-up customer experience across the customer journey.
ContactCentreConference.com #EngageCustomer
Organised by
CX MARKETING FOCUS ON
The art of making a restaurant a destination Searcys explains how, 172 years after the brand was founded, it continues to progress and develop to maintain its brand truth of quality, service, and craft.
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earcys was established in 1847 by John Searcy, a confectioner and pastry chef working for the Duke and Duchess of Northumberland. He identified a niche in the market with providing events catering for the up-andcoming middle class, and the business was founded. Today, the company is one of Britain’s longestrunning hospitality businesses. Anna Fenten, the Head of Brand, Marketing, and Communications at Searcys, explains the research undertook on global trends and Searcys’ own customer base when she joined the company in 2017. “When looking at macro-trends, it became very obvious that driving the consumer today, particularly in the dining out market, was the tension between local and global authenticity. London is the capital of global cuisine at the moment, but we as consumers also care so much about the provenance of our produce.” She also highlights how Searcys navigates tensions between traditional attitudes around dining out with new emerging trends, such as the consumers’ want to indulge against the health and wellbeing scene coming into the mainstream. “We try to really tie those things together and weave big global trends into our own brand stories and narratives.” Fenten continues to note the importance of value of experience for the consumer. “Value for money is a cornerstone of our purchasing decisions. If we as restaurateurs, as event providers, can understand what drives that value, what makes it
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unique to the customer – the quality of ingredients, of presentation, of service, all of the attributes that make a guest feel special – we can try to really strengthen the perception of value.” “We try to create value at every single corner of our journey. We need to give something unique to talk about and remember. We’re not competing on price, but on the uniqueness of experience.” This distinction of offering something “unique” is not just explored in the food and drink, but in an all-round dining experience. For example, in January 2019, Searcys ran a “wellbeing campaign”, where “nutritionists and yoga instructors, and artists and painters” were involved to “augment the experience in restaurants and at events”. The reason Searcys places such a focus on this is due to the feedback they gathered when researching what made a restaurant a destination, both at Searcys and in the wider market. Fenten highlights the top five drivers. The first was the quality of food, with 49% of participants naming this as the most important. Fenten says that culinary craft is a key competency of Searcys: “It’s intrinsic to our company: the love for ingredients, ensuring the chefs have creative space to be themselves, to show their personalities through the dishes.” The second was the “place that makes you feel special”, and the remaining three were “the menu, the service, and the reputation”. Fenten says that with such a high percentage
placing emphasis on the venue, “feeling special became a cornerstone of Searcys’ brand proposition going forward.” This is in addition to Searcys’ focus on its “Britishness, its no compromise on ingredients, the quality of service, and the delivery of food and drink.” This research also showed Searcys that the focus of its marketing activities needed to lie in strengthening brand awareness and consistency of messaging around an established “brand truth”. “Ultimately, we looked at what the customer was looking at: the big marker of trends of localisation, provenance, and the personalities of brands. When we overlaid those three buckets of insights with our own internal competencies, competitor gaps, and customer demands, we realised at the crossroads of these is our brand truth.” This “brand truth” was for Searcys to be “known for its provenance, and famous for its warm, generous hospitality”. Fenten says: “Hospitality is an art, and we want our customers to feel special every day when they cross our doorsteps.” She explains: “Any brand promise or truth needs to be internally and externally facing. The way we have articulated the brand truth is that Searcys is there to make the people we serve feel special by being consistently exceptional.” She highlights the word “serve” as particularly significant in the hospitality industry. “I also think it’s so important to talk about the people we work with, both our
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colleagues internally and our suppliers who work with us in the wider world. It is so important that we treat everyone with equal attention, politeness, kindness, courteousness, and fairness.” She continues: “We wouldn’t be anywhere without our people. The big piece of work that is happening this year is in building really forward-looking, agile teams at every single site.” In addition, Fenten states that Searcys wants to be known as “the best server of sustainable British produce”. She lists the three pillars of delivering this. The first is following through with pledges of sustainability. “In 2018 we launched 24 pledges. These food pledges, whether it’s to source only sustainable beer and water or to buy locally, have actually been implemented. These are the pledges that have become the foundation of our
procurement process, and we’ve been running with these for two years.” The second is expertise. “We’ve had great history and legacy in champagne and hospitality, and we only need to strengthen that. That expertise comes to life in our champagne school which has opened for our colleagues and external colleagues where we share our knowledge about sparkling, which is a very exciting masterclass, and these are held throughout the year. It has also translated itself into a hospitality school and various menu recommendations. Sharing that expertise and learning is very important to us as a brand.” The third is craft. “I think that’s such an important, lovely notion, because craft means that there is a lot of thinking, preparation, and planning, but also art in every single dish and every single event.”
Anna Fenten, Head of Brand, Marketing, and Communications, Searcys
Furthermore, Searcys has prioritised creating strong partnerships. This includes a small coffee house in Bristol: “All of our coffee is bought through ‘direct impact’, whereby Extract Coffee goes out to particular farms and their organic co-operatives to buy Searcys beans and blend them in Bristol before delivering them to us. This is a mutually beneficial partnership because we can give them scale and exposure, and we’re very proud to shout about Extract Coffee; they have been an incredible part of our journey.” Searcys also partners with non-food brands. “Every year we run two summer pop ups; one is at the Gherkin, and one is at St Pancras champagne bar. The reason behind the pop ups is to create something exciting and wonderful with the British summer season. This year we have partnered with the most amazing luggage brand, Globe-Trotter. They make incredibly beautiful luggage and suitcases, so it’s only appropriate that we showcase their products at our St Pancras pop-up, which is an internationally-known railway station.” She adds that these partnerships are very important to Searcys. Moving forward, Searcys is hoping to establish itself as a ‘must do’ destination for tourists, and to achieve this, as of 2019 it has become a premium partner of London & Partners, the mayor of London’s official promotional agency. Fenten says Searcys also wants to continue developing in the realm of customer engagement through social media and customer feedback to further strengthen its relationship with visitors.
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The Engage Awards ceremony takes place on 11th November 2019 at the Westminster Park Plaza. Book your table now to the biggest party of the year! Tickets are sold on a first come first serve basis, and the awards bring together the very best customer and employee engagement professionals, recognising both organisations and individuals for trail blazing excellence and defining the future of the industry.
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Introducing your Awards Host Hugh Dennis
Following on from the success of the 2018 Engage Awards programme, which broke records across the board, we are delighted to announce the renaming of our programme for 2019 to the International Engage Awards. The new moniker is an acknowledgement of the increasingly global spread of organisations wanting to enter what is now firmly recognised as the only customer and employee engagement Awards programme. The 2019 International Engage Awards are delighted to welcome Hugh Dennis as the host, the ceremony will include a record number of categories covering every conceivable aspect of customer and employee engagement, and including for the first time a coveted Lifetime Achievement Award. If you’ve achieved great things with your engagement initiatives, the Engage Awards are perfect for you.
Book Your T able
O
nline www.Engage Awards.co.uk
SUMMER 2019
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CX MARKETING FOCUS ON
Daring to be digitally different Canford School, a co-educational independent school for day and boarding pupils, explains how it transformed its digital marketing through an innovative website redesign to uphold its standard of excellence.
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n 2018, Canford School was named Best Boarding School of the Year by industryleading magazine School Parent, and was rated amongst the top 10 most beautiful schools in the UK by The Telegraph. The 250-acre campus is situated in Wimborne Minster in Dorset, and currently has 660 pupils aged 13-18, which is the highest number in the school’s history. The school boasts impressive on-site facilities, including a golf course, a real tennis court, a sports centre, and the grounds have also proven a popular wedding venue for the general public. Philippa Scudds, Director of Marketing and Communications at Canford School, says: ‘Canford is thriving at the moment – we’re very lucky.’ Canford School collaborated with Finalsite, a global provider of school marketing and communications software and services, to completely redesign their website and, by extension, improve the first impression many prospective parents and potential customers would have of the school. Scudds describes the typical website structure many schools follow, and why Canford School wanted to take a different approach. “Lots of school websites focus very much on recruitment of new pupils, and obviously education is the core business of the school, so I can understand why schools do that.” However, she says that there are other stakeholders that Canford wanted to give “pretty equal weight to” on their new website as they are “equally important” in many ways, and part of the “school community”. She clarifies who these different stakeholders are. “You’ve got your current parents, they’re your existing customers, and all your former parents and pupils (we
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call them ‘old Canfordians’, and they are often very helpful to us in terms of career support and advice to our current pupils). We’ve also got a whole section of people who aren’t interested in their children attending the school, but like to come and make use of our facilities, such as the 500 members of our sports centres, and the club members who row on our rivers, or people who play golf on our course, or real tennis on our court. There are a lot of stakeholders who all contribute to the life of the school, and in some ways financially as well through their membership.” Scudds also highlights the schools’ other connection to the local community: “We’ve got over 8,000 hours of community service that our pupils do each year, and those are local links with churches, businesses, hospices, childcare facilities, and more”. She notes that it is possible that the reason “few schools” give adequate emphasis to similar areas on their websites at present is because they may have several different websites running simultaneously to cover these, which is what Canford School used to do. She highlights the issues this approach raised: “When I joined the school about 10 years ago, we had separate websites for different facilities; these were all branded in different ways and lacked consistency”. She explains that this lack of consistency didn’t align with Canford School’s communications strategy, and that they wanted to move towards a uniform standard of excellence in their messaging across
everything they put online. “It was really important for us to draw all of those websites into the same overall school website when we were building the design.” She continues: “Another thing we’ve done is ensure we’ve trained staff that are now responsible for those different parts of our website, and we’ve still got centralised ultimate control of what’s put out there. So that’s given us much more clarity and consistency of the branding across everything that we’re marketing.” She says this has proven successful in
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CX MARKETING
Philippa Scudds, Director of Marketing and Communications, Canford School
She describes the result of this collaboration, and how it made Canford School’s website unique in its sector. “Finalsite came out with some brilliant different layouts, templates, and quick links, which has enabled us to have variety throughout the site, and I hope encourages people to stay on the site for longer and browse. Also, quite a bit of video which is becoming increasingly important on websites. We found a lot of schools’ websites had some beautiful photos on their landing page, but when you got into the information pages, they all followed quite a predictable style and there wasn’t a lot of flexibility in terms of the design.” “Our site does have quite a lot of pages on it because we have to provide an awful lot of information in different areas for people who are looking at the school as prospective parents. But, we also wanted to make it quick and easy for our current parents who have been through the admission process already and just want quick links to key information.”
enabling the school to align its brand messaging with corporate strategic goals. In addition, Scudds notes the importance of the research conducted before the redesign, and how looking at brand marketing beyond the school sector proved beneficial. “We found that many of the schools similar to us had websites akin to each other, and in some cases they didn’t stand out. We asked Finalsite if they could look into some different industry websites based on the brief we’d given them, just to have something a little bit different, more exciting, and very clean in terms of the look of the site. We came up
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with some really fantastic examples of work that was being done in different sectors.” “There were lots of really great points and layouts that we could take inspiration from in our design, and that enabled us to produce a site that really did look quite different and innovative from others within our sector, and therefore have differentiated us. There are so many exciting businesses and industries out there that are doing some really great digital things, and we want to be part of that.”
Moving forward, Scudds says that Canford School is currently working with Finalsite regarding the potential of personalising the customer experience on their website. “We’re not quite sure how far you can go with personalisation, but certainly tailoring the site and experience to individuals so they find the parts of the site relevant to them as quickly as possible is something that is really exciting.” She finishes by acknowledging the ever-changing nature of digital marketing, meaning that the website will continually be advanced, and mentions that some schools have already taken inspiration from Canford’s progression in this area. “There’s always new techniques and new software coming out – sometimes we can feel a bit overwhelmed thinking that we’re not keeping up. But it’s important to take a step back and think what’s going to work best for us and our business, and when you see your competitors following your lead you know you’re hopefully doing something right!”
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EBM Live Events INTERNAL COMMUNICATIONS CONFERENCE
ENGAGE FOCUS GROUPS
17 SEPTEMBER 2019 I VICTORIA PARK PLAZA, LONDON
26 SEPTEMBER 2019 I HILTON LONDON, HEATHROW
This Conference will take an in-depth look at the fast changing world of internal communications and how it is increasingly taking on the critical employee engagement role that has too often been neglected by those in HR.
Our exclusive Engage Focus groups allow senior individuals working in customer and employee engagement to come together and voice their thoughts and share experiences across a wide range of topics in a structured professional environment.
CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT SUMMIT 2019
ENGAGE AWARDS 2019
11 & 12 NOV 2019 I WESTMINSTER PARK PLAZA, LONDON
11 NOV 2019 I WESTMINSTER PARK PLAZA, LONDON
Our flagship Customer Engagement Summit is back, and is now firmly established as a 2 day event. Delegates will hear from 90+ speakers during the course of the two days, and we’ll be covering the latest, hottest topics in the industry.
Following on from the success of Engage Business Media’s 2018 Engage Awards programme, which broke records across the board, we are delighted to announce the renaming of our programme for 2019 to the International Engage Awards.
FUTURE OF THE CONTACT CENTRE CONFERENCE
DIGITAL WORKPLACE CONFERENCE
13 FEBRUARY 2020 I VICTORIA PARK PLAZA, LONDON
12 MARCH 2020 I VICTORIA PARK PLAZA, LONDON
Contact centres remain well placed to become the beating heart of an organisation’s customer engagement strategy. It is the contact centre that can deliver the customer insight that is needed in a business environment where our customers are in control of how they choose to interact with organisations and where the so called ‘customer journey’ is ever more complex.
Engaged employees are more important to organisations than ever before. Providing our people with a truly digital workplace environment enables new and more effective and efficient ways of working while improving engagement levels and at the same time relationships with our customers.
EMPLOYEE WELLBEING CONFERENCE
AUTOMATION AI AND ROBOTICS CONFERENCE
12 MARCH 2020 I VICTORIA PARK PLAZA, LONDON
30 APRIL 2020 I VICTORIA PARK PLAZA, LONDON
The challenges and opportunities relating to the mental, financial and physical health related wellbeing of our people are now firmly at the top of the business agenda, alongside increasing awareness and understanding of the myriad of issues involved.
Automation, AI and Robotics are undoubtedly forming the core of any strategy relating to enhancing customer experience, with new technologies enabling us to create stronger relationships with customers through fast, accurate and consistent responses to their queries.
EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT SUMMIT 2020
CX MARKETING SUMMIT 2020
15 MAY 2020 I RIVERBANK PARK PLAZA, LONDON
19 JUNE 2020 I VICTORIA PARK PLAZA, LONDON
Progressing into its seventh year, the Employee Engagement Summit is firmly established as Europe’s premier event, examining all aspects of work under the overarching theme of how technology is changing the face of employee engagement.
Every interaction that a customer has with a company, be it online or offline, changes their impression of the brand. For this reason, there has never been a more important time for the marketing function to ensure a great CX through each touchpoint of creating awareness, driving conversions, and keeping existing customers happy.
For more information please contact us at: tickets@ebm.media or 01932 EngageEmployee.com
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