| Customers experience your brand in numerous
ways: products, packaging, price, marketing, sales personnel, etc. Each of these contacts
or touchpoints molds the customer’s impression of the brand. Some of these
touchpoints are obvious, like product performance, and 1-on-1 customer interactions. Other
touchpoints like the product manual, monthly statements or post-sales support, may be
subtler in their brand affects.
Your brand image creates expectations. It defines who you
are, how you operate, and how you’re different from your competitors. In essence,
your brand image is a promise – a promise that must be kept.
If the brand is a promise you make, then the customer
experience is the fulfillment of that promise. The customer experience can’t be left
to chance. It should be actively designed and controlled in a manner that enhances your
brand image. It must consistently reinforce the brand promise across every customer
touchpoint or the value of the brand itself is at risk.
Here are 5 easy steps to building a strong brand and an
optimized customer experience:
1. Identify Your Reasons-to-Believe
Your brand promise is irrelevant if your customers do not
believe it. Therefore, your promise must be supported by reasons-to-believe. This will
automatically add substance to the promise and define specific expectations for the
customer.
For example, an automobile manufacturer promises potential
customers that Car XYZ is an “intelligent choice for serious drivers.” What
makes it an intelligent choice? Why should the customer believe this promise?
To address this question effectively, the manufacturer
could frame its promise with two reasons-to-believe…sporty performance and safety.
These two reasons in essence define “intelligent choice” and clearly set
customer expectations. They also give the company specific direction for designing the
customer experience through tangible customer touchpoints like vehicle design features,
advertising campaigns, dealer sales approaches, and customer service activities.
2. Identify Customer Touchpoints
Each individual step in your business process contains a
number of touchpoints when the customer comes in contact with your brand. Your ultimate
goal is to have each touchpoint reinforce and fulfill your marketplace promise.
Walk through your commercial processes. How do you generate
customer demand? How are products sold? How do your customers use your products? How do
you provide after-sales support?
This comprehensive trace of your marketing, selling, and
servicing processes allows you to create a simple touchpoint map that defines your
customers’ experiences with your brand.
3. Determine the Most Influential Touchpoints
All touchpoints are not created equal. Some will naturally
play a larger role in determining your company’s overall customer experience. For
example, if your product is ice cream, taste is typically more important than package
design. Both are touchpoints, but each has a different affect on our customers’
experiences as a whole.
To determine the touchpoints driving your customers’
overall experience, your organization can use a wide array of techniques ranging from
quantitative research to institutional knowledge. The methods you use will depend on the
complexity of your products, commercial processes, and your existing knowledge base.
4. Design the Optimal Experience
Once you have completed the above 3 steps to building a
strong brand, you should be able to design your optimal customer experience.
Here’s how:
Determine how to express each reason-to-believe at each key
touchpoint. For example, how can you reinforce sporty performance (a reason-to-believe) in
product design, at the dealership, and in marketing campaigns (the influential
touchpoints)?
5. Align the organization to consistently deliver
the optimal experience
A holistic approach to aligning your organization to
consistently deliver the optimal experience is essential. Identify the people, processes,
and tools that drive each key touchpoint.
Look beyond employees that have direct contact with your
customers. The impacts of behind-the-scenes employees are less obvious but no less
important. Similarly, the impact of workflow processes and tools (i.e. technology systems)
on the customer experience may be less intuitive but crucial to consistent delivery.
Identify which activities don’t align with your
envisioned customer experience. Determine how to address them so that these components can
be brought into alignment.
The Final Word
Every product or service you bring to market yields a
customer experience. Is it the experience you intend? Does that experience fulfill the
promise you’ve made to the marketplace?
By identifying the people, processes, and tools that drive
your customer experience, you can actively design and control your own, unique, optimized
experience. The brand promise you make to the marketplace will be kept day in and day out
across every key customer touchpoint. |
