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Rather than promising higher revenue, sales, and market share (at least, rather than promising it directly ), my philosophy about Customer Experience is that it should be founded explicitly on your Brand Promise, and its goal should be eliminating the gaps that exist between your Customers’ experiences and that Brand Promise.
Rather than promising higher revenue, sales, and market share (at least, rather than promising it directly ), my philosophy about Customer Experience is that it should be founded explicitly on your Brand Promise, and its goal should be eliminating the gaps that exist between your Customers’ experiences and that Brand Promise.
strives to be the industry leader in [enter brand promise here]. strives to be the industry leader in [enter brand promise here]. I’d give special weight to those who identified in their score question that we weren’t living up to our Brand Promise, but I’d also take feedback from those who say we are.
They’re an interesting bunch, and considering that, as I like to say, Marketing and CX share two sides of the same coin—that being the Brand Promise—I’ve had many conversations as our work compliments each other. Marketing is all about building a Brand; at least in theory. You , in Customer Experience, do the Brand Delivery.”
But here’s the thing: Recently I had an experience with this brand that was decidedly not luxury in any way whatsoever. But here’s where the experience , or more precisely the Brand Promise intersects with that decision: When I tried to find satisfaction—or even information —with all this, I had far less than a luxury experience.
But the vagary is universal if you’re not asking with an intent to learn; the summation of my own experience in terms of whether or not I’ll recommend your product or whether I’m satisfied with my most recent interaction with you may have very little to do with what you , as a brand, are trying to accomplish with your CX efforts.
These improvements are streamlining and making more pleasant (or at least more efficient) their interactions with our brands when they need help. Thats pretty awesome and somewhat revolutionary for the CS world. Its not totally new, even IVRs have been around forever it seems. Thats the heart of CX. How do your agents spend all their time?
Briefly, I noticed that , absent the incentive of increased costs (tied to increased Customer interactions, which, with automation would now not need costly humans to handle), the new technology would actually decrease CX in the long run because brands would be less driven to address the root causes of issues. Sound familiar, AI?)
What we have here is a brand with zero incentive (at least none operationally ) to deliver on a promise to its Customers. Theyll offer some sort of attempt at a face-saving make-good, if just for the sake of their brands. Could your brand learn a lesson? But the USPS isat least on papera quasi-for-profit organization.
We have to learn the fundamentals (listen to your Customers to learn where you’re falling short on of Brand Promise…then fix it !). Then we have to learn how it fits in (when we drive Brand Promise Alignment, our Customers come back and spend more with us). My fellow Professors of Practice are phenomenal (Talk about learning !
By and large that’s always a great idea, even when working with a trusted and Customer-centric brand. And, after all, let’s be honest: If a brand didn’t live up to its written word, wouldn’t you hold them accountable? Of course, that’s quite the luxury brand (it doesn’t cost Schlage anywhere near that much each time).
Wise players in certain lines of business own several different brands that can appeal to various tastes: Nissan owns Infiniti, for example; and the InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) includes brands ranging from Kimpton and Crowne Plaza to Holiday Inn Express and Staybridge Suites.
Pull it apart: If that person is a representative for the brand , then he or she is kind of like an ambassador: “Thanks for calling us. our brand that you’ll meet. I’m here as the face of our brand to help you, inform you, or basically be the brand in human form.” How does your brand consider your “representatives”?
Sometimes brands stiff-arm you without even giving you the courtesy of telling you why. There’s even a brand that I call rarely …maybe once or twice a year…and they’ve been using the longer-than-usual wait times idiom as long as I can remember. No brand didn’t have a disruption due to Covid. Whenever was it ‘usual’?
Self-deprecation aside, the much-more-straight-faced point I’m making here is that we as brands need to develop our systems for the lowest-common-denominator Customer. As I consider this concept, I’m taken back to a situation I recently wrote about where I had a difference of perspective from a brand I was dealing with.
Sure, they’re hiring me because they’re looking to limit churn in their own Customer base…they’re engaging with my approach to CX because they’ve identified (or maybe they haven’t yet, and we can work on that) ways in which they’re falling short on delivering their Brand Promise.
In fact, I had two incidents in close succession with two different brands. One of the brands is a large well-known home-service provider that I’ll write about here. The other was a smaller, start-up brand also in the home-service field, and I’ll write about that in another article.
So why do so many brands squander that? Now, this isn’t the end of the world; surely it’s not good for your brand or your reputation, but many Customers may not even notice or care. They’re not necessarily going to bail on your brand just because they got one bum product or you were late one time for an appointment.
Last week I wrote about an interaction I had with a large well-known brand that provides services for homeowners. It was a cautionary tale about how challenging it is to actually communicate with some brands. This is that story, which actually has some curious similarities, even though the brands are in such different places.
I wrote recently about how the term “representative” can take on a different meaning depending on whether you consider your front-line agents as representatives of you as a brand, or of your Customers as they navigate your systems. When dealing with a hospitality brand recently, that came to mind.
Naturally, considering my Framework , I concentrate a lot of my efforts on identifying processes and systems that are causing misalignment with a Brand Promise. Well, what works personally goes double for your brand. Well, okay, I do that a lot anyway. If you never face adversity, it’s easy to always be magnanimous or friendly.
is to improve the alignment between what your company says it’s all about (call it mission/vision, corporate values/principles, or simply Brand Promise) and the experience your Customers have when they interact with your brand. Notice that there’s no mention in there about revenues, sales, or market share. So why even bother?
When you gain insights about gaps between your Customers’ experiences and your Brand Promise, surely you’re feeding into the bigger CX ecosystem with direction on where to improve your processes. It isn’t often that brands crack them open and update the questions they’re asking. But surveys aren’t usually all that dynamic.
There’s lots of room, for example, in the insurance industry for brands to differentiate based on, say, policy options: You can bundle home, auto, life, and umbrella liability. Heck, Mary Hart had her legs insured by Lloyds of London (if you don’t mind me dating myself with that reference). How can you still not have adjusted?
If you’ve read much of my stuff, you may know that, once you ground your CX strategy in your Brand Promise , the three moving operational parts of your Office of the Customer should be Insights , Process Engineering , and building a strong CX Culture. This is a pretty big lift, takes a lot of energy, curiosity, thought, and analysis.
If you’ve read much of my stuff, you may know that, once you ground your CX strategy in your Brand Promise , the three moving operational parts of your Office of the Customer should be Insights , Process Engineering , and building a strong CX Culture. This is a pretty big lift, takes a lot of energy, curiosity, thought, and analysis.
Customer Experience is a very important part of advancing your brand. In fact, as I like to say, CX is the delivery of your brand. When you think about your Brand Promise, your Marketing team spends a lot of time and energy developing and designing it. Everything needs to promote your Brand Promise, whatever it may be.
If we appeal to the actual strategy of our organizations, we can see the vital role CX should and could be playing if we really cared to: CX should be the link between what our Customers encounter when they deal with our brand, and the Brand Promise we market and endeavor to deliver to them.
Many brands offer a markdown of some sort: Flash your Common Access Card (CAC, the unnecessary obviously-has-to-be-an-acronym term we use to mean, “Military ID”) at checkout, and a lot of places knock 5, 10, or even 15 percent off the total for your purchases. Now, there are two major warehouse-type home improvement brands in the US.
There are articles all over the place and books overloading shelves in the business section of the stores having to do with strategies and branding. But your brand and your vision should likely be more than simply, “we make good/great shoes.” It has repercussions on the ground: If you make men’s shoes, that’s great.
And if we’re doing it right, if we’re truly curious and hungry to learn about CX broadly, we’re actually looking for the good and the bad in our experiences with brands. Since you’re constantly working to improve your organization’s CX, you may even take offense that other brands aren’t similarly working on theirs. We should chat.
Even if it’s not flattery, it’s pulling me into their brand as a fellow athlete. Plenty of folks talk about incentivizing participation, and what’s in it for me approaches. They’ve clearly never seen me ski!)
The goal of your VoC program should be to identify what you can do better as an organization to improve your Customers’ experiences and bring them into alignment with your Brand Promise. (The If you’re stuck on what to ask next, try this: “Why?”. The goal of your overall CX program, of course, should be to take that action.)
I wrote a long time ago about an experiment I performed in trying various different channels with a few brands I use a lot. There’s a more direct application for us in the CX world as well, and it goes by the name Omnichannel.
Once they’ve encountered your support function and a broader experience with your brand, it may be wise to survey them on Net Promoter Score (NPS, or more specifically, s NPS, the extra ‘s’ for support) to gauge their overall loyalty and likelihood to re-purchase. Check out the aesthetics and branding while you’re at it.
linking heated seats—which used to be a hallmark of luxury automotive brands, but like onboard communication systems have since become much more ubiquitous, present in many non-luxury cars as well—to a subscription service. This is a luxury brand. Luxury brands costing more is one thing; you’d expect as much.
I know I rail on about VoC (truth be known, that’s not my strongest topic of expertise; I’m much more of a Process Engineer)…Sure, VoC and Customer Insights inform the work we do to improve and better align our Customers’ Experiences with our Brand Promise, but it’s really just the first step. How do you feel about our brand?
To that end, I often say that these teams have the best insight into what your Customers are experiencing (by way of the contacts they receive from your Customers), which is the first step in addressing your Brand Alignment gaps. After all, each contact with your brand is an opportunity to advance the Brand Promise.
The way I see it, aligning your CX strategy with your corporate strategy is about ensuring that every experience your Customers have with your brand enhances your brand’s promise. Consider a luxury branded company. That’s what a luxury brand means to its Customers. Part of your brand promise comes with that understanding.
What should you do when you’ve met your Brand Promise goal? Some people want to set ‘the sky as the limit’ when it comes to delivering for their Customers, especially as pertains to their Brand Promise. And keep in mind, if you’re getting CX right , that Brand Alignment is at the heart of your efforts. Probably not.
But then again, sometimes when we interact with brands, we’re not even given a satisfactory explanation in the first place: How often are you trapped in an inescapable IVR just searching for something you need? As a result, resentment sets in and we’re left with the feeling that the brand simply doesn’t care.
It’s definitely the longest I’ve ever been with any brand that I can think of off the top of my head. It’s kind of a weird thing to think about: loyalty to a brand. Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful that there are brands of gas or paper towels or thumb-drives that strive to be the least-cost competitor.
Why did this brand do that? The brand is making it worse. But no…I was 100% asking a question about this brand irrespective of the type or level of service I was paying for. So, the whole rigmarole was entirely useless and something imposed on me by the brand, making this experience more frustrating than it needed to be.
Still, I couldn’t help but wonder how often Brand Promises are impacted—negatively, often—by the company we choose to keep; which is to say, our business partners. to ‘Dude in a truck’ (again, not a total jackass, but still… not that luxury brand from a few steps ago). How does this luxury brand provide consistency of service?
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