Second To None

Drive Brand Value Through the Customer Experience

By Jeff Hall

Today's consumers enjoy the benefit of having more options for meeting life's needs than ever before. Explosive growth and expansion within the retail, restaurant, banking, wireless and grocery sectors, among others, has resulted in intense competition between brands and a more discerning customer with higher expectations.

Leading brands have come to recognize how changing their focus from the three P's of price, product and place to that of the overall experience can result in uniquely sustained advantage. The key is authenticity. Consumers are starved for memorable experiences and handsomely reward those who consistently deliver on their brand promise through loyalty, profitability and enhanced shareholder return.

Authenticity is the outcome of a carefully designed customer experience strategy – one that is supported top-down within an organization and in which everyone understands and is aligned with the brand's purpose, mission and vision.

The Core Objectives

A widely cited Bain & Company survey reveals just how commonly companies misread the market. Of nearly 400 firms surveyed, 80% believed they delivered a "superior experience" to their customers. When actual customers were asked about their own perceptions, just 8% percent of companies were rated as truly delivering a superior experience. Clearly, it's easy for companies to assume they're keeping customers happy; it's quite another thing to continually achieve that kind of customer devotion.

For those 8 percent recognized as delivering exceptional experiences, the common thread is found in their taking a distinctively broad view of the customer experience. Unlike most companies, which reflexively turn to product or service design to improve customer satisfaction, the leaders successfully deliver on three core objectives simultaneously:

1. They design the right offers and experiences for the right customers. Customer segmentation plays an important role in experience design, with all customer touch points taken into consideration.
2. They deliver these propositions by focusing the entire company on them with an emphasis on cross-functional collaboration. Every associate and department is mindful of the impact their decisions and actions have on the overall customer experience.
3. They develop their capabilities to meet and exceed customer expectations over and over. Employees are properly trained and supported to have an ample degree of empowerment and decision-making autonomy. An important outcome is to establish direct accountability for the customer experience.

Customer Experience Design

The design of an effective customer experience strategy is dependent on a brand's ability to understand both internal (organizational) and external (customer) stakeholder needs, expectations and values. Offering customers a brand promise that delivers real value begins by defining customer values. Key outcomes involve defining target customer segments and the profitability they represent, gaining a factual understanding of what the most profitable customers expect as well as knowing which aspects of customer experience most impact intent to repurchase and recommend. This data then shapes the experience strategy, where critical customer touch points are identified and the service experience is designed in such manner as to deliver on the brand promise in a way that is authentic, differentiated and valuable to target customers.

Equipping People to Deliver Consistently

High performance brands are comprised of high performance people. High performance people clearly understand, support and are aligned with the brand's customer experience vision. To ensure effective delivery, leaders must first create and motivate cross-functional teams to deliver their value proposition across the entire customer experience. This involves defining an internal communications plan to build commitment, understanding and clarity around implementing the experience objectives. Leaders must understand their roles as champions of the customer experience, while effectively communicating the brand promise to employees and the importance of their contribution in making it a reality. Second, they must treat customer interaction as a key competitive differentiator. Creating alignment across touch points is an ongoing endeavor and exponentially more challenging based on the scale of the organization. The best brands continuously seek to identify specific ways of improving their people, processes and products in order to improve the delivery of their promise over time.

Key Performance Measures for Sustainable Success

The most successful brands in the world aren't that way by accident. It takes a relentless dedication to understanding customers intimately and to creating value in customer experience delivery – supported through culture, leadership and organizational focus. The best companies find ways to capture and react to the voice of the customer every day.

Understanding the degree to which your brand is executing on alignment and authenticity can be achieved through ongoing performance measurement. Leading brands create a balanced set of metrics providing all levels of their organization with objective, timely feedback as to how well they are delivering on their brand promise. Such measures may include store or location-level operational compliance audits, mystery shopping, voice of the customer surveys (phone or web-based), customer intercept interviews and employee workplace attitude studies. Optimal utilization of customer and employee feedback includes sharing results throughout the organization, in order to affect positive, lasting performance improvements. The final component to success is in continually communicating the progress and results in how well the brand is delivering on its customer experience promise across the entire organization.

Customer Experience, Brand Strategy