Engage and Deliver: Understand Your Customers and Improve Their Brand Experience

by Kevin Perlmutter and Michelle Kramer

Beyond Engagement

There’s been a lot of talk about brand engagement recently. We’ve seen the rise of Engagement Planning Departments in advertising agencies, all with the purpose of helping communications better connect with consumers in multiple channels with 360 degree ideas. Additionally, there have been a multitude of marketing conferences around the idea of engagement planning, but few that focus on the customer experience.

Indeed, more engaging communications are a step in the right direction for marketers. Let’s face it, consumers are more time starved than ever. They have more messages coming at them, and are more skeptical of communications than ever before. With less time to process an increased quantity of information, there’s no doubt that an emphasis on ideas that truly connect with consumers on an emotional level – in the right place at the right time – is a necessity. It’s what we’ve always done and it is even more complicated now.

But wait, there’s more. Great brands not only need to engage, they also need to deliver. To be a truly great brand, you don’t just need to get them hook, line and sinker, you also need to take good care of them once they are in the boat. Unfortunately, many marketers work very hard at fishing, then do the equivalent of taking the fish off the hook, and tossing it back in the lake.

Understand your customer

To deliver their brands, marketers need to work on understanding their customers. Whereas lots of marketers have become very good at acquisition, they are not doing a very good job at retention. Meanwhile, we all know that it is harder and more expensive to win over new customers than to retain existing ones.

In many cases, marketers are actually blind to the problems their customers are experiencing. According to Bain & Company, 80 percent of marketers believe that they deliver a superior customer experience, but only eight percent of customers agree. (1) This statistic suggests that the majority of marketers simply don’t understand their customers: they are not clear on how customers are feeling, if customer retention can be improved, or how to go about it. We’ve become very good at working with our media agencies and account planners to find our target audiences, and reaching them in the right place at the right time by knowing who they are demographically, geographically, and psychographically. But to truly understand them, the relationship must go deeper.

Think about the relationship you have with your significant other. Is it enough to know their age, where they live and what they like? Well, yes, with some good planning and/or some luck, it was probably enough in the early stages of the relationship. Years later, however, it takes a richer understanding to keep the relationship strong. You need to know what drives his/her decisions, what makes him/her happy, and what makes him/her not so happy.

Long-term relationships are hard work, and cannot be taken for granted. What distinguishes great brands from their competition is not only the ability to connect, but to sustain a relationship over time.

Earn the customer’s trust

Marketers will want to earn the trust of their customers. This can be achieved by showing customers respect as they interact with your brand, and treating them as you would like to be treated.

Zappos.com is a great example of a brand that is earning trust and a loyal customer base. For Zappos.com it all starts with a highly motivated and satisfied workforce, which translates directly to the customer experience. Employees are incredibly attentive to customer needs and they exceed expectations when responding to customer inquiries. They leverage every opportunity to surprise and delight the customer. As a result, word of mouth is a significant driver of Zappos.com’s business growth.

According to CEO Tony Hsieh, Zappos.com has a loyal base of repeat customers who account for about 75 percent of purchases. (2) This can be attributed to a fanatical emphasis on the customer experience, resulting in highly positive word of mouth, and word of blog.

The power of word of mouth and word of blog

As Zappos.com demonstrates, we’re now in a time when individuals play a significant role in shaping the opinions and actions of others. According to Deloitte, 62 percent of all consumers are reading reviews online and 82 percent of people who read consumer written reviews online say that their purchase decisions are directly influenced by reviews. (3) Further, Nielsen BuzzMetrics reports that consumers are 50 percent more likely to be influenced by word of mouth than by mass advertising. (4) Simply put, it is harder than ever for marketers to control the messages that circulate around their brands, and new consumer behaviours can either be ignored or embraced. Consumers are talking about your brand: your actions can dramatically influence what they say.

Harnessing customer opinion to your advantage

Some marketers are harnessing customer opinion to their advantage. Dell took the concept of the classic suggestion box and evolved it into an active, customer forum moderated by Dell employees.

IdeaStorm.com launched in February 2007 and in the first 18 months the Dell Community contributed nearly 10,000 ideas, ranked the ideas, and made nearly 75,000 comments on the ideas submitted. (5) Many suggestions have been implemented, including the introduction of computers running Linux instead of Windows and the continued offer of Windows XP. Dell has begun using this forum in place of other forms of market research.

Similarly, Starbucks launched MyStarbucksIdea.com in 2008. This open dialogue between consumers and brand managers generated ideas for product/service innovation, and it gave Starbucks a real-time, accurate pulse on how to improve their customer experience. For example, they launched Vivanno Nourishing Blends, a concept that came directly from consumer suggestions to offer more healthy and natural beverages. (6)

This approach has both an upside and a downside. If done well, marketers can improve their brand’s offering, build trust with customers, and enlist an army of brand loyalists who feel rewarded because they participated in the development of a brand that they care about. On the downside, marketers open their brand up to criticism in a very public forum. They need the resources to manage the influx of suggestions, and they need to be fully committed to implementing good ideas for everyone to feel that it was a worthwhile venture.

But let’s say that the mass suggestion box isn’t for right for your brand. Another perfectly viable approach that’s been around much longer than the blog involves the same basic principles – understanding the customer and responding to their needs.

Evaluate, analyze, ideate, and prioritize

Learning how consumers make decisions when it comes to the consideration of your offering is at the root of understanding. What are the triggers for consideration? What are the top drivers of purchase? What other options exist for their needs to be fulfilled? What aspects of the customer experience are impacting customer sentiment in positive or negative ways? What aspects are engendering loyalty and what aspects are causing individuals to leave your brand during a given time period? Which customer experience improvements add value to the business?

A thorough analysis of the customer journey is very helpful way to understand all of the stages of the customer experience. It can give marketers a much better understanding of the customer experience from their perspective, and it can help marketers discover new opportunities for improvement.

There are four primary steps that we rely on to improve the customer experience:

1. Evaluate the Customer Journey

An evaluation of the customer journey is required in order to get a clear understanding of how your brand is working in the marketplace today. This can be accomplished though qualitative investigation such as customer simulation, ethnographic observation, blog analysis, salesperson ride-along, and customer intercepts and surveys. Additionally, more formal research such as customer satisfaction studies or decision driver research can help clarify the customer journey.

How are people learning about your offering, evaluating alternatives, and buying? Perhaps you’ll find that reading online customer reviews or technical information online is a far more important to the decision-making process that it was in the past.

Once they buy, why are they staying or leaving? What are loyal or disloyal customers saying about your brand in public forums? And how is that impacting other potential customers?

By asking questions like these, chances are that you will learn about key influences in the decision-making process of your customers and prospects that you did not know existed.

2. Analyze what you learn about how your brand is working today

It is important that this analysis is compared to customer desires at each stage of the customer journey.

Are you fulfilling customer needs at each stage, or are you leaving them frustrated? If they become disloyal after making a purchase, does it have to do with the product’s performance, the technical support personnel, the account representative, or some other functional or emotional factor that you haven’t thought about?

The objective is to improve customer attraction and retention by removing the hurdles that cause customers to leave your brand and head elsewhere. This will enrich the experience so that it will yield more loyalty and advocacy.

When analyzing, you should focus on uncovering the answers to three questions: What should you continue doing? What should you stop doing? What should you start doing?

3. Ideate improvements to the customer experience at each stage of the customer journey

These ideas should close the gap between the current customer experience and experiences that will be more fulfilling to the customer. They are innovations that stem from the question, “what should you start doing?” – specifically, what should you start doing to improve the experience at each stage of the customer journey?

There’s no single way to develop new ideas. They can come in a variety of ways. Some new ideas may be very obvious once you analyze the current customer experience. Others ideas will come from brainstorms with internal teams, the services of your marketing service partners, or consumer ideation research.

Regardless of how the new ideas are arrived at, innovative thinking is key and will open up opportunities for change.

4. Prioritize the opportunities based on their impact to your business

You will be considering a lot of different ideas to solve key customer issues.

The trick is to make improvements in areas that are currently having the greatest negative impact, or where there is the greatest upside opportunity.

Whereas, in some cases, small changes can have a large impact, at other times, large-scale changes are worth the investment. Some improvements may even have the potential to completely reframe the competitive environment.

The most important criteria in prioritizing the opportunities you’ve developed is whether or not the improvements will add value to the business. Selected opportunities need to thwart the erosion of current customers and do a better job at attracting new ones. Improved customer satisfaction by itself is not a strong enough reason. You need to trigger an increase in purchasing though the elimination of hurdles, stronger loyalty, or advocacy.

A fulfilling customer experience adds value to your brand

In today’s market, great customer experiences – not just great advertising – lead to strong emotional connections with brands. Now more than ever, consumers can garner a lot of attention by telling others about their experiences with a brand. Therefore, it is imperative that brands not only engage, but also deliver.

Those marketers who continue to focus on acquisition with less regard for retention are at risk. Meanwhile, those who focus on improving their brand’s customer experience can benefit from competitive differentiation, increased brand loyalty, advocacy, and revenue growth. There’s never been a more important time to focus on understanding your customers and improving their experience with your brand.

Source: Interbrand