Is your brand delivering great customer experience?

If you are staring at static NPS or the only thing driving your customer base is discounting; dive back into your brand & make sure it is delivering at every stage of the customer experience.

WHAT IS BRAND CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE or BCX?

We are all focused on creating & measuring the friction-less customer journey – so that everything from ball gowns to burritos can be tailored to customers’ needs & delivered directly to them, on the sofa, at a whisper to Siri – but often we overlook three factors:

CONSISTENCY

Less that 50% of companies in digital transformation are making the effort to truly integrate their experience across channels.*

EXPECTATION

Most companies benchmark themselves vs. competition but not against customer expectation.*

EMOTION

In our left-brain-scurry for rational process we forget that “emotions count for more than 50% of a customer’s experience”.^

Whose brand is on the bag that comes through the door?

 

So Where Do We Go Wrong?

Let’s start with convenience:

Shareware, SaaS & the gig economy have changed the game. SME’s can bolt on booking engines, ponder WooCommerce vs. Shopify, plug in a payment gateway or negotiate Deliveroo vs. Uber Eats, faster than you can say ‘digital transformation’, then dust themselves of off, say “Phew” & move onto the next project!

Not so fast!

Between out of the box technology & 3rd party distribution, did we let go of our brand along the way? In 90% of cases, whose brand name is on the bag that comes through the door?

Introducing Brand Customer Experience or BCX

Brand Customer Experience (BCX). It’s what customers expect from your brand vs. what they actually get.

PERCEPTION

Most customer journey plans start with discovery but they skip-over brand brand promise. What is the customer’s expectation when they hit that “buy now” button? Blind hope, excitement … who knows?

ENGAGEMENT

50% of customer experience is emotion.^ However, the value-driving emotions identified in years of research are unhelpfully generic; “Happy” “Pleased” Cared-for” etc. What makes a 23-year-old fashion purchaser happy or pleased is very different to that required by a 55 year old placing their elderly parent into care.

So what are we doing to evoke that emotion & what do we do to engage & evoke the same emotions from the service given by a seasoned expert, when we have replaced them with a call-centre or removed human interaction altogether? The reality is that few companies have even explored the customer journey with real customers.*

DELIVERY

Finally, how do we unlock those unrecognised strengths to attract new customers, or know when to jolt ourselves off our laurels, unless we compare actual delivery against expectation?

FAST FOOD, SLOW

A Case Study In Compliance KFC had one of the first, great customer journey ratings schemes. However, embarking on drive-thru, the operational K.P.I .was set at 3 minutes wait time. Time & again the operational scores achieved 100% on wait time but despite this, quarterly results for speed of service from customer experience measurements, compared to the competition, sucked! What went wrong? MacDonald’s had set the expectation for drive through at 2 minutes wait time. KFC’s benchmark metric had been set without reference to customer expectation. So whilst Operations were high-fiving, the customer was quietly marking us down as ‘fast food, slow’

 

SINCE WHEN WAS BUBBLE-WRAP GLAMOROUS?

A Case Study In Consistency A chain of skin clinics retailed a superb range of premium cosmeceuticals & mineral make-up on line. The products were marketed with smoky-eyed, glass-skinned glamour but their actual arrival in home was far less glamorous – more reminiscent of the first, scrunched-face, bed-head scowl you pull at yourself, in the mirror each morning – bundled together in bubble-wrap, brown packing tape & loose in a postbag.

Is Presentation Important?

Damn right it is!

If you have bagged a fashion bargain, you want everyone to know that you are that beautiful girl in the (full-priced) shiny frock, in the chic shop window! You will show off the carrier bag by taking your lunch to work in it, carry the dress bag on the plane & wrap your best friend’s birthday gift in the tissue paper. Even if it doesn’t fit, you will lose weight rather than send it back, because the whole package is so perfect.

In reality, return rates in apparel dropped to 29% in 2018, however this has more to do with improvement in communication of colour, size & fit.~

Less that 50% of companies in digital transformation are making the effort to create a truly omnichannel experience.

Many private sellers on ebay are using thoughtful & stylish packaging to demonstrate care, quality & enhance the excitement of unwrapping your purchase, to notch up those rating stars. Yet many brands have leapt at the omnichannel sales wagon with little thought about the reach & consistency of their brand throughout the experience.*

Building Brand Back Into CX

Brand Customer Experience (BCX) is the measure of your brand differentiation. It’s where the brand personality rubber hits the customer journey road.
So if you are staring at a static Net Promoter Score (NPS) & wondering what it all means, or the only thing driving your customer base is discounting, then dive back into your brand & make sure it is delivering at every stage of the customer experience.

Here are the top 5 places along your customer journey mapping to start looking:

Book a BCX Expert Audit to see how your Brand Customer Experience delivers.

We offer two; Expert On-line or Expert Omnichannel, where you have a retail store presence.

BrandCents Consultancy is an independent Marketing Consultancy, specialising in Brand Transformation, growth & improving Customer Experience. Reach out for help on customer insights for decisions, impactful brand collateral & truly useful content.

References:
*A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Accenture Interactive, May 2016
^ The DNA of Customer Experience – Colin Shaw. Palgrave Macmillan. Published on June 30, 2008.
~Narvar Consumer Report 2018. The state of returns: What today’s shoppers expect.