I've focused my past few entries around the steps to creating a branded customer experience. I've already written about the first three:
- Evaluate your current customer experience
- First things first: make it predictable
- Step it up: build momentum
Now I'll focus on the final step: focusing on the details.
As you move into the final phase of developing a branded customer experience, you'll realize it's all about the details. You now have all of the elements in place to apply your corporate knowledge to every customer interaction, letting your customers take away that feeling of familiarity and contentment that the branded customer experience creates. Remember how it felt to be an Avocado Spa customer?
Your contact center philosophy is now further extended to tailor service propositions by individual or customer segments, and service is a brand promise that you keep. Your people are brand managers, and you invest significantly in training, coaching, performance management and communications. These elements make motivation intrinsic within your organization.
Your business processes are aligned cross-functionally so that service delivery is consistent and intentional, almost always delivering on your brand promise. On those rare occasions when your company fails to deliver what the customer needs, you have an efficient system in place to handle these issues and resolve them quickly.
Your company now relies on your technology to enable the branded customer experience, because it is wholly designed around achieving customer outcomes and provides the actionable intelligence to make a difference. You use this intelligence to understand customer preferences and characteristics and analyze them to anticipate future customer needs. You can foster continuous improvement by using what you learn to customize products and services to meet the ever-changing needs of your customers.
Now that have reached your goal, you track your success by measuring what matters:
- Increase in valuable customer outcomes
- Increase in customer satisfaction
- Increase in customer retention
- Increase in average revenue per customer
- Improved and distinguished brand image
- Recognition of service excellence
The end result of this effort is that you have transformed your company into a customer-intelligent enterprise. You recognize that the value of your company's present and future relationships with customers determines the viability of the company. The real value of your company is reflected in the loyalty of its customers, and your customers are now advocates who trust your organization to deliver for them, every time.
Building a branded customer experience has become an enterprise initiative - central to the core functions and success of your business. This revolution fosters enterprise-wide collaborative improvement fueled by actionable intelligence that is driven by the voice of the customer. Truly listening to what your customer interactions tell you enables your organization to use technology and process to deliver better service, increase customer satisfaction and loyalty, make better and faster decisions, and ultimately, to enjoy increased revenues and profits.
