Are You Creating Customer Experience Parity?

Is your company paying enough attention to what sets your brand apart when you embark on improving the customer experience? Are you creating an emotional connection with your customer that is uniquely memorable and true to your brand’s image and core values?

As many companies begin to use some of the same techniques and technology to understand customer needs and increase satisfaction, do they run the risk of creating “Experience Parity?”

Even a megabrand like Google can still stand to differentiate its brand by adding a more emotional, human touch to its brand experience.

Bruce Temkin’s blog post on Monday Oct 24^th http://experiencematters.wordpress.com/2011/10/24/google-lacks-apples-emotional-design/  shows the contrast between customer experiences created by Google and Apple. As he points out, Apple has made a unique human connection with customers who have become passionately devoted to the brand. Temkin’s post shows how Apple excels in these three key dimensions of successful experience design:

1. Functional: Does it do what you want it to do?
2. Accessible: How easy is it to do what you want to do?
3. Emotional: How does it make you feel?

His side-by-side comparisons show how Google has only mastered 1 and 2.

This post crystallized a concern I’ve had in the past year as I’ve seen more companies begin customer experience improvement plans. Where does defining the emotional brand value proposition fit in the experience design process?

Many diagnostic methodologies and technologies are being used to listen to the voice of the customer, communicate customer feedback across business functions, prioritize and eliminate customer points of pain and train employees to deliver a consistent experience.

But I don’t see brand experience definition getting the same attention as the rest of the best practices being baked into companies’ customer experience transformation plans.

We all know the genius of Steve Jobs drove Apple’s attention to the human touch, but how can we mere mortals add that magical, emotional satisfaction to new products, services and everyday customer interactions?

By building the company’s brand promise into the customer experience early in the design process.

Aha! I hear that pause and head scratching. You’re not sure what your brand promise is? Your new CMO just decided to hire his favorite branding firm and redefine it for the 4^th time since you’ve been with the company?

You’re not alone. Customer Experience Practitioners are facing this everyday and getting too distracted by metrics, dashboards and analytics to step back and define the emotional essence of the brand’s experience. Besides, another group in the company owns that.

But you don’t need a new brand campaign to guide you in creating emotionally differentiating brand experiences.

Just define how your company is uniquely able to fulfill your customers’ most important emotional needs.

Ok, it’s not that easy. But without first taking that step of defining your brand’s uniquely emotional connection to your customers, many of your experience improvements run the risk of feeling similar to your competitors’. The same type of surveys, the same newly trained front line staff, and the same thanks for your loyalty.

Make sure to define the feeling that sets your company’s experience apart.

Here are five critical steps to incorporate in any Customer Experience Design program to ensure you are designing for brand differentiation:

1. Bring the brand, marketing and research teams into the experience design process as early as possible.
2. Identify your most valuable and most grow-able customers
3. Dig deep to uncover these customers emotional as well as rational needs. The brand team may already have this insight.
4. Analyze where your company is uniquely qualified to fulfill those emotional needs at every stage in the customer’s journey (and map that journey)
5. Expect your customer experience team to demonstrate the same creativity you expect from marketing and branding teams to create uniquely memorable, branded experiences for customers.

It’s not any easy job to integrate right brain thinking into what is quickly becoming the very left brain science of customer experience design.

Metrics and all the new analysis and technology-driven reporting tools are important, but you must create a consistent emotional connection if you want to be as loved (and valued) as Apple.

Advertisement

Tags: brand building, brand image, Customer Experience, Customer Journey Mapping, emotional loyalty, experience, experience branding, Voice of Customer