Five Keys to a Well-Managed Brand

The wheels of industry usually move slowly. But in the case of customer experience management–the science of building brand preference by meeting customer needs and exceeding expectations–the speed has been break neck. Back in 2005, the Web and the prevalence of blogging helped shed shocking new light on the myriad obstacles to building sustainable loyalty: the New Jersey couple who were labeled “Jew Couple” on their check by restaurant staffers, the financial services company that addressed an Arab American as “Palestinian Bomber,” and the customer service reps who changed a telecom customer’s name to “Bitch Dog” in its database. These little things can get in the way of building your brand.

So it’s not surprising that customer experience management has become a critical objective during the past two years. Customer experience teams and enhancement initiatives have emerged everywhere. Companies of all shapes and sizes are dedicating themselves to identifying, isolating, and managing their customer interactions, both to improve satisfaction and to retain their most valuable assets.

Simplicity and user-friendliness have become more important than the comfort (to companies, anyway) of business as usual. One executive, in describing the desire to make things simple, told us that his services needed to be as “easy as Google.” Another talked of leapfrogging the competition by offering simpler transactional forms and intuitive interfaces. By recognizing the power of everyday media and communications to reinforce brand strategy, these companies–and others like them–are setting a trend that will gain steam over the next few years. They are breaking down functional silos, desegregating marketing and operational budgets, and beginning the process of refocusing frequent and often unheralded touch points to better deliver enhanced customer experiences.

Brand alignment and consistency are prerequisites for improving the customer experience, especially when the brand has been damaged by isolated events such as those described above. Here are five tips to getting started down the path to a well-managed brand:

1) Customers return to companies they understand and trust. Make yours one of them.
• Raise your conversation with customers to its most natural state of clarity and simplicity.

• Be honest. Recognize past problems, and articulate what you are doing to fix them. Employees and partners will respect you; customers will listen.

• Reward participation (internal and external sharing of expectations and experiences). Competitive reviews can help establish a baseline against which to compare.

2) Revisit your company’s core identity, values, and operating principles.
• Are your people and processes supporting these? If not, find out why.

• Think about how you gain or lose value through customer experiences, and map out a picture of the current state.

• Identify the key behaviors that impact brand performance.

3) Once you know where the pain is, run cost-benefit analysis to determine the magnitude and value of needed changes.
• If the ROI is there, go for it. Prioritize first, then set achievable goals. Focus on the most-critical points of interaction with your most valuable customers first.

• Try to make innovative changes that reinforce your brand and demonstrate customer focus.

4) Consider how you measure satisfaction.
• Work with business leaders to balance financial and customer experience goals; these should align.

• Consider the frequency with which you need to measure satisfaction. Fast-paced industries, such as technology, may need to measure satisfaction more frequently. More-traditional industries might be able to use quarterly touch-point research to remain responsive.

• How you present products and services is also important. Linking product development specs to postsales surveys can help you averting future dissatisfaction.

5) Evaluate and quantify progress against goals at planned intervals.
• Employ tracking studies to maintain focus on customers and provide a regular basis for realignment.

• Online questionnaires, direct mail surveys, and paid user research can be effective ways to collect this data.

Let’s remember why customers matter. Brand is a total reflection of a company and the experiences of its customers. Without customers, brands lose meaning.

Customer experiences are a constantly changing reflection of brand strategy and how effectively it is delivered. This has only become more complex with the steady maturation of the Web. By acknowledging the strong correlation between simpler and more-transparent interactions and higher customer satisfaction scores, fewer companies now question whether investment in customer experience justifies the expenses. After all, the customer is always right in the end.

Patrick Ohlin is brand director of CoreBrand, a New York-based branding agency.