Customer Experience Branding
Whether you realize it or not, you offer customers an experience. It doesn’t matter if you sell gadgets or provide services that have nothing to do with virtual reality. Your business is broader than you realize, and customer experience branding is one of the most powerful tools to attract and keep your audience loyal and raving. In fact, 89% of customers switch brands because of poor customer experience. Is yours helping or holding you back?
What is “customer experience”?
Did customer service come to mind? That’s only a fraction of the way your brand engages with customers.
Customer experience is a wide landscape: the “sum-totality of how customers engage with your company and brand” over the entire life of their relationship with you. It isn’t a specific moment in time. It grows from and between every touch point or encounter with a brand, whether a website visit, a shopping experience, the actual use of the product, satisfaction, feedback… collectively, these create the customer experience.
How your business capitalizes on that breadth of relationship will impact customer loyalty. In other words, customer experience branding is an important part of your overall platform and positioning.
So what’s “customer experience branding”?
Perhaps you’re thinking, “But I just sell gizmos!”
Although the thing that creates direct revenue for you may be selling a gizmo, you’re actually selling (or failing to sell) your company (and brand) on multiple levels. Ask yourself: have I anticipated the customer’s full journey? Look at this from the consumer experience, including finding your brand, purchasing from you, using you, sharing you, and discarding you. If you haven’t explored that question, consider a “customer journey map” to help identify the various steps a consumer takes in using your brand. Have you anticipated any of these? Is there anything between these steps your brand can anticipate? How does your brand engage throughout the customer experience? What does your customer experience branding look and feel like?
More importantly, what do you want it to look and feel like?
The ideas behind visual and verbal identities are the same, regardless of where they get implemented. Remember, perception is reality! In this ever-changing world of commerce, there are multiple opportunities in the full spectrum of customer experience where branding creates a perception. These are now critical in a market where expectations grow and evolve, particularly as virtual reality changes consumer products and design tools.
Here are 5 specific questions that can help you look at your customer experience branding:
- The customer’s journey: how many touch points did you find?
- Do these points of engagement meet the consumer’s minimum needs for personnel (do they need to speak to a live person) or technology (do they need access through a mobile device)?
- Which of these points exceeds those minimum expectations?
- Are these touch points efficient, or do you use outdated methods (remember carbon copy credit card receipts)?
- Would you return to your business? Or, phrased another way, what do you prefer in your consumer experience and are you providing that to your customers?
Don’t forget: consumer experience is more than touch points.
As one commentator in Forbes pointed out, there may be moments between the “tent-pole touch points” where customer experience branding is important. Don’t over-focus on the medium through which the customer is engaged and ignore the consumer’s real need. The customer’s journey described above isn’t linear: branding targets them in multiple, often disconnected ways. What’s missing? An accurate, obsessive empathy, from a consumer’s perception, becomes a decision-making factor. This commentator offers three suggestions to generate this perspective:
- Anticipate.
- Think out of the box.
- Collaborate.
Zipcar is one great example of a company connecting the dots for a customer’s full need when renting a car: finding a car, renting, gas, tolls, insurance, drop-off, all at a defrayed expense. What have you anticipated? What have you not considered? Customer experience branding will not only fill those gaps overlooked by competitors, but will generate the consumer loyalty you need.
It makes common sense to hire a branding agency … for branding. And, you can do that in just 2-days with our “Branding Intensive“.
