Customer Experience is a very important part of advancing your brand. In fact, as I like to say, CX is the delivery of your brand. When you think about your Brand Promise, your Marketing team spends a lot of time and energy developing and designing it.
It turns to the CX function in your organization to deliver on that promise.
That takes an awful lot of investigation into your Customers’ insights, identifying the gaps between what you’re telling the world you’re all about and what your Customers are actually getting in the real world. Then it’s turning your Process Engineering efforts toward those identified gaps and going to town improving how you do what you do so that what your Customers are experiencing is what your Marketing team is promising.
If you’re the ease-of-use brand, that means streamlining the processes and systems around not just the product you sell—making it easier to understand, implement, integrate, use, etc.—but also improving ancillary mechanisms (interacting with your Legal department, your Account Receivable systems and processes, etc.) so that every touchpoint lines up with that promise of being easy to use.
Alternatively, if your Brand Promise is as, say, the high-tech, best-new-systems and whiz-bang cutting-edge services, it’s not enough that the service you offer truly does deliver in a way that’s at the vanguard of technology. Additionally, you’d better have great support and a well-designed digital presence.
Everything needs to promote your Brand Promise, whatever it may be.
But, here’s the thing also:
If you sell widgets that don’t widget properly; or your service simply doesn’t deliver what it’s supposed to, don’t “do CX.” You’re not ready for it yet.
I love the phrase (and use it in CX all the time): “You had one job.”
That sentiment needs to supersede all efforts to make sure you’re “delivering on your Brand Promise at every touchpoint.” Or, maybe, you can consider this your first touchpoint: the product or service you provide your Customers.
I see a lot of brands trying hard (and good for them, really) to make that seamless demonstration of dedication to their Brand Promise throughout the entire Customer journey: A nascent luxury travel company making an effort to ensure concierge-like service at every step of the way; a restaurant or bar with the ‘togetherness, community’ feel and vibe greeting everybody personally and intimately. And I love that they’re taking their Brand Promises so seriously.
But if that travel company can’t get you to where you need to be (or doesn’t even serve that location), or if that bar or restaurant simply doesn’t have good food (or runs out of drinks), they’re shooting too far for the moon and not enough in getting that one thing they need to get done, done.
The “Experience Economy” really is a thing these days. And yes, all those CX gurus who are chanting about how important the experience is—even more so, they’ll say, than the product or price itself—have a point. But before you get there, you’ve got to deliver your one job.
For that matter, I’d even say, don’t bother with whatever your CX is…don’t even engage your Brand Promise at all…at least not at first. Put that off until you know you can reliably and consistently actually make your widget or perform your service.
Do that right first. Then we can talk about “Getting CX right.” Prematurely trying to do the CX piece on top of simply getting your one job done properly is frankly a distraction.
