Creating an exceptional customer experience

From Brand Strategy
www.brandstrategy.co.uk

It seems totally illogical that a sane human being can foster so much hatred for a disembodied voice or for someone we don’t even know, but it happens to all of us sooner or later. Frustration, exasperation, perspiration – it’s all there – the signs of a bad customer experience. When it’s bad, we know it. When it’s good, we pretty much take it for granted. It’s this stand-off that poses one of the biggest conundrums for any company.

By exceptional we mean an experience a customer remembers. One that will lead them to recommend your company to friends and colleagues. One that will keep them loyal to you – even if they see the same product cheaper elsewhere. But it’s not always obvious which parts of the customer experience our own customers value the most. While sound products and good service standards might be enough to win their business, you need to go much further to stand out as different and special.

We examined the views and attitudes of 1000 business people from the UK and US, from a broad spectrum of age, gender, seniority and business fields. Each was asked a series of questions regarding their relationships with suppliers, and their opinions on their working environment. Which suppliers provided a strong customer experience? What was most important to them in making this decision? What aspects of their job do they find most important? Respondents were questioned about the quality of the customer experience delivered by their own firm and their own job satisfaction – and were asked to rate both.

Hotel groups, a great example of a sector that offers a service based around human interaction, featured heavily in the list of top-rated companies. Office support, technology and IT, sectors that tailor solutions to client needs using intuitive products, were also well regarded.

So what’s the difference between a well performing company, and a truly amazing company? We distilled factors involved in strong customer experience into those that were highly valued, and widely used by suppliers, and those that were highly valued, but not generally used in the marketplace. We found that good companies cover the basics - factors such as being easy to reach, having communications and services that are easy to use and always keeping to schedule. However, it’s the person-to-person factors such as valuing a customer’s business, treating customers like individuals and having the same ethical standards as customers that really make the difference between a provider of an acceptable customer experience and a provider of an exceptional customer experience.

They think the quality of the customer experience is important in the evaluation of the supplier, while only 25% of the rest of our sample would simply go for the most competitive offer. And while value for money was one of our highest rated factors, cheapest price came a lot further down in our poll.

So it seems pretty simple – if the combination of brand reputation and employee-customer relationships can foster a strong enough emotional bond with customers on these levels, the goal is achieved. Indeed, emotional brand and marketing campaigns such as viral messaging, guerrilla marketing and corporate social responsibility efforts are nothing new.

As we can glean from personal experience, job satisfaction has a lot to do with how much engagement we have for, and how much effort we are willing to put into, a job. Our research took this further – finding a strong and clear correlation between job satisfaction and the quality of the client experience an employee provides. Subjects who had high levels of satisfaction at work strongly believed that they provided an exceptional customer experience.

Firms that base the employee experience around these characteristics, rather than poorly-rated factors like ‘health insurance’, ‘attractive physical working environment’, ‘opportunity to travel’ and ‘holiday allowance’ – which HR departments may traditionally use to entice new recruits – will create higher levels of job satisfaction. Not only does this boost the customer experience, but on a separate level, aspects such as ‘interesting work’ and ‘good colleagues to work with’ are good for the business through greater engagement with projects and with the team.

1. Empowerment (I can make a difference) 2. Engagement (I am committed to the business) 3. Reputation (I am proud to work here).

This is reflected quite dramatically in the annual rankings lists. For example, Fortune & BusinessWeek publishes a ranking of the world’s most admired companies and the best global brands. However, when we cross-reference these brands with the Institute of Europe’s Best Places to Work list, the number of top-ranking names falls drastically.

The brand challenge

There are numerous methods to engage current and potential customers. The challenge is to identify which methods your audience will actually buy into, and which will deliver the fastest results. From our research findings, we propose that truly great service revolves around emotional, people-to-people bonds. However a truly exceptional customer experience can only come from the confluence of three factors:



Our survey highlights how brand flows through company-employee, employee-customer and customer-company relations to create a driving force that impacts everyone, but in different ways. We suggest that by fixing internal aspects of its brand a company can influence customer experience (as well as turnover) and thus the external embodiment of its brand reputation. It’s a challenge to large corporations to understand that it’s employee freedom and empowerment that makes a difference, not simply salary.

To drive local, national and global perceptions of a powerful brand with an exceptional customer experience, companies must embrace the idea of a unified brand experience, both internally and externally. The transition from prospect to customer and from recruit to employee becomes seamless as unified brand value becomes widespread. By opening up communication and creating new channels for engaging effectively with customers and employees, a company can go beyond the competition and create a customer experience, employee experience and brand that are truly exceptional.