Customer experience can make or break a company. According to a study by CallMiner, $35.3 billion is lost every year by US businesses in…
Customer experience can make or break a company. According to a study by CallMiner, $35.3 billion is lost every year by US businesses in customer churn linked to poor customer experiences.
Customers who have had a taste of what you offer will share what it was like to interact with your business. If they do not have a pleasant experience with your product, service, or even a company representative (sales/customer service representatives), they will likely let others know. This could affect how your target market perceives you, even loyal customers. The power of negative customer opinion is magnified by online reviews. It is your responsibility to ensure customer satisfaction at every point of contact.
It may surprise some, but branding has a significant impact on customer experience. Quality branding can set you apart from your competition and make others see your business as a step above the rest.
The following suggestions can help you ensure that your customers will have a good experience with you thanks to your established brand.
The perfect customer experience depends on the brand, although there are elements of customer experience that are consistent across industries and companies. These elements boil down to treating others how you want to be treated and fixing parts of your business that cause customer frustration.
Harvard Business Review highlights two different ways to create a positive customer experience. They differentiate between brands that provide a “frictionless” customer experience (Amazon, Walmart, etc.) and those that provide a “memorable” customer experience (Disney, Restaurants, etc.)
Let’s use two of Elon Musk’s companies as an example, Tesla and SpaceX. These two companies linked by one of the most famous entrepreneurs of our time have different customer experience strategies.
Tesla’s customer experience strategy focuses on being frictionless with personalized driver profiles, self-service sales, and vehicle delivery, while SpaceX’s customer experience strategy focuses on creating a memorable experience for its high rolling space tourists.
We suggest framing your brand internally as a memorable brand or a frictionless brand. Choosing to be memorable doesn’t mean buying your product should be a pain in the ass. But it does mean that customers will be willing to overlook some issues due to the experience as a whole. For example, people are blown away by Disney World despite sitting in long lines in the Florida heat.
After defining your company as a frictionless or memorable brand, you should focus on other elements of branding. Before starting other projects branding should be nailed down. Branding is fundamental to an exceptional customer experience. If branding is clear and reflects your company’s beliefs, objectives, and personality, you can attract customers who relate to your brand and share the same sentiments.
How can you establish good and solid branding? Step one, evaluate your logo. Does it represent your brand? Could it be better? This can be hard for business owners to view non-emotionally. If you’re in-house, tread carefully, but share your opinion. If you know that your boss will react poorly, attempt to outsource the rebrand, so you can avoid delivering the message.
Creating, editing, or changing your logo so that it’s consistent with your brand can make a huge difference when performing a rebrand. Your color schemes and overall marketing approach must also align with your branding and values. By doing so, you can create consistent content that your audience can immediately identify.
You will also need to make sure that your branding elements are consistent across all off-line and digital channels. For example, you do NOT want to have one logo on Facebook, a different logo in a print ad, and another on your website. That being said, you may need to design different versions of your logo for different marketing channels (Facebook profile picture and email header image). You can create different versions while staying on brand, by using consistent design elements.
Public customer reviews can be your best friend or worst enemy. Happy customers who leave a public review (Facebook, Google, Yelp, etc.) are a brand’s best friend! According to BrightLocal, 79% of customers trust reviews posted online as much as personal recommendations.
When a customer or customers leave a review mentioning a bad experience, it can be a disaster for a brand. A negative online review could be the difference between a potential customer choosing you or your competitor.
Whether a review is about a positive experience or a poor experience, you should always respond to the customer’s review. Quickly and consistently responding to reviews is known to boost your listings performance on a variety of digital channels, and it shows you care enough about your business and customers to respond. Additionally, if you’re responding to a negative review, it gives you a chance to tell your side of the story and/or make the situation right if you were at fault.
According to a Harvard professor, 95% of purchasing decisions are subconscious. Your emotions are front and center. On its own, a product is merely an item. But when you encourage customers to form an emotional connection with what you offer, they are more likely to buy what you’re selling.
A great example of this is Kevin Espiritu of Epic Gardening and his gardening books. Kevin is a master of customer interaction that forges an emotional connection. His ability to create this emotional connection makes his gardening book a must-have in the eyes of his subscribers instead of just another gardening book. How can you do this? As always, it boils down to branding.
If you have established good branding and extended that to your marketing strategies, you will be able to make your customers feel something. What that feeling is supposed to be depends on your unique situation. For example, if you’re trying to sell gardening books, you’d want to appeal to home gardeners and make them feel that you care about their success in their garden and your book will serve as a guide for them.
Nowadays, people gravitate towards businesses that offer personalized services and products according to their needs. You can do so by displaying products they may be interested in instead of generic items that everyone else can see. As part of your branding and customer experience management efforts, you need to cultivate an image that shows you can give them what they need.
We suggest being mindful of the customer insights. Your company has information related to previous purchases, interests, and other online shopping histories. You can use the data you’ve gathered about your target market to streamline what they see and provide them with a superior online customer experience. You can also easily segment them into certain demographics and provide the items and services that suit each group.
Effective branding and, by extension, marketing strategies should be designed to make the entire customer journey exceptional. You need to invest in quality branding at every customer touchpoint because customer’s pay attention to how a business presents itself. Present your company as trustworthy and professional by providing a consistent experience across all your communication channels.
At Carbon Digital, we can help you achieve your marketing goals. We are a branding agency that specializes in business development services and more. Our company is also known for business consultations, conversion rate optimizations, data analysis, and search engine optimization, to name a few. If you’re interested, please contact us today.
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