Friday, March 1, 2013

Customer Experience is todays hottest topic It is the competitive weapon of the 21st century.

We have moved from product to brand to the information society and now we are facing experiential techniques that lift the game to another level it moves the battle for the hearts and minds of consumers to another level that if you cannot play you will be relegated to the old fourth division! Extinct? 

So, if you have not got an opinion, nor a considered approach nor sit in the vanguard of developing your own Customer Branded Experience then get going now or be prepared to be ever following your competition or a worse fate still.

It is very simple a positive customer experience will keep consumers coming back to you a negative customer experience will make sure they remain wavering consumers prey to your competitors overtures they will be firmly in the market melting pot - looking for alternatives - searching for something new.  They want to be so WOWED they will tell their friends, be proud to call themselves a customer, to wear your brand as a badge of honour, or tell her next door how they solved that nagging problem by using the new service at the local council that you created. 

A very positive experience will get your customer talking about you and your service, telling family, friends, and colleagues about your service. A break through highly differentiated experience will have your customers converting to become advocates of your brand. You will have a whole army of brand champions fighting your battle for share of voice and selling your product for you.  

The absolute winner is that if you can produce a breakthrough customer experience that breaks the norm - breaks new ground, wows the audience and surprises and delights the market then you will have a viral wild fire campaign on steroids - sweeping all before you to a dominating market position.  

Can you achieve a customer experience breakthrough of your own? - And can this breakthrough be the market sweeping branded experience that accelerates your business and personal success?

Customer Experience (CE) is what is left behind when a customer has had any kind of interaction with your company.  For the customer this can be tangible or emotional.  What is left is the essence of business, it is what makes up your brand value the future intentions to buy from your customers, it is what is spoken about you and your service in the market it is your reputation.  Customers want service at the speed of life and they want information at the speed of light. 

In the current competitive landscape the positive and negative impact of a customers experience has been heightened to a new level.  Todays accelerated and magnified Word of Mouth phenomena has elevated Customer Experience to the top of competitive strategy. Viral on steroids, web, mobile, proliferation of consumer groups, forums, pressure groups, discussion groups and the power of the minority as well as people focused media with content, created by communities - has all transformed the marketing and business landscape. 

CE matters because directly or indirectly it determines the total value that your business will create and the longer-term sustainability of your business.   Good Customer experience has a positive multiplier effect on Customers and your business value, while the converse is true for bad customer experience.

So what to do about it? Well you need to pull together all the right ingredients to make an impact. The best ingredients can be found by looking at what the best in the world have been doing and understanding how they can be emulated.

The leaders are focusing all their efforts to take the perspective of the customer to see things from their point of view to put themselves in their shoes. Everyone from the leadership team downwards are focusing on what it takes to transform the perception of their service to their customers by aligning their brand, with the reality of the operation with the experience of the customer.

This we call The Branded Customer Experience. The branded customer experience helps you to connect all the communications to the market with the reality of the experience. What are the brand values that we try to emulate in the way we present our image, the way we package our product, the way we sell, the channels we use and the partners we associate with.

The same questions need to be asked when we consider our operation and when we design the call centre experience, how we execute our billing process, the way we chase bed debt in fact every part of our operation.
When you asses the best in the world there are a number of crucial ingredients that are required to develop your own Branded Experience These can include the way we lead our business, the empowerment of our people, how we engage customers, the way we reward customers, channels and staff, approaches to aligning our business to the market and much more.

There are many things to do but there are key sets of principles that are in fact rules that if not followed will invariably lead to the ruin of your most vital business asset Your Customer. If followed these rules will lead unbridled success with market dominating positions as your break through branded customer experience leaves your competitors behind. The Customer Fanatix Team have created a set of rules that have been extensively researched with the leaders in break through customer experience and they are called "The Ten Immutable Laws Of Branded Customer Experience".

No comments:

Post a Comment