|Customer Experience | april '14
'Customer Experience' Is Today's Business Benchmark
Not so long ago, every business assumed that the keys to success were the highest quality product, the best value for the buck, and the best customer service. Now all we hear about is providing the best "customer experience." Exactly what is that customer experience that every modern marketer is talking about, and how do you measure it?
A recent article in the Harvard Business Review "The Truth About Customer Experience" defines it as your customer's end-to-end journey with you, not just the key touchpoints or critical moments when customers interact with your organization. Customer experience is the cumulative impact of multiple touchpoints over time, which result in a real relationship feeling, or lack of it.
The advent of social media and real-time interactive feedback via the Internet allows every customer to build and expect a relationship with your business, rather than just touchpoints. Yet we are all still learning what that means, in terms of hard business practices.
I like the insights outlined in the new book "Summit," by F. Scott Addis, who is an experienced business executive and recent Inc. "Entrepreneur of the Year" finalist. He ties business success and your personal summit to elevating your customers' experience with the following specific recommendations and key differentiators:
Listen to the individual customer. Every relationship requires listening, as well as talking. You have to hear your customer's dreams, goals, passions, and aspirations. That opportunity for your customers to talk and be heard is pleasurable and memorable, and defines their customer experience, more so than just satisfying business touchpoints.
Exploit your product and service differences. A memorable experience has to have something different from the norm. You must be able to highlight these differences between your products and services, and those of your competitors. If not, you are part of the crowd, and no relationship can be built.
Demonstrate the value of your offering. The first step in being able to demonstrate your value is being willing to find out what your customers want or need. This will create a connection with them, which demonstrates more value than price or quality. You create a loyal customer that wants to buy from you, and will recommend you to others.
Show your passion and creativity in every solution. This active discovery mindset searching for new questions drives real innovators away from more of the same. They fundamentally become value seekers; they look for value in every experience, in every conversation. They don't seek prescriptions, they seek possibilities.
Demonstrate your personal commitment. When in contact with customers, focus 100 percent on them, and do all you can to determine and meet their needs. Remember, customers are the reason you do what you do. Give them the respect and results they deserve and they will tell others about your good work and your business.
Shoot for the customers' hearts. Engagement and an emotional connection will make a customer relationship the driving force for loyalty and differentiation. Move from customer friendliness to customer charisma. A business with charisma gives the customer something very special, and they want to tell others about it.
Once you know how to improve your customers' experience, you need to also know how to benchmark it. Remember the old adage, "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it." So how do you measure customer loyalty and relationships? One new metric now commonly used is called the Net Promoter® Score (NPS).
This works by asking your customers for feedback, and dividing them into three categories:
Promoters. Loyal enthusiasts who keep buying from you and urge their friends to do the same.
Passive. Satisfied but unenthusiastic customers who can be easily wooed by the competition.
Detractors. Unhappy customers who feel trapped in a bad relationship.
The formula for the Net Promoter® Score is the percentage of customers who are detractors, subtracted from the percentage who are promoters (NPS=P-D). Legendary companies like Amazon and Costco operate with an NPS between 50 to 80 percent. But the average venture sputters along at an NPS of only 5 percent to 10 percent, or even negative.
Maybe it time for all of us to focus more on the customer experience. There is other evidence that companies with the highest customer experience typically grow at more than double the rate of their competitors. The inverse case is that you can lose you competitive lead very quickly by focusing on the wrong things. Have you checked your customers' experience lately?
Origin via forbes.com
Brands Integrated Customer Experience
"What brands really 'get it' when it comes to customer experience today?" What company has so seamlessly integrated its online and offline experience that it never feels like two different companies? I'm looking right at Burberry. Sure, Nike has combined its products and digital applications into a singular holistic experience, allowing you to track your athletic endeavors big and small, and Dove and Tide drive as many consumers to the website as they do to the shelves they live on.
During a keynote talk I delivered in London last week, I was asked the question: "What brands really 'get it' when it comes to customer experience today?"This wasn't a naïve question. It came from one of the 100 senior marketers from the strongest global brands in the world. The question extends beyond great digital customer journeys—Zappos, Peapod, Travelocity or AirBnB— and great physical customer spaces, BMW, Southwest or Virgin.
What company has so seamlessly integrated its online and offline experience that it never feels like two different companies? I'm looking right at Burberry.
Sure, Nike has combined its products and digital applications into a singular holistic experience, allowing you to track your athletic endeavors big and small, and Dove and Tide drive as many consumers to the website as they do to the shelves they live on. The Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas helps you feel like you're there even when you are shivering in Chicago, while AMC's The Walking Dead allows you to participate in the zombie apocalypse online while your heroes take care of "live" walkers on Sunday nights.
But the brand that is truly doing the best right now at blurring the physical and digital worlds is Burberry.
The historic transformation of Burberry is well documented in many interviews, case studies and the like, including HBR's "Burberry's CEO on Turning an Aging British Icon into a Global Luxury Brand." In a nutshell, Burberry underwent a seven- year transformation from an underperforming, marginalized, over-licensed, decentralized brand, to becoming one of the most beloved and valuable luxury brands in the world, tripling sales in five years. It transformed from a stodgy, beige trench coat company to one of the leading voices on trends, fashion, music and beauty, all while redefining what a world class customer experience should be, digitally and physically.
Angela Ahrendts, CEO of Burberry and soon-to-be head of Apple AAPL Retail, articulated this best when describing Burberry's London flagship store. "Burberry Regent Street brings our digital world to life in a physical space for the first time, where customers can experience every facet of the brand through immersive multimedia content exactly as they do online. Walking through the doors is just like walking into our website. It is Burberry World [their website] Live." Chief Creative Officer/Brand Czar (and incoming CEO) Christopher Bailey also recently declared that Burberry is as much a content-driven company as it is a leading fashion icon.
I will leave the rest of the storytelling to others, but what Burberry has done with its customer experience is definitely worth teasing out. Where do great brand-driven customer experiences start? Here are five steps to consider, using Burberry to illustrate each:
Declare what your brand will stand for. This one was easy for Burberry's new leadership team, led by Ahrendts back in 2006. It all tied to getting back to the glamorous fashion roots that had movie stars and the rich and famous in the 50s and 60s proudly showing off their Burberry trench coat and, in effect, selling the coat for the company—what we call "earned media" today. Trench coats represented less than 20% of their sales in 2006 and the "coat as fashion" trend exploded in the mid-2000s. Harking back to the romance of Burberry in a modern world became the brand's mantra, and "being the leading, globally relevant, luxury British brand" became the brand's aspiration. When you choose very purposeful words like leading, globally, relevant, luxury and British, you have, in effect, chosen the hallmarks of what your experience has to deliver upon.
Choose a target wisely. When Burberry began to relaunch their brand and truly own their new positioning, it would have been easy to choose the middle-aged man who probably already owned an old trench coat as a target. If they had gone that route, though, 2% annual growth would have continued to be the norm.
However, Ahrendts and Bailey broke free of tradition and declared they would build a brand, product and experience aimed at Millennials. Bailey stated, "Most of us are very digital in our daily lives now. Burberry is a young team, and this is instinctive to us. To the younger generation who are coming into adulthood now, this is all they know." While it can be unfair to group them all together, more often than not Millennials are the influencers, tastemakers, official critics and reviewers in society today. They also happen to be incredibly brand loyal as a collective whole, with an increasingly attractive level of disposable income. If delivered well, this target would pay dividends to Burberry for years to come.
Design an experience that delivers your brand promise to the target audience. Once the first two objectives were in order, developing an experience became directionally straightforward. It's not a simply a matter of fixing broken links in the customer journey, it is about understanding the customers' needs and motivations and designing an experience that best meets that need. For the most part, high-end fashion had been about the fashion house telling you what the latest fashions were and ordering you to like it/buy it.
Burberry looked at the target customer and realized that Millennials are more influenced by peers than by anything that a fashion house might have to say. And discovery, advocacy and sharing among communities do a lot of the heavy lifting of brand-building. While a company can make a potential customer aware of its brand, current consumers and advocates help sell it.
One customer journey innovation is Burberry's The Art of The Trench, described as "a living celebration of the Burberry trench coat and the people who wear it." This platform successfully positions the customer as a hero, and provides a forum for him or her to proudly show off their trench coats and individual styling via selfies posted on Instagram or Pinterest. Thousands of selfies have been posted, with comments, likes and dislikes and the opportunity to shift any one of those pictures into a purchase.
Burberry also recognized that music is so interwoven into customers' lives that it created Burberry Acoustic, a platform for new British bands looking to get a break. A few years ago, you might have seen Jake Bugg before he made it big or The Daydream Club posting videos on the Burberry Acoustic website that streamed to Burberry stores around the world. Burberry's authentic dedication to giving young British bands an opportunity to break through, using all of its multi-media platforms, is not only on-brand but plays right into the Millennial sweet spot of getting access to music in unique and innovative ways.
Create a branded experience, branded signature touchpoints and the organizational alignment to empower employees to bring the brand to life in unique and surprising ways.
Online, Burberry created Burberry Bespoke, which allows you to design your own customized coat by choosing from hundreds of different options, from the buttons on the outside to the lining in the inside. In the store, many products are lined with an RFID tag that, when triggered, will launch a video about its craftsmanship. A dress taken into the changing room may trigger a runway video showing this jacket/dress combination on a model.
Can't afford a Burberry jacket yet? How about throwing a Burberry Kiss to a loved one? Burberry Kisses is a collaboration with Google that allows users to kiss their touch screens and send their lip prints to loved ones—no purchase necessary. It's a valuable entry point that whets consumer appetites that will be satisfied immediately or down the road with a Burberry purchase. Music and kisses are free of charge and build good will for a loyal customer down the road.
Internally, Burberry invests in organizational alignment and brand engagement, sending out monthly webcasts, weekly videos and previews of ad campaigns before they launch. According to Ahrendts, "Knowledge is power. So the more the associates know about the strategy, about what's coming, the better. Everyone talks about building a relationship with your customer. I think you build one with your employees first."
Continue to innovate the experience and the brand
Last Fall Burberry launched its first ever men's cologne called Burberry Brit Rhythm in a totally non-traditional way—through global music events and digital media. "Inspired by the energy of live music" helped propel Rhythm to become one of Burberry's most successful new product launches.
And in January, Burberry launched The Burberry Beauty Box in Covent Garden, a new concept space where shoppers can enjoy an exclusive collection of beauty products and accessories. Inside, you can go to the Digital Nail Bar to help virtually select the right nail shade for your skin tone while Burberry Acoustic music is playing in the background and a Millennial sales person helps you put together your perfect Burberry Gift Box.
I wonder if, for just one day, we can rename Burberry to Blurberry, to teach others how to get it right?
Service Design Morning Talk
Brandcell organized a Service Design Morning Talk, in partnership with London-based Livework and shared the latest in customer engagement strategies and innovation with a focus on service design approach in the presence of Business Executives from prominent industries.
The 25 Most Creative Companies In The World
Move over, Google. According to a new ranking, Sanofi, FedEx, and Apple are among the world's most creative companies. The analysis was done by ViewsOnYou, a site for employees and hiring departments to match up personality fit in businesses. Users log in with their LinkedIn and Facebook logins, review themselves by key personality traits — including measures of creativity, ambition, and appetite for risk — and then invite their peers to review them, too. Several standard psychological models are used to assess employees, such as the five-factor OCEAN model that measures openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.
Tens of thousands of professionals around the world have reviewed themselves, creating employee snapshots for hundreds of large companies, including Google, Goldman Sachs, KPMG, and Walmart.
According to ViewsOnYou, the following 25 companies have the most creative employees in the world:
1. Sanofi Industry:
Drug manufacturer Headquarters: Paris, France
2. Toyota Motor Corporation Industry:
Auto manufacturer Headquarters: Toyota City, Japan
3. Grant Thornton Industry:
Accounting services Headquarters: Chicago, Ill., U.S.
4. Qualcomm Industry:
Communication equipment Headquarters: San Diego, Calif., U.S.
5. FedEx Corporation Industry:
Delivery services Headquarters: Memphis, Tenn., U.S.
6. Apple Industry:
Electronics Headquarters: Cupertino, Calif., U.S.
7. CBC Television Industry:
Media Headquarters: Toronto, Canada
8. Universal Music Group Industry:
Music Headquarters: Santa Monica, Calif., U.S.
9. Viacom Industry:
Media/Entertainment Headquarters: New York, N.Y., U.S.
10. Qatar Airways Company Industry:
Travel services Headquarters: Doha, Qatar
11. Costco Wholesale Corporation Industry:
Discount goods Headquarters: Issaquah, Wash., U.S.
12. Smith & Nephew Industry:
Medical equipment Headquarters: London, U.K.
13. Verizon Communications Industry:
Telecom services Headquarters: New York, N.Y., U.S.
14. Cathay Pacific Industry:
Travel services Headquarters: Lantau, Hong Kong
15. Virgin Group Industry:
Diversified travel, telecom, financial services Headquarters: London, U.K.
16. Intel Corporation Industry:
Technology Headquarters: Santa Clara, Calif., U.S.
17. Colgate-Palmolive Company Industry:
Consumer goods Headquarters: New York, N.Y., U.S.
18. Marks and Spencer Industry:
Department stores Headquarters: London, U.K.
19. The Boeing Company Industry:
Aerospace and defense Headquarters: Chicago, Ill., U.S.
20. Eli Lilly and Company Industry:
Drug manufacturer Headquarters: Indianapolis, Ind., U.S.
21. Warner Music Group Industry:
Music Headquarters: New York, N.Y., U.S.
22. News Corp Industry:
Media Headquarters: New York, N.Y., U.S.
23. Volvo Car Corporation Industry:
Auto manufacturer Headquarters: Gothenburg, Sweden
24. Alcatel-Lucent Industry:
Communication equipment Headquarters: Paris, France
25. Merck & Co. Industry:
Drug manufacturer Headquarters: Whitehouse Station, N.J., U.S.
Origin via businessinsider.com
FEATURED CASE STUDY: PERSONA Mattresses
Ayoub Industries & Co. wanted to create and add a new mattresses brand to its portfolio.
HOW DID WE HELP?
We drafted the strategic route and created an identity for the new brand. The result was a distinctive name, logo and story expressed across all branding material and we followed this with the development of a creative website and a unique online buying experience.
by Linda Ireland
Establishing a target customer experience to drive daily decisions within your organization will determine the fluidity of that chain of events, and the level of profit outcome you achieve.
CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE TIPS
1. Make a connection with your customers
2. Understand how your business is different from others
3. Empower your employees
4. Inject the unexpected into service or product
5. Use online communities for your benefit
6. Leverage analytics and reporting tools
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