Your brand is fundamentally comprised of the relationships among your customers, stakeholders, and employees in addition to the attitudes and feelings your brand brings to mind when they think about or interact with it.
It’s what you represent in the marketplace, and it establishes customer expectations for doing business with your company. Customer experience is how customers identify their interactions with your brand.
For example, if your brand represents flexibility and simplicity, then that’s what customers expect, whether online, in-store, or over the phone. If the customer experience you provide doesn’t deliver on that promise consistently, you have a problem.
But providing the ultimate customer experience is only possible when you understand the link between it and your brand.
For Most Businesses, Their Two Most Important Assets Are Their Customer Relationships and Their Brand
Think about this for a moment: Studies show that businesses that improve their brand’s diversity have – on average – approximately a 50 percent higher operating margin as compared to companies that allow their brands’ differentiation to diminish.
The implication of having a strong brand and providing a great customer experience seems obvious, but it’s also true. And there’s plenty of evidence to back up the short- and long-term financial benefits of both.
So How Do Leading Companies Achieve This?
Companies that are most successful at classifying and executing truly different customer experience are those that start with a clearly-defined brand. And that brand is expressed in a vision that everyone in the company appreciates and supports.
Take Apple for example – for them, it’s all about product and service distinction as embodied in “elegantly simple design.” This differentiation translates to every facet of their customer experience, from using an iPhone to walking through one of their retail stores.
Identify And Connect Your Brand And Your Customer Experience
Studies show that over 90% of companies report that customer experience is among their company’s highest priorities, and 75 percent want to use customer experience to differentiate themselves from the competition.
Yet less than half of these companies have developed a clear strategy for improving customer experience. So it stands to reason that the majority of those companies without a strategy in place have yet to do the challenging task of defining their brands.
This is why developing a brand strategy is a crucial first step for any company that hopes to become customer-centric. Without a strong brand, your customer experience goals will remain just that – goals.
But once you bring into line the customer expectancies of your brand with a capacity to consistently deliver on those expectations – across all touch points, channels and customer sectors – you’ll be able to enjoy differentiation and earn the rewards of passionate customer loyalty.
How Video Mystery Shopping Can Help Your Business
Wouldn’t you like to know with 100% accuracy how your business is being perceived by your customers? With GameFilm®, our Video Mystery Shopping program, you’ll get an insider’s firsthand look at how shoppers respond – or don’t respond – to their shopping experience. If you’re ready to enjoy the rewards of fierce customer loyalty, contact Reality Based Group today to schedule a consultation.
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