By Vera Lang
To build a strong brand with a loyal customer base, your business must create a complete chain of customer experiences with outcomes that your customers value and adore.
Repeat business is the most profitable business, and so all business should aspire to build customer loyalty. Customer loyalty is based on customer service experiences. These experiences are not merely at the point-of-sale or the exchange desk. Instead, they encompass the compete chain of customer experiences.
They start with the time when, where and how your customers hear about your brand, their first contact with your brand – which may be your website -. They extend all the way to a time that they receive a notification that their warranty is about to expire and that extended warranty is available to them. And beyond this, of course.
Strong branding is the result of this consistent delivery of customer experiences, through distribution and media channels. In these customer experiences, what is important is how your customer feels when they are in your brand presence. How do you manage this? What kind of service is needed?
There is my 4-part approach for a complex topic such as loyalty-building & brand-building by managing the complete customer experience:
1. Manage Brand Loyalty and Customer Experiences From The Top.
Senior management should be responsible, not a service rep nor middle management. By putting the management of customer experiences in the hands of top management, a bird’s eye view can be applied encompassing the complete set of customer experiences. Furthermore, it gives a clear message to all that your business takes satisfying customer experiences seriously.
2. Complete Measurements Go Beyond Metrics.
Management is to set explicit brand value propositions plus guidelines for employees and channels to bring these value propositions alive. Monitoring click-through rates, conversion ratios or phone-time-on-hold metrics should be complemented with complete customer interaction review.
3. Detail Key Customer Scenarios through Research. Market segmentation can help in pinpointing what customers consider important outcomes of key scenarios. After all, not all customers have the same needs and wants. Detailed market research reveals what customers consider to be key-scenarios and what factors to get right in each scenario. You will find that this kind of market research will give your business an edge over competition that is not necessarily transparent to your customers.
4. Put Complete Customer Experience Management Protocols In Place. When performance metrics and evaluation results are not reflecting your intended brand value proposition, a process should be in place for prompt corrective action.
Find a complete write up of the approach, go to http://mypersonalcmo.com/branding-your-complete-customer-service-experience or look under Marketing Strategy or Brand Positioning categories.
In Conclusion
Once you and your company have established both the leadership for and the appropriate means of managing and evaluating your Complete Customer Service Experience, you’re ready to actually tune the experience and so create customer loyalty. Loyalty results when customers feel understood and cared for. A strong brand shows business choices that foster loyalty. This article offers a path to successfully strengthening your brand.
About the Author: Vera Lang, MBA is a CRM expert, Senior Strategic Marketing & IT Research Director, and Experienced Strategic Planning Consultant. She is a contibuting writer for
My Personal CMO
,
CRM HelpDesk software
and
Stock Markets Investment
Source:
isnare.com
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