How to create a customer experience strategy across the full lifecycle

 

Discover how a customer experience strategy that enhances digital experiences across all touchpoints can help build brand loyalty and improve ROI

In today’s fast-paced digital world, providing a seamless customer experience strategy is no longer a luxury but a necessity. As consumers have more options than ever on where, when, and how to interact with brands, ensuring a consistent and positive digital experience can significantly impact your business's growth and competitiveness. 

It’s easy to forget just how many touchpoints your business may have. The Smart Insights customer lifecycle visual highlights just some of the many paid, owned, and earned media omnichannel options available today to communicate with prospects and customers. There’s a lot! 

The diverse array of channels highlights the amount of avenues we need to effectively manage to create effective customer experience, no matter where or how a customer interacts with us. 

However, due to the speed at which our industry moves and the amount of changes we have to regularly adapt to, it can be easy to neglect implementing a customer experience strategy. In doing so, you may be losing potential customers to competitors at various stages of the lifecycle, without even knowing.

What do we mean by customer experience?

Customer experience refers to the cumulative impact of all interactions a customer has with a brand throughout their entire journey. This includes every touchpoint, from initial awareness and engagement to post-purchase support and advocacy. A positive customer experience is characterized by ease of use, personalized interactions, and consistent satisfaction across all channels.

Integrating customer experience into your marketing strategy is essential because it not only influences customer retention and loyalty but also enhances brand reputation and drives revenue growth. By prioritizing customer experience strategy, businesses can differentiate themselves in a crowded marketplace and create lasting relationships with their customers.

Why does customer experience matter?

Customers form opinions about your brand through various digital touchpoints, whether it’s via social media, your website, or email campaigns. We need to go beyond customer actions here and really consider their emotions and feelings to truly understand sentiment. As TechTarget summarizes:

“Managing customer experience isn't just about how people perceive their experience with a brand or the actions a company takes, but how customers feel when engaging with a brand.”

If these interactions are not optimized, you risk losing customers to competitors who offer a more engaging and satisfying experience. A well-structured customer experience strategy can be the decisive factor between thriving in your market or lagging behind competitors. 

Top Tip: Think ‘consistency’. You want your customers to feel comfortable that they know what to expect when interacting with you at any stage of their journey, at any touchpoint. This is why brand messaging and experience needs to be consistent across all channels, to help build brand trust and reliability.

What does good customer experience look like?

This will vary depending on your business, industry and product/service. However, there are some key fundamentals that apply to any business, which Hojar has succinctly summarized.

"In short, good customer experience can be achieved when you:

• Make listening to customers a top priority across the business
• Use customer feedback to develop an in-depth understanding of your customers
• Implement a system to help you regularly collect, analyze, and act on feedback
• Reduce friction and solve your customers' specific problems and unique challenges"

Benchmarking your customer experience

When diving into any marketing optimization, we first need to consider - where are we now? And what are we basing that on? 

Customer experience of all brand interactions is often based on Voice of Customer (VoC) tools, like customer ratings and surveys of satisfaction that are benchmarked, but often these don’t drill down into satisfaction with online channels which account for a high proportion of interactions. There are also behavioural measures of satisfaction with experience that with digital you can assess directly and aim to improve. 

Top Tip: A great way to better understand your customers’ pyschographic motivators, is to work on your personas and customer journey maps. For more advice on this, read our How to create an actionable customer journey map using RACE blog.

Our Digital Customer Experience review (shown below) enables you to review your capabilities for managing digital experiences too. Where does your business currently sit?

Looking at the benchmarking visual, it’s likely that you can already see areas you can improve to take you to the ‘Optimized’ stage consistently across channels. Now you have identified where you need to improve, it’s important to build these key activities into your customer experience strategy.

Key elements of a robust customer experience strategy using RACE

To effectively manage and improve customer experience, we can split up areas to optimize effectively using Smart Insights RACE Planning Framework. Our newly launched customer experience playbook is built using RACE, providing a detailed roadmap to enhance your digital customer interactions. RACE can support you in delivering an exceptional customer experience strategy by splitting out activities across the full customer lifecycle:

1. Plan: Set clear objectives and measurement criteria. Define the scope of customer experience, focusing on online interactions which often form a high proportion of customer engagements.
2. Reach: Increase your brand's visibility and demand through effective use of digital media. This involves improving your SEO, integrating social media strategies, and ensuring your content reaches the right audience.
3. Act: Encourage digital interactions that lead to increased subscribers and leads. By enhancing your website’s customer journeys and providing relevant, engaging content, you can significantly boost user engagement.
4. Convert: Turn your prospects into customers by optimizing conversion rates through an omnichannel approach. This includes both online and offline tactics to ensure a smooth transition from lead to customer.
5. Engage: Build long-term customer loyalty and advocacy by maintaining consistent communication through email marketing, social media, and other digital channels. Engaging your customers beyond the initial purchase is key to fostering lasting relationships.

Benefits of focusing on customer experience

Although it may never feel ‘top of the list’, optimizing your digital customer experience can really help support your overall business goals by creating:

• Increased Customer Loyalty: Satisfied customers are more likely to return and recommend your brand to others.
• Improved Brand Reputation: Positive experiences lead to positive reviews and word-of-mouth marketing
• Higher Conversion Rates: Optimized customer journeys reduce friction and increase the likelihood of conversions.
• Enhanced Customer Insights: Understanding customer behaviour helps refine marketing strategies and product offerings.

https://tinyurl.com/msespkms

The 100 Most Valuable Global Brands

 Apple is the most valuable brand in the world in 2023, with a brand value of $880 billion.

Google is the second-most valuable brand ($578 billion), and Microsoft is the third-most valuable ($502 billion).

That's according to Kantar BranZ's annual ranking of the world's most valuable brands.

An infographic (below) looks at the 100 most valuable global brands in 2023, covering each brand's total value and what industry it is in.

Check out the infographic:

https://cutt.ly/UwsTi3yI

Creating and Defending a Strong Brand

 

Your Brand is much more than your logo

Your brand is the way you want the world to know you. It should allow people to quickly understand key aspects of who you are, what you do, the “feel” of your company or product, and it should be something that sets you apart from others. It should not be taken lightly, and once you define your brand, you need to make sure everything you do lives up to the guidelines that define it, to create and defend a strong brand. You too as a Top Executive need to have your own Personal Brand (see link at the bottom for more info on this).

Your Brand needs to be part of your business strategy. This will help you decide what you want to offer, to who, at what price, through what sales channel, and how you will communicate this to the market. I’m a believer it is easier to sell what people want, so take time to listen to your market and find out what they want. Knowing your market helps you create a brand that connects to your prospects in ways they can relate to and keeps you above your competition.

Of course, some companies like Apple have been very successful at building products that people did not know they wanted – yet. What Apple does is understands the way things are and where there is “discontinuity” between what exists, and what could be. Then they jump into the gap and win!

Either way, you need to combine what you want to be with what the market wants, and there is where your Brand should live.

Know Your Why

Simon Sinek has generated a lot of press talking about discovering the WHY of your business. It’s a simple, yet important aspect of the brand you create. Your WHY determines what you offer the world, who you do business with, and what you say about your product or service. If you want to provide the ultimate in IT Services or the best hamburger, you have to decide what that looks like, then create the offering to match. Once you are sure of your vision and mission, you can offer products and services that live this out, and create a brand that represents this to the market.

If you have not evaluated your own Brand lately, it may be time for an update. Not that the Why of your Brand needs to change, but the way it connects to an ever-changing market may require revisions in how you present it. For example, during my time as VP of Marketing for EFA Processing, we had a division called Debt Relief Options (DRO) that provided Debt Settlement services. When I joined the company, DRO was trying to launch into the market but did not have a Brand that would connect to the market and live out their vision.

I factored in the needs of the market, the mindset of customers, the way we wanted to treat people as part of our vision, and the way others had gone to market before us. We changed the products and services we offered, the look and feel of our logo, our website, and the way we connected with our market. Here is the Before and After this effort to show you what changes we made as part of our re-branding efforts.

Your Brand Lives Everywhere – not just in your Logo

Your logo is a part of your brand but not ALL of it. Everything you say and do needs to have a consistent look and feel to represent your Brand. That includes your web page, Facebook page, printed brochures, trade show booth, and email blasts. This Brand Touch-point Wheel can help you think of key areas you need to be mindful of about your Brand.

The way you create and live out your Brand will make your Logo something others will be drawn to. No one knew what the Nike Swoosh was when they first saw it, but as the product developed a cult-like following, it came to reflect all that was great about Nike, and now EVERYONE knows what it is.

Your logo is the short version of your story and helps you build awareness with limited words or space. How you deliver on your brand will make people believers or mockers of your logo. The products you offer, the way you serve the market, the prices, the performance, all add together to confirm or contradict the brand you present to the market. If you don’t deliver what your brand promises, you lose credibility with your customers.

Take for example these two logos. One has always said it is the Ultimate Driving Machine, the other has tried to convince us that Quality was #1. One is more believable than the other – wouldn’t you agree? People may not know what the letter BMW stands for, but they can tell you the reputation they have created. Everyone knows what FORD stands for… (You will have your own version of this joke I’m sure.)

Create your brand wisely, nurture it patiently, and defend it passionately.

If you are struggling to do this well, contact me today and I will connect you to others who can help. This website is part of the Renaissance Executive Forums Brand image but we shine best when you see us in our Top Executive Groups. Come learn how we are serving the business leaders of DFW during our next CEO event.

by Robert Hunt

https://cutt.ly/w7cp1PH

The Importance of Measuring Brand Strength

 

Introduction

Brands are more important now than ever before! Brands are a promise to your buyer and in a world of uncertainty a powerful brand conveys credibility, trustworthiness, integrity, quality, reliability and experience. Brands are valuable and can often be the differentiator in a commoditized or undifferentiated B2B market.

Therefore, if you are going to make a change to your brand you need to be confident in the changes you are going to make.

This quote is something we frequently hear from conversations we have with our C-Suite clients:

“If we need to make changes to the way we do things that’s absolutely fine, but show me the numbers to prove it!”

‘Big’ decisions, be they operational or strategic in nature, are rarely made on a whim or based on gut-feeling alone and typically need to be evidenced and rationalized before approval is given and resources allocated.

As well as being based on large, robust samples with high degrees of statistical confidence and therefore the reassurance that they are in fact correct, a desire for a single number or metric is frequently driven by an organization or management’s need for:

1. Clarity (ease of understanding)
2. Consistency (ability to measure and track over time)
3. Comparability (to assess similarities or differences between markets, segments or types of customers)

There are many widely accepted and proven metrics in the world of market research – the NPS is perhaps the best known as a measure of customer loyalty and it is unquestionably clear, consistent and comparable. However, brand strength is maybe not as widely known but a metric that is just as important and could be argued as even more important. Let us introduce The Brand Strength Score to you…

 

Measuring the Performance of a Brand

Creating a single metric is arguably more straightforward where the subject is something tangible i.e. customer satisfaction with an experience or interaction, overall feeling towards a supplier, ease of working with a supplier or recall of a company name. But when it comes to brands and specifically assessing the wider performance of a brand or its strength in a market, there are many different aspects that need to be considered and typically, each is measured using separate metrics. For example, a typical brand assessment study will likely include:

• Brand funnel – to measure how well awareness is converted into usage or preference

• Recommendation (NPS) – assessing ‘loyalty’ or advocacy

• Unprompted brand associations – understanding what aspects of a brand are most recalled

• Brand perceptions – measurement of a series of values, characteristics or desired associations

• Communications recall and reaction – extent to which activities are recalled and recognized

Although these different measures are highly correlated and should be interpreted in conjunction with one another, distilling the wealth of information from these multiple data points into a single, reportable measure or metric is difficult. Which elements of each should be included and how do they work together to create a strong brand?

In answering these questions and ultimately deriving a single metric that can be used as a yardstick for measuring a brand’s strength, we need to consider a number of factors:

• To create buy-in, support and ultimately ensure that action is taken, any metric must be based on elements (inputs) that can clearly be shown to impact the wider business objective or strategy i.e. we must be measuring something that matters

• To further generate support for such a metric and to aid efficiency or understanding and implementation, the metric should be familiar in make-up to those who will be using it i.e. it must be based on elements that are already recognized, measured and tracked rather than generating additional data points

• Remaining consistent (and potentially being applicable to past data that has been collected) to allow like-forlike tracking over time is also important i.e. any metric must have mid to long-term use to ensure that ‘real’ movements over time and the effect of actions taken can be seen

• Encompassing elements that are applicable and relevant to all audiences or sub-groups of interest is fundamental to enable ‘fair’ comparisons to be made i.e. being able to compare and contrast audiences such as geography or industry sector on a ‘level playing field’

 

The Brand Strength Score

Considering these factors and the long-held need for a single measure of brand performance, B2B International has developed an approach that allows organizations to measure Brand Strength in a way that:

• is tailored to their own strategic objectives and goals

• is based on recognized and robust statistical techniques

• provides clear direction on which areas to focus on to improve competitive performance

In creating the Brand Strength metric, we follow a number of pre-defined steps;

What Does it Look Like?

The flexibility and tailored nature of Brand Strength means that the way in which it is presented is not set in stone and can be adapted to suit individual preferences. The core principle is that the different categories feed into the overall metric and the following are example representations;

Example 1

Example 2

Example 3

Advantages of Brand Strength

The value in this single measure of Brand Strength is its ability to address the earlier mentioned challenges of combining multiple inputs and understanding their relation to one another. To reiterate, once the measurement has been established it allows an organization to;

• Report a single and robust measure of performance that is grounded in an overall business objective

• Compare and contrast performance across the organization i.e. by geography, business unit, subsets of target customers to identify variations in performance (both overall and within the component elements)

• Measure performance against key competitors to identify where strengths exist (to communicate and differentiate) and where focus may be needed (to improve performance) – provided that competitor data is collected

• Consistently track performance over time providing like-for-like comparison to assess or measure the impact of actions taken

 

Considerations When Using Brand Strength

As with all metrics and frameworks, there are some considerations to be mindful of;

	The metric is reliant on the quality and breadth of its component elements – care is needed to ensure that those elements being tracked sufficiently cover and represent what the organization is looking to achieve (i.e. desired brand values and positioning). And also that they provide direction in terms of what may need to be actioned to improve performance i.e. they go beyond simply being ‘generic’ attributes
	To provide robust, directional results requires relatively large sample sizes so where measurement is needed by sub-group, sufficient volumes of data must be available for each
	Where competitive performance needs to be measured, it is important to ensure an appropriate spread of competitors within the data collection i.e. is the focus on large global brands only or is a wider spread including regional or local brands required; and are niche or up-and-coming/disrupter brands to be included?

Adapting the Model Over Time

A final note on The Brand Strength Score is to acknowledge a common challenge in all tracking and measurement studies – how to remain relevant over time. By that we are concerned with how to accommodate changes in market needs or dynamics and reflect them in attributes or desired brand characteristics. It is inevitable that over time, new elements will be added to a tracking study and this raises the question of how and whether these should be reflected in The Brand Strength model.

One approach is to derive the component elements once (in year 1) and then continue to track these year-on-year to ensure a consistent measurement. The benefit here is that it requires little adjustment from year to year which builds familiarity with the component elements. Additionally, the statistical analysis is conducted only once – making it more cost and time efficient to develop and track. This approach would likely be recommended in mature/established markets where minimal change or disruption is expected and key market drivers are well-known and unlikely to change.

Written by Ian Marshall

https://bit.ly/3JEGiUR