The experience that any customer, prospect, influencer or opinion-former gains when coming into contact with your brand has a profound and lasting effect on their perception of what you offer. And it is a lot harder to overcome a bad impression than to lose a good one.
It is of course self evident that people’s perceptions are coloured by their experiences – but it is one often overlooked in the context of B2B. We are used to expecting people in a B2B environment – buying or evaluating for their company – to be governed by logic and motivated by rational argument. But we know now that this is not the case – and that people buying in a work context have the same emotional responses as when they are acting as consumers. This is why B2B brands need to be clear about the emotional response they want to instigate and ensure that the experiences they are delivering, match and consistently replicate that initial brand experience. So much lasting damage can be done when the brand promises one thing and the customer experience delivers another.
Delivering compelling experiences is too important to leave up to chance and a vague notion that you would know what people want. It needs to be approached methodically and logically, and communicated succinctly and intelligently.
It can be summarised into a four-stage process:
1. Discovery and insight: How to go about mapping experience
Too often, organisations will just assume they know what a customer’s journey is, what they have encountered and what they wanted. We need to clearly map out all the experiences a customer has on their journey and understand every single touchpoint they have in their engagement with the brand.
Naturally, this starts with the brand’s identity and personality. But then we need to look at what people are experiencing with the brand – from initial engagement right through to every single time encounter – both before and after any sale.
We need to understand any fractures and dysfunctionalities. We also need to understand where there might be weak points and where the brand is portraying itself in a strong light.
We also need to understand who is engaging with us and what their needs and motivations are. We can develop personas of the type of people we are attracting and the type we want to attract to gain insight into how their experience in dealing with us is likely to have been received.
The insight and discovery phase is the most important of the phases in ensuring you are delivering a compelling experience. Nevertheless, it is one that is frequently skimped on. This is a major error, since these insights form the bedrock of the creation phase.
2. Creating compelling experiences
Taking what we have and turning it into a compelling experience is the point of the creation phase. Once again there are a variety of methods we can use to ensure that the experiences we create are innovative and compelling.
A useful and important method is ‘co creation’. Using both existing customers and employees in the design of a new customer experience ensures there is a continual integration of customer demands and employee knowledge.
Using visualisation techniques like mock ups, prototypes, and storyboards, this work method brings to life the services you are offering and experiences that can be delivered.
3. Validating created experiences
Using prototypes of ideal experiences enables you to compare them with the existing brand experiences. It is a reality check to see just how feasible your newly designed service offerings are to implement, and how important they could become. We also need to look at cost benefit here. How costly would these innovations to customer experience be and how efficiently can they be delivered?
We should remember that this is not an expense but an investment. We should also look on the whole creation as one that will create value for years to come in the organisation for increasing and repeating business. Nevertheless, all newly designed experiences must be practical and justifiable.
4. Implementation
This is where the whole system is put into action, starting by developing the organisation’s processes. It will usually require some IT support and above all, involve training especially for customer facing employees, back room, marketing, web development and product/service development people within the organisation.
It will also involve extensive and comprehensive communication – internally to make sure everyone understands their role in delivering compelling experiences, and externally to ensure that customers and prospects are aware of the kind of experience they can expect.
But we aren’t just in the business of developing and delivering expected experiences. We are out to achieve a brand that delivers compelling experiences. Compelling meaning that it drives people to engage with the brand. It makes people want to return to the brand, and it develops a level of satisfaction and delight that is consistent with the brand or that which we would like.
We should always remember that the brand as an intangible asset does not exist in the logo, identity, brand manual or website of an organisation. Instead, it exists in the multiplicity of experiences that anyone has had when coming into contact with the brand. From the website to reception and from the logo to after-sales service, every single time someone comes into contact, they take away a brand impression. An impression that affects the way they think and feel about the company and that influences their desire to do business.
By Richard Bush, MD, Base One
