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Are You Delivering on Your Brand Promise?
“Companies don’t have poor brand promises, they have problems delivering on the promises they’ve created.”
During his Call Center Week keynote, ResponseTek Networks CEO Syed Hasan went on to say that instead of working to meet the original promise, many companies will keep adjusting their brand promise as necessary. Hmmm. Perhaps not the best option.
Consistency, according to Hasan, is the better choice. He cited Southwest Airlines and Apple as two companies that consistently deliver on their brand promise, adding that this consistency creates customer advocates.
How can you be sure that you’re delivering on your brand promise?
Ask your customers. “Unless you measure you can’t improve it,” Hasan said. Unfortunately, according to Hasan, nearly one third of contact centers still don’t even measure customer satisfaction with the service experience.
“Companies don’t listen to customers because they want to,” he said. “They do it because there’s financial gain in it.”
Making customer feedback payoff is where customer experience management (CEM) comes in. Hasan suggested that companies adopt CEM, which he defines as the practice of closing the gap between the brand promise and the actual customer experience that is delivered, the goal being to create a dependable population of customer advocates. He cited three steps integral to CEM:
Involve Listen to customers at every touchpoint using every channel
Integrate Get that information to the right people within your organization at the right time
Improve Drive accountability to make continuous improvements
Sounds promising.
Bill,
One of our 1to1 Impact Award winners, Bath & Body Works, takes the approach of training both retail and call center associates on the same "customer experience" approach. This ensures a consistent experience for the customer no matter which channel she uses to interact with the company. It seems to works fantastically well for them.
In my search for personalization discussions, I came across this 1to1 blog. Some great posts here. I'll definitely be paying more attention. This "Brand Promise" post definitely resonates with me. More and more, we see our retail customers relaunching their web storefront and contact center application at the same time. The goal is to have a seamless tranistion from the web to the call center and to turn the contact center into a sales center. Finally, length of call is not the dominant metric being tracked. Progressive retailers are tracking customer sat, account/order "saves" and sales conversion rates in the contact center.