Unite Brand, Marketing, and Customer Experience

5 Ways To Unite Brand, Marketing, and Customer Experience

5 mins

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Darshan Shah

October 6, 2022

“In my experience, siloed operations are a challenge. Departments that are not interconnected and not all centered on the customer will disrupt the customer experience”, says Katie Lukas VP, Customer Experience & Consumer Insights, Cronin.

In a Clootrack study, 1 out of 8.7 respondents states that organizational structure is a significant barrier – in other words, organizational silos. Sometimes companies are working in silos when it comes to developing a great experience. It won’t work if you work more on marketing or sales if your customers' experience at the store was crappy.

It is very common to hear “We only handle in-store transactions. Please contact the dealer from where you bought the product”. But for customers, this means delays, extra costs, extra patience, and an overall bad brand image. They start to wonder - Am I dealing with one brand or multiple teams who don't know about each other?

Customer Experience - Your Ultimate Focal Point

Every customer interaction with your business has an impact. Customer experience is influenced by how you perform your duties, collaborate with coworkers, and deal with customers.

Both individual and group efforts impact your products' and services' quality. Sales personnel create the first engagement with your organization, but the overall interaction determines whether or not a customer will return. If a brand can deliver pleasant experiences across the customer journey, 65% of respondents would stick with it over time.

Customers do not perceive a specific department; they see a brand. They find it incomprehensible that a help desk representative can't recall a Twitter exchange they had with the company the day before. So, employees must feel responsible for generating happy customers under the CX ideology. It is not a division or a group of individuals. Every employee in your business must deliver a superior CX.

CX and Your Brand

CX is essential to a brand in the broadest sense. The perception of your brand among "users" and all of their "connections," irrespective of place, time, or individual, determines its brand.

"Brands have a hard time seeing beyond their presumed impact versus how they are experienced. This is core to having a brand in the first place. Branding is the impression you create on the people that come into contact with your product or service. How does it make them feel? How does it bring them value? Most companies believe just showing up with a good product is enough. Companies need to graduate from products and services to meaningful experiences. A brand has to recognize what makes it "special" to consumers. That's when they become truly irreplaceable. You have to make a significant impact on the people who matter the most to your business - the customer," says Daniel Cady, Director of Creative Services, PeaTos, in Clootrack's CX report.

There is no doubt that during these times, the value of word-of-mouth, the change from sale to buy, the decline in confidence and trust, and the significance of community have become more apparent than ever. However, your brand is important in other areas as well.

CX and the Silos

"The main challenge is to change company culture and accept that if working still with rigid silos that cannot cooperate, maybe the initiatives will not reach their goal," says Adriana Salazar Hidalgo, Customer Experience Specialist, Gowi, as stated in Clootrack's report.

Departmental silos impose the biggest challenges. Therefore, to succeed, all internal obstacles, individual priorities, potential issues, overlapping channels, and anything else that makes change difficult must be addressed.

Within any major firm, numerous silos are broken down in the delivery of the customer experience. This is not a problem that only affects the marketing or human resources departments. Almost every area of a business's operations will be impacted by the process of developing and delivering a consistent, distinctive, and branded customer experience. Therefore, creating a cross-divisional strategy solely focused on people is the toughest difficulty.

5 Ways to Achieve Uniformity in CX and Branding

Like "products" and "services," experiences fall under a separate category. The impact that numerous products or services can have on customers' lives is highlighted by the experience economy. Great businesses are based on cultures obsessed with the consumer and strategic decisions that can wow the customer.

Here are 5 ways for your brand to overcome and prosper through silo-induced CX challenges:

1. Unite Branding, Marketing, and Operations

Branding is generally considered a marketing activity, while CX typically falls under operations. So, assure that omnichannel operations and marketing are integrated with omnichannel service.

You must ensure that outside-in thinking extends beyond the surface in terms of substance and organizational penetration across the ranks and underserved regions of your business. Incorporate the following measures to blend branding, marketing, and operations:

In various media formats, share consumer feedback and stories with all employees.
Discuss how each observation or story relates to each functional domain.
Encourage coworkers to assist one another. Managers should be encouraged to collaborate with others.
Improve internal communication about missed opportunities and collaborative achievements.
To get a sense of the big picture, use tools such as interrelationship digraphs, fishbone diagrams, etc.

Businesses spend huge sums of money daily communicating their brand's story. A compelling, consistent message will improve your consumers' experiences through repetition alone. Not to mention the unity it will foster among departments as they complement one another's advantages.

2. Meet the Brand Expectations

What happens after a user likes a brand story? Will they feel the excitement that was displayed? Or will there be gaps in expectations? The customer experience and operations teams now determine how well a company meets customer expectations established by marketing.

Consider these points while you set expectations:

Make sure the CX and operational teams can regularly and dependably deliver on the expectations established by your marketing.
Invest in feedback-gathering technologies that are efficient, relevant, and up-to-date to find out if your business is living up to expectations.
Make sure the feedback is considered objective and properly assessed.
As needed, implement the appropriate measures in light of the feedback to each department.
Ensure the feedback includes the details that genuinely influence the customer's purchase choice.
Create your brand expectations based on what people want.
Make your brand commitment the compass for how your entire organization must act and think.
Appoint a team of CX champions to lead initiatives within each department.

The customer should have a smooth experience while switching between different departments. This means that branding, marketing, and operations must collaborate to create the strongest possible version of the brand story.

The best customer experience—the one that customers expect—will come effortlessly once that narrative is consistent across all departments.

3. Integrate CX into Every Customer Interaction

Every aspect of your business, from online interactions to entering the office and speaking to employees face-to-face, should be based on the same image.

Invest in processes, systems, and mechanisms to assess the multichannel customer experience.
Customers should get a consistent service even as they switch between channels. Their omnichannel customer experience ought to resemble a huge, continuous dialogue.
To learn how leaders proactively improve the customer experience, invite them to attend and present at "lunch and learn" sessions with a CX theme.
Work with your internal communications team to identify leaders who are enhancing particular touchpoints, share customer success stories, and guide them on how to assess customer experience success.
Ensure your organization knows your CX values and that they have been shared with all employees.
Make a team charter that emphasizes the complete customer journey.
Describe each member of the team's unique duties and responsibilities.

The entire organization should work together to adopt a customer-first mindset, with everyone aligned around the same set of objectives and best practices. Consistency is essential for any customer experience culture approach, and this is the way to ensure it.

4. Keep Up With the Latest Customer Expectations

If your business takes advantage of these trends in customer experience, you could benefit greatly. Consumers' top priorities are technological advancements that boost speed, convenience, friendliness, and awareness. Apart from this, you should be aware of new trends:

Make sure technology enhances the human component of the customer experience without adding to the current issues.
Improve your team's skills by teaching them how to adapt to changing consumer needs and communication channels.
Focus on CX by understanding change management strategies and paying attention to customer data.
Learn more about the preferences, requirements, and aspects that affect consumer decisions.
People's brand research behaviors are becoming increasingly influenced by social networks. Keep up with the latest live updates, breaking news, and communications with an instant feed.
Cleverly employ self-service strategies. Consumers are more inclined than ever to try to fix their problems, whether it be through self-checkout lanes, FAQ pages, or contact center IVR.
Today's consumers demand regular free delivery, even on the next day.
Your agents require access to all of their previous communication and information about their purchasing patterns and preferences.

"Understanding your customer is a significant factor in go-to-market success. However, I think brands forget to map out the customer journey and buying experience because each demographic has a different way of making purchasing decisions. It's also important to realize that customer expectations are constantly changing due to outside factors (think pandemic, layoffs, housing crash), and brands need to be agile and accept change to satisfy customer needs," says Katelyn Morgan, Marketing & Communications Manager, First American Insurance Agency, Inc. in the Clootrack report.

Companies need to reconsider multiple systems and procedures that have been established over the years, driven mostly by the demands of the company rather than by the customer's desires, as customer needs change and their knowledge of the competitive landscape increases.

5. Listen to the Voice of Your Customer

Understanding customer expectations can be easily accomplished by listening to the voice of your customer. You must converse with them if you want to get further. Customers anticipate that you will remember them and treat them as unique individuals rather than simply another statistic.

Utilize AI to create customized conversations that instantly adjust to the issues that each customer wants to discuss.
Gather reviews because they are the most trustworthy sources of feedback.
Timing is important; people must have time to think things through and still have recent memories of the experience.
Consider how you'd ask people to leave a review, such as social media channels, Google reviews, local search engines, etc.
Avoid asking too many questions or queries that require a lengthy response.
Ask queries like "How likely are you to suggest us on a scale from 1 to 10?", where 10 is "Definitely," and 1 is "Not at all."
You may pleasantly surprise the respondents with a delightful reward for taking part.
Create in-person opportunities for your customers to interact with you, such as brand events.

Many businesses unintentionally discourage customers from submitting reviews by requiring fields that divulge information, like a phone number, or by imposing a minimum character count. It might be far too simple for them to skip the entire thing. If you decide to host an event for them, teach your employees to be attentive to feedback and suggestions, especially when interacting with customers. Any calls your team makes to customers, whether sales calls, demo calls, customer support calls, or conversations about something completely else, are a treasure trove for Voice of Customer data.

The Key Takeaways

Every business should be built with a strong emphasis on CX culture. A culture cannot be established overnight. They grow with time and must adapt to meet the changing needs of your customers. Establishing customer-centricity as a central tenet is necessary.

Your company can gain more strategic market and industry insights with good CX, operations, and marketing integration. It may aid in raising the standard of your company's performance and increase customer satisfaction with your company.

Customer experience silos can be avoided if you see customers as the rationale your business exists, focus your management on what's best for your main customer segment, and have confidence that most of your other issues will be resolved due to your emphasis on customers.

Also, Read - 5 Steps to Accelerate CX During Digital Transformation