Auditing your company’s Brand Experience regularly can close more sales, more quickly, improve the ROI on your sales and marketing investments, drive customer loyalty and advocacy, and grow your business by 10% more than your competition – all while reducing expenses.
According to “Experience is Everything” by PwC, 73% of consumers reported that a positive brand experience is key to brand loyalty. Additionally, consumers are willing to pay a 16% price premium on average for products and services from companies where they have a good customer experience. Adversely 60% of survey respondents reported they would stop doing business with a brand after a poor experience.
There are many who believe a Brand Experience is just a marketing deliverable – an event, an activation, a web site, a social media campaign, etc., and on the surface, they’re correct. However, Brand Experience is not a ‘thing’ but a way in which your brand behaves. Marketing deliverables are points in time. Brand Experience is points over time, and it is owned by everyone in your company. Sales, marketing, product management, customer service, logistics, finance… everyone. Customer Experiences are owned by the customer, and while Brand Experience is brand behavior, Customer Experience is their reaction to brand behaviors, among other environmental factors, such as brand perceptions, social reputation, influencers, etc.
When it comes to measuring Brand Experiences, many companies turn to surveys, focus groups, consumer panels etc. The data garnered from these approaches is certainly valuable. However, it is only a starting point. Each and every touchpoint with your prospects and customers should be reviewed and improved regularly, and tethered to business data. Understanding everything from sales volume and velocity, to customer retention, longevity, lifetime value, etc. is paramount to ensuring you’re measuring and improving the right things.
So what is a Brand Experience Audit? Quite simply, it’s going through the brand engagement process first hand, as a prospect or customer would. It also includes examining any customer or business data available to identify challenges, and opportunities for improvements. Finally, it includes prioritized, actionable recommendations on how to improve the Brand Experience. The challenge is, it is exceedingly difficult to conduct a valuable audit internally, as there are inherent biases that exist for employees, and they often do not have the outside perspective from other similar and dissimilar brands to draw experience and performance comparisons from. Bottom line, find a trusted advisor who can help.
Here are seven the areas where a Brand Experience Audit should focus.
- The Employee Experience – Happy, well-trained, employees make or break the Brand Experience. Surveys, interviews, knowledge reviews, and observations can help identify opportunities for improvement here. Note that often there is an inherent mistrust between employee and employer, so reliance on truly neutral parties and anonymity can play an important role in success.
- The Marketing Experience – Marketers love measurement and surveys. But to truly understand what’s working and what’s not, it’s important to walk a mile in the customer’s shoes. Audit your events, trade shows, website, email outreach, social activity, campaigns, and everything else. You may find you’re not balancing the line between value and spam very well, and you’re providing too much or too little content at the wrong times in the process.
- The Sales Experience – Have you ever bought a car? Similar to marketing touch points, looking at the type and level of content your team is providing to prospects is important. Here, it’s not often what the content is, but how the content is delivered. Also – remember that it’s about the customer and their problems, needs, opportunities, not your company’s products and solutions. A robust audit here can drive up sales productivity.
- The Partnership Experience – Are your partners lucky to be working with you? Sure. But are you lucky to working with them? Absolutely. Audit your relationship from your partner’s perspective to understand the value they receive from working with you. Look at shared business, product fit, investment in each other, etc.
- The Product Experience – If your products or services suck, you won’t be in business very long. Look at everything “in real life” from design, to functionality, to impact, to usage and value to the customer. Also, how a product or service is delivered or implemented plays a role.
- The Customer Support or Service Experience – “When things don’t go well” is not a problem but an opportunity. The service or support experience and make or break a relationship between a customer and a brand. No one wants to be put on hold or hours only to speak with “Jerry from Banglore” who knows nothing about you, or your problem, and offers up a warranty replacement, but only if you provide a receipt from 17 months ago and pay for shipping both ways. Walk through the process in real life. If you’re surprisingly delighted at how easy it was – you’re doing it mostly right. If they don’t have to engage support or service in the first place, you’ve nailed it.
- The Relationship Experience – OK, you’ve got a customer, how do you grow the relationship, or even keep them? How are you rewarding loyalty, supporting advocacy, and sharing relevant and timely content that will entice them to do more business with your company? This can be the culmination of Marketing, Sales and Customer Service or Support Experiences. It can include Partnership Experience. Audit Relationship Experience throughly, as this is where most of your business comes from.
I recommend you audit your Brand Experience annually at the low end, to quarterly at the high end. You can also adopt a rolling, or phased approach focusing on one area at a time. It’s important to note however, customers do not experience any one of the seven areas identified above in a vacuum. They are looking at the total relationship with your brand. Are you looking at your customers in the same way?