The Internal & External Branded Customer Experience
/In today’s experience economy, delivering a consistently positive branded customer experience is a key factor for any business to succeed. A branded customer experience can only be considered successful if it meets or exceeds customers’ expectations of the brand.
In a recent article, Experience Design: Beyond a Simple ROI, Corinne Wayshak stated:
“Experience-centric companies are profoundly authentic—from their marketing, to their products, to product support. They provide a positive, consistent experience across every touchpoint.”
A successful branded customer experience can only be designed and delivered when the business is customer-centric and is committed to delivering a differentiated customer experience based on its brand values as well as meeting the needs of both its internal customers / employees and external customers.
Employees are more likely to be engaged and committed when working for a business that provides a positive experience and they can connect with the brand by identifying with its values. When evaluating the employee experience, HR need to measure the branded customer / user experience, both the cognitive factors and the emotive factors such as employee satisfaction and trust. For more information, please go to: Mapping the Employee Experience - An HR Perspective.
In a recent Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) research report, Brand Experience report, the research found that the internal and external brand alignment is key to creating a great customer experience. Some of the recommendations in the report include:
“Partner with HR to integrate brand much more closely into people and change initiatives.
Partner with finance, IT and customer services to develop a dashboard of brand KPIs which go beyond the easy metrics and, more accurately, help understand how the brand is being delivered across the customer journey, as well as the effect this is having on value.”
Therefore, for a business to design and deliver a positive integrated multichannel branded customer experience, where the customer journey involves an ever increasing number of brand interactions and touchpoints, this would require many parts of the business to work together to achieve this objective including business strategy, marketing, design, technology, finance, operations, customer service and HR.