Achieving a brand and commercial step change through a CX approach

Eliot Sykes, managing partner and head of consultancy at UK-based integrated agency krow Group, discusses the role of CX, and how optimising touchpoints can do wonders for a brand.

Do you know a business that delights its users in every interaction? Possibly not… Delivering a positive customer experience sounds easier than it is, and many companies believe they are doing a good job.

However, there’s usually a large gap between consumers’ needs and expectations - and what is actually happening. A CX strategy addresses the totality of a customer's experience with a brand, over time. Our ethos is that brand and CX should be united rather than thought of as separate entities, with a view to identifying where best to leverage the brand across customer touchpoint and embedding the strategy throughout an organisation.

Customer journey mapping

You can't transform something you don't understand. Brands need a 360-degree view of their customers' needs and expectations. Comprehensive customer journey mapping puts businesses into consumers’ shoes, to help understand their experience: what they think, feel, do and experience at each stage of their buying journey. It establishes an appreciation of the route and channels customers take to get that product, as well as demonstrating what’s happening at each touchpoint - from their perspective.

CX can be thought of as the net effect of a brand on its customer. So all of those little interactions add up to the total customer experience. Once an organisation understands users’ pleasure and pain points, they can start to address them and ultimately, exceed consumers’ expectations.

Customer journey mapping has already driven significant growth for brands including the likes of Emirates and Rail Europe. When music streaming app Spotify mapped their user journey, tracking touchpoints for sharing playlists via third-party apps, the research revealed a key pain point - fear of being judged for their music taste - that can hold users back from sharing music.

They also identified an awareness gap: some users didn’t know the feature existed. By mapping the user journey, Spotify improved their user interface and in-app flows to streamline the customer experience and make every touchpoint relevant to how real consumers use the product.

Needs-based profiles

Developing a holistic understanding of your customers - encompassing what audiences are saying, hearing, thinking, doing and experiencing - enables brands to create needs-based profiles, which can help you identify challenges, opportunities and deliver your brand's benefit to different segments.

A brand that identifies a customer's behaviour - and understands their needs – is more likely to influence that individual than one that targets someone purely based on traditional demographics. It’s worth noting that people from very different demographics can share the same needs. And building in those needs can lead to something more powerful in the messaging and experience that’s being created.

Internal buy-in

To unite brand and CX, it’s vital that the mindset shift is embraced by the entire organisation. Once the vision has been defined, everyone should be aligned to that. So, principles need to be really actionable, clear and understandable so employees can actually deliver upon them.

It’s not as simple as saying, ‘we need to be friendly and more human’. Employees need to be equipped and empowered - especially if they're customer facing - to give users the experience they expect. They need to be educated on the desirable customer experience but also given the choice of how they interpret and deliver it.

It’s also important to assign stakeholders across the business, so that CX is not just owned by marketing or brand. Many firms install a customer experience officer, whose role is to ensure that the company aligns around the CX vision. By doing that and creating a service design blueprint - detailing the organisation’s backstage considerations - each part of the business can see where it's having an effect: from a customer benefit perspective. 

From a delivery perspective, there are four stages to delivering customer-centric communications at each stage of the journey.

1. Discovery

Immersion into the business, customers, and wider trends influencing audience attitudes and behaviours. This combination of internal and external research is crucial to gaining an objective picture of a brand in all contexts.

2. Development

Consolidating the discovery-stage insights and exploring opportunities, before testing and refining into a robust and validated strategy. This is key for identifying a brand’s potential and crafting the building blocks for future activation – including brand promise, narrative and personality.

3. Deployment

Collaborating with creatives to bring a brand narrative to life by exploring alternative executions and activations, followed by thorough stress-testing of brand flexibility and longevity.

4. Distillation

Analytics and campaign reporting allows those adopting the strategy to continuously refine their approach. Through regular reviews, adjustments and optimisation they can derive insights to refine and refresh activity at every stage.

Small changes, big impact

Pret illustrated this with one small addition. Previously, personal assistants who booked Pret’s business lunch platters didn't receive any acknowledgement. By including a simple thank you note in the bag - plus a discount for when they visited Pret on their own - they made a huge difference to that interaction.

While high-impact marketing projects will always have their place, the CX approach demonstrates how lots of small, positive interactions can have a huge impact on brand perception, sales and success.