You meet someone at a party. They make a good impression – seem attractive, interesting and interested in you. A connection is made.
Then it all unravels. You meet them again, in a different place under different circumstances. Oddly, they’ve forgotten who you are altogether and when you remind them the conversation takes a really weird turn – they appear to be an entirely different person and reveal a totally different set of interests and values. Far from being interested in you, they make clear that they couldn’t care less and are much more interested in someone else they’ve just met.
Unsettling, isn’t it? There’s a good reason for that – there are a whole raft of psychological disorders which have this appearance of rapidly changing personality as one of their symptoms. We are programmed at a very deep level to find this kind of thing unpleasant and to run a mile from it.
So why do brands do it to their customers over and over again?
Now I know what you’re thinking. All your marketing materials are checked for brand consistency before they leave you, and you’ve just invested all that money in a CRM system to ensure that your inbound and outbound communications fit together into a neat pattern for the customer. You have done that, haven’t you?
If not, you have some important projects in front of you. But even if you have, it does not guarantee that your brand is demonstrating one consistent personality to your customers all of the time. What about the written communications you probably never even look at? The despatch note that comes with your product delivery, the instruction manual, the form letter your call centre sends back to someone when they change their address, the error message your website gives if an underlying system is down? The list goes on. And that’s before we even get to the unscripted conversations your customers have with you every day – with your sales people, your call centre agents and even people who don’t work for you at all, but deliver some part of your brand experience to the customer.
These are the hard yards of bringing a brand to life. Every interaction we have with a brand counts towards the overall impression we form of its personality. If two of those interactions are wildly different to each other, or give a totally different impression of what the brand stands for, we have the same reaction as we would if an individual person behaved that way. In fact, I believe that a good rule of thumb for successful relationship marketing is to assume that the consumers’ “mental picture” of your brand is the same as the picture they’d build of an individual personality. The fact that brands are made up of thousands of different people all doing different jobs is too hard for us to process, so instead we think of them as amalgams – as effectively an individual.
If you accept that model as your starting point, here are some pointers to delivering great execution:
- Accept the fact that the communications a customer believes are the most important to them will not match your ranking of the ones that are important to you. The direct mail piece you’ve sweated blood over might get a casual glance but the system-generated one-line descriptions of your charges on your bill will get read intently. Make sure your marketing teams really understand which of your communication points is critical to the customer experience.
- Be the customer yourself. It still amazes me how many businesses are populated with senior people who don’t use their own products, at least not the way customers do. Do you have to listen to all the “on hold” messages that your customers do, or do you have your own internal line to your call centre? Do you get a bill for your own services, or is that handled for you internally?
- Really listen to customer feedback. Not just the complaint itself, but the root cause and what it tells you about how your brand’s personality is perceived by the customer – chances are high it will not match the set of positive words you have on your wall.
In future posts, I’m going to talk about how we might craft each individual customer experience in such a way as to make every customer an advocate of the brand. I’m also going to highlight some other blind-spots I think big brands often have which prevent them from achieving greatness. In the meantime, however, think about whether your business delivers a truly consistent customer experience across all its touchpoints. Get involved; let me know what you think. After all, none of us want to be the weirdo at the party, do we?
