Does the Customer Experience Live Up to Your Brand Promise?

How many times have you used a product you really like only for it to fail you?

And I don’t mean the kind of failure that totally prevents you from doing what you needed to do. I mean the “that’s really annoying, but I don’t have a better alternative at the moment” kind of failure.

The experience colors your perception of the brand behind the product. You’ll be more cautious about trying out new products or features from this same business.

This doesn’t mean you’ll never trust again, but things have definitely changed.

In today’s article, let’s talk about the types of broken experiences that happen with products and marketing efforts, and let’s look at what we can do to address those issues.

A Tale of Frustration

Let me share a quick software experience I had recently. This particular software is something that we as a company use pretty regularly. The company that makes the software prides itself on good customer service and solving problems for their customers.

They’re not like Google or Facebook advertising platforms. This company actually tries to get back to you relatively quickly.

As I used the software, I noticed various quirks that definitely slowed me down. Some information capture areas behave oddly, causing me to have to go back and fix things on occasion.

In another area, a screen that displays task deadlines changed, which caused some important details to become completely obscured. To get to the same information, I now have to go through a series of clicks to find what I needed.

These aren’t dealbreakers, but these quirks are annoying.

Reaching Out to Customer Service

I reached out to the company to share that these issues are making my job harder. Customer service acknowledged my issue and thanked me for bringing it up. They then pointed me to a forum where I could go and create a ticket so other people could vote on the suggestion to become a new feature for the software.

Never mind that I’ve already taken the time to explain the problem. I’d need to do that again. And I’d have to hope other people knew how to find this forum to be able to vote on “new features,” which I actually think are just bugs in the program.

Woe Is Me

I’m looking back at the previous paragraph, and I realize how much it looks like I’m whining. And I am. I know it.

But…

These are the kinds of things that make people start looking for alternatives.

Customer service didn’t go above and beyond for me, saying that they could go ahead and create a ticket on my behalf to try and get other customers’ input. The responsibility was totally on me.

And I lost interest in solving their problems with their product.

Your customers and my customers could be having the exact same experience, whether it’s with a product or a marketing campaign.

Measuring Loyalty

Here’s a fantastic quote from a book I’m reading now called Trust-Based Selling. Author Charles H. Green talks specifically about real trust and how that differs from our typical “customer loyalty” measurements.

Customers who trust you tend it to stay with you—but not all customers who stay with you trust you. Some customers stay with you just because they don’t have a better alternative. Others are behaviorally loyal. They stay because the relationship is a narrow, economically good deal for them—but their trust is wafer-thin. All these kinds of buyers show up as retained customers, and customer retention has become a commonly used proxy for customer loyalty.

Just because the numbers look good, that doesn’t mean our customers actually trust us.

We have to look for every advantage to streamline our customers’ experience to be able to win and continue to nurture business.

Broken Experiences in Products and Marketing

This isn’t just an issue for products like my software experience I wrote about earlier.

Marketing efforts run the same risks of engaging and ultimately frustrating people because the experience didn’t go smoothly.

Some common types of
marketing breakdowns:

A digital ad leading a prospect to a landing page that isn’t closely aligned enough to the ad promise, leaving the prospect wondering if they clicked on the wrong ad
A form on a landing page simply not working (ouch)
Following up long after someone signed up for a demo
Delivering the wrong content to someone who signed up for a specific white paper or asset

We all do what we can to prevent these things from happening, but it still slips through the cracks on occasion.

Hell, I’ve done this recently.

And in moments like these, we have to step back to figure out how we can adjust to deliver the best experience going forward.

Heading Off Issues in the Future

There’s a ton of great content out there about damage control, apologizing sincerely, and looking for how to move forward.

Seeing as how Health Connective isn’t a PR firm, but rather an application development team focused on building great systems, I’m going to talk more about what we can do to improve the workflow.

Quality Control

Obviously, testing is a big part of any new system you put in place, whether it’s for a product or a marketing campaign. The tricky thing is, at some point, you’re going to uncover new problems that you weren’t expecting.

As much as you can rely on automated systems and reporting to let you know if something’s working, you still have to dig into the results on occasion to ensure you’re providing the experience you set out to deliver.

Meaning, at some point, you have to look to your customers to get a real pulse on how things are going.

In-Depth Conversation with Customers

Even if we perfectly delivered the product or marketing experience we wanted, we can’t check for everything that customers (or potential customers) will care about. In other words, we don’t know what we don’t know.

We may be missing a critical component of what our customers actually want.

Cross-Departmental Discussion

Beyond customer input, it’s important to get enough of the right people involved internally.

I was reminded of this as we were speaking with a potential customer about a project. He mentioned the need to bring in several different stakeholders to ensure their efforts would include the needs of the entire team—not just one corner of the company.

It’s easy for me to try and just push a marketing effort to completion so I can check something off the list, but I’ve ended up slowing things down many times because I did not involve enough people to help think through all the systems that needed to work together.

Daily Review and Improvement

I’m not saying anything radically new here.

We know we’re supposed to create positive customer experiences, prevent errors, and work collaboratively.

I’d encourage you to take a minute after reading this to identify one area of your many responsibilities where you could check back in to make sure things are flowing as smoothly as you expect.

This isn’t about being neurotic.

It’s about making sure we’re consistently delivering on our brand promise.