Building a great customer experience brand is a bit like investing in the stock market. Following a slow and steady strategy. Some businesses just don’t have the patience to build the vision, nurture the skills, establish the customer experience standards, train for competence and create the infrastructure required for a congruent ecosystem, that delivers an exceptional customer experience. This flight path is just too protracted. A quickened pace would be more desirable.
Two unwelcome perils typically accompany a quickened approach to building a legacy of service excellence. Firstly, the choosing of a wrong reference point for customer experience modelling and secondly, the premature winding down of the experience-building effort, as soon as there’s visible evidence of an uptick in the customer experience.
Firstly, the choosing of a wrong reference point for customer experience modelling and secondly, the premature winding down of the experience-building effort, as soon as there’s visible evidence of an uptick in the customer experience.
Typically, a reference point represents a baseline for comparison. In the case of the customer experience universe, there are brands that are standard bearers for excellence and then there are those that are non-starters. When choosing a reference point for service excellence, businesses should choose well. The choice of a customer experience branding reference point can either make or break a business. The right choice can mean achieving forward momentum for one’s service delivery effort, whilst the wrong choice can mean service diminution. The right reference point can inspire a business to elevate its efforts to unprecedented heights, whilst the wrong choice can cause the business to become known for being unremarkable in its service delivery.
When you think of the businesses that deliver the best-in-class levels of customer experience, which brands come to mind? Conversely, when you consider the worst levels of customer experience, which brands come to mind? The best brands become reference points for many businesses that are aspiring to elevate their experience branding efforts, whilst the remaining brands become associated with the lowest performance thresholds for serving customers. The peril in making the wrong choice, therefore, is that the business will be playing Russian roulette with its brand reputation.
The best brands become reference points for many businesses that are aspiring to elevate their experience branding efforts, whilst the remaining brands become associated with the lowest performance thresholds for serving customers.
A second customer experience peril facing businesses, is the success fallacy syndrome, where the business seduces itself into thinking that it has reached the definitive milestone of customer experience leadership, when it has only conquered the first mile of the one-hundred-mile journey to service excellence.
When a business initiates its service elevation effort and the early indicators show that its customer sentiment scores have begun to trend upward, at this point, many businesses become seduced by the trends. They become blinded by the trend indicators and fail to understand that the scores only mean that the business has only just begun to push the rock up the customer experience mountain. They have conquered only the first mile of the long journey to service excellence.
I have encountered many miscalculations of service delivery impact, on the part of business clients. One of which happens when there’s a prevailing belief that the business has cracked the service excellence code. Far too often, this mistaken belief leads to the scaling back of the service elevation effort, at a critical juncture that requires the business to expand its effort exponentially.
It is well-documented, that many businesses overestimate how well they are serving their customers.
The peril here, is that the remainder of the one-hundred-mile journey to the top of the service excellence mountain, will not be completed, the untapped potential on the journey to keeping customers happy will not be realized, the business will be unable to maintain momentum, will experience slippage and sustained slippage will cause the end to be near.
It is well-documented, that many businesses overestimate how well they are serving their customers. There are customer-resonance testing surveys, where businesses are asked to rate their level of service to their customers and these ratings are compared to those submitted by their customers, based on the same question. More often than not, the businesses overestimate, significantly, their level of delivering excellence.
Iconic brands never sacrifice the invisible work, just to be able to boast about the visible achievements.
Iconic customer experience brands do not make this fundamental estimation error, that turns out in the long run to be fatal. In fact, they never “estimate” their impact. They understand that pushing the customer experience rock up the mountain is a herculean task, with many moving parts that need to move in precise synchrony. So, it’s important to note that when a business selects an iconic brand as a reference point, the work that is needed to mirror the excellence demonstrated by the icon, requires patience, a willingness to reject quick fixes and a fixated commitment to delivering unprecedented value to the customer. Another thing. There is the visible value being delivered to the customer and then there’s the invisible infrastructure that supports the visible value.
Iconic brands never sacrifice the invisible work, just to be able to boast about the visible achievements. They favour long term victories, over short term triumphs.
So, my question is, “Which iconic business is your reference point and is your business willing to do the work to achieve the same level of stardom?”