Dont Miss the Opportunity to Build Your Brand Promise

Every time your customers are exposed to your brand—through a commercial, advertisement, online product review or a purchase of your product or service—you form your brand image.

The images you portray, the tone of voice used in the commercial and the message you relay all are part of what’s called the brand promise. In other words, you’re informing potential customers what you will do for them. The message is about the product you created, the subscription they sign up for or the services you offer, as well as the price you ask for all of this.

But a brand promise isn’t just about what you offer customers. A brand promise is the emotion you evoke when you expose your brand. That emotion—when it’s a positive one—is the strongest motivator for a consumer to become a customer.

Think about brands like Apple, Coca-Cola and Harley Davidson. They all evoke emotions that make people want to be part of that particular brand. The best companies understand that every part of the organization plays a role in delivering on the brand promise.

A critical stage in building your brand is the point when customers contact you for help—to make a change, finalize a purchase, or look to get a question answered or problem solved. These customer contact moments are reality checks for delivering on your brand promise. Miss these opportunities to connect with your customer and you’ll suffer a brand disconnect.

However, when something unexpected happens during the customer experience, something that is counter intuitive or even conflicting with the brand promise, the customer’s perception of the brand could be negatively impacted.

Often, customers adjust their views of your brand based on the following ‘10 brand disconnect indicators’:

  1. Is my experience consistent with my initial view of the brand?
  2. Is it easy or difficult to contact the company?
  3. How much effort do I have to put in?
  4. Can I contact the company through the contact channel I prefer?
  5. How long do I have to wait before the company responds?
  6. Do I need to repeat information?
  7. When I switch between contact channels, does the company or employee follow me?
  8. Is the employee that I interact with knowledgeable?
  9. Can I get my questions answered or my problems fixed right away?
  10. Does the company deliver on operational promises, such as returning a call?

Fail to deliver on these indicators and customer views of your brand will erode; your NPS scores will suffer, repurchase rates will drop—and all of this will negatively affect revenue and profits. Worse case, your customers will share their poor experiences with their peers through social media.

As the variety of channels that customers use to contact you grows, these challenges multiply significantly; and this pushes organizations closer to what I call the customer experience tipping point. This means that, at some point, the cost and effort needed to deliver a consistent customer experience are no longer sustainable—you must reach a decision. You must either try to build a consistent customer experience by integrating the same disjointed technologies you have already, or you need to architect a true customer engagement engine and connect each customer moment to deliver a consistent journey.

A true customer engagement engine is a platform that manages all customer interactions consistently using a single set of business rules and a uniform, but open, technology stack.

A true customer engagement engine does the following:

  • Designs the customer journey
  • Manages all channels natively using a single set of business rules
  • Routes customer interactions and work items in real time to preserve customer context
  • Leverages machine learning and blended artificial intelligence
  • Offers a single employee desktop
  • Provides access to the right content and is knowledgeable enough to help customers
  • Offers an integrated set of employee engagement capabilities
  • Is open, scalable and proven
  • Offers a choice between on-premise and cloud-based consumption deployment models

A customer engagement engine is a critical building block in your enterprise architecture; it ensures that customer touch points, employees, business applications and IT infrastructure all are orchestrated to deliver the desired business outcome.

At Genesys, we enable organizations to deliver the best customer experiences based on this vision—our best practices, industry knowledge, people and technology.

If you want to learn more about how to architect the engagement engine of the future, please watch the recorded webinar I conducted with Bern Elliot, VP and Analyst at Gartner.

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