Can you describe the experience your next customer will receive by engaging with your brand? By taking a look at how customers are involved with, use, and perceive your products in the market, you can begin to understand how your brand accrues value. However, doing this research alone is not enough to make your brand stand apart. What you do with this information and how you act upon it become critical in shaping the interaction for the best possible customer experience .
Identify Your Customer’s Current Experience
This is done through qualitative and quantitative research followed by a gap analysis based on the results.
- Brands should seek to find where the frustrations of customers lie and focus there in order to understand the pains in the market. Sometimes these pains/gaps are not actually gaps for your brand, but for the entire industry. Either way, they can become opportunities to create increased value and differentiation.
- New solutions can be tailored to take advantage of the new market knowledge. While looking at the gaps at each of the touch points of the customer experience, it is important to seek solutions that transcend individual gaps and resonate across the end-to-end journey. Exercises like root cause identification, reimagining the experience, and creating actionable activation plans can have a powerful impact on your ability to shape the customer’s experience.
Imagine Your Customer’s Next Experience
Too often, we focus on a specific gap in the customer experience and the entire journey is not fully considered. Simple pains in today’s journeys can be gone in tomorrow’s.
- Instead of incorporating changes for today’s market and delivering into the same channels in the same way you have always delivered, think critically about where your market is headed.
- Understand what your brand wants to be in 2 or 3 years from now and begin to incorporate those thoughts as you create your next customer’s experience. Then, with alignment from your team, create action plans around your new vision.
Today’s business environments are very complex. Keeping abreast of the business climate in your market, the expected impact of your company’s innovation stream, and the available technologies that could enhance your customer’s journey can make a difference in understanding where your brand is now and where it could be. Incorporating this knowledge with the full customer experience process could allow you to make your next customer’s experience with your brand the best yet.
