Have you heard of the famous brand crisis of United Airlines in 2017?

Importance of Customer Experience for Developing the Brand

The company lost a whopping $1.4 billion in value when a passenger experience went viral and created a buzz in the online world.

United Airlines understood the importance of customer experience (CX) the hard way!

When building and developing a brand, the missing piece of a marketer’s puzzle is the customer experience. Be it customer service or customer perception regarding your brand; it’s your CX that decides whether or not a customer will continue to do business with you.

Customers are the lifeblood of every brand, and how they perceive your brand depends on the outcome of every engagement they have with your business. A positive engagement results in a positive CX. In fact, according to research, 94% of customers who rated a company’s CX as ‘very good’ are likely to repurchase from that company.

That’s the kind of magic your customer experience has on your brand.

In this article, we will discover different ways of how customer experience is developing your brand.

Let’s get started!

How is Customer Experience Building your Brand?

Here are six proven ways to build your customer experience and develop your brand.

1. Understand how your customer perceives your brand

Got a great product or service that’s selling like hotcakes? Excellent – what next? It won’t last long unless you nail understand how customers perceive and think about your brand.

Customer perception is more than liking your brand. It is more about the feeling your brand inspires in them every time they do business. If a customer holds your brand in high esteem, they are likely to become loyal and repurchase, otherwise not.

That’s where brand management comes in. It’s the process of improving and upholding your customer perception and awareness about your brand while remaining a customer favorite.

With 1 in every three customers leaving a brand due to one brand experience, it’s essential to understand how your customers perceive your brand to stop customers from shifting to your competitors.

Using best brand management tools like Attest, Extensis Portfolio, and Brand24, you can maintain customer perception about your brand, increase customer loyalty, and build brand awareness.

Many of these tools include social listening features that allow you to track what customers say about your brand. While you cannot control these factors, you can swiftly reply to bad customer experience and change their perception.

Additionally, these tools will help you identify potential shifts in the customer sentiment about your brand, which you can try to change before it’s too late.

2. Use technology to create breakthrough CX

Machine learning and AI are tailor-made for improving the CX. These are two technologies that can bring a significant impact on your CX and help you build a brand that customers remember for years.

Technologies like machine learning help you understand what customers want in free-form text messages, and live engagement helps you strike 24/7 real-time conversation. This ensures a higher level of personalization and customer service.

With the help of these technologies, you can engage customers in real-time without the need for in-person events. Also, the rising popularity of live engagement channels like live videos, chatbots, and one-to-one selling platforms is making it a more authentic and human way of talking to your customers.

With live engagement, you can let your customers start a conversation with you on the spot without having to wait.

Apart from kickstarting a real-time conversation, this engagement method builds trust, helps you tailor your services and products, and enables personalization that directly impacts your conversion rate. This results in superior CX, which eventually helps in developing a brand.

In today’s fast-paced digital world, companies that embrace these latest technologies are the ones that don’t fall into the trap of digital Darwinism.

3. Attend to your customer’s requirement

Going back to the research by Bain & Company, 80% of companies believe they offer excellent customer service, but only 8% of their customers agree with them.

Shocking?

That’s why it’s important to fill this gap and bring an alignment in customer’s requirements and your brand delivery. When you have an idea of what drives their need, what alternative they have, how urgent their purchase is, and what they expect from your business, you can tweak changes in your customer experience strategies.

To create products, services, and processes that resonate with your customers, try tracking their behavior in real-time. However, the best approach is to simply ask. If you offer a product, you can encourage your customers to provide feedback or request a new feature that they would like for your product to have. Understandably, handling feature requests at scale can be daunting, but that won’t be an issue with the right feature request management tool up your sleeve.

Furthermore, using a customer relationship management (CRM) tool, you can understand their activities and develop your strategies. You can even invest in social media engagement and leverage customer service interactions to further alleviate their experience with your brand.

4. Create an emotional connection

For brands looking to create a unique CX, they should establish an emotional connection with their customer.

According to Harvard Business School, 95% of a customer’s purchase decision is driven by emotions. When you use emotions to develop a product or service, your customers are more engaged and involved, which is great for enhancing the CX.

Furthermore, it’s not easy to convince customers to trust your brand, but you can create a bond with the right emotional connection. This is because such customers have a higher lifetime value as they are more engaged, loyal, satisfied, and ready to purchase from your brand.

With emotionally engaged customers three times more likely to recommend your product, it makes sense to create an emotional connection. You can do this by telling authentic stories, unveiling your humanity to customers, showing interest in your customer’s life, and embracing personalization.

5. Focus on providing an omnichannel customer experience

Your customers probably don’t touch your products before making a purchase. They learn about them from platforms like social media, Google searches, company websites, videos, and mobile apps. Companies that create an omnichannel customer experience treat all these channels as a part of one unified customer journey.

Using this approach, you empower your customers to begin their experience in one channel and continue it to another channel. Interestingly, customers who interact with a brand on multiple channels are likely to spend more than people who use a single channel for interaction.

With this statistic in mind, it makes sense to provide an omnichannel CX.

Let’s understand it using an example:

A potential customer is browsing Instagram when they see an advertisement for a party dress they want to purchase. They click on the advertisement, which takes them to your company’s Instagram page, where they find out more about a party dress and read customer reviews.

From there, your customer clicks on your website to purchase that dress. Unfortunately, your customer finds that their desired color is not currently available. So, they click on the live chatbot link and ask an agent when they can expect the dress to be back on sale.

The customer service agent informs that their dress is available in their brick-and-mortar store near their house. The customer goes to the store and makes a purchase.

Notice that your customer used five different channels or touchpoints with your company. Each channel was connected to the next, thereby giving a positive experience.

Your company nailed the customer journey from awareness to purchase using a sample omnichannel customer experience approach.

It increases customer experience and helps create a positive customer perception, which eventually helps build a brand. 

6. Improve your user experience (UX)

Today, customers hate interacting with complex sign-ins and interfaces. Instead, they want a delightful customer experience.

That’s why it’s important to give attention to the UX. It’s the experience your customers have with your digital products and services, including your website and mobile app. So a good UX design can result in a knock-out effect on your overall customer experience.

A user-friendly digital product conveys to your customers that you understand their requirements and value their feedback. This boosts customer satisfaction and retention.

Brands that focus on improving their UX are the ones that thrive in the competitive environment because it fosters loyalty and helps in building brand advocacy.

UX is one of the most neglected yet critical aspects of customer experience. Invest in it today!

Over to you

Evergreen success mantra: Customer is at the heart of all your interactions. It’s not about the experience that you want to create. It’s more about the experience your customers want to have.

With delivering a great CX becoming the top strategic objective of many companies, it’s probably the right time to embrace the power of CX either before you run out of business or your customers shift to your competitors.

Always remember that customer experience is an ongoing process. Regardless of the nature of your business, taking the necessary steps to improve your CX is always worth the effort and a starting step to building a brand that your customers remember for years to come!

Customer experience is the building block for your brand, and you cannot afford to overlook it in this digital era where customers require instant gratification.

What’s your favorite tool and strategy to increase your customer experience? Is investing in customer experience resulting in brand development?

Share your thoughts below in the comments section!

Author’s bio:

Priya Jain is a professional copywriter with 8 years of experience. She has an MBA and engineering degree. When she is not writing, you will find her teaching math, spending her day running behind her toddler, and trying new recipes.