Our white paper, Because I’m The Customer, defined a brand as the sum of all expectations and experiences. This implies that a consistent message and set of experiences will lock in customer loyalty. However, after an incident or two, the memory of these experiences will replace the previous expectations. This makes consistent experiences more important than expectations but does not replace them.
When the experiences meet or exceed expectations, the customer has positive feelings about the company creating the experiences. When the expectations exceed the corresponding experiences, there is a great disappointment, disillusion, and dislike.
We compare experiences to expectations and want to believe the “better” of the two. But when expectations and experiences bounce all over the place, our mind has difficulty deciding which is real and should be used for planning purposes. And when we can’t decide, we start looking for an alternate supplier to deliver consistency. And it won’t be you.
This type of human behavior plays out all the time. We get frustrated when the call center recording says, “Your call is important to us. Currently, all of our agents are busy assisting other customers. We project that your call will be answered in 7 minutes.” If our past experiences ended happily with a live operator answering your call on the first ring, you would be frustrated. Conversely, if our past experiences resulted in a 15-minute wait, we plan that into the call by putting our phone on speaker and attacking a short project so that the hold time is not a waste. But if the call is answered in 3 minutes and you are really into your 10-minute distraction project, you have mixed feelings – happy to get the operator and frustrated that you could not finish the short project. Again frustration.
The solution
Create processes and training that will reinforce the need for consistency. While this may sound easy, it is pretty hard. Here is a high-level graphic of the process:
Some of the challenges:
- Agreeing across the whole company – most businesses are still siloed
- Deciding on what is essential, what is doable, and what is important and doable
- Finding enough evangelists in the business to start changing the corporate culture – is problematic if the business has been around for a significant amount of time.
- Convincing the organization to get on board and not just pretend like they are on board
- Establishing metrics to identify who is “in” and who needs additional coaching
- Measuring how the company perceives your new expectations and experiences
- Closing the loop
- Doing it again
The struggle you must face head-on to provide a consistent experience
An obvious but often overlooked fact is that if making consistency the hallmark of your business model is as important as so many believe it is, the CEO must lead the company-wide change efforts. Without continuous, visible, internal messaging, the rest of the company will nod their heads and then do whatever they want to do. And your customers will never feel comfortable working with you. They will eventually exchange you for someone else, and you will never know why.
Everyone pushes to have the CEO lead every vital effort, but, in this case, it is critical to the long-term health of your business.
Related article; Why The Say:Do Ratio Is So Important To Building Customer Trust and consistent experiences
About Middlesex Consulting
Middlesex Consulting is an experienced team of professionals with the primary goal of helping capital equipment companies create more value for their clients and stakeholders. Middlesex Consulting continues to provide superior solutions to meet the needs of its clients by focusing on our strengths in Services, Manufacturing, Customer Experience, and Engineering. If you want to learn more about how we can help your organization become more customer-centric, please contact us or check out some of our free articles and white papers here.