Your customers buy products like the ones you manufacture because they have a limited number of outcomes they must achieve. Furthermore, you and most of your competitors’ products can deliver these outcomes at approximately the exact cost. The big question is, “Why do they choose one of the products over all others?” Or, what is your compelling differentiator?
To find out the answer, keep reading.
What Is a Brand?
Despite what we think, a brand is not something we can see, hear, or touch. It only exists in the minds of people who have expectations or experiences with a business and its products.
A brand is 1) emotional and 2) unique to each person. Brand equity is a concept people use as a substitute for customer loyalty.
This definition raises two questions:
- Where do expectations come from?
- How do experiences influence our purchase decisions?
Where Do Expectations Come from?
Here is a partial list of sources of expectations. You will note that you cannot influence all of these sources. However, you can preempt some of these influences through your website, advertisements, and training of your customer-facing employees and distributor partners.
There are six sources of customer expectations:
- Organizational promises – Web, advertisements, and data sheets.
- Competitor’s promises and performance – If they can, you should be able to do it, too.
- Personnel promises – “Lead time is 30 days, and we will start installing it the next business day.”
- Business-to-Consumer (B2C) experiences – Amazon can do it, so why can’t you?
- Previous experiences with your business – Last time I paid $X so that is what I will pay again (3 years later).
- Comments from friends and associates – “I had a tough time trying to set it up to run my parts.”
These things happen to everyone every day, so don’t be shocked when a prospect or customer pulls one or more of these out of their bag of tricks and throws them down on the desk. The best you can do is tell your team to let you know whenever they hear one of these and figure out where and how to address the subject first.
How Do Experiences Influence Our Purchase Decisions?
Experiences are a larger differentiator and carry more weight than expectations because they happen to you or someone you trust. But not all experiences matter. What matters is only the experiences you or others remember. People generally remember only two parts of the total experience: 1) the most memorable (either great or awful) and 2) the last thing that occurred during the total experience.
For example, one day, your dishwasher stopped running mid-cycle. You called your service organization and expected next-business-day service. Unfortunately, it took two days for the technician to arrive, but that was not critical since you remembered how to wash and dry plates by hand.
When the technician showed up, she said she could repair it in about one hour (which seemed a little long to you). But when she cleaned up, the area around the machine was spotless, and she presented you with a bill that included a 20% discount because she missed the 24-hour response promise.
The most memorable and last experiences were both highly positive, so you remember a positive experience months later. When it comes time to replace any appliance, you will most likely return to the dealer that serviced the dishwasher. That is the definition of a differentiator.
How to Ensure Your Aftermarket Team Is Creating Experiences Like the Dishwasher Repair Person in the Previous Example
The secret sauce of excellent service experiences is a combination of the following:
- Excellent hires
- Well-thought-out onboarding
- Certifying everyone on the details of their jobs plus company values, customer-facing processes, and continuous improvement
- Periodic refresher training for everyone
- Digitizing as much as possible with customers using the systems before the release
- Empowering everyone to create improvements
- Ensuring employees embrace their roles
- Transparent processes
And for everyone in the company:
- Customer input into the design process
- User testing before release to manufacturing
- Final testers go on service calls with field service technicians
- Impartial reviews of marketing documents and website before release
Ensuring excellent customer experiences is everyone’s job. But the post-sales team has some unique responsibilities so make sure everyone else is supporting them.
Related posts
- Differentiation – Copy, Innovate, or Blend?
- Experience-Led Growth: The Path to Sustainable Differentiation
About Middlesex Consulting
Middlesex Consulting helps our B2B product manufacturing clients grow their service revenue and profitability by applying the methodologies and techniques associated with Customer Value Creation and Customer Experience professions to assist its clients in designing and commercializing new services and the associated business transformations. Contact Sam here.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay