Brand Promise Vs. Customer Experience Vision

I was speaking with a client recently when this question came up:

“What’s the difference between a brand promise and a customer experience vision?”

I thought it was an interesting question that deserves discussion.

The brand promise is a key input to the cX vision that informs the vision of what the brand explicitly stands for through a concise set of statements (much of which is also used in advertising).

The cX vision suggests how those brand value statements will be interpreted by the organization as it goes about intentionally building out the activities within a certain touch point or its system as a whole.  The cX vision can also help the organization distinguish how it plans to optimize the business (type of customer, use of technology, cost structure, etc.), so it provides those who need to produce the experience an idea of what the organization expects (and visa versa), especially for situations like  yours where you have  a system at scale.

Think Disney.  They do a good job to embody their brand values in every experience they produce, especially when their employees are interacting with the public in places like Disney World.  You would know immediately if something was “off brand” because their values are so carefully and consistently applied.

In my opinion, a company cannot do a good job on customer experience without a solid set of brand values because the brand values serve as the “north star,” the primary reference point in bringing differentiated experiences to life.  But brand values serve a different purpose in the equation than a vision does.

Being More Efficient Improves Your Bottom Line—And Your Customer Experience

As you probably know, mapping a customer journey helps identify both the points at which a company interacts with its customers and the customer emotions at each of those touchpoints.

While marketing and customer service teams typically use this tool to identify areas for improving the customer experience, operations teams can use customer journey mapping to simultaneously create happier customers and improve a company’s bottom line. Keep reading »

Putting Patients First for Healthcare Innovation

What is the patient experience?*  I think most people would agree that our system, comprised of diverse stakeholders with priorities and objectives that often compete against each other, seldom puts the patient first. Some of the resulting common pain points that characterize today’s traditional patient experience include:

• Lacking the autonomy to research and select service providers that consumers in other industries enjoy
• Being forced to fill out tedious medical history forms over and over again
• Having to make great sacrifices to rearrange schedules to accommodate limited and sometimes inconvenient hours of operations for healthcare appointments
• Generally lacking of control over patients’ own care

Fortunately for us all, things are beginning to change. As organizations put more emphasis on the patient experience, I am optimistic that we will soon find ourselves in a system where some of the pains described above are less common, or even eliminated. In this blog series, I will focus on patient-centric methods, tools, and technologies that are being discussed, explored, and implemented across the healthcare industry.

* Patient (and family) experience: Many organizations are rightly thinking about their “customer” as a stakeholder group that is centered on the patient but includes family members or others who play an important role in the journey and are highly invested in the process and outcome of the patient. For the purposes of this blog, we will use the term patient experience, but unless otherwise stated, we are referring to the experience of the larger stakeholder group centered on the patient.

Keep reading »

Innovation Quick Tip #1: Tweet About It

Open any business publication to the article on innovation and you are likely to learn about the glitzy “front end of innovation” – idea generation, crowdsourcing, and problem-solving.  While these practices continue to capture interest, sustaining a reliable innovation capability requires attention to a range of more mundane organizational elements: leadership, culture, communication, process, structure, roles, skills, incentives, commercialization, etc.

Although these topics can be ponderous, there are plenty of good approaches that can be adopted quickly.  Each entry in this blog series will provide a quick tip for improving the organizational climate for innovation.

Challenge:  To prevent innovation from being perceived as a “flavor of the month” program, top executives must sustain an active communication campaign around innovation.

Quick Tip:  Have the CEO “tweet” about innovation.

Keep reading »

How To Measure Customer Experience

Last month, Jeneanne wrote about the need for modern businesses to stay competitive by driving customer experience innovation. As Peter Drucker famously said, “What gets measured gets managed,” and it is for precisely this reason that customer experience innovation efforts must include the identification, measurement, and digestion of key metrics.

After years of work in the customer experience realm, Motiv has developed the following framework for identifying metrics that you can use to quantifiably assess the current state of your customer experience, as well as to track the success of your improvement efforts.

© Motiv Strategies

Keep reading »

2013: The Year of Customer Experience

Customer Experience, or CX, is finally coming to the fore as a new management competency to be mastered. Unlike in years gone by, the average executive now has a good idea of what customer experience is, and what it can do for his or her business.

The challenge is that most companies now face the reality that they probably offer a large set of mediocre customer experiences. Due to legacy structures and systems, this is likely especially true if your company is more than fifteen years old (which I see as the demarcation point for when “customer experience” became a tangible idea) because either the importance of investing in them was ignored for so long, or perhaps they weren’t originally designed from a consumer perspective.

What this means is that many companies (maybe even the majority of companies) are now in “fix-it” mode with respect to making the customer experience they produce competitive to begin with.  And when I say competitive, I don’t necessarily mean competitive with the typical industry competitors who may be just as bad, but rather the larger set of customer experience exemplars that we have all grown to love and respect—the Amazons, Apples, Starbucks, and Virgin Atlantics of the world.  Let us not forget that customers are now judging by the golden standards that these companies have set, and in an age when people are moving at constantly accelerating pace, “fix-it” may not be enough. Keep reading »

Why Cable Companies Are Missing Out On Millennials

Cable TV has not lent itself well to the technological demands of the millennial generation. We wonder why we must wait in desperation for a guy to show up to plug a couple boxes into the wall. To add to the frustration, customer service at cable companies is notorious for its unhelpful automated menus and repeated suggestions to “plug and unplug the box.” We are baffled by the need for cable boxes and an installation appointment for a digital service. In short, clunky operations and slow technological advances make cable companies seem ancient in an environment where other companies can deliver digital services in seconds.

Maybe cable companies do not feel that they have to offer good customer experiences. After all, consumers are often limited to choosing cable companies that provide services in a given area. I ended up with my cable company because my apartment building has a relationship with them, not because I evaluated my options.

However, this cornering-the-customer strategy becomes less sustainable as people move away from traditional TV. A Nielson study (July 2012) revealed that that 51% of people streamed TV via the Internet on their laptops, followed by 49% on an iPad, 37% on a tablet computer and 41% on their smartphones. Newer TVs come with built-in “smart content” that only requires an Internet connection for access to video content. An NPD Group study (September 2012) found that 45% of people said their televisions were their primary viewing screens for streaming Internet videos.

This does not mean the era of the cable box is coming to an end, but the way we engage with our television sets is changing (if we even engage with them at all). Cable companies are missing a significant opportunity to capture the attention of a younger generation that has numerous alternatives to the cable box. According to recent YPulse study, Gen Y, defined as those in their late teens to early twenties, is more likely to stream TV content via the Internet than watch traditional TV.  The study points to millennials’ access to a variety of streaming devices (laptops, phones, tablets, etc.) that make it unnecessary to plan their schedules around viewing their favorite TV shows. So we still watch TV, but it’s becoming easier for us to do it differently.

As millennials make up 25% of the population, marketers know there is money to be made here. Establishing a Twitter account is cool, but we value quality, convenience and speed, like any other paying cable customer. Cable companies require a commitment and a contract, so we want to ensure we get what we pay for each month. Seeing that no major company in DC has above a two-star review on Yelp at the time of writing, what can cable companies do right now that benefit both the customer AND the company? Here are just a few ideas: Keep reading »

Social Media For Corporate Innovators

Jeneanne opens the roundtable. (Photo: Motiv)

Stefan Lindegaard (Photo: Motiv)

Stefan Lindegaard (Photo: Motiv)

Stefan Lindegaard (Photo: Motiv)

Greg Berguig, Stefan Lindegaard, Jeneanne Rae (Photo: Motiv)

Stefan Lindegaard, Jeneanne Rae (Photo: Motiv)

Photo: Motiv

Photo: Motiv

Yesterday, Motiv hosted a roundtable on social media for corporate innovators led by Stefan Lindegaard, a noted speaker and author of three books on innovation.

Stefan discussed how social media is a game-changer for innovation, allowing people to network and collaborate in more ways than ever before. ”Social media is a natural extension of open innovation,” Stefan argued, comparing the connect-the-dots mentality of innovation to that of social media. Keep reading »