Most enterprises have felt the pressure mounting for years, and in 2018, 89% of organizations say they know transforming their customer experience is critical to their survival. However, there is still a lot of confusion among companies about what exactly customer experience means.
When marketing experts talk about improving a brand’s customer experience, they’re talking about a deeper and more holistic brand overhaul than just making sure your customer service reps are prompt about responding to customer complaints on Twitter. However, when you look at many brands’ attempts to improve their customer experience, their improvements are often superficial and seem improvised, rather than part of a planned strategy. As a result, many of these customer experience transformations fail to live up to expectations.
To substantially improve your brand’s customer experience, you need to have a plan. And for enterprises, with huge numbers of employees scattered around the country or around the world, one of the keys to providing a great customer experience is consistency.
Talking about improving customer service is something businesses are used to and it’s simple to understand—making sure that your customers get what they want, when they want it. But customer experience isn’t about giving customers what they want; great customer experience is about avoiding unpleasant surprises.
One of the most common unpleasant surprises for consumers dealing with enterprises is inconsistency. More than anything else, people expect consistency from the companies they deal with. If one of your employees tells them something, they don’t expect that to be contradicted by another employee. Similarly, they expect your branding and brand voice to be the same, wherever they interact with you.
When customers don’t find what they expect to find, it can result in a poor experience. The way to ensure that customers find what they want is to find a way to enforce a consistency of experience and presentation, and when we’re talking about branding, that means investing in digital asset management.
A good digital asset management solution gives you an enormous amount of control over your customers’ experiences when they’re interacting with your brand. One of the most common customer experience stumbling blocks comes from local branches or stores mishandling brand assets.
If your company is like most enterprises, you entrust a certain amount of your local marketing and promotion to people working in those local markets. This is a fantastic practice—after all, who in your organization would know more about their local market conditions than the people who are working in them every day? The trouble occurs when these people are unfamiliar with how they should be using brand assets, or simply don’t have access to them to begin with.
When consumers come across branded materials, whether it’s a Facebook page for a local office or an ad in a newspaper, they may not consciously be aware of the fact that the branding is wrong or an outdated logo is being used, but they will recognize that something is off. This sort of experience damages your brand’s credibility, but it also has the potential to confuse your customers about who exactly they’re dealing with.
If your company is using effective digital asset management software, it eliminates this problem. It allows you, as a senior marketer, to control, manage, and distribute your branded assets. You can make sure that anyone who needs them has access to the latest resources and brand guidelines, ensuring that your customers are receiving a consistent experience—no matter where they’re interacting with your brand.
Of course, brand consistency is only one aspect of great customer experience. And while digital asset management is important, if you’re relying on a variety of single-purpose software solutions to manage all aspects of your company’s customer experience, you’re going to end up with results just as fragmented as your tech stack.
If you want to discover how an all-encompassing solution can replace your single-purpose solutions, deliver more cohesive campaigns, and capture more cohesive customer data—all enabling you to provide a more consistent and effective customer experience, check out our white paper, “Customer Experience: Strategies for Multi-Location Enterprises to Create Memorable Brand Interactions.”
It contains all the information you need to make decisions that work better for your customers and get better results for your brand.