Understanding the Customer Experience is Brand Protection

August 31, 2004

By Jack Corneveaux; VP of Sales, Mindshare Technologies

The Brand-Consumer relationship is a critical asset that requires constant vigilance to develop and protect. When you seek to improve your performance in a given activity, how do you do it? Do you just work harder (in general) or do you identify your strengths and weaknesses and work on the latter? Take golf-if you want to improve your score, your scorecard only tells you how many strokes you take per hole. But if you track your driving distances, your fairway strokes, your approach shots and your putts, now you will better understand where you need to focus your efforts.
Most will agree that brand development, promotion and protection are critical to establish and maintain a competitive position in the marketplace. And in B-C organizations, the customer-facing employee plays a critical role in brand representation. Indeed, a recent Booz Allen & Hamilton study indicated that up to 80% of the brand-consumer relationship begins at the point of sale!

We might divide the drivers of this Brand-Consumer relationship into three major categories:

1. Virtual: Logos, Advertising, Signage, etc
2. Physical: Store/Restaurant design, merchandizing/menu mix, etc
3. Behavioral: Associate/Customer Interface

If we then allocate these three categories according to the Booz-Allen study results, we see that the Behavioral impact on your customer is huge. The distribution of the three "drivers of brand" in your business may not exactly mirror the allocation shown here. However, it is clear that the behavior of your customer-facing associates is the key driver. It affirms or denies all your other efforts to develop, promote and protect your brand. Therefore it follows that you need to focus considerable attention on associate behavior.

Accordingly, most organizations devote considerable resource to associate training. The goals of this training might include:
Insure Product knowledge (menu, merchandise, etc) Teach interpersonal skills Teach selling skills Impart the company (Brand) philosophy
Yet, all this effort can slide into a black hole unless you "close the loop" and capture actionable feedback from your customers that demonstrates whether your training is actually being implemented! Are your associates greeting the customer the way you want? Are they upselling? Are they making guests feel important? Not just today (when they know the mystery shopper is coming), but every day, continuously, because hard-won customers are lost or retained daily, continuously.

If you provide your customers with a simple, convenient way to give you feedback, they will respond. If that feedback is converted into actionable insights and tools to help them improve, managers and associates will respond (and it is critical that the customer feedback is available daily).

As Dale Furtwengler said in the 10 Minute Guide to Performance Appraisals:



If your employees know where to place their efforts and they experience "the sense of success more often", this will directly and positively impact the co, ask your customers how you are doing, daily, continuously. And give your employees this feedback daily, continuously.

What gets measured improves. What gets measured continuously improves exponentially. Measuring and understanding the critical associate/customer interface is a major component of brand protection.