Here are just a few excerpts from an excellent article by Sampson Lee, Deliver a branded experience that reflects your most valuable customer segments—and their needs. Check out the complete source article for much more, including numerous “real-life” examples:
Figuring out who your own business’s target customers are is the first—and probably the most important— decision in you’ll have in managing the customer experience.
Before businesses can deliver a branded customer experience, they have to first segment their customers and identify each segment’s value to the business. The value directs your resources allocation, and their needs align your brand values to deliver the target branded experience.
The customer strategies of acquisition, retention and growth have to be converted into quantifiable targets in profitability and loyalty; your target customers could be managed and monitored by different customer segments…
Real voice of the customer
To listen to the voice of customer more effectively, reasons Anthony W. Ulwick in the Harvard Business Review (Turn Customer Input Into Innovation, January 2002), you must stop asking customers what they want and start asking them what they want your products to do for them.
Always remember that brand values are meaningful only when they fulfill your brand promise, which means satisfying the critical needs of your target customers. To differentiate from competition, you must stop satisfying all customer needs, but excel at the critical few that can reflect your brand values.
With the critical needs set and defined, touch-points are for actions. They allow a company to interact with customers, build relationship and brand loyalty because they are the places where customers experience you.
All companies have numerous touch-points but limited resources. Not only do you have to decide which touch-points (customer contact through your online site or by email, through your call center, in person at your store or through one of your partners) are more important and critical, but also you have to justify resources allocation among those various touch-points.
Alignment
To deliver results requires a dedicated effort to align the capabilities of your people, product(s) and technology.
Customer experience management is a journey, not a destination. It starts from the time you segment your target customers and continues through the formulation of an effective experience strategy. You choose your own brand values out of all your customers’ critical needs. It culminates in the focusing of your resources to deliver an effective experience to those different targeted customer segments at multiple touch-points. Then it loops as you take what you learn from feedback to constantly improve the experience.
