Many organisations, quick to respond to the shifting balance of power the digital world has handed to customers and consumers alike, have had to work quickly to embrace what customer centricity truly means.
Understanding what your customers expect in terms of service or product delivery is one of the first steps on the journey towards being truly customer centric. However a harder and more advanced step to take is to understand how your consumers expect your brand to behave in any given situation. This involves developing a deeper level of brand knowledge internally – beyond the descriptive adjectives so often part of the brand tracking questionnaire. Your customers and consumers touched by your brand have started to build a relationship. Like all relationships this is founded more on emotional connections than descriptive anecdotes. When people say they ‘love’ your brand, they mean just that. What emotions or values form that depth of bond need to be understood so that any activity or response your brand makes is in line with what your customers would expect it to make. Being able to second guess what your favourite brands will do cements the relationship and anchors the emotional connections ever more strongly.
At The Buzzz we believe in the value of understanding emotional brand relationships – we find it is a great way in building customer service. If we understand the nature of the relationships and stages of relationship our customers have reached, we can use customer touch points more effectively to strengthen and cement those ties between brand and customer. This requires aligning our staffs’ perception of what a customer would expect from our brand to be able to act appropriately; say the right things and build on the relationship further. It is amazing how often we see a misalignment between what staff think is important to customers and what is actually important to customers.
Customer Centricity is moving fast – yet it is amazing how many brands overlook the need to align staff and customers view of the brand.
