What does great customer experience rely on? What is the role of complex emerging tech and human interactions to achieve great CX?
Studies show that up to 75 per cent of brand-building comes from experiential touchpoints.
The most successful brands understand that for experience to have a long-term impact on brand growth it is important for brands to be both meaningful and different in terms of the experiences they deliver.
Experience power is measured through both meaning and difference – questions around meeting needs, emotive impact, difference to other brands and setting trends.
When customers receive a “neutral” or negative experience it is more likely to result in negative word-of-mouth mentions.
When customers get experiences that have a strong emotive impact (i.e. make them love the brand) and are seen to be different to others, evidence suggests that it helps support three mission critical outcomes for successful companies: higher retention, an ability to defend margins, and the ability to grow market share and attract more customers.
Six drivers of experience
There are six drivers of experience to help clients understand what they need to work on to improve their experience. Divided across two categories, meaningful and different, here are the six drivers:
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Meaningful
Meets people’s needs and they feel emotionally connected to it.
1. Effective
Providing a service that delivers on needs, and doing what you promise.
2. Easy
Being easy to do business with, creating experiences that feel effortless and enjoyable.
3. Affinity
Creating experiences with empathy, so customers feel cared for, building connection and trust.
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Different
Perceived as a trend setter for its category, as unique
4. Authentic
Consistency, fairness and transparency and being true to the expectations of your brand
5. Unique
Going beyond, sensorial, distinctive, and offering something your clients can’t get elsewhere
6. Inspiring
Magical moments, that delight with the unexpected, going above and beyond where it matters
Meaningfully Different Experiences (MDX) needs to meet both people’s functional and emotive needs. Studies across sectors show that brands need to deliver on these six drivers to improve the experience.
Depending on the brand strategy and sector they operate in, they may need to improve on some areas more than others. For example, premium brands in hospitality will need to think differently than mass market brands in airlines.
Technology in its various manifestations – apps, chatbots, immersive experiences and GenAI – will help in delivering against some of these drivers including “easy”, “effective” and, to a certain extent, in tailoring experiences and making them more personalised (helping build difference).
But brands need to be careful that they use technology only after making sure they have tried and tested it, and prior to a full-scale roll-out.
Customers in the Middle East don’t like chatbots because they don’t really meet their sophisticated conversational needs.
Technology has helped to make many things effortless – or require less effort – such as the ability to buy even complex products online; make payments; consume entertainment content, and so on. Technology is needed to drive speed, cost saving and hassle-free experience.
At the same time, brands are realising that there needs to be a strong human factor to deliver emotively impactful experiences.
Take an airline experience, for example. While technology makes it easier for passengers from a booking, online check-in and baggage check-in perspective given that all these elements can be completed without human interaction, without ground staff, pilots and cabin crew it is impossible to deliver emotively impactful experiences.
The experience drivers around Inspiring and Unique, amongst others, all need human involvement of some kind. This is particularly true for brands across sectors, from Disney entertainment to banking brands, tourism and retail.
Magical moments create great memories, and memories drive brand choice. To create magical moments requires a human touch. Aspects such as empathy and customer understanding, including looking at non-verbal cues, can be only delivered via human interactions.
Reinforcing at every opportunity
Brands therefore need to combine technology and human elements to deliver great CX.
Consumer centricity is about reflecting what people want, need and expect from a brand. To remain relevant, brands need to monitor changing cultural and category context.
There are massive differences in terms of what older and younger generations want – younger generations, for example, are more focused on experiences as opposed to material possessions. There are also differences across ethnic groups, gender and customer segments.
High growth brands go beyond functional differentiation to offer something customers can only get from their brand. They deliver experiences that are both meaningful and different with the result that they leave a much deeper level of emotive differentiation which remains in the memory for longer.
Creating meaningfully different experiences is not easy. To be successful requires that brands recognise that all their experiences create customer memories, which drives long-term commercial impact.
To stand out, they need to reinforce what makes them meaningful and different in their competitive context and deliver difference at every opportunity.
By Satish Dave, Executive Director, Customer Experience, Middle East, Kantar
