Is your business focused on improving its customer experience? Many businesses are these days. Walmart is one of these businesses. But are the Walmart customer experience designs failing improvement efforts?
Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it. It is what the client or customer gets out of it.
–Peter Drucker
Peter Drucker certainly understood the real meaning of a great customer experience design, didn’t he?
The end state quality of what the customer received was what counted. Including the experience of the customer while he purchased the service.
Often that is what was remembered the most.
Companies lose customers for a variety of reasons, some of which they never discover. Sometimes customers walk away after a single unpleasant experience.
Other times they’re frustrated by a series of small perceived problems. Is a lack of a customer experience strategy costing your company customers?
Do you know the answer? It is not rocket science, is it? It is a key secret to your success, however.
The truth is, it usually takes significantly more time and energy to find new customers than it does to lose them. So you can be sure a strategy to build a positive customer experience can pay off when done well.
All the marketing in the world cannot make up the damage when it is done poorly or ignored.
Customers today engage with businesses in many different ways, leading to numerous touchpoints and tremendous opportunities for positively influencing their customer experience.
If one considers the hundreds of interactions each customer has throughout his/her lifecycle with a company, how do you define a customer experience to focus their limited resources?
When it comes to coupling the Wal-Mart customer experience to their marketing, they don’t yet grasp the importance of the improved design, do they?
But customers are often less tolerant of their experience (if average experience or better) if the company focus is lower prices.
What constitutes a great customer experience? (See our article on the nine truths to improve customer experience and service design.)
The quality of a business’s customer experience is ultimately determined by the way customers feel after their last interaction. If the customer is unhappy, the customer experience is bad.
If the customer doesn’t have a feeling one way or the other, your business’s customer experience is mediocre.
If the customer feels good, your business’s customer experience is satisfactory. But if the customer feels delighted, your business’s customer experience is a substantial competitive advantage. (See our article on the laws of customer experience).
is the only one that matters to success to most companies. Why shouldn’t it be the same for your Walmart store?
But should it be that way though? It shouldn’t and here is why I conclude this.
Walmart’s customer experience … creating good feelings
When a business does something good for someone, that somebody feels good about them. Are you familiar with Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream brand?
They are leaders in this type of discrimination. Other than the focus on lower prices, can you name one thing Walmart does to create good customer experiences?
(SeeWhat Ben and Jerry’s Can Teach You About Social Commerce Business)
Have you ever been in a Whole Foods grocery store? If you have, you will remember the emphasis on the visual presentation of their products. Draws your eyes to many, even if you are not looking for them.
Helping customers visualize and sometimes taste the products. Traditional product aisles and a product presentation at Walmart.
They work hard at just getting to average, don’t they?
(See How Whole Foods Marketing Uses Social Media to be a Difference Maker)
Walmart’s customer experience … employees don’t care
If you hire people that are not delighted to be social and servicing people, you’ll likely end up with employees that don’t care. Nothing is worse for a customer’s experience.
Most Walmart employees don’t have a positive service attitude, do they?
Walmart’s shopping experience does it make a difference?
Being very good at solving customer problems is a great way to create a good experience. Very needed in the technical product lines of computers and electronics, for example.
The standout in this category is Best Buy with its Twelp Force and Geek Squad home services.
If you want to ask technical questions on electronics products, better do it before you get to Walmart is our experience.
Limited solicitation of customer feedback
Many customers are itching to tell you how to improve. If they are not given an opportunity, it degrades the experience.
Likewise, customers always feel good when they see positive improvements.
I have never seen a suggestion box or any activity where Walmart solicited my feedback. What about you?
No empowerment for employees to do the right things? You might as well build a robot to respond to customers.
Nothing worse than have an employee that knows what needs to be done, but is not empowered to do it. Little to no evidence that Walmart empowers employees much.
Little to no personalized customer engagement
Employees who rarely smile and engage socially at one on one engagement are at a very serious disadvantage in being able to create a delightful customer experience.
In the longer term, the business needs to build relationships, particularly with its best customers. Hard to do with no personalized engagement.
Poor to average personal engagement is how we would rate Walmart.
If a customer is told X will be done, they should feel that it will happen. Hopefully faster and better than promised. If something unexpected happens, a good experience demands the customer to be notified and kept informed.
Not much experience with Walmart on this criterion.
Don’t meet expectations
If promises are not kept, expectations by the customer not achieved, negative experiences result. Too negative and your business will lose the customer forever. The absolute last thing you want.
I can’t ask a lot of Walmart without going to extremes. Average at best on this criterion.
The bottom line
So, in summary, here’s the thing: social isn’t just a new way of marketing, it’s a new way of running a business.
Many businesses certainly have figured this out and are using social marketing and improved customer experience to grow their business rapidly.
So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is completely up to you. But believe in the effectiveness of delightful customer experience. And put it to good use. Don’t be happy with average as Walmart seems to be.
It’s up to you to keep improving your creative, social marketing and customer experience efforts. Lessons are all around you. In this case, your competitor may be providing ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.
When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy improving your customer experience?
Do you have a lesson about making your customer experience better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add to the section below?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.
More reading on customer experience from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Random Acts of Kindness for Customer Experience Improvements
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.
At the heart of creating a successful corporate image design is the promise they commit to delivering to their clients.
No matter how clever or memorable their brand image, if they fail to comply with that pledge, they fail. And those promises represent what the brand stands for. Feelings and emotion, as Freemantle states, are critical in the way customers are influenced.
The next big thing in brands always starts out looking like nothing at all. If it was easy to see coming, everybody would be doing it already and the market impact would be minimal.
So you can never create something truly new based on what you already know. The only way to find it is to start looking. Not all who wander are lost. The trick is to wander with purpose.
Invest the time and money into a professional picture, and it will be worth its weight in gold for your brand. Make sure you smile.
Why? Because a smile can build trustworthiness.
Failure to deliver on your promise or to be what you stand for is like a politician promising no new taxes. Mark my words. Those kinds of promises are a prescription for a marketing disaster.
So here are a few great thoughts and super examples on how to create a smashingly effective brand design:
Also see: Brand Identity Design: What It Is & How to Do It [+ Examples]
Corporate image design … importance of brands
We like to quote from the book Funky Business Forever when we discuss brands or branding with our clients:
The ‘surplus society’ has a surplus of similar companies, employing similar people, with similar educational backgrounds, coming up with similar ideas, producing similar things, with similar prices and similar quality.
It is not easy being different, is it? But all the more important.
The key to a good brand is being different. There are four critical things to remember about brands and branding:
Every business has a brand, whether explicitly defined or not. The important question to be answered is how good the brand is?
Brands deliver an emotional connection to a business’s products and services. Most purchase decisions have critical sensitive components.
Your brand represents a collection of your customer’s perceptions of how they see you, how they feel about you, and what they say about you.
Your brand communicates every time it touches a customer. This makes you, as a marketer, responsible for this communication ‘moment of truth’.
Most brands sell products or services. GM sells cars. Borders sell books. Real estate brokerages sell homes. Killer brands, however, satisfy the desire to get at the emotional heart of the matter.
A great brand example of differentiation? There is none better than JetBlue. JetBlue’s brand success centers on the achievable – the simple things – they knew would make a difference for their guests.
This set the stage for direct TV and XM radio, the provision of first-class seats to everyone, more legroom, great snacks and high-end service at lower end pricing. No other airline others these value propositions. They are different, and their brand stands out because of those differences.
Simple. Attainable. Targeted. They delivered.
Solving customer problems
“For the past 18 months, Best Buy’s U.S. marketing team has been working to reframe the retailer’s brand proposition. Now it’s ready to unveil its efforts. Best Buy’s new tagline is ‘Making technology work for you.’
Best Buy sells high-tech electronics and is a leader in applying technology to help be a leader in customer service.
Ben and Jerry’s have a progressive, nonpartisan social mission that seeks to meet human needs and eliminate injustices in our local, national and international communities by integrating these concerns into their day-to-day business activities.
The focus is on children and families, the environment and sustainable agriculture on family farms.
Much has been made of corporate America’s propensity for internalizing the fruits of doing business while socializing the costs.
Ben & Jerry’s, by contrast, is dedicated to what they call “linked prosperity,” which primarily recognizes the possibility that business can and should be a dominant force for the betterment of society.
Delivering happiness
They don’t sell shoes. They provide that extra dose of love we all need from time to time. There is no secret here. Zappos became Zappos because of the positive customer support it offered. That is the company’s brand.
As Tony Hsieh, the CEO, puts it, “Back in 2003, we thought of ourselves as a shoe company that offered excellent service. Today, we think of the Zappos brand as about great service, and we just happen to sell shoes.”
Product presentation
Lifestyle brands march to a different drummer. They have a clear and distinct point of view, are outspoken, and inherently polarizing. For many brands, this polarizing effect is precarious, but for brands seeking to be disruptive in mature categories or sectors, it can be the path to huge success and bear high dividends. Whole Foods is a textbook case.
When brands have a clear, distinct point of view, it forces choices that may forfeit short term gain for long term benefits. It is a conscious decision to invest in the brand. The values of the brand permeate the behavior of the organization, the customer experience and, ultimately, public opinion. The result is a very powerful appeal to a much smaller audience.
Branding design inspiration.
Customer immersion
Magical, fantasy entertainment is what Disney is all about. Be bringers of joy, to be affirmers of the good in each of us, to be — in subtle ways — teachers. To speak, as Walt once put it, “not to children but the child in each of us.”
Disney does this through great storytelling, by giving our guests a few hours in another world where their cares can be momentarily put aside, by creating memories that will remain with them forever.
The bottom line
So is this what killer branding is all about for companies?
We think so.
Making promises and keeping them.
Some organizations work very hard to weasel in the promises they make. They imply excellent customer service or exceptional results or spectacular quality but don’t deliver. No, they didn’t lie, but they came awfully close. The result: angry customers and negative word of mouth.
It’s very easy to overpromise. Tempting to shade the truth a little bit, deliver a little bit less to save a few bucks. Who will notice?
The customers see. If you need to overpromise to make the sale, don’t bother. It’s not worth it.
The best way to generate killer branding is simple: over-deliver.
So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is entirely up to you.
Need some help in capturing more customers from your branding design strategies? Such as creative branding ideas to help the differentiation with potential customers?
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to improving your continuous learning for yourself and your team?
Do you have a lesson about making your brand marketing better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
More reading on brands and branding from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn
It’s no surprise that the job of a marketer is extremely complex in today’s business world, especially with digitalchannels allowing customers to command how and when, if ever, they will engage with your brand. In addition, marketers have less and less control over their brand communications than ever before. Despite this, they are routinely asked to boost customerinsight and experience like these brands.
Customer insight.
Marketers need to shift their mindset from telling customers what their company wants them to hear, to listening to customers and having engaging conversations on their terms, when and where they want to have them.
The endstate quality of the product or service the customer receives is what counts. However, this Includes the experience the customer remembered while he purchased the item. Often that is what is remembered the most.
So what constitutes a great customer experience?
The quality of your company’s customer experience is ultimately determined by the way customers feel after their last interaction. If the customer is unhappy, your company’s customer experience is bad. If the customer doesn’t have a feeling one way or the other, your company’s customer experience is mediocre. If the customer feels good, your company’s customer experience is satisfactory.
But if the customer feels delighted, your company’s customer experience is a substantial competitive advantage. That is the only one that really matters to success. And the one everyone is attempting to find the magic for.
So, let’s dig deeper into these customer experiences and what they should include in order to be successful.
Deliver happiness
Feelings and emotions certainly have a significant role in the way customers influenced in the marketing process. Zappos and its business culture of ‘delivering happiness’ certainly has established this as one of its distinct customer experience designs.
Have you ever been in a Whole Foods grocery store? If you have you will remember the emphasis of the visual presentation of their products. Draws your eyes to many, even if you are not looking for them. Helping customers visualize and sometimes taste the products.
Get the customer involved in trying their skill with your different products. More and more businesses are building product trial engagements into their customer experience designs as discriminators. Two of the best at this design approach are Bass Pro Shops and Legos, which often have become major attractions.
Engage all the senses
Starbucks is the master of the customer experience design of engaging all the senses. From the luring visual appeal of their stores, to the coffee aroma, to the new sound headset stages, and the unique tastes of their products, they engage all of your senses. You may not be Starbucks, but you should consider how you can better engage customer senses in their experience.
Here what the brand represents surrounds the customer and positively influences everywhere they turn. The two best example of brand immersion? You’ll surely recognize the Disney World and Legos brands in this regard.
More details: 8 Ways Disney World Makes Customer Experience a Difference Maker
When a business does something good for someone, that somebody feels good about them. Are you familiar with the Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream brand? They are leaders in this type of discrimination.
This example, while being traditional, will surprise you in the best brand in this discrimination category. Ever flown Jet Blue? Our favorite airline because of its great, unique discriminators. Consider its high touch service, its Direct TV and XM radio and quality snacks. They are number 1 in our minds.
Customer collaboration
Fostering ideas, intentions, and interests is the key to this experience. Dell and Starbucks, along with Zappos, are the standouts in this category with their long standing use of customer crowdsourcing. Legos is also growing its crowdsourcing usage.
The customer journey
Marketers need to predict and monitor the customer journey, not the sales cycle. When marketing and sales deliver the right information at the right time, they are able to build relationships and let the customer choose the direction. This includes inbound marketing tactics like offering premium content the customer downloads after submitting profile information, which helps to identify qualified leads and provide more relevant information in subsequent interactions.
Conversations need to take place in real-time. Thanks to real-time decision technology, organizations have the to ability deliver a personalized experience to each customer or prospect right at that moment of interaction — be it lunch on a weekday or one in the morning. Give them what they need, when they need it, and structure your digital ecosystem so that consumers can discover more through serendipity, not by you forcing it on them.
Personalization is essential
Relevance and personalization are key. Customers get vocal and often discredit the company and its communication when they encounter marketing and advertising that doesn’t speak to their needs and interests. In one recent example — and there are countless others — a photo service sent out emails congratulating customers on having a baby.
The problem was the email went out to the company’s entire list, which included people who had not welcomed a new bundle of joy and were offended. The secret to delivering a tailored experience is collecting data, using it to show your audience you understand them, looking at analytics to find opportunities for improvement, and optimizing continuously.
Customer insight … solving customer problems
Marketing content has to be about solving problems, not selling products. Today’s consumers are sophisticated and wary of blatant marketing efforts. Every communication needs to address critical challenges and pain points and answer “what’s in it for me” for every customer. You’ll know your messaging is resonating if people are sharing your content.
Stay consistent at all costs
Brand interactions need to be consistent across all channels. Whenever and wherever someone interacts with your brand, the experience needs to build upon everything that came before and flow seamlessly into what they do next. Again, this is a challenge aided by technology. If a customer calls a contact center, wouldn’t it be good to know in real-time that the customer had recently opened an email about a particular product, and read six web pages about that product?
Marketers and CRM specialists need to maintain an interaction data store, so that the history and meaning of previous interactions can be factored into the personalized next-best action decision engine. Attribute data about a person and people like that person is no longer enough to make optimal real-time decisions in this omni-channel world.
Keep experimenting with channels
Omni-channel capabilities will be critical. Today’s marketing is all about meeting your customers where they are, regardless of channel or platform. If your audience spends time on Twitter or Pinterest, so should you. If they’re mostly on tablets and phones, consider a mobile app. But all of this technology needs to work together to avoid mixed or misdirected messages, like the example given in rule No. 3.
Keeping all promises
Don’t make a promise you can’t keep. You can’t just tell people they’re important to you; you need to show it in everything you do and say. That includes addressing issues and complaints promptly and professionally, as well as asking permission and earning trust at every interaction.
It’s important to note that changing the minds of your fellow marketing team members might not be easy at first, but the first step is to commit to changing the focus from campaign-oriented marketing to real-time marketing. You need to devise a plan and shift and gather the right team to develop a holistic, long-term strategy — then get ready to put those plans into motion. The organizations that embrace this new reality will be the ones that rise to the top.
The bottom line
Here’s the thing, social isn’t just a new way of marketing, it’s really a new way of running a business. Many businesses certainly have figured this out and are using social marketing and improved customer experience to rapidly grow their business.
So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is completely up to you. But believe in the effectiveness of customer experience as a key way to discriminate. And put it to good use.
It’s up to you to keep improving your creative, social marketing and customer experience efforts. Lessons are all around you. In this case, your competitor may be providing the ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.
Need some help in building better customer insights from your customer engagement? Creative ideas to help grow your customer base?
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job of growing customer insights and pay for results.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new insights that you have learned.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to improving your continuous learning for yourself and your team?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed how reasonable we will be.
Check out these additional articles on customer service insights from our library:
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.
