By Mark Geden, Head of Strategic Planning, Tribal
A company’s reputation is built – or broken – by a myriad of moments. Interactions with each individual customer, be these functional, such as purchasing a product with ease, or joyous and creating positive emotional feedback, each one goes a small way to contributing to the overarching impression of a brand.
It’s not enough to deliver once, or even a couple of times; constant and consistent delivery are crucial. It’s the combined effect of all these moments that equates to the brand promise, turning it from words on a page to a statement of true intent, and brand integrity.
Lose one element of the sequential chain of interactions that make up the customer experience and it crumbles.
Simply put, bad experiences rapidly drive away customers. One in three consumers (32%) say they will walk away from a brand they love after just one bad experience.
Behavioural economics has taught us memories are imperfect and susceptible to bias – overall we’re more likely to remember negative experiences than positive ones. Rather than forming our memory of an experience based on the average of every moment, we base it on how we remember feeling at its most intense point and the end – known as the peak-end rule. And for all those businesses looking to appeal to new generations of customers there’s bad news – paying attention to negative memories seems to be more pronounced among young people.
The end however is often the place where companies make a crucial mistake – they massively underestimate the importance of the end of a customer’s experience. Whether it’s ordering via slick, well-functioning menu touchscreens but ending up with slow service and cold food, or exhaustive online searching to identify your next car, only to be presented with a bland “Thanks for booking” and no follow up confirmation from the dealership where you requested a test drive – too many businesses fall at the final stage of the customer journey.
By doing this you’re demolishing all the hard work you’ve put into engineering the entire interaction with your customer. If you end on a spiritless point, you’ll leave the customer feeling completely uninspired and miss an easy opportunity to greatly amplify the customer’s experience.
Strategically the end is probably the best place to focus your efforts to improve your brand’s customer experience. So, how do you end on a high note?
One common approach is to introduce mood boosters such as surprise discounts or unexpected free gifts. Disney offers the ultimate mood booster with its grand finale spectacle in its theme parks that ensure visitors leave on a post-show high, dimming the memory of the long queues and overpriced food.
Chick-fil-A has a thorough understanding of its customers and the drive-through experience. Drive-throughs can be stressful; you might not know what you want, you feel pressure from the cars behind and there’s frequent mistakes with orders. Chick-fil-A has tried to eliminate the most stressful points using its crew members. Employees come to the customer; you can ask them questions, ensuring you place a more accurate order; and they round off every interaction with the delightful Chick-fil-A trademark phrase, “It’s my pleasure”.
Similarly, Aldi has really considered their customers’ experience from start to finish. It knows that a huge pain point (and emotional low) in most grocery stores occurs at the checkout. So, while you won’t find fancy displays or ornate decorations, Aldi does have the world’s fastest checkouts. Because Aldi sells owned-brand products, it can create packaging with multiple barcodes on different panels. Cashiers never have to search for where to scan and rarely look up an item code. They’re even scored based on the length of their average checkout. Aldi has turned an industry pain point into an opportunity to create an unforgettable customer experience.
Humans are impatient creatures and anything that can speed up a process is bound to make for a more positive experience. Zappos understands this and it has focused on overcoming the number one challenge of buying shoes online — what do you do if they don’t fit? Zappos allows for a number of return options, including shipping box-free and printer-free returns to Whole Foods Market and The UPS Store, as well as UPS Pickups – integrating its process easily and efficiently into the day-to-day lives of their customers. Because of its liberal and flexible return policy, Zappos quickly built a thriving business. In this case, the peak and end of an experience are tied to the same moment – returning an item. Knowing that Zappos happily takes returns created brand advocates, drove try-ons, and increased repeat customers.
Evidently there are many touch points along the customer journey. All these steps build the impression people have of a brand. But the final interaction is the moment that creates a lasting impression – there’s some brand wisdom to the saying “Save the best for last”.
