A strong brand experience is the surest way to turn occasional customers into fans and evangelists for your brand, and it has a measurable effect on your bottom line. In fact, presenting your brand consistently can increase revenue by an average of 23 percent, according to Lucidpress. Not too shabby.
It’s important to remember a few things about how customers react to good and bad experiences. According to customer service experts Groove, people tend to share a negative experience more quickly and frequently than a positive one, both on social media and in daily interactions with friends and family. On average (without considering social media reach), happy customers will tell nine others about your business, whereas unhappy customers will tell sixteen people. This is why your goal as a brand should be to offer a consistent experience regardless of the location. Follow these tips to start building a strong brand experience today.
Develop Brand Guidelines
Brand guidelines include more than when and where to use a cool logo, slogan or color palette. A brand is your company’s personality, and it extends to everything your company does. Think of your brand as a collection of impressions a customer has about your company and how those impressions make them feel and act. Yes, this involves visuals such as logos and color choice, but it also extends to how you follow safety standards, how you greet customers and can even include details such as how many pickles you put on a hamburger. These quality management components work together to establish a consistent and strong brand experience for customers, and the only way to manage customer expectations is to ensure their interaction with your brand is consistent across all locations.
Create Rigorous Processes
Consistency in brand standards is critical, but it’s a massive undertaking for multiunit enterprises. When you have dozens or hundreds or thousands of locations spread across the country or the world, there are countless details to track. It takes a lot of work to manage it all. The best brands use proven tools and resources to ensure consistency among all locations to save time and streamline their efforts. Their solutions include well-trained quality assurance teams as well as auditing and quality management software. Whatever they use, management knows it’s key to make brand guidelines available to everyone and to make compliance efforts trackable.
Monitor Specific Channels
Even with brand standards and brand experience plans in place, it can still be tough to determine how well you’re maintaining consistency. Typically, there are three areas brand managers will focus on when it comes to brand experience:
- Voice of the Customer (VOC): Good or bad, what are customers saying? What do they need and want and how can you prevent negative outcomes? How are you improving their experiences?
- Voice of the Employee (VOE): Are employees adequately trained? Are there plenty of opportunities for employees? Are mechanisms — such as anonymous surveys or other input tools — in place to gain feedback?
- Voice of Quality (VOQ): Are your products maintaining a consistent quality? What about the look and feel of your stores? Are all employees knowledgeable and well trained?
Each of these should be monitored, inspected, and evaluated so you can maintain brand standards and keep lines of communication open between franchise and corporate workers as well as customers. This increased transparency will help you see issues earlier and correct them quickly.
Find the Right Tools
The big question is “How can I keep track of various programs without using separate software to track standards, record location assessments and create meaningful reporting?” Many companies use a series of complex spreadsheets, email chains, and pen-and-paper checklists to make it happen. However, a manual process like this this can waste hundreds of hours a year and make it overly difficult to gain meaningful insights to hundreds of thousands of data points. That’s why it may be time to find a quality experience management software that offers a simple way for brand managers to keep their fingers on the pulse of customers, employees, and quality. When you can see all your business information in one place, you’ll get a detailed view into your company’s overall brand experience, and it will be much easier to measure how well your organization is upholding your brand guidelines.