Driving Sales and Marketing Alignment

Evaluating Brand and Customer Experience

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As I outlined in my previous post Matching Brand Promises To Customer Reality," with the power shift in the business/buyer relationship that social media and unprecedented access to information has brought about, it is more evident than ever that B2B marketers no longer have complete control over how there organization is perceived — rather, much of this power now lies with the empowered customer. So, what robust brand and customer experience management strategies can a B2B business leader use to ensure that their brands match the reality of their company? The following strategies extend beyond logos, words and colors, and should set the stage for a successful re-evaluation of the brand and customer experience management initiative:

• Customer experience management is ultimately a marketing responsibility. Marketing is clearly best suited to understand the expectations their messages create as it is within marketing that the brand and its associated promise is often defined, refined and projected out to the world. Also, customer experience is increasingly defined by marketing touches in the form of content, newsletters, websites, direct mail, email, events, tweets, customer communities and much more. Finally, developing and maintaining great relationships with prospective buyers starts with marketing and is an inherent part of the entire marketing process because relationships are exactly what leading marketers use to convert unknown prospects into engaged and sales-ready leads. The CMO, working closely with counterparts in sales, customer service and product development, should assume leadership of B2B customer experience management due to this intertwined link between marketing success and an exceptional buyer/customer experience — one that marketing is most likely to ensure matches the brand promise of the organization.  
• Analyze and understand customer experience. Since the goal of customer experience management is to move customers from satisfied to loyal, and from loyal to advocate, the best place to begin analysis is simple customer loyalty surveys and in-depth interviews. Utilizing open-ended questions along with quantitative questions in surveys and interviews will help establish a baseline and identify specific strengths and issues. Also, identify ways to gather “operational feedback” that comes through the normal course of conducting business, including customer service, sales, CRM data and comments left on your Website. Finally, monitoring customer comments and discussions about your company in customer communities and other online social networks is another relatively easy way to continuously analyze customer experience and perceptions. If you don’t currently have a customer community, starting corporate/executive blogs can open up fruitful conversations between customer and business that can also streamline customer experience research. 
• Manage the expectations your messages create. In a business environment defined by social media and empowered customers who expect transparency over-promising has gone from unwise to high-risk as significant promise/reality gaps will be ruthlessly exposed in customer communities or other business social networks. Mapping your primary messages and brand promise to what you learn about your customers’ perception of their own experiences working with your organization goes a long way toward identifying significant gaps. In general, be vigilant to avoid creating expectations that can’t or shouldn’t be met by focusing messages on core competencies that differentiate your organization or offering and matter most to your customers.
• Proactively turn customers into champions with a customer advisory board. B2B marketers should consider initiating a customer advisory board as a crucial component of the customer experience strategy. Customer advisory boards can help to flush out any troubles that buyers might be experiencing with the company, as well as highlight and improve what the organization is doing well. Also, by engaging customers in defining processes and initiatives to improve their own experience they will quickly adopt a sense of ownership, which will help significantly with managing risk and mitigating communications crisis if they come up. It is always good to have customers come to your defense if possible, particularly in the social world.

While there’s no doubt that successful brand and customer experience management takes time and business resources, positive brand awareness and customer perceptions do more to ensure the reputation and success of a B2B company than any short-term initiative. The sooner B2B CMOs takes this to heart, the sooner the business will survive and thrive well into an optimistic future.