Creating Emotionally Driven Brand Experiences

When service design is successful, it is invisible to the user. It is an end-to-end customer journey that captures and meets your needs seamlessly. Creating experiences that touch hearts and make a difference. Customer experiences, employee experiences, and brand experiences are the basic building blocks of any great business, but when they don't work together well, you'll see friction and experience failure. It's important to understand what the underlying problems are in order to design solutions to solve them in an innovative way.

The Customer Experience

Today's consumers demand great brand experiences. While millennials especially seem to gravitate toward brands that offer unforgettable experiences, emotions run deeper than age demographics: everyone wants something memorable from their interactions with brands. The key ingredient here is an emotional connection. Whether it means capturing hearts or changing minds, the emotional connection goes beyond logos or names; sometimes all it takes is one heartfelt interaction to change everything forever for both companies and their customers alike. Creating brand experiences that touch hearts is pretty complex. It involves planning strategies to make real connections with customers. On top of customer insights and research, a well-thought-out strategy plays a crucial role in creating brand experiences that connect with people at an emotional level. While technology helps us capture insights quickly and easily, data only takes us so far if we don't know where to take those insights. Here's what I mean by emotional design: first, make sure customers appreciate every moment of their engagement (make sure you deliver on your promise). Then, they experience some kind of discovery that makes them want to share it with others (it should fulfil a desire or communicate a reason for using the product). Next, you create brand experiences based on user needs rather than your own agenda. This way, businesses strengthen relationships between businesses and their target audiences (they're more likely to stay loyal). Once these relationships start flourishing, brands will notice how much better things get through qualitative forms of data like qualitative interviews and focus groups. At this point, businesses have created events that matter as the cornerstone of brand loyalty (Your customers are more likely to refer your business to others). You've no doubt noticed a trend in recent years where stories come before information; brand experiences play out as events across traditional media channels and digital/social tools.

The Employee Experience

For a brand experience to happen, there has to be employee experience. Employees make up every facet of an organization's customer interactions, and therefore, employee experience design is a crucial component in creating emotionally driven brand experiences. Customer service is our first line of communication, and it doesn’t make sense to think we can offer exceptional experiences without investing in employee experience design at all levels. More often than not, we believe that higher-ups don’t appreciate how much an awful experience from one single employee can hurt their brand's reputation, regardless of their position or departmental role in a company. Customer experience designers are looking to prevent problems before they occur. But what happens when you can't do that? A great employee experience designer will step in and help solve problems for customers by interacting directly with them. They'll work alongside frontline employees to come up with solutions that ensure customers get what they expect from your brand. The most successful brands tend to view everything through a customer's lens. That means looking at their business through three different lenses: employee experience design, brand experience design, and customer experience design.

The Brand Experience

To create emotionally-driven brand experiences, we have to design experiences that begin well before a customer interacts with our company. We have to design perceptions first so that emotionally-driven brand experiences can become real. A brand is essentially a reputation, or more accurately, the collection of opinions people hold about your business. Those opinions are influenced by how customers perceive other aspects of your business, such as their interactions with employees and other customers. Designing for emotions means thinking about what kinds of emotions you want to evoke from customers. This can be done by identifying ways to make the customer feel the way you would like them to. For example, if you want happy customers who feel safe when using your product, then make sure that everything from the messaging used in advertising campaigns to colour choices in packaging reflects these values. To craft emotionally-driven brand experiences, start by recognising that empathy leads to insights. Most importantly, once you know what your audience wants and needs, look for moments where those desires conflict with each other. Then ask yourself, how might I use technology or design to give my customers exactly what they need? Technology doesn't always have to be visible either; just look at the launch of Apple Pay in 2014. When Apple Pay launched, Apple didn't get rid of credit cards altogether; it just made paying easier than ever.

Conclusions?

To design a great customer experience, you first need to understand your customers (and your employees and your brand). Put yourself in their shoes. Take into account the varied contexts of your users and then plan accordingly. Use empathy as a guiding principle in developing solutions that work for your audience. Finally, ask yourself, is what I'm designing truly differentiated? It all boils down to understanding your users and delivering value to them at every point of their journey with your brand. Your ultimate goal is to create experiences that stand out in an increasingly crowded market. In order to design a successful service, it must be invisible to the user.