Part III: The Brand, The Customer, and The Nuances of Co-Creating Experiences

We are all shaped by the experiences we have throughout our lives. As working professionals, parents, partners, friends, and – you guessed it – customers, we are shaped by these different experiences all the time. From the customer perspective, we want to feel a certain way throughout the entire journey. We want an easy, cohesive, streamlined experience where the value provided is clear. And this actually starts at the brand level. To ensure a positive customer experience, we have to look at the significant impact of the brand experience, and the importance of aligning the two. In a fast-paced industry where the customer voice continues to get louder, how do you achieve alignment and keep the brand promise intact? There are a few key elements that come into play.

To start, let’s talk about what it all means. The brand experience and customer experience both inherently focus on the same thing – the customer. The differentiator is that the brand experience includes every touch point, every interaction (both directly and indirectly) with the brand, the product, and the company’s employees, before the customer makes their first purchase. The two experiences are defined below.

Brand Experience (BX) : The feelings, reactions, and ideas that result from the direct or indirect exposure to any branded/brand-medicated interaction – influencing a future purchase decision.

Customer Experience (CX) : The feelings, reactions, and ideas that result from direct consumption, purchase, and use of a branded product or service.

The customer experience is a subset of the brand experience, directly guiding the customer along their journey within the greater ecosystem of the brand. Service and support teams have to be present and well-educated across every touchpoint of the customer journey, making interactions and product usage easy and seamless in order to create loyalty. This starts at the first line of defense – self service. Self service is a huge part of the customer experience and one that’s growing every year. Examples include help centers, customer portals, and online communities, and content is often presented via knowledge articles, how-tos, and frequently asked questions (FAQs). It’s an area where customer experience teams and brand teams have tight collaboration around content creation, where the content lives, how customers access it, and where it fits along the customer journey. When done right, self service allows employees to stay focused on more strategic work by making it easy for customers to find routine answers by themselves. This clears the way for delivering excellent customer service at scale. What customers experience along their self service journey ladders up to the overall brand experience, which is where the brand promise comes in; articulating what customers can expect across all touchpoints. When customer experience teams and brand teams collaborate behind the scenes, it creates a more robust and better self service experience for the customer, driving CSAT scores up and support costs down.?

“Brand experience is how consumers interact with brands in real life, generating feelings, beliefs and behaviors that result in comparative marketplace advantages that lead to more sales, pricing power and resistance to competitive threats.”

– Frank Zinni, Senior XM Scientist, PhD

By the time a customer starts engaging with your company and therefore your brand, expectations have already been set. That’s why the upstream brand promise is so critical. Customers come to you with the expectation of what they’re going to find. So what can brand teams do about it? They can declare the brand promise to drive alignment with the brand experience and therefore, the customer experience. That said, while brand teams can declare the brand promise and design strategies to influence the brand experience, the experience itself is, by nature, owned by the customer. In reality, there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of people involved in the relationship between you and your customer, and those people have influence over your brand experience.?

Companies can no longer solely control their brands because there is an increasing strength of voice from customers near and far. Platforms like G2 allow people to discover, review, and manage software, essentially resulting in a crowdsourced brand experience. Platforms like G2 act as a partner, for better or worse, in helping brands manage their reputation and gain authentic customer insights. Due to the very nature of these types of platforms, brand experiences might not align with the brand promise because the brand is constantly being shaped and co-created by forces outside the company. Similarly, big players like Gartner are starting to leverage crowdsourced insights in place of formal analyst coverage. Gartner has an entire Peer Insights platform to help customers choose enterprise technology and services, and guide technology and business decisions with peer-driven insights. This community experience empowers leaders to connect with thousands of other leaders through online discussions, instant polling and Q&A. It’s free to join and free to use, and currently has over 40,000 members chiming in and shaping the brand experience for hundreds of companies.

While the customer has a significant impact on the brand experience, there are, of course, things that can be done in-house to shape it and help bring it into the customer experience. A great brand is always the expression to the world of a company’s highest intent. The “why” behind what’s being done is the source of sustainable competitive advantage. A company’s intent is captured in its mission statement, or purpose, that defines what it stands for. Authentically acting from your mission ensures seamless integration of all your operations through the connective tissue of your strategic intent. So, expressing your mission to your employees and your customers creates a virtuous feedback loop from the customer back to the brand. From this perspective, ensuring the brand is expressed consistently at every touchpoint is essential. You maximize the opportunity for this to happen when you interlock processes.

A brand promise that’s rooted in purpose can lead to deeper clarity around aligning the actual experience your customers are having with your brand promise. This graphic from Smith+Co illustrates how having a clear purpose leads to the connection of the brand promise and customer experience, and the importance of additional operational alignment between product and service offerings, processes, and people. It’s a matter of investing in these areas in order to consistently deliver a valuable experience to customers. Eventually, customers get to the point where they’re not only willing to work with you on their pursuits but willing to let you lead them, as discussed in Part II of this series . Getting there is the responsibility of everyone in the organization. From the brand perspective, customers aren’t divided into prospects vs. customers, they are all people experiencing the brand. Zooming out to consider the brand at every step of the way can help uncover blind spots along the customer journey. Of note, a study by Salesforce found that 84% of customers feel that the experience a company provides is just as important as its products and services. Aligning the experience operationally and aligning along the sales cycle helps close the gap. At Smartsheet, our mission is to empower anyone to drive meaningful change. This not only drives our brand experience but can be found at every point along our 4 Phase Customer Methodology.?

Plan Outcomes -In the planning phase, customer journey mapping is a critical aspect of the total brand experience. Internal alignment around strategic priorities (with a focus on particular industry verticals, new product capabilities), and the brand lexicon (brand platform, brand personality, tone of voice, etc.) are essential to creating the right conversation, at the right time, with the right people, and MUST be consistent in all venues where the prospect/customer and brand meet.

Enable Capabilities - In effect, marketing communications make a promise to customers and prospects. The customer experience? is required to deliver these promises.

Delight Users -It’s imperative that current customers not only experience the delight from the superior performance of our offering, but have a positive sentiment about the company overall.?

Mobilize Success -The creation of “documented success” is critical to the success of the business and the long-term health of the brand. It’s the proof of our brand promise. It’s the evidence of our nuanced offering in 2000+ use cases. It’s the reason to believe we can continue to serve our current customers in more expansive ways and the call to action for others to leverage the platform in a way that unleashes latent potential.

Connect Leaders and Community - Are we delivering on our promises and customer expectations? Every phase is propelled by frank discussions sharing experiences in two settings. In the first setting, we connect leadership of the customer in a structured manner with Smartsheet leadership through marketing events and business reviews. The second is more of a semi-structured, viral and hugely active community connecting users and experts in our online community. In both settings, the greatest source of momentum is consistency and predictability of the customer experience back to the initial brand promise.

According to Deloitte , a well-executed brand promise can translate into lower cost of sales (selling to loyal, emotionally connected customers is less expensive than winning new customers). When it comes to the post sales experience, aligning the brand experience along the sales cycle starts on the inside, where it’s imperative to make the brand promise explicit. Translating the brand promise into a clear set of expected behaviors for employees makes it much easier to articulate their responsibilities, and therefore easier for them to improve their capabilities. Communicating clearly and consistently internally is key. If employees are not clear on the brand promise and not connecting the dots to the brand and customer experiences, it shows in how teams interact with customers. It's important to train employees accordingly, especially those that have direct contact with customers. Ensuring employees understand how to effectively execute on the brand promise as it relates to their function is essential. There’s an important intersection between customer teams and brand teams, and sales and marketing teams, and closer alignment is needed between them. Companies must also connect the dots between teams, making them aware of what other teams are doing, their capabilities, and ensuring all teams are holistically enabled when it comes to post sales. This way, there is a depth and breadth of knowledge that allows employees to think critically and offer solutions to customers that are aligned with individual customer needs and challenges.?

Without this type of cross-functional alignment, there are gaps where sellers don’t understand how marketing content is relevant to their sales cycle because it’s not contextualized for specific opportunities. It takes a strategic, concerted effort driven by sales enablement and post sales teams like services, success, and support to convey value-added services in a way that resonates with sellers and customers. This is important both from an internal and external perspective. It can be challenging to connect the dots between the brand and customer experiences both for employees and customers, because customer teams and brand teams often don't work in lock step. But with closer alignment, the brand experience can be extended to permeate the post sales phase, at which point there are a multitude of value added services available to customers.?

A well-executed brand promise incorporates the post sales experience by helping to cut through the clutter, driving customer loyalty and increased revenue. Post sales teams provide the tools, information, resources, and customer-centric services to help scale the organization. As a result of sales enablement , 76% of business organizations have seen an increase in sales between 6% and 20%. One study found that companies with mature sales enablement practices experienced an 18% increase in deal sizes and a 20% increase in win rates. Knowing that sales enablement has a positive impact on revenue, it can be argued that all employees are involved in sales performance in one way or another. All that said, there’s a definite missed opportunity when sales and marketing are misaligned. Sales and marketing alignment can contribute to a 67% increase in closed deals, but companies don’t always make the connection. In fact, nine out of 10 marketing and sales leaders identify disconnects in strategy, process, content, and culture that hold back GTM efforts . This lack of alignment creates gaps between sales and marketing, and exposes the lack of Marketing Enablement, which is a trend occurring across industries. More than 77% of companies have dedicated sales enablement in place, yet companies are spending only about 10% of what they spend to enable sales on marketing enablement. According to Forrester, this is largely due to the fact that clearly establishing and communicating the value of marketing enablement efforts can be challenging. Without a clear sense of the value provided, marketing enablement can easily be passed off as a “nice to have'' despite its ability to have a measurable impact on businesses, like creating differentiated experiences for buyers that yield faster time to close, higher win rates, and more revenue. Smartsheet is no exception when it comes to this trend – as we continue to grow and scale as a company, there’s an opportunity to drive more alignment, better arm our marketing teams, and push more marketing enablement all the way upstream.?

Part of the disconnect is that there’s rarely any defined process to drive alignment between customer experience and brand teams. There often isn’t a clear path for customer experience teams to circle customers back into marketing teams’ awareness, but closing the loop here is essential – there is a direct correlation between brand loyalty and the customer experience. Research conducted by a global leader in Customer Experience Management found that 94% of customers acknowledge the role a positive customer experience plays in their decision-making process when choosing one company over another. Moreover, 56% of customers agree that feeling a connection with a brand is key to becoming long term customers. This brings us back to connecting the dots between the customer experience and the brand promise, which sets expectations and guides everyone across the organization in terms of how, when and why they engage with customers. Creating and maintaining a clear brand promise builds trust and upholds credibility, both internally and externally. Reflecting the brand promise in an organization’s customer experience delivery helps differentiate the organization in a crowded marketplace. Keeping a finger on the pulse with metrics like customer satisfaction (CSAT) and Net Promoter Scores (NPS) can help identify if different channels and touchpoints are delivering a consistent experience.

Ultimately, the best way to improve both the brand experience and customer experience is to view them as two sides of the same coin, drive and measure them in an aligned manner, and start on the inside. This approach naturally shines a light on where and how resources can be better spent. It’s not only about understanding the current state but having a vision and strategy around where we’re headed. A clear brand promise is a key driver and not only helps provide direction to employees, but encourages customers to give you a shot. Even if they start small, the ability to grow and scale is there and can be taken advantage of at any point along the journey. Delivering on the brand promise by providing a consistent and cohesive experience, the opportunity to scale, and right-sized, tailored support along the way increases customer retention and creates raving fans. It’s no secret that a misaligned experience forces customers to look elsewhere – we are all customers ourselves, after all.?