Customer Experience Determines Your Brand Equity

In today’s competitive business environment, most of the business leaders would define brand equity as a result of all the positive experiences a customer has across all touchpoints and levels (rationally, emotionally, physically and spiritually) throughout his journey as a customer. To put it differently, Brand Equity is directly proportional to customer experience. Offering better customer experience is inversely proportional to the number of touchpoints a brand has with a consumer.

A brand with world-class customer experience will have a high/positive brand equity and will thus command more leverage on the pricing of its offerings.

So how can you offer a quality customer experience?

1. Get the basics right:
   • First thing is to get your basics right. You should map out the entire consumer journey starting from the time a customer discovers about your product/brand. This will help you 1) identify gaps in your process 2) give a sense of the type & number of touchpoints and teams interacting with the consumer. This enables you to provide consistency to your processes, teams interaction (one messaging across channels), align technology to enhance customer experience, and also capture the right set of data points.
2. Using the right and actionable metrics
   • Net Promoter Score (NPS): NPS is the most commonly used metric for measuring customer experience but the problem is that this metric alone cannot drive any action- for instance, you ask a customer to fill in NPS score after his store visit when he might not even have a chance to use your product/services. There can very well be a case that a customer faces a problem when he starts using the product or faces issues during servicing of the product. However, combined with other metrics like CSAT can lead to actionable insights.
     • Usage of NPS: Firms are using NPS to determine the when to launch a product for masses basis response on the alpha & beta version of the product. The product doesn’t go live till NPS reaches a benchmark. Tech product companies are deploying deep learning techniques to capture NPS basis customer interactions on a beta version. When it reaches a certain benchmark then a product is taken live.
   • CSAT: Customer satisfaction is usually captured In Moment i.e when the customer has just had an interaction with the brand in the form of product use, service or delivery or any event.
     • Usage of CSAT: firms are leveraging social media chatter to gauge CSAT or having in-app popup surveys to capture the feedback at the moment. Then leverage the same to improve their process.
   • LTV of a customer: Life Time Value i.e total revenue a firm can expect from its customer during his entire life cycle and subsequently cost of acquiring a customer. Growing LTV is a sign of improved customer experience.
     • Usage of LTV – LTV is typically used by firms to assess their marketing strategy & expenditure. Increasing LTV and decreasing the cost of acquiring a customer signifies positive brand equity.
   • Customer Conversion or in other words inquiry to visit or search for engagement etc.
     • Usage of Customer Conversion: Customer conversion will help you ascertain the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, i.e was your messaging right, if so then were you able to generate enough interest in your target audience and drive them to engage with the brand. If not then where did you lose your customer?
   • Product/Quality metrics: This is the most unused and unheard set of the metric when it comes to customer experience. Low quality leads to low CSAT, NPS and declining LTV and Customer conversion. Hence it’s important to track product/service quality metrics.
     • Usage of Product/Quality Metric: Leverage product quality metrics as a baseline for the new product introduction process.

Benefits from tracking customer experience metrics

Tracking and monitoring the customer experience metrics will have a positive impact on your brand equity and business as below:

• Brand Extensions & Products: Metrics will help you determine how, when and where to launch your new products and improvements in your products. Also, help ideate to develop brand extensions in the form of new business, etc.
• Reduced time to market: Little to no time investment in market intelligence or surveys to identify pain areas in processes or product thus greatly reducing time to market.
• Marketing: Target marketing (for instance- with data you will be able to track your customers with multiple bad experiences and strategize a plan to retain them)
  Engagement: Help create curated experiences/events for your customers to drive more engagement