The Future Of Customer Communication: An Authentic Brand Dialogue
By Suzanne Hader, Principal, 400twin Brand Experience Consulting
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| Suzanne Hader |
The last 20 years have brought amazing improvements in how quickly and easily your audience can interact with your brand. Now discerning customers want to know: where’s the authenticity?
Achieving this new gold standard has two parts: being honest, and being real. Honesty boils down two simple guidelines:
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Clearly set your audiences’ expectations and then meet them.
On the rare occasion when you don’t, take responsibility and apologize.
Being real is a little more conceptual; it means that you can’t communicate with your customers in ways that are robotic, fake or scripted. Always having the option to interact with a real person instead of an automated system is the first step, but there’s more to it than that. For example: at a 5-star hotel last winter, the person at the front desk mentioned that my room was his “favorite suite” on the 11th floor. At dinner, the server remarked that I selected her “favorite bottle of wine.” By the time my spa request turned out to be the reservationist’s "favorite treatment,” I just wanted it to stop. I’m sure this practice started out with good intentions, but there’s nothing luxurious about feeling manipulated.
On the positive side, for companies that want to distinguish themselves from the competition, breathing authenticity into their brand experience can draw their audiences into deeper, more devoted relationships. There are three must-haves to make it work:
Know your audiences: Market research will help you understand, manage, and surpass their expectations. Throw out the script: Your brand is a culture, not a robot army. Empower everyone at your company to become a living part of it. Create customer dialogue: Open up and give your customers ways to more fully engage with your brand. This isn’t about satisfaction surveys: they want to feel like they affect you as much as you affect them.
Brands that get it right make their customers feel like every communication—from PR to marketing to purchase to followup—is a part of one continuous, authentic relationship. Just like with a real person, in addition to building trust, it also means there will be new things to discover with every interaction. And that will keep them coming back to your brand again and again.
Suzanne Hader is Principal at 400twin, a customer experience consulting and research group for luxury brands.
This article appeared in the September
2007 eBulletin.
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are always welcome! Please email jtobin@dmi.org.
All articles reflect the opinion of the author and not the Design
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