Your brand is defined by the sum of all your customer interactions
Direct interaction with clients is one of the most memorable ways to represent your brand. This is a significant part of the often recognized importance of creating a good customer experience; in fact, the separation between you and your competitors has everything to do with delivering better customer experience. Taking advantage of more personalized and direct client interactions will snowball over time naturally participating in your overall brand reputation.
There are many different routes to achieving a positive direct interaction such as through customer service. Good customer service is not only used in the event of an issue or complaint but can be applied in many encounters; it’s amazing how a negative situation with only a single employee can leave the customer associating it with the entire company. It’s beyond crucial to create a work environment in which employees are personally willing to contribute to the positive message. Once you have that, it is then necessary to ensure that they fully understand their role more directly within customer service. Some roles require a face to face interaction whilst some efforts are being made behind the scenes. Whatever their role, it is important that they understand exactly where they fit into the makings of the customer experience.
If you want to be known for trust, you need to start educating your customers.
– Michelle Deery
Trust is an essential part of creating successful client interaction. Aside from showing your consumers that you have their best interest, they also need to feel that you know really know what you are talking about. Bringing education into your brand’s message will help achieve this; applying this can be as simple as educating the employees. Learning new useful information from a chat with a brand employee serves as a memorable experience that will reflect on the entire company. There is so much that goes into behind the scenes of beauty products. Making an effort to distribute effective information that is useful to the customer will make them trust you and in result build their loyalty.
They may forget what you said but they will never forget how you made them feel.
– Maya Angelou
An article on Deloitte Digital holds some interesting insight into brand loyalty and how you can achieve this through emotion. Remembering the importance of creating a genuine tone within customer interaction will help to induce trust as “When consumers describe the kind of relationship they want to have with brands, it sounds a lot like a good old-fashioned friendship.” A few key points that have become a consistent part of the customer response include personalization, contextual awareness, responsiveness and empathy. Your consumers want a mutual understanding and engagement, that grows over time.
Which begs the question: As a brand, what type of friend are you? Are you the friend who never stops talking about yourself? Are you only available when you want something? Do you remember what your friends told you just a week ago? Harnessing and acting on emotional data can help brands move beyond CX, basic customer experience, into the broader, deeper connections that make up human experience, or HX, becoming the kind of friends they need to be.
A personalized experience will usually work best with direct verbal or online interaction. However, it is possible that there are exceptions to this. Retailers such as Sephora and Loreal have begun offering virtual makeup engines as a part of their service; if you are unfamiliar with the term, this is the process of digitally applying different makeup products the brand is offering to a picture of your face. This works better than just trying testers because it really expands your options as there is a limit of testers you can try in a row before irritating your skin. This fits in with more personalized customer experience as, like a direct interaction, the process is specially tailored to the individual and their needs.
Technology has pretty much taken over the world and the opportunities that this has created for beauty brands are endless. However, too much focus on digital branding can take attention off the value of face to face interaction. Tangible interaction allows the consumer to fully engage by using more than just their eyes “as we all know, there is no substitute for being able to physically see, touch, smell and test a beauty product for yourself.” Many brands, especially online shops, who would consider striving more in-person engagement with their customers could organize small projects to encourage this such as events and pop up shops. Pop up shops have many benefits as they really tend to create a lasting impression. Face to face contact can give the employee a better understanding of what the customer is going to love and help point them in the best direction for them.
The purpose of making an effort to personalize your brand is to create an experience that is unique to the consumer; your consumers want to feel that their purchase will specifically fit their wants and needs. This is likely to excite them which will make them likely to return to your brand.
Can you think of a specific pleasant encounter that you have had with an employee? What stood out to you? Did it affect your decision to purchase?
