Employees play a vital role in manifesting this brand, as their everyday actions deliver bottom-line success.
Challenge: Using a values-driven rebrand to deliver a better customer experience
As a strategic imperative for a new company vision, an omni-channel consumer electronics retailer was excited when it rolled out its new brand.
A major goal of this re-brand: Differentiate the company from digital-only competitors with a better, more consistent customer experience across all channels, whether in-store, online, in person, or over the phone.
While the company did a great job of articulating its values in the new branding, real-world implementation encountered a glitch.Inconsistencies in how brand values were expressed to—and interpreted by—employees made it hard to deliver an experience that accurately represented the intent of the brand. From front-line employees to the back office, such as legal and accounting, team members didn’t easily see a connection between the new brand articulation and their roles. This lack of alignment made it hard to consistently interpret and deliver a category-leading brand experience.
As a result, this major retailer realized they needed a brand-aligned customer experience vision to bring the brand to life in tangible, relevant ways across the entire organization.
Today, the organization knows the expectations the brand sets, and is aligned on how to design and deliver customer experiences that consistently and appropriately meet those expectations across channels, functions and roles.
Approach: Develop a CX vision that helps bring the brand to life for employees and customers
Working closely with the retailer’s customer experience, marketing, and transformation teams, McorpCX engaged with the following audiences:
Executive leadership to codify business goals
Customers to understand the linkage between brand loyalty and experience
Employees at all levels and divisions of the company to understand roles and responsibilities within the context of customer experiences
Leveraging in-depth internal and external research, McorpCX analyzed and organized insights to serve as the foundation for their customer experience vision— a “north star” of sorts—to guide the design, development and delivery of brand-aligned customer experiences.
Key to the process was a CX vision that supported, articulated and brought the new brand to life in meaningful, measurable ways for employees and customers alike. The client tested this vision across audiences, then we iterated, re-validated, and finalized plans for a staged roll-out.
Once finalized, McorpCX designed a robust measurement and metrics system that integrated with the retailer’s existing Voice-of-Customer (VoC) program. It linked business goals, customer perceptual and behavioral metrics, and operational metrics across functions and teams.
Holistic programs such as this give organizations visibility into how customer experiences are being delivered across channels, functions and roles throughout the enterprise, regardless of customer segment, employee title, or type of interaction.
When the objective is quantifying, scaling, leveraging and influencing customer brand perceptions, leadership gains valuable insights from metrics surrounding employee actions, and operational activities. They’re especially effective at informing which levers will be most effective to toggle at a systemic level—relative to effort and cost— to influence customers’ brand perceptions.
Recommendations: Educate, measure and iterate on experience delivery
McorpCX had a series of recommendations for the company:
Quantify the internal organization’s perceptions of what the new brand means to employee roles as well as to the customers.
Translate the brand into an actionable customer experience vision for employees, including frameworks that clearly link business goals and behaviors throughout the organization by role.
Implement the vision through trainings from the top-down. Align executives first, the regional leads second, and the managers and line staff third. Rolling out by levels ensures a greater understanding of how the brand impacts everyday actions and enables behavior modeling by management.
Measure over time to ensure the organization is consistently delivering on its brand promise.
Perform data-driven course correction or coaching as needed over time and
at every level of the organization.
Results: A more consistent and authentic brand-aligned customer experience, a more competitive edge
By implementing these programs, the business ensured employees understood their vital role in making the brand manifest through their everyday actions. Correlated to the implementation of the initiative, this omini-channel retailer’s performance improved greatly.
While many factors contributed, the customer experience initiative was a significant strategic undertaking and a big contributor to connecting employees with the business, to deliver an aligned customer experience.
McorpCX is independently recognized as a top customer experience services and solutions company, enabling and guiding leading organizations since 2002.
Touchpoint Mapping®, Touchpoint Metrics® and Loyalty Mapping® are registered trademarks of McorpCX, LLC