Our customers don’t often fall in love with us at first sight – or first encounter. Their hearts could have skipped a beat at first sight of your glistening product or alluring ad.
Yet, like attracted individuals early in the dating game, customers are evaluating you with their subconscious radars on high alert. As quickly as they were infatuated with you, you could lose their favour. At the weakest link in your omnichannel experience, they might just ‘ghost you’.
Make ‘em fall in love
Sometimes, it seems like organisations are from Mars and customers are from Venus. Customers expect to be understood without a word, and organisations struggle to ‘get it’. Understanding what is important to customers is critical.
Ipsos R&D found that there are 6 forces linked to building strong customer relationships: fair treatment, certainty, control, status, belonging, and enjoyment. The importance of these forces differ across sectors and brands, and understanding this will help you to dial up the right forces at the right times, to meet customers’ needs where they matter1.
As Simon Sinek said of falling in love, “it was the accumulation of all those little things that she woke up one day, and it’s as if she pressed a button, she goes, ‘I love him’. It’s not about the events. It’s not about the intensity. It’s about the consistency”2
It was a scorching day at Castaway Cay, Disney’s private island in the Bahamas. As we dragged our feet back to the Disney cruise exhausted and thirsty from a full day of fun, what greeted us on the way was a comforting assortment of complimentary refreshments and cheery cast members. Once again, they knew the littlest things customers needed – when it mattered most. I heard my heart go ‘awww’, and I fell deeper in love with Disney.
Achieve consistency across your customer experience (CX)
Repetition is a powerful learning tool than creates long term memory. Just observe the number of times a budding musician repeats the same music scales to commit it to memory. Think about the power of repeatedly serenading your customers with the same CX love song, across your omnichannel ‘orchestra’.
Customer journey mapping, and an omnichannel strategy across the customer journey, sets you on the path to achieving that. While many profess to have such maps and strategies, the key to success lies in the depth of detail and empathetic understanding in design and implementation.
The well-beloved Disney World in Florida went through a rough patch in the mid-2000s. There were sentiments that it was lacking in innovation, and 50% of first-time visitors said that they would not return3. Disney’s answer: MyMagic+, an ecosystem composed of the Disney MagicBand and My Disney Experience App. The central idea of the ‘magic of Disney’ is made real and repeated throughout the guest experience, through its seamless omnichannel magic: The MagicBand enables you to enter your Disney hotel room, make F&B and retail purchases, tap in for fast pass, and link PhotoPass photos (taken by Disney photographers) to the app. The app also enables you to track MagicBand expenditure, view PhotoPass photos, order food on the way to restaurant to reduce wait time, etc.
The joys of the loving CX relationship
When you are in love, you rave about your lover at any available opportunity. It is no different for your customers. Customers who are emotionally attached to your brand are far more likely to express a preference towards the brand, recommend the brand, and stay with the brand in the future4. They are also almost twice more likely to continue using your brand following a negative experience, compared to those who are only functionally satisfied5.
It’s time to reignite the spark with your customers. DON’T LET THEM GHOST YOU!
1Damais, J. (2020, May). The Forces of Customer Experience. Retrieved October 15, 2020, from https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/publication/documents/2020-05/the-forces-of-cx.pdf
2https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9_70poLEvU
3Carr, A. (2015, April 15). The Messy Business Of Reinventing Happiness. Retrieved October 15, 2020, from https://www.fastcompany.com/3044283/the-messy-business-of-reinventing-happiness
4Damais, J. (2020, May). The Forces of Customer Experience. Retrieved October 15, 2020, from https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/publication/documents/2020-05/the-forces-of-cx.pdf
5Ipsos R&D 2019: Ipsos carried out R&D across nine sectors (airlines, banks, broadband, car insurance, energy, hotel booking, mobile networks, online retail and supermarkets) in the UK (5,000 respondents/9,166 evaluations).
