Everything is beginning from the painstaking research regarding the brand experience and up-to-date expert analysis to meet two goals: satisfy customers and meet the business goals.
It’s easy to see the difference between brand and customer experience when each of them is explained. And to improve customer journeys – you really don’t need a lot of efforts.
What is the brand experience, the conception in which many call center owners are misunderstood?
In short, the brand experience is the perception of the customers regarding companies based on their thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. Plus, the brand experience fosters customer loyalty – the traditional KPI metric that gives the “upper hand” in the call center industry. As simple as that.
Some prefer to build the brand experience through advertising only. That won’t work if all other parts of the brand are lost and not found.
The customer experience and the brand anticipates the future of the business relationships or cancels them altogether. In this guide, you’ll discover how to actually distinguish the brand experience and customer experience. And you’ll know from which the user experience is consists from.
Plus, we’ll give you a rundown on how to actually improve both of them. Remember: addressing both customer experience and brand experience is an issue of paramount importance. Hint: the competitiveness of the call center will rise by an order of magnitude.
What is the brand experience in the call center, and what constitutes it?
Take a look at the largest brand you’re knowing today with the perfect brand experience. Giants such as Amazon, Walmart, General Motors, Rolls-Royce, etc. All of them have a similar recognition among the audience throughout the world.
Despite the fact that most small and mid-sized companies are unable to reach the same level of worldwide recognition. As a result of the brand experience improvement.
More, that’s doesn’t cancel the fact, all of the companies qualified to build their own, even small brand recognition. And what’s noticeable for these brands is that customer experience and brand experience don’t exist in the silos – on their own.
It’s better to take it for granted – your own brand experience will give you everything you need: the cash, the workforce, the recognition, you name it. So let’s get it straight and dissolve all of the essential parts of the customer experience and brand image recognition.
What is the distinguishing part of the customer experience and the brand image?
The customer experience is part of the brand image. And here’s why. Consumers are perceiving the company’s brand image based only on what they’ve received from them.
Thus the customer experience and the brand image are improving when customers are satisfied. And on the contrary, the experience is going down the drain if people aren’t receiving the desirable result.
Yes, it’s impossible to build neither the brand experience nor the customer experience without thoughtful work. Yet there are proven ways.
The importance of the customer experience and the brand as a compound part of the brand recognition
As you already know, neither the brand image nor the customer experience isn’t existing in silos. Both of the parts are connected to each other through constant positioning and business relationships. The difference between brand and customer experience is clear they aren’t the same thing but definitely interdependable.
The improvement of the brand experience defined
To show the difference between brand and customer experience, it’s easy to show after picking up each of them and describing their parts thoroughly. The brand experience is improving under the correct actions of the business owners to correct customers touchpoints.
The policies to foster the customer experience are communicated to the employees. And now here are these policies and solutions for the brand experience:
The brand experience is improving only in cases the company is customer-oriented across phone, chat, social media, email, and even business mail. That means that everything from the goods and services to the agents and C-suit staff is concentrated to deliver the perceived value to the customers.
The brand experience arises and fosters revenue velocity only when customers are satisfied. And only when all of the employees in the call center are eager to deliver the value.
Consequently, the customers satisfied with the brand will surely return later for the new goods or services. Additionally, this improves the success rate for cross-selling and upselling.
The brand experience of the call centers strategies
One of the well-known strategies is the call center is the brand positioning. The business owner must know how, when, and why customers are willing to purchase the goods and maintain business relationships with the company.
Both customer experience and brand experience are supporting each other through branding. Just look at the questions below to achieve additional insights regarding the issue.
To find the clues on how to properly position your brand ask yourself two questions:
- What are the reasonable ways to position the brand taking into account the current economy?
- Should your call center concentrate on the small segment of the audience versus the worldwide brand recognition?
The reasonable way to position the brand experience is to calculate the budget and options to improve the brand. It considers advertising, information materials, competitive service, staff professionalism, and expertise in the field.
Look at the example. You are in the insurance business, and you know how to establish yourself as an expert in the field. Now, you are providing insurance policies for the drivers – the citizens of the country.
And of course, your insurance company must know the legal requirements, billing plans, and most important of all, the capacity to satisfy the citizens in case of car accidents.
That’s your expertise deepness you promote and most important – fulfill. After the fulfillment of each of the essential parts of the customer experience and brand experience – the revenue of a call center increases.
Let’s expand our example regarding insurance policies for drivers. In the insurance business, there is always the factor that is called the “risk category”. Typically, the risk category of the citizens paying the higher rates for their driver's license.
In the example we’re describing this category is the single people of the age around 25 years or so. So all of the relevant legal responsibilities, insurance plans, and so forth are deriving from the concrete category of the citizens.
The top insurance companies in the insurance business for vehicles know exactly how, when, and why some drivers safely drive and why others are in the risk category. Their policies for drivers are based on numerous factors. But two essential of them are these: the risk of the “meant to happen accident” and “inevitable accident”. Their customer experience and brand experience derive from expertise and promise fulfillment.
The whole brand experience of the insurance company above stems from the legal and financial risk responsibilities. So such a company would never position itself in other ways. Or will try to cheat the customers because what the company is doing is reflecting their business and brand experience.
So your company must do the same. There’s no necessity to position the brand and cheat customers for better financial results. All you have to do is to spell out clearly what your company is and what goods or services are. No tricks or gimmicks are necessary in any way. Below you’ll find the clues on how to properly avoid them.
More, you’ll find out how to attract the relevant audience with the promise of unlimited expansion. Anyway, the customer experience and the brand experience of these companies above have concrete foundations deriving from their products and services.
Knowing methods, strategies, planning, tracking, and checking, you’ll obtain the necessary insights regarding the difference between brand and customer experience. Later on, we’ll show how to use marketing for the purposes of improvement.
The marketing strategy toward the brand experience defined
Every company in the world is striving to market itself in one way or another. Some companies the website, and others move to more sophisticated marketing campaigns, which include TV, radio, print advertising, direct email, catalogs, brochures, white papers, etc.
Too much is depending on the company’s marketing budget. More often than not, the presence on all of the channels can afford only the biggest companies in the business such as Amazon, Walmart, AT&T, Coca-Cola, etc.
The marketing budget of these companies per year reaches tens and hundreds of millions of dollars. Their ROI as well as the customer experience and brand experience offset all of their expenses handy.
For small and mid-sized companies – the choice is tiny. Often they are using the internet as the main tool for their marketing strategy. And let’s face it: with proper marketing management, marketing campaigns over the internet are capable to make miracles and build the brand experience equally efficiently than the combined efforts of all other media of the big brands.
Now, in the marketing strategy, all of the business owners must keep one thing in their heads. There’s the necessity to utilize the full capacity to target the relevant audience. The spread of marketing efforts is often counterproductive. Let’s put it this way: shoot with the rifle, not with the shotgun.
Call centers are building their image on the all levels they can. And the front-line agents, that are talking with the customers on a day-to-day basis are the main workforce for the call center’s brand-building efforts. Customers will hear and feel what the company wants to communicate to them via the agents.
This is the moment of the test of both customer experience and brand experience. And lastly, customers evaluate the brands based on previous successes and failures. So striving for productive conversations allow us to accomplish the strong brand creation mission.
One of the most forgotten things regarding the building of the brand experience is this. There are only two things involved in the brand experience strategy initial planning:
The sales pitch. This is everything regarding advertising across all the media such as the internet, print advertising, radio, TV, direct mail, and email
The delivery system. The delivery system is the advertising media such as the internet, phone, chat, social media, print, TV, etc. It’s easy to prequalify customers through these media and make the success rate of the calls much higher.
As a result, knowing the facts, you can search for clues on how to match your brand experience with the customers. You can pick up any, few, or all of the marketing media for the brand experience improvement. Occasionally, the internet is the weakest media because you need to grab the attention of prospects and customers and hold it until the final sale.
But when you know that the media is matching your budget and you defined the proper sales pitch targeted the relevant audience – even the internet becomes a powerful tool for building awareness and brand experience building.
The first touchpoint shouldn’t be the last one, yet today it’s a trend
Do you know how many companies lost their customers even during the first touchpoint? Billions of dollars were lost just because the agent of a company underperform during the conversations with the potential customers.
But customer shrinkage occurs when the existing customers are failing to receive the relevant services from their brand. Thus to ensure the positive customer experience and brand experience, it’s necessary to provide the stand-out-of the crowd services.
Stand out of the crowd customer service derives from the customer experience and brand experience
How are you improving both the brand experience via the customer experience? The solution is simple: just giving the consumers what they need. Know how to do it right.
Let’s pick up another example. Let’s say your company is in the technical support with the internet communication company. Now, to give the customer’s what they want, you must solve all of the technical problems of your customers and the internet.
In the eyes of the clients, the internet connection must be stable and fast – just as agreed previously. And moreover – reflected in the contract.
Another real-world example, for instance, if you are selling the outfits via phone, thus your agents must know all the products in the catalogs and know when and how to sell and cross-sell.
The quality, the size, the durability, etc., all of these qualities are in the catalog, isn’t it? So what’s the problem to fulfil these simple promises? You think it right: there’s no problem at all.
In other words, satisfaction of the customer’s needs is the only way to improve the brand experience via the customer experience. What is happening when customers aren’t getting what they need? Well, it all starts with the decreasing of the customer experience.
And as you already know that the brand experience has the foundation on many things including the customer experience – the overall company competitiveness begins to meltdown. While the competitors quickly re-cap the situation and suck up all of the dissatisfied customers in a split second. That’s how one brand loses customers in favor of others.
Tricks and gimmicks versus professionalism and courtesy: the styles of the communication
The “experts” claim that everyone in the call center business is motivated by emotions such as a fear of the sale and the greed. And for that reason, all of them are meant to use tricks and gimmicks to close the sale or just take the money away from people.
Nothing can be farther from the truth. Because the top call center managers are shaping the call center’s attitudes towards professionalism and courtesy – two essential parts of the call center’s strategy. What constitutes both professionalism and courtesy?
Professionalism. Behavior as a professional during the conversations with the prospects and the customers across all the touchpoints mean two things: perfect knowledge of the product and service and expert analysis of the current state of the product and service to provide the perceived value to the customers.
The courtesy. The top manager knows the old saying: “The customer isn’t the moron – she is your wife”. Meaning the treatment of the people based on moral and ethical principles.
The reps in such call centers never shout, treat, harass, going out of control during the conversations. Instead, they’re providing the relevant services either customer support or sale.
The telemarketing results prove this. Such companies as AT&T long ago applied the “professional” style versus all others. Agents in AT&T would never use gimmicks or tricks to close the sale or provide customer service. And you know why? Because these methods aren’t selling.
So no matter what you are selling: insurance, outfits, pizza, you don’t need the “hype”. And if you are delivering customer service, all you need is to know the technical systems within the given business. As simple as that.
The top call centers and companies defined long ago the ultra-critical values
In the top call centers in the US and around the globe, the company values are emphasized on the consumer’s preferences. These companies also have a higher retention rate and above-average annual revenues. Keeping consumer-oriented values helps to foster the brand experience over the long haul.
The call centers should apply the Fortune 100 companies’ practices if they want to survive in today’s tricky and highly competitive environment. However, many managers feel, yet don’t recognize the essentials of the top brand experience values. And they are:
The development and maintenance of the top professional behavior practices. Each of them must stand out of the crowd, no mediocrity is allowed. Otherwise, consumers will switch to other brands faster than one business owner may think.
The consistency. All of the successful companies deliver consistent services. Often companies deliver value to customers from time to time. When that happens, customers are switching to other brands – just in the time gap between the great and the mediocre service. If in the years before customers would close their eyes on mediocrity, today that’s not the case.
By satisfying the two requirements above, the brand experience only improves, even during the economic factors. And frankly, there are no other ways around it.
How to achieve the next level of customer experience and brand image in the call center?
Any kind of call center is capable to thrive by shifting the customer experience of a call center to another level. The main burden of improvement always lies on the shoulders of the call center manager and supervisors. But why the improvements aren’t happening or come too slowly? Actually, there are reasons for it:
Manager’s research. The research on the current state of the customer experience and the brand positioning of the call center has paramount importance. Really, how one manager must know what has to be done in the call center without proper data at the elbow?
Only with the data about the previous years, months, and weeks, it’s possible to adjust the agents to the next working shifts. Interestingly, the manager will find out many data regarding the telemarketing successes by just viewing these data. He or she also will find dozens of mistakes. However, all of these data are essential parts of the planning.
Manager’s planning. The transition to the next level of customer experience branding is possible only after the manager’s painstaking research and careful in-depth analysis of the call center’s current state.
Having all the data at their disposal regarding telemarketing successes and failures, the head of the call center is qualified for the right planning. Every plan for the improvement of the customer experience and the brand positioning must have concrete stages and due dates. The plan will include the action plan.
Action plan. Now, the head of the call center must go to the implementation of the plan. The fulfillment of the plan works only on due dates. Let’s say, the head of the staff decides to improve the customer experience in 2 weeks.
Thus the 2 weeks is the end period of when the action must be taken as a period. On half of the path (1 week), the manager must check the implementation of the plan. More often than not many obstacles lie before the manager – thus in most cases, the manager needs to make adjustments to fulfill the action plan.
The adjustment actions. These are the actions regarding the “fixing” bad customer experience due dates. And all professional actions for the customer experience improvement. That’s a normal situation.
Never ever, even the most successful manager capable to fulfill all of the goals regarding the call center’s customer experience and the brand image due dates. Oftentimes, it’s more efficient to take a step back and look at the call center from the side.
Customer-oriented customer experience and the brand improvement
Let’s look at how exactly to increase the customer experience in a call center. There are essential features call centers are unable to shift unless they’re fulfilled. Here are the features to meet the customer expectations:
The customer experience design through personalization. The sales reps or customer service agents treat each caller as the most valuable client. They identify themselves, use the caller’s name, and keep themselves professional throughout the conversation.
Let’s see how it works in the AT&T call center: “Hello. This is Rebeca with AT&T, may I speak with Mrs. Williams?” See how an emotional connection is established in a first seconds of the conversation? Professional, firm, and fast.
The conversation is always personalized. There’s no need to constantly repeat the customer’s name. Yet when the agent needs to ask the question, they always call the second name of a customer. That’s how you create the positive experience and save the customer’s time and money.
Customer experience branding via rapid and professional service
Although there are phone, chat, social media, email, and even business mail at the call center’s disposal, the main tool is telephone conversations.
Telephone talks occupy the largest portion of the company customer's conversations. The conversation via voice channels must strive for the 80/20 golden rule.
The rule tells us that 80% of inbound calls are processed in 20 seconds. Meaning the call center has all of the necessary agents in place, at the time to serve all the customers within 20 seconds. But don’t be too overwhelmed by the idea to serve all customers within 20 seconds.
In reality, you have a time gap of around 40-60 seconds to answer all the inbound calls. Thus your standard could be 80/40 or 80/60, and that will not aggravate the customer experience and the brand state in any way.
In case of the telephone usage, there’s just no excuse for the low response or constant call transfer. Because of the manager’s capacity to adjust the calling activities in a way to reduce the call transfers, it’s wise to reduce the call transfers as close to zero as possible.
Then the other channels of communication are supporting the overall customer experience and the brand's current state.
Channel such as chat gives a longer time gap. It’s great performance if your agents answer 80% of inbound chat messages within 20 seconds. In the real world, you’ll have 40 to 60 seconds and up to 2 minutes for the response without the customer’s aggravation.
Social media. The social media answer could be much longer. It justifies by the time-gap employee can check the message and extends to the minutes up to 2 hours. That’s a normal situation. Yet the head of a call center must know these customer-oriented timings.
Email. Email is nearly the last source of communication. It takes time to write an email, send it to the recipient, and wait for the response. Most of the business emails regarding customer-company services are justified to answer from a few hours up to 48 hours.
Business mail. Business mail is in usage nearly only in cases of strong necessity. They’re rarely used by the customers, only if there are some legal issues, refunds, and similar sorts of processes involved. Regarding the business mail, the time gap is 3 business days or 72 hours.
Knowing these timing gaps, your call center is capable to deliver timely and valuable service. As you already know, you need to strive to the standards with a small margin of additional time. To close the gap in customer experience branding, all you need is to fulfill the requirements of which every business is consistent.
Don’t be sorry – be better
The presumption that Fortune 100 companies with tens of billions of dollars of annual revenue – never make mistakes – is wrong. The most important of all is how they’re addressing their mistakes.
Many companies offer a complete refund, no question asked in case the company failed to deliver the promised goods or services. Thus the performance of the customer experience and the brand are maintained at a high level.
Other companies propose the substitution of the current product for the new one. Anyway, here’s the solution for the company not only to say “sorry”, but to repair the situation and keep the customers.
So every successful call center applies these practices. The manager is knowing for sure when the margin of the mistake is possible and what to do about it. Really, is there an obstacle on the path to delivering the perfect “professional excuse”, perhaps only in case none of the people want to do anything about the problem? But they’re making a huge mistake by leaving the problem afloat.
Let’s give you examples of the successful customer experience and brand experience of the outfit retail store. The retail outfit store delivered item X to the customer.
But it occurs that this item is damaged and none wearable anymore. The solution? First of all, the manager or rep can give a business call to the retail store and find out the current state of the case.
Perhaps the item was damaged during the packaging and delivery. So the retail store can take the damaged item and in return give the new item. Everyone is satisfied, and the customer experience and the brand experience are on the perfect level.
There’s another popular case every manager of the call center must know about. This is the kind of case, the manager has little or zero control on it.
Let’s see: Manufacturer X created the advertising across all the media matching their budget regarding their product. The customers respond to the ad, place the order, and receive the product.
Now, the trick is in the advertising, product, and the company’s policies. In other words promise-fulfilling gap. Sometimes it occurs that the claim of the ad promises certain features regarding the product, refund, technical service, etc.
But in reality, this isn’t working that way. There’s the crucial moment when brand experience or customer experience is predefined.
And this is the moment when the head of a call center is in a difficult position. Although there’s a professional desire to help customers but none of the options are open for the solution. In case, the manufacturer refuses to address the problem and the store does the same, the manager has no authority to help these customers.
The solution for the customer experience and brand experience: To avoid these tricky situations, the business owner must never pick up the projects with the margin of such a mistake. That would be just a dead end for the manager. And in the eyes of customers, the responsibility will be on the manager’s shoulders.
One manager must investigate the project, the product, the service, the technical conditions, the refunds, etc. After painstaking research, the chance to pick up the wrong project will be reduced by an order.
It’s better to avoid companies that sell garbage than to fail to close the gap between customer experience and brand experience, and consistently underperform on the short and long-term basis.
Credibility is everything you need for the perfect brand experience
How customers are happy with the company they have business relationships with? It is simple. The companies with the perfect brand experience just fulfill the promises they’ve made. Take a look. For example, the company with the perfect brand experience is the internet provider.
The customers of the company expect the strong and good internet connection they’ve admitted in the contract. Here are the takeaways from the best brand experience:
- The internet speed is matching the agreement terms and conditions;
- Internet shortages are rare;
- The technical support must be fast and easy;
- The consultation regarding internet provider services is professional and informative;
- The company is never looking for excuses but offers the solution instead;
- The company always offers the 24 hours a day technical support.
And guess what? The company is keeping both customer experience and brand experience in sight. The provider gives everything customers want, firm, professional, and as a result – credible.
Customers would never shift from such a provider just because of the successful advertising or other tricks from other internet provider companies.
What is the future of brand and customer experience and brand experience management?
The brand experience exists only as a compound feature of the call center. The tricks and gimmicks wouldn’t work if the advertising is perfect and the delivery of the promise is failing.
The future of the brand experience is shifted towards claim fulfillment. All the managers have to emphasize that the across every touchpoint – customers get what’s promised.
And although many business owners know this or at least think about it from time to time. In the real world, they’re doing little or nothing at all to establish a strong customer experience and win more customers – more often.
In the B2C environment, quantity matters to achieve reasonable ROI, customer experience, and brand identification. In the B2B environment, only the most credible and professional call centers are capable to retain and even gain new clients.
The ROI, customer experience, and brand recognition are tremendous for those call centers that keep the highest standards.
Fostering both customer experience and brand experience to the next level
You just have read the top practices for the perfect brand experience and customer experience improvement practices. Should you apply them today, you’ll experience a positive impact across all the interactions with the customers.
Moreover, your cost per 1000 outbound calls as well as cost per 1000 inbound calls will reduce dramatically. Because customers will receive the desired results faster and more efficiently. Both customer experience and brand experience are shifting to another level and all of the financial benefits are yours.
The Voip Time Cloud company is responsible for this guide. But outside of the independent counseling, we’re furnishing the small call centers with the tool – the cloud-based call center software. It’s easy to deploy it in 24 hours, in any location in the world.
And the protection protocols of the software, supported by the certified data center’s firewalls – make the business safe and profitable. If you’re interested in this kind of software, just contact the Voiptime Cloud Company today. Thank you for your time. The Voiptime Cloud is yours. For stellar results – more often!
