You’ll never get to ‘best in class’ customer journeys by committee

The brands held in the highest regard in this area are the usual suspects. Take Nike or Apple: both are constantly referenced in briefs. They have some key things in common – a clear brand vision, owned by strong leaders, with the decision-making power to override siloed opinions to reach their intended goal. They aren’t best in class because they’ve followed a generic template but because they’ve forged their own path, making the right decisions for them.

That’s why it’s not as easy as imitating a brand you admire. Best practice, by its very nature, is not something you can replicate. To emulate the best, you must diverge; create experiences that feels like meaningful expressions of your brand.

There’s no textbook answer, even within sectors. Adidas and Nike both do things brilliantly, but they do them differently. Even though they’re selling the same sort of things to the same sorts of people, they’ve made differing choices that resonate with their own identities.

Beware stakeholders

Plenty of brand leaders talk a good game, but a previously clear vision can suddenly look pretty cloudy when the conversation inevitably comes to various stakeholders. “We can’t do X because I can’t get time with Y,” or “We can’t do Z because the platform team has a different roadmap.”

If you cannot push the vision through at the highest level, it’s little more than an aspiration or an unachievable dream.

This is why start-ups often make leaps in CX, then grind to a halt. We’ve seen several startup banks innovate the customer experience and excite audiences with their MVPs, but as soon as the buds of success appear, so do other influences. Suddenly, all that innovation dries up, and they’re just another bank with all the same problems.

Best behavior

The concept of ‘brand behavior’ is a methodology that at least keeps things moving in the right direction and helps to join the dots from an ethos perspective. Nevertheless, if you’re applying it to an e-commerce model not aligned with your online and marketing stories, you’re just creating more ‘stuff’ that doesn’t join up and fractures the brand.

To truly deliver on brand behavior, you need a consistent perspective, conversation or story for each customer. It’s personalization, but not in the way most brands tend to apply it. It’s not about just sticking my first name at the beginning of the scattergun email; in fact, it’s more likely about not sending the email in the first place. Unless you’re pretty sure I’m interested in something, and you’ve got a clear idea of why I’d be interested in buying from you, then why are you bothering me?

Most personalization isn’t personal. It’s about data. It might give you accurate, clear communication, but you need to know more than that to connect on a human level. If personalization fails to understand why a customer engaged with something in the first place, you probably won't end up with the right answer.

Some recent emails in my inbox are perfect examples of wrong answers. Firstly, someone’s trying to sell me Guns N' Roses tickets because they’ve got my email from a jazz event. Sure, I’m a man of a certain age who’s been to a gig. But that doesn’t necessarily mean I like 90s hair metal. Nor can you automatically just sell me things that are just similar to things that I’ve already bought. To the parts company that I bought a clutch from: I’m not a clutch enthusiast. One will probably be enough for now. Maybe try some different parts from the same model?

These two companies have done the opposite thing, but both are equally wrong. Out-of-the-box solutions will only get you so far. Brands need to make an effort to define who they are, then do the research to establish what people actually want from them. All of this requires a level of genuine human insight. Through our Human Understanding Lab at Unlimited, we understand, at a brand level, the motivations of a customer being on our platform in the first place, the emotions we want to account for or indeed evoke, and to drive the right actions from this.

This level of understanding helps everything fall into place in the unique way your brand should behave. Once you’re armed with demonstrable knowledge of your audience, defining that singular vision becomes much easier, and fighting for it in the boardroom does it too.