Want to deliver better customer experience? Align it with your brand experience

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Customer experience doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The practice goes hand in hand with brand experience — the overall perception consumers have of a business — and misalignment between the two can weigh on customer trust.

Brand experience is often established before a customer engages with a company, according to Isabelle Zdatny, head of thought leadership at Qualtrics XM Institute. Marketing, word of mouth and product quality can all have an impact.

“Brand experience sets people's expectations,” Isabelle Zdatny told CX Dive. “This is what's creating the mental model of what customers can expect to experience before they even purchase or engage with your company.”

Brand and customer experience work together to create the largest impact on the business, according to Zdatny. A lack of consistency between the two can erode customer trust, and maintaining that balance can require buy-in from several teams within a company.

Tesla is an example of how a mismatch between brand and customer experiences can negatively affect a brand. The automaker has a relatively high customer experience score but the lowest brand experience score across all brands in Forrester’s Total Experience Score index.

“It significantly hampers their acquisition potential despite providing a strong offering to those who own their cars,” Dipanjan Chatterjee, VP and principal analyst at Forrester, said in an email. “Prospects are leery of entering into a relationship with the brand because they find the brand neither relatable to them nor trustworthy.”

Consistency is king

The brands that best align their brand and customer experience are the ones that keep them in tune with one another over long stretches of time. A strong, reliable baseline experience is important even if no particular element stands out.

Customers view the experience brands offer through the lens of their expectations, and keeping interactions consistent helps ensure their needs will be met, according to Zdatny.

“If you promise it's going to be simple and convenient and high quality, and it ends up falling short of that, it's going to erode trust more rapidly than if you're meeting expectations,” Zdatny said.

Some of the most successful companies in terms of brand and customer experience alignment are Costco, Sam’s Club and Wegmans, according to Zdatny. These brands present their shopping experience plainly and deliver on their promises during every single trip.

Their brand experience is that “you know exactly what you're getting with us, and we are going to meet those expectations,” Zdatny said.

Companies also need to define just what “customer experience” means for their brand, according to Zdatny. She brought up the example of a bank that promised great CX as a core tenant, but didn’t have a vision of what that meant. This resulted in branches taking very different approaches to CX. One location interpreted it to mean it should have lollipops on hand for every customer, while another ensured workers smiled at customers within the first 10 seconds of their interaction.

In contrast, a consistent definition of a great experience lets companies embed its values into hiring, training and promotions, which helps workers embrace brand promises, according to Zdatny. Consistency helps businesses track the impact of their CX initiatives and understand how they drive the brand’s efforts as well.

Alignment is a team effort

Maintaining consistency between brand and customer experiences, while ensuring core customer promises are met, is a responsibility that transcends any single team.

At its core, the alignment of brand and customer experience is about communication, according to Chatterjee. Companies need to make sure the brand proposition expressed to customers matches the experience that is delivered — and different teams are responsible for each.

“It really is an iterative process between the departments that own these two components — traditionally marketing owns the former and CX the latter — because few get to start with a clean sheet,” Chatterjee said. “So they need to rework their marketing and experience strategies and tune them to together drive growth.”

CX teams should be intimately involved with the partnerships that drive brand and customer experience alignment, according to Zdatny. CX can be the driving force behind such initiatives by defining core expectations and bringing in relevant stakeholders to support them. That can include working with leadership and HR about how promises can be built into leadership and HR promises and tracking the way customers respond to the company’s offerings.