Understand the gaps in your customer’s brand experience, and work with your employees to close them.

The connection between actual brand experience and customer expectations is crucial to the perceptions of your brand.

A deep understanding of the importance of alignment between the customer experience and brand promise is evidenced by the nearly one-hundred percent of customers who responded in a recent MCorp Consulting survey who – through a series of research methodologies, across retail customer segments – stated that this relationship strongly affected their perception of an organization.

At the same time, just over half of the organizations we’ve worked with feel that they are performing extremely well in this regard. In short, the more accurately aligned the customer experience is with the brand promise (and their expectations of the brand that your promise implies) the greater the positive influence your brand will have on your customer relationships.

How well aligned are your brand and customer touchpoints?

Taking a look at your own company, how closely aligned do you think experience and brand are? If you deliver what you promise across all your touchpoints, then you’re part of a thriving minority. Congratulations! But maybe there’s some discontinuity. Or perhaps you don’t know. If that’s the case, there are questions to ask to help you find the answers.

• Does your brand accurately reflect the relationship your customers feel they have with you?
• Do your employees deliver your brand in the same way customers feel about it?
• Does management “buy into” your brand?
• Does your market perception and brand promise match the brand experience across all your touchpoints?
• What do your customers think of you vs. your competition?

For those organziations who get this connection, the threads that drive success are a combination of direction and obsession. Top-down direction from a leadership team that both understands and values the customer experience. And obsession on the part of everyone in an organization when it comes to delivering a consistent, branded customer experience.

From back-office operations and the call center to front-line, customer-facing staff, obsession with experience delivery and “expectation management” across touchpoints and interactions is a hallmark of customer experience leaders, across industries.