CONNECTION IS EVERYTHING
June 12, Alicante
A Strategic Playbook for Building Customer Loyalty, Brand Intimacy, and Emotional Resonance.
speech
summary.
With the birth of the Beta generation, we now have seven different consumer demographics to serve, seven different customer groups whose needs we need to satisfy (four relevant to our industry).
From Traditionalists (born after WWII) and Baby Boomers, all the way through to Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z, Gen Alpha and on to the Beta babies of today, meeting consumer needs has become a much more complex task for every brand.
Change in all forms presses down on every industry and the demands placed on the construction industry are no exception.
Change comes at us as Technological, Economic, Social, Regulatory and most critically from customer expectations themselves.
To survive (and thrive) every brand needs to exert a greater force against these changes, otherwise we will be crushed by them. To survive and ensure our businesses are future focused, we need to have the courage to embrace new directions. We need to collaborate and have an excellence in execution to have better connections with our customer. The old business models of the early 2000s are not serving the modern consumer of today.
It would be arrogant of us to assume that we can continue to run our business and retail offerings the same way over the next 10 years as we have over the past 10, as arrogant as Kodak thinking digital photography would be a fad. Arrogance kills entire brands and industries, and it could kill your business faster than you think.
As customer expectations change, alongside our business and service landscape, so must the way we do business.
Staying relevant is key to survival and so we aim to focus on what our customers value. It is in exploring and understanding the values of the modern customer connection, we can build brands and a merchant business for future success.
Take your eye off what your customers value and you run the risk of becoming irrelevant.
We discussed four key values during the keynote.
01/BLUE DOT
CENTRICITY.
We need to place our customer at the centre, not the brand, product, merchant operation or our own ways of working. The customer is not some inconvenient truth at the end of a customer journey. They are the BLUE DOT – the pulsing centre point around which everything must revolve.
Everything comes to the customer today. Why go to a restaurant when Uber Eats will deliver to your home? Why go out on the streets to flag a cab when Uber will deliver it to your door? Why use an expensive orthodontist when you can straighten your teeth with mail- order clear braces? Customer service expectations have changed. As an industry, perhaps construction has often been product, brand or operationally led for too long. We need to shift from a transactional to a customer experience focus. The experience needs to be wholly customer centric.
Carrying the Blue Dot metaphor farther, no one would open Google maps and follow someone else’s blue dot on the map – you are only shown your own. The modern customer expects to be treated personally; made feel special, and have heavily customised service at every touch point.
Make them feel special by connecting personally with them. Move away from a commodity experience. Use data to better leverage that connection. The construction retail experience can be notoriously commodity focused. Brand is everything when it comes to differentiation.
Think about how your brand can better connect with your customers in a way that makes them feel like they are at the centre.
02/EXPECTANT.
Customers expect it to be right, first time, every time. There is no room for inconsistencies in how a customer is treated today. Ultimately Customer Experience has become the battle ground for success, and in that reality, we need to strive for better. Their experience in a store, online or with a brand is our opportunity to go beyond their expectations.
No longer is a customer delighted with expected levels of product or service. You must push past satisfaction and expectations into the ‘excite & delight’ space if you are to cut through with today’s customer, be they trade or end-consumer. They rightfully demand more from every brand and retail experience they invite into their lives.
Think about how to delight your customer in unexpected ways. Your customer experience needs to connect beyond mere product and service provision. It is only through going beyond expectations that we build brand advocacy and tribal belonging, an empowered customer. You need to be different from others in your industry, specifically in how we emotively connect with customers. Escape that commodity trap and build connection.
Remember those Harley Davidson and Red Bull tattoos – that is what we all want. An empowered consumer who will go out and sell your brand and business for you.
In a highly competitive market, what truly differentiates your business? The brands that invest in CX and strive to go beyond any and every customer expectation lay down the foundations for Customer Lifetime Value.
03/PHYGITAL.
We now live in a ‘Digital First World’ – a world where we all reach for our digital devices first to answer any question or solve any problem. The digital Immersion is only going to increase with the coming Quantum Computing reality and as AI and Robotics converge alongside customer expectations.
Every brand proposition has to be part Physical, part Digital. Customers now expect digital to drive their experiences. The AI ‘spring-jump’ is real.
AI is set to change every industry. Most importantly, it will unleash a new set of customer expectations around hyper personalisation and relevance in their brand and service interactions. We need to engage with AI so that we free up the human talent to focus on connection.
AI is not all about productivity and efficiency – it is about using technology to better connect with customers and create better experiences. AI is only useful to us in customer experience if a customer feels something positive.
Agentic AI will also change the very nature of the customer decision making process. Once customers hand over buying control to their AI assistants, the human steps away from the decision-making process, unleashing a new channel; business-to-machine. In an Agentic AI world, our stores become critical as a space to build real customer connections.
04/RELATIONAL.
Ultimately, building Customer Lifetime Value and Customer Intimacy is about building Relationships. It is about moving away from the old ‘transaction model’ and moving towards a model that is based around putting the Relationship at the centre. This is why Experience Management has become such an inherent part of most companies’ strategy.
It is only when emotions are engaged do we build Relationship, when the customer ‘feels’ something. We need to become a trusted partner in life for our customers, not just another brand or merchant offering. This is a new space for many brands, traditionally product or operationally led.
The more we embed emotional response and authentic, compassionate customer interactions in the customer experience, the more we build that bond with that customer. We achieve that scale and depth of connection mentioned earlier.
Look for ways to build significant relationships, with depth, authenticity and purpose. Recall the Taylor Swift fan enraptured with experiencing the product. This type of engagement only comes when there is a significant relationship related to the brand experience. In our future deep-fake, AI-fuelled world, authentic relationship will be everything. The experience a customer has in-store should also build that relationship depth.
Your Strategy Audit
10 Questions to Answer
01
If you were to make your brand or retail proposition more BLUE DOT tomorrow, what would that look like? Where in the customer journey could you do a better job at making it about THE CUSTOMER and not about YOU?
02
Where could you implement PROACTIVE service rather than waiting for a customer to ask? How could we build loyalty and brand respect by moving towards a proactive service model?
03
Where do we routinely go beyond customer expectations into the delight space? What 5 ideas could we bring to life in a customer journey that would make a customer smile in delight on all sides of your business?
04
What digital elements add value to the emotive customer experience? Are most of our digital tools about efficiency and process? Where are the delight moments using technology?
05
What moments have we created in the last 3 months that would be your Goldfish moment? Who is telling your Brand Story today?
06
How do you share the moments of delight and above customer expectation internally? How does the organisation hear, routinely, that we are delighting our customers?
07
Who is your Excite & Delight Director within your team, responsible for delivering moments that go beyond customer expectation in-store.
08
What are you doing in the Employee Experience space that motivates your employees to want to deliver 5-star CX service? All of the values discussed apply to employees also.
09
If a customer left your business tomorrow, where is that failure most likely to have come from in your customer journey? Audit your CX processes, identify pain points and look to dissolve the friction.
10
Where is the evidence you are building relationships and Customer Lifetime Value in your customer service provision in-store? Where are you authentic and pushing past transaction into relationship?
More content
from Ken.
THE CUSTOMER INTIMACY LADDER: FROM SERVICE TO SOUL
QUANTUM PHYSICS & THE ILLUSION OF SEPARATION: WHY ENTANGLEMENT MIGHT BE THE MOST POWERFUL METAPHOR IN CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE (CX)
DECODE, DELIGHT, DEVOTE: TURNING CUSTOMERS INTO TRIBES THROUGH GAMIFICATION
For those too lazy to read blogs, and to view further visual content and past performances from Ken Hughes, check out the YouTube channel where he discusses all things consumer and customer experience related.
If you want to develop a true understanding of Customer Intimacy and Brand Advocacy and understand the power of the EX/CX relationship, get yourself a copy of my latest book. Packed with inspiring stories around CX/EX, it is your backstage pass to brand brilliance.
