Deliberately creating your consumer experience for business growth.
The consumer experience is ripe with opportunity. It’s quickly becoming the number one purchase decision driver for a consumer while at the same time becoming the most valuable asset for a business. Deliberately building and optimizing your consumer experience is the foundation for business growth in today’s marketplace.
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As the consumer experience becomes the most valuable asset for a business and becomes the number one driver for a consumer purchase decision, we need to truly understand what this means. The consumer experiences isn’t something that you find solely on a screen. It’s not a one time stunt or event. It’s not even your customer service. However, these all play a role.
A company’s consumer experience is a deliberately designed journey a consumer takes to find, learn about, interact with, shop, buy and own your products or services. The interaction points in this journey, in essence, becomes your consumer experience. And each of these interactions need to not only fulfill your brand promise and provide the consumer the value they are expecting but it also needs to grow off each interaction. A tall order, but a necessary step in creating growth in today’s marketplace.
“Engaged and satisfied customers buy 50% more frequently, spend 200% more each year, and are five times more likely to display brand loyalty.”
In order to optimize your consumer experience to build real value for your business, we usually look at five areas:
Moments of Chore
We have made it really hard for consumers to do business with us. We’ve created poor retail experiences. We’ve built our websites and ecommerce platforms on legacy requirements. We make consumers start their relationship over with us after each touch point. Each and every one of these (and more) pain points are seen as ‘chores’ for the consumer. The first step in optimizing our consumer experience is to reduce or remove the chores that consumers have to experience to do business with our consumer. Delta does an amazing job with this in their holistic experience. They are continuously finding ways to make the booking, check in, boarding and flying experience more seamless for their flyers.
Moments of Cherish
On the other side of the coin, there are some moments or activities that consumers get to do to do business with your company. These moments of ‘cherish’ are things like trying on a new, custom wardrobe; rearranging their living room with their new rug; driving their new vehicle off the lot; arriving in their vacation destination. These moments are the payoffs that consumers are striving for when they go through the motions of shopping. The next step in optimizing our consumer experience is to find these moments of cherish and expand them. We need to celebrate the consumer at these moments and find new ways to add value for the consumer.
Living Your Brand
To build off the first two steps, we have an opportunity and responsibility to truly live our brand at each touchpoint and moment throughout the consumer experience. We have spent years, if not decades, and millions of dollars building our brand and our brand promise. It is an outright waste if we don’t find ways to truly live our brands as we interact with our consumers. Living our brand doesn’t just mean being consistent aesthetically, but it means building interactions and experiences that only our brand can create. Shopping for Warby Parker (whether online or in-store) is a unique experience. Their tools, website, people and environments are something that only Warby Parker can provide - and the consumer knows that.
Finding Efficiencies
The next area to optimize your consumer experience is to continuously find new ways to become efficient. Amazon does this better than anyone in the world. They didn’t launch with Prime Same-Day delivery, they iterated themselves towards it by continuously finding efficiencies in their supply chain and logistics. These efficiencies create opportunities to reduce chores, while at the same time reducing cost for the organization.
Finding New Value (Revenue)
The final step to optimizing your consumer experience is to find net-new value opportunities for your consumer. This takes form in business model transformation creating new services or products that consumers would be willing to pay more for - building new avenues for revenue.
Is your consumer experience supporting your business goals?