Shaping the Experience Customers Get From Your Brand

Customer experience, as well as brand experience, doesn’t happen by accident. For every time a customer interacts with a business, something is being communicated to the customers. 

This goes from how quickly the brand responds, how easy it is to buy, how employees speak to customers and even how the product is packaged.

All these marched up to the reason some customers keep buying from one brand and ignoring the others. 

Despite knowing that you craft the kind of experience your customers get, many brands leave all of this to chance. 

You know you are the one to influence that experience yet you’re doing nothing to make that a reality. 

At most, you have a brand promise, a logo, colours and a social media page, but no deliberate decision about what and how you want customers to actually experience that brand promise.

It is one thing to shape your brand’s customer experience, it’s another thing to know the how. And oftentimes, this is where brands get stuck because they confuse knowing for actual doing.

And eventually, your brand becomes inconsistent. You promise one thing but you do another thing tomorrow. 

So, How Does Your Brand deliberately Shape its Customer Experience? 

1. Decide What You Want to Be Known For

The first thing is to decide the kind of experience your brand wants to create even before you design that experience. 

One central idea is more useful than ten scattered ones. So you might want to be more deliberate about it. 

Do you want customers to experience your business as exceptionally convenient?

Warm and personal?

Premium?

Reliable?

Get this: a brand cannot meaningfully design an experience if it hasn’t decided what that experience should communicate.

2. Translate the Promise Into Customer Touchpoints

Once you have decided what you want to be known for, it is only useful when customers can experience it.

Suppose your brand promise says, “We make life easier.”

What does that actually mean from the least interaction customers have with your brand to the most?

How does that play out when placing an order? 

Does the customer have to send five messages before placing an order?

What does it look like in payment?

Does payment require unnecessary steps?

If so, the promise exists in communication but not in the customer experience.

So, take that promise and ask: 

“Where will the customer encounter this promise?”

Before, during or after purchase.

Each touchpoint is an opportunity to reinforce or contradict the customer experience the brand wants to create.

3. Decide What You Will Not Do

Sometimes, knowing what you won’t do keeps you from going off brand. This is where shaping an experience gets interesting.

A distinctive experience requires boundaries.

If a brand wants to be known for premium service, it cannot keep saying yes to every request that compromises that positioning.

Every choice communicates something.

So businesses shouldn’t only ask:

“What will we do for our customers?”

They should also ask:

“What will we refuse to do because it doesn’t fit the experience we want to create?”

Trying to satisfy every customer expectation can make a business flexible.

It can also make the brand forgettable.

4. Turn the Desired Experience Into a Process

This is where brand strategy meets operations. A brand can say it wants customers to experience excellent service. But “excellent service” means very little if employees have no idea what it looks like in practice.

The best way to do this is to clearly define it. Define what excellence means to the:

Receptionist, delivery guy, salesperson and even to the cleaner…

The goal isn’t to create robotic interactions.

The goal is to create a reliable standard that employees can understand and reproduce.

5. Train the People Who Deliver It

Now that you have defined whatever your brand promise is, it’s time to turn it into something your employees can practice. 

And this is only possible through training. 

Moreover, customers don’t interact with a brand strategy document. They interact with people.

Your receptionist can destroy months of carefully crafted brand communication with one careless interaction.

That is why employees need to understand more than their tasks.

They need to understand the experience the business is trying to create and their role in creating it.

If a business wants to be warm and personal, employees need to know what that looks like.

The experience belongs to the brand, but the people deliver it.

6. Watch What Customers Actually Experience

Defining the experience doesn’t mean refusing to listen to customers. 

It means listening without handing them the steering wheel.

Customers are valuable sources of information because they can reveal gaps between what the brand intends to deliver and what customers actually experience.

A business may believe its ordering process is simple yet customers may disagree.

These observations are useful.  They help the business refine the experience without allowing every individual preference to redefine the brand.

Customers provide the feedback. The brand decides what to do with it.

7. Keep Evolving Without Losing the Core

Understand that in shaping an experience, it is not craft in stones. You need to keep adapting using the information at your disposal. 

Customers change.

Markets change.

Technology changes.

Competitors introduce new standards.

What felt exceptional five years ago may feel ordinary today.

So businesses need to protect the core of their experience while remaining willing to improve how that experience is delivered.

The promise may remain the same while the method may change.

That is how a brand stays recognisable without becoming outdated.

Conclusion

A brand does not shape customer experience by simply telling customers what it stands for.

It shapes it through thousands of small decisions about what customers see, feel, receive and remember.

The response time, the packaging, the payment process. The employee interaction, the complaint resolution and the follow-up.

The standard behind all of it.

Of course, customers can tell businesses what they need, what frustrates them and what they currently prefer.

But the brand still has to decide:

“What do we want people to experience when they choose us?”

 

Why?

Because a brand doesn’t become distinctive simply by promising a particular experience.

It becomes distinctive when customers can repeatedly experience what it promised.