User experience has time and again proved itself to be a deciding factor when it comes to choosing one brand over another – just ask the 62% of global consumers who switched service providers last year due to poor customer service experiences (Accenture Global Consumer Pulse Survey, 2013). 

While the case for prioritising user experience is solid, I honestly believe – and I’m probably skating on thin ice here – that most of the principles upon which brand experiences are based are a complete waste of time. I’ve certainly seen a fair amount of projects where the team has spent two weeks of wasted effort coming up with a bunch of words and ‘best practice’ examples – ultimately with zero resemblance to the final product.

Nearly every project that has a UX element has experience principles in the brief. But on first glance, these values can look rather made up, with little reflection of the brand or where the future lies. Words like ‘simple’, ‘joyful’, and ‘rewarding’, get thrown around, but when you put them together with the experience principles claimed by other brands – and importantly your competitors – you might notice a striking resemblance. Yes, most experience principles tend to be exactly the same.

Having differentiated experience principles based on brand values that are genuinely lived and breathed by the company is a critical business tool, not a nice to have. And as such ensuring your brand’s experience principles are different to your competitors is vital. One of Volkswagens core values is simplicity. It’s a value I’ve heard other brands try to execute especially in digital where the number of product/service combinations is overwhelming. Whilst other car brands race ahead with ever changing glitzy offers from the homepage, Volkswagen lives and breathes simplicity with the core customer statements: so much so they’ve become a primary navigation tool. Writing in this simple style, not dressing it up or adding flashy pictures is real cut through and truly differentiating.

Marketers shoud focus on creating true battleground areas in the customer journey – like the O2 Guru for helpful sales advice and service content – that will make the brand famous, rather than a ‘me-too’ brand.

Likewise, brand values need to be real – buzz words in a PowerPoint presentation mean nothing without execution. However, marketers should likewise ensure their values work across all touch points – that the retail space reflects the brand’s online presence. The transformation of Argos demonstrates how the click and collect model is really paying off. Not just matching luggage, but the service value of speed. Be that the ability to check and reserve a product online without payment to the ease of collecting in store. They’ve certainly brought the fight to Amazon – with an Argos within a 15 minute drive of pretty much every UK postcode how can the giant Amazon compete with such speed? No way. This value is now at the forefront of the advertising – just look at the guys in the wind tower collecting your parcels. The bricks, clicks and people all deliver this value.

Above all, the most important thing is to have an equal mix of rational and emotional values – both of which set up the customer experience to outperform the competition. We need rational values, they’re the attributes that are proof points: e.g. We will respond with 15 minutes. It sets out the claim and everyone can measure you by that. The problem with purely rational experiences is they can feel robotic and operated from a spreadsheet, you just have to remember when the NHS was overburdened by tracking. It made sense on paper, but in reality patients were nothing more than records in queues screaming to attain targets.

Emotional values are typically orientated from people in the organisation. It’s about the way they will deliver the service and how that will be different (and better) than the competition. It goes without saying that John Lewis completely aces both of these. From (rational) never knowingly undersold with sale price matching, to the (emotional) hyper quality attention you receive from their partners when in the store. Once you’ve had the experience a few times, there’s no going back. The alternatives just feel too poor in comparison.

 

By Jonathan Lovatt-Young, Head of Service and Experience Design at Tribal Worldwide, London. 


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