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Event Review

Shaun Smith marched back and forth across the stage like a drill sergeant, imploring the London Business Forum (LBF) to act. Good customer service is no longer enough, he shouted. Today you need to offer a perfect end-to-end experience for your customers, or they'll take their business elsewhere. "There are so many brands out there. There are so many products out there. There are so many organisations out there. Unless you can... cut through the pack, it's very, very difficult to win."

The author of Managing The Customer Experience was here to explain why, in his opinion, market-share is no longer as important as "share of mind". To be a truly leading organisation, he said, your brand must spring to the mind of customers whenever they have cause to consider your industry.

Take Amazon, for example. It's synonymous with book-selling, despite the fact it has hardly used any traditional marketing. The reason? Founder Jeff Bezos believes the customer experience starts "when you first hear about Amazon from a friend". Even its packaging has been thoughtfully designed to open easily. "Few of us have ever spoken to an Amazon representative," Smith pointed out, "because few of us have ever needed to."

Similarly, the iPod became the world's leading MP3 player because Apple thought carefully about the entire process of buying, downloading and carrying music, centred around the iTunes application, which doubles as an on-line store. And Virgin Atlantic's Upper Class travel service was designed to overcome the most stressful parts of any journey - getting to the airport check-in desk on time, and finding your hotel after the flight - with its door-to-door chauffeur service.

Such brands have consciously formed an emotional attachment with their customers, Smith suggested. As a result, they have won not only repeat business but "advocacy" - recommendation and referral that draws in even more business.

To demonstrate how this emotional attachment can be created, Smith projected a short video onto the conference centre screen. The video depicted Tom Ford, former chief designer at Gucci, touring the viewer around one of his luxury goods stores. As he walked around, he emphasised the multi-sensory nature of the experience: the smell of the place, the feel of the fabrics, the sound of the music playing in the background. "Did you notice it was all about emotions?" Smith asked once the house lights had been raised again. "He didn't say that much about handbags and shoes at all."

Fundamentally, Smith suggested, the Gucci brand isn't about products, but about the end-to-end experience of buying and owning those products - as Tom Ford puts it, to "create indelible memories" in the mind of the purchaser. "And the more multi-sensory an experience we can create," Smith said, "the more indelible it becomes."

You don't need to sell "sexy", consumer-oriented products to create an emotional bond with your customers, he added. Consider, for example, the Leo Burnett advertising agency, which created iconic brands such as the Marlboro Man. This B2B firm used to be fondly associated with the smell of apples. Why? Because when Mr Burnett founded his company, during the fast of the Great Depression, he insisted on keeping bowls of fresh red apples in the reception areas of all his offices, offering them free to anyone who might visit.

Today, Smith argued, it is the following six steps that will generate an ideal, end-to-end customer experience, no matter what type of organisation you run:

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2. Understand your target customer. "Many organisations want to serve everybody... But unless you can tell me who you are definitely not serving then I would argue you're not making a choice. And unless you're making a choice, you can't stand for something."
3. Smith cited Lexus as an example of a brand that doesn't have technical superiority in its category, but that nevertheless represents the apogee of luxury. When Toyota entered this market, they could have tried to build a faster car or to enter at a lower price point, he pointed out. But instead they chose to "reduce the hassle factor... the inconvenience of picking up your own car, getting it serviced, and so on." In other words, they decided to differentiate themselves on experience. Indeed, "their brand promise talks about treating customers as 'guests'."
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6. Create the brand platform. What do you want to promise? If you clarify this early on, then use it to underpin all your marketing, you'll be less likely to disappoint.
7. Smith tested this hypothesis by displaying a few world-famous logos on the screen behind him and asking the audience to discuss what each one evoked. Words like "adventure" and "freedom" were used commonly to describe Harley Davidson, the motorcycle manufacturer. The IBM logo elicited terms such as "dependable" and "risk-free". And the bright red button of Virgin conjured up concepts such as fun, entertainment, innovation and value.
8. Few members of the audience were confident of the resonance of their own brands. And that, Smith suggested, was a major problem. "If you can't articulate quickly and crisply what your brand stands for then... your customers aren't likely to know either. And nor are your people."
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11. Design the experience. Virgin Atlantic designed Upper Class by considering what catching a flight would be like if the experience fulfilled its overall brand values - fun, entertainment, irreverence and innovation.
12. "They've got a high-quality sound room in their clubhouse lounge," Smith pointed out. "There's a ski simulator and a golf simulator so you can be practicing your swing as you wait for your flight." And, once you're on board, you'll find the Virgin sleeper seats are for two people. "Remember?" Smith asked. "This is a brand about entertainment and fun." The essential point to remember is that Virgin doesn't try to compete in the same spaces where everybody else competes, such as food and drink. "What they've done is to differentiate the experience."
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15. Make sure people are on-brand. According to Smith's research, there's around an 85% correlation between the way your employees feel about your brand and the way your customers feel. "So if you want to influence your customers, job one is to influence your employees." You can achieve this by applying the same values to your employee experience as you do to your customer experience, he advised. In other words, you should consider the end-to-end experience of working at your organisation, from recruitment right the way through to redundancy, then improving it based on your brand values.
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18. Communicate the experience externally. Many organisations think external communication is the first step to launching any new product or service, but it's not, Smith argued. You must first decide how the experience of using your organisation is different, and train your people to deliver this.
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21. Measure and maintain excellence. There's a dramatic difference in performance between companies that score four out of five for customer satisfaction and those that score five out of five. Research has shown that "customers who say they're satisfied have no more likelihood of loyalty than anybody else," he pointed out. "So if you are measuring customer satisfaction [then] unless you are measuring the top box, you're wasting your money." It's the experience you offer that takes your score from four to five, he said. And the only way to sustain an ideal experience is by continuously examining it from the perspective of the customer.
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Harley Davidson has had continuous earnings growth for about the last 22 years, he pointed out. But before then it was failing. The turnaround was made possible by an initiative dubbed "superengagement," under which every senior executive is "tasked with riding 15 days a year with the customers to hear [about their experience of the brand] first-hand". As markets have become more sophisticated, and as organisations have become more complex, so we have distanced ourselves from our customers, Smith argues in his latest book, See, Feel, Think, Do. Every company, therefore, should be practising superengagement as a matter of urgency.

Finally, you've got to make sure your marketing, HR and operations people are working in harmony. "All too often what I find is that the CEO has gone off with the senior directors for the weekend, played a few rounds of golf and come back with a vision statement," Smith said. Or, alternatively, "the marketing people come up with a brand promise and brand values and those get issued; the HR people come up with corporate values, cultural values or whatever, and those get sent out to people; the operations people have their standard operating procedures, or customer service standards that they issue. And the poor damn employee is completely mystified."

As the CEO, it's your job to turn this mélange of ideals into something truly customer-centric. In other words, it is you who must focus the organisation on the ideal customer experience.