Article first published on bizcommunity.com on 5 January 2022, written by Paula Sartini

Article first published on bizcommunity.com on 5 August 2021, written by Paula Sartini

The Covid-19 pandemic has changed the world and consumer needs have evolved accordingly. Consumers are more discerning now than they were a year ago and what they wanted from brands before may no longer matter to them today. 

This is supported by McKinsey which found that 40% of consumers switched brands or retailers during the past year (1) as customer concerns shifted to safety and hygiene and their expectations of brands changed. As customers are revaluating their expectations, companies need to adapt to stay relevant.

As a starting point, companies need to assess their brand health and determine if they are still relevant in the market today. To achieve this, they need to understand what is important to their customers today and evaluate if their brand purpose and brand promise are still relevant for today’s discerning consumers.

Reassessing customer needs

Companies have spent a lot of time and money building their brands over the years. However, over the past year, brand expectations have changed and consumers now expect more of the brands they support. They are looking for brands to live their values and demonstrate a greater commitment to their employees and the communities they operate in. They are looking for brands to be purpose-driven and accountable, taking action to help people in this unprecedented time.

This is supported by Brand Finance which states that brand expectations have changed (2), and they are now expected to provide collaboration, protection, and security. This means that companies need to shift their focus from brand campaigns and consider how their brand actions can improve the lives of their customer and prioritise employee safety if they are to build their brand reputation.

The Checkers Sixty60 app is a great example of how a company adapted its business model to meet its customer’s needs. The pandemic led to a radical shift in online shopping and the app provided a seamless experience at a time when people didn’t feel safe leaving their homes, demonstrating the company’s commitment to customer wellbeing and customer experience.

Customer experience remains important

Many companies have changed how they work, putting employee safety at the fore and enabling them to work from home during the pandemic. While this was necessary and important, it has impacted customer experiences. With employees fragmented and working from disparate environments, the quality of experiences is likely to be inconsistent.

To help employees provide the best customer experience, they need access to the right information at the right time. Systems need to be put in place to empower employees to provide quality support to customers wherever they may be working from. This is supported by SmarterCX, which states that service teams should be empowered to work from home with the right tools and knowledge base to assist customers with consistent information.

Human touch matters

With people spending time in isolation, the human experience is more important than ever. Brands enable customers to connect with humans, get assistance, receive emotional support, and solve a problem. This human touch is critical to customer experience and to building trust. According to McKinsey, a primary barometer of customer experience will be how businesses deliver experiences and services to meet customer needs with empathy, care, and concern.

This is supported by findings from the latest from Deloitte, which found that customers are seeking authentic human connection from brands with more than a quarter of consumers stating that they will walk away from companies they perceive to be acting self-interestedly. Global Marketing Trends Report from Deloitte, which found that customers are seeking authentic human connection from brands with more than a quarter of consumers stating that they will walk away from companies they perceive to be acting self-interestedly.
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

Consistency gives reassurance

As the pandemic has created great uncertainty for many people around the world, customers want consistency from the brands that they support as they seek stability and reassurance at this time. As such customer expectations verse the experience they receive is critical at this time and is a key measure for brand health. According to PwC, consistency is more essential in 2021 than ever as customers expect seamless experiences and this, in turn, builds trust, loyalty, and customer retention.

Measuring brand health

According to Deloitte, brand health is a measure of how well a company or brand delivers on certain attributes of a product or service that it promises its customers, especially how those attributes are perceived by customers in terms of quality and delight. Given that customer expectations of brands have changed over the past year, companies need to assess their brand promise and customer expectations to determine if they can align.

Forrester suggests that brand experiences and customer experiences be tightly interwoven by implementing four key components. First, companies should evaluate the brand strategy, second, they need to ensure it flows through to the customer experience. Third, they need to enable the brand promise to become a reality and then implement structures to ensure the delivery of the customer experience. Finally, companies need to measure the brand experience against the customer experience.

As customer needs change, brands need to adapt to remain healthy and competitive. This means understanding what customers want, engaging employees, and implementing technologies to help empower employees to deliver consistent brand experiences and delight customers regardless of where they are working from.

Points to remember to maintain brand health:

• To maintain brand health companies need to continually track and measure their brand and customer engagement as follows:
• Assess the brand and determine if the values make a difference in the lives of employees and customers
• Measure the customer experience by gathering customer feedback. This can be achieved with a Net Promoter Score or similar mechanism
  
• Give employees technology solutions that free them up to engage with customers directly and provide the personal touch that makes each customer feel important
• Put measures in place to deliver consistent brand experiences in every customer interaction
• Consistently measure your brand health by evaluating your brand strategy and ensure that it flows into the customer experience.

It is important to measure brand health regularly and adapt the brand strategy to meet customer’s evolving needs. These should be tracked using a brand measurement tool which provides analytics based on branded content and emails vs. brand engagement and customer reactions.

(1) Retail Reimagined | Marketing & Sales | McKinsey & Company

(2) https://brandfinance.com/insights/brand-impacted-by-covid-19

Article first published on bizcommunity.com on 7 June 2021, written by Paula Sartini

Document creation and management have a big impact on the day-to-day life of a knowledge worker and subsequently on a company. Generating documents is a time-staking process with the average employee spending approximately 50% of their time creating and preparing documents.

Despite this time investment, approximately 83% of employees recreate documents that they cannot find on the company network. All of this time spent creating and recreating brand documents is estimated to cost a company $20,000 or over R300,000 per annum.

Yet, many companies do not have content governance systems in place to manage brand templates, documents, presentations or content which results in duplication of work, employee inefficiencies, inconsistent branding and increased workloads particularly for the IT and branding departments. The value of having the correct brand assets easily available when they are needed, extends beyond improving employee inefficiencies, it also improves customer and employee experiences, driving customer and employee retention and positively impacts the company’s bottom line.

Whether employees are developing documents, presentations or emails, content should be easily accessible and companies need to gain control of this process to overcome employee inefficiency, drive down costs, improve brand consistency and enhance customer experiences.

Saved time means money saved

According to Tech Crunchies, document issues account for over 21% of daily productivity loss. The average salary in South Africa is R22,500 per month which means that companies spend on average, R4,725 per employee per month on document issues. That amounts to R56,700 per employee, per annum in lost productivity.

Having correctly branded and up-to-date templates, document, presentations and email content easily accessible to employees as and when they need them, helps to improve employee efficiencies as it saves time spent searching for documents that have been misfiled or accidentally deleted. This also prevents the need for employees to spend time reproducing branded content that already exists and gives them peace of mind that they are sending the correct and most recent and brand compliant documents and templates to customers.

On-brand document compliance across the business

Brand consistency is a key driver of business success. When you take your brand seriously, customers believe you pay attention to every detail and this reinforces your values and builds brand trust. As part of this, templates are an important component of business communication and need to carry the correct content, logo and brand elements including the font used.

Within organisations, many employees can access, edit and save company templates and documents, resulting in brand inconsistencies across documents. In some instances, outdated templates are used carrying incorrect company details from the director’s details to contact numbers which raises questions about the legitimacy of the document. Further, brand inconsistencies across documents dilute the brand, influence brand perceptions and impact customer trust in the organisation.

To overcome this, companies should be able to share the latest documents and templates across the organisation with immediate, permission-based access. However, employees should be restricted from being able to override content on these legal and binding documents which can result in incorrect information being sent to customers. This is supported by findings from Kroll Ontrack, which attribute 26% of data loss incidents to human error.

Improved security

By implementing user permission access to branded assets such as letterheads, templates and documents based on specific departments or individuals, adds a layer of security to this content. It also allows for companies to monitor who accesses the documents and the changes they make to them.

While managing document accessibility within the organisation is important, it is equally important to safeguard access to company assets and templates by third-parties. In some instances, companies save all their brand assets and templates on an extranet for employees and partners to easily access, but it is just as easy for third parties to access. Companies should save these documents within secure, access-controlled environments, such as a cloud-based platform, to allow for content to be updated, shared and managed while protecting against third-party access which could have dire consequences for the brand including potential fraudulent activities and reputational damage.

Better customer experience

Empowering employees to access the information they need at the right time, enables them to work effectively and improves employee satisfaction levels. This has a direct impact on customer experiences as inspired employees put in more effort. With the brand compliant content easily available when it is needed, employees can focus on meeting customer expectations with improved response times and on-brand content every time.

The real value of brand-compliant templates and brand governance lies in the ability to remove the content clutter from the workplace, empowering employees to meet customer expectations and deliver customer experiences that drive satisfaction levels and retention. It also reduces the need for IT and branding departments to fix mistakes after the incorrect content has been sent out and aids companies to meet governance and compliance requirements. In addition, with a secure, cloud-based solution, the company can minimise potential reputational damage to its brand by preventing third-party access to branded templates and content.

Article first published on mediaupdate.co.za, 18 January 2021, written by Paula Sartini | see article here

Whilst the role of the marketing department appears to have evolved significantly over the past few years, fundamentally it is still about building relationships.

SECURING CUSTOMER DATA

Over the years, marketers have collected massive amounts of customer data to provide positive, personalised experiences. While customers have come to appreciate the personalisation, they are concerned about their data falling into the wrong hands.

Customer privacy is under the spotlight as South Africa follows in the footsteps of Europe's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and other privacy regulations that have come into effect across the globe. The newly implemented Protection of Personal Information Act (PoPI Act) aims to govern how organisations collect, store and use personal information and while compliance and governance have traditionally fallen under the legal department's domain, this is changing. Marketing departments can no longer ignore their role in adhering to the requirements of the PoPI Act.

Privacy management is critical, not only as a compliance tool for legal and compliance practitioners but also as a tool for building trust with customers. As such marketers have to be involved in privacy programmes to establish trust and deliver the best user experience to meet customer expectations which include treating customers in a manner in which they feel respected and valued.

While customers are willing to disclose personal information and have this information used by an organisation, they want to know that the company has procedures in place to protect their individual privacy. According to Deloitte, data privacy is about more than keeping hackers at bay, it is also about assuring consumers that the trust they place in a brand is warranted.

WHAT IS PRIVACY WORTH?

Customer privacy and its importance for business and profitability is gaining attention as consumers are increasingly aware that companies are collecting their data and do not know what it is being used for.

Consumers are increasingly concerned about their privacy with the PWC Consumer Intelligence Series: Protect.Me citing that as many as 85% of consumers will not do business with a company if they have concerns about its security practices. Further, if companies have privacy scandals associated with them, it eliminates the potential brand from being considered during the selection process of the buyer’s journey, thereby decreasing the chances of being chosen for purchase.

However, as many customers are not experts on data privacy, they expect the brands that they trust to put their privacy at the centre of all decisions they make. In other words, the trust that consumers place in brands trickles down to the privacy measures they believe the brand has in place to keep their data secure.

Trust and customer privacy go hand-in-hand and companies need to live by their brand promise and protect their customer’s data if they are to meet customer expectations and establish a relationship of trust.

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE BUILDS TRUST

Although marketers have traditionally used customer data, gained either directly or via third party sources, to develop targeted campaigns, consumers needs have changed. While customers want personalised experiences and targeted campaigns this needs to be balanced with compliance and privacy requirements.

Transparency is critical to this process. Customers are more likely to give companies their data if they know that they are collecting it and what they will be using it for. This is supported by Deloitte’s 2019 US Retail Privacy Survey, investing in building trust through consumer privacy can deliver a measurable return with 73% of consumers stating they are more likely to share data with companies that have privacy policies in place and advise how their data will be used.

In essence, the customer experiences develop trust and the data companies collect should add value to the consumer. Consumers want customer-centric user experiences that deliver on the brand promise while adhering to privacy policies. To achieve this the customer has to be central to the business strategy which includes the marketing and technology strategies that need to drive brand security.

IMPLEMENT PRIVACY BY DESIGN

Legal, marketing and IT departments need to work closely together to ensure that the proper privacy standards are adhered to, brand experiences delivered according to the brand promise and customer data is secure all times. As such marketing departments are becoming more reliant on IT departments to gather customer data and implement technology solutions to deliver on-brand experiences that adhere to brand security standards and maintain relationships of trust with customers.

Companies stand to benefit from using technologies that have been independently tested and align with European security standards to give customers and employees peace of mind that data is gathered and stored securely. Further solutions that have been designed with security upfront to include segmentation of risk, ensure that content is safeguarded and secure throughout the data storage and usage processes.

CONSISTENCY GIVES PEACE OF MIND

The increased focus on customer privacy means that marketing departments need to keep customers informed that they are collecting their data and how they are using it. They also need to ensure that they are engaging customers on their terms according to the data they have collected.

It is equally important that marketing departments pay close attention to brand consistency across all company platforms such as websites and emails as this reassures customers that the company takes their privacy seriously. When companies pay attention to the smallest details in their branding, it gives customers peace of mind that they take their brand seriously and will have put thought into the brand security, privacy policy and strategy.

TRUST IS MARKETING'S RESPONSIBILITY

Customer privacy can no longer fall solely in the domain of the legal department. Customer privacy has to move beyond checking compliance boxes to ensure that the company adheres to privacy regulations that have been stipulated by the government. Rather it is about focusing on the customer and prioritising trust.

To enhance customer experiences and build relationships of trust, marketing departments need to play an active role in establishing privacy or trust policies, implementing brand security measures and putting the customer at the centre of these strategies. Customers seek transparency and confirmation that companies will protect their data while balancing this with personalised customer experiences.

Overall marketing departments need to invest in privacy and take it seriously. From the newsletters companies send to pop-ups on websites and the technology solutions they implement to help deliver customer-centric experiences, customer privacy and brand security needs to be at the core.