Customer experience is a growing priority for organisations, as it should be as it is becoming the most critical factor for customers selecting your brand over another. As such companies need to implement measures to meet customer expectations and deliver consistent customer experiences at every customer touchpoint.

However, this can seem like a monumental task, particularly for organisations that work as silos, assigning specific responsibilities to specific departments. In today’s environment where the ‘customer is king’ and should be central to every business decision, customer experience can no longer lie on the shoulders of a single department. It needs to be the top strategic measurement for the entire organisation.

To be successful today, companies need to develop a customer centric strategy that is built from the customer’s perspective and designed to meet their specific needs. With tech savvy customers companies are adopting technology solutions that aim to delight their customers and enhance customer experiences. According to the 2019 Global Customer Experience Benchmarking Report from Dimension Data, ‘CX is recognised as the number one driver of digital transformation’.

While companies may be keen to adopt technology solutions, often knowing which solutions to select can be a challenge on its own. In addition, legacy systems can also hamper companies from implementing technologies that could potentially be key in improving customer experiences. However, companies should start by putting the I before the A. This means implementing information automation which utilises intelligent automation and only once this is in place, implement AI.

AUTOMATING FUNCTIONS AND HUMANISING INTERACTIONS

Some technologies can sound like the silver bullet your organisation needs to improve customer experiences and drive company success, but companies should not adopt technology for the sake of technology. Rather solutions should be used to enhance the customer experience and assist employees to meet customer needs. Even though customers are tech savvy and accustomed to using technology solutions to meet their specific needs, technology cannot replace the human touch.

Automation can enhance customer experiences by improving self-help functions that require limited involvement from employees. At the same time by automating tasks that take time and resources but add little value to the client, employees are freed up and empowered to focus on high-quality, lasting customer engagements that delight the customer.

For example, if a customer is looking for a statement, rather than placing the customer in a queue to speak to an employee, the customer is able to help themselves to access the information they need. However, if the customer has a query on the statement, it would be more appropriate to have an employee handle the sensitive issue and spend more time meeting the customer’s needs and making a difference where it matters the most.

MAKING MAGIC WITH DATA AUTOMATION

Automating repetitive tasks can have a significant impact on improving customer experiences by removing repetitive tasks and empowering employees to give customers the personal touch they seek in specific instances. In addition it can reduce costs and help drive sales and growth.

These benefits alone present a good case for companies to adopt automation technology, but they would stand to benefit significantly more by using data to firstly determine which tasks should be automated and then understand how customer data can be used to enhance experiences even further.

At the crux automating repetitive tasks has a significant impact on driving employee satisfaction which directly impacts on customer engagements. However, when companies put the I (information) before the A (automation) and strategically and intelligently drive automation, this is just the cusp of how the marriage of data and automation impact the customer experience.

Customer data should be used to add personalisation into your customer engagements. By understanding your customer behaviour, you are able to target them with offers and deals that are specific to their previous behaviour. You are able to engage them when it matters most and enhance the customer experience beyond the standardised content companies have traditionally relied on to reach out to their customers.

This is supported by the Dimension Data 2019 Global Customer Experience Benchmarking Report which states that ‘by transforming big data into customer and market intelligence, they’ll be able to align their analytics strategy with their business strategy and design personalised experiences that proactively address customers’ needs – using self-service and automation at the right time in the customer journey’.

IGNITING CUSTOMER EXPERIENCES

Although technology brings great promise to companies and is able to increase productivity and drive cost saving, customer experience is about more than the technologies that companies implement. Customer experience is about creating a customer centric business where the customer is at the centre of everything the business does.

So while there is benefit in giving customers the tools they need to access self-help services at their convenience, employees need to be given the tools that empower them to deliver high-touch customer experiences at critical times. To ignite customer experiences, the customer needs to be at the top of the agenda in all boardroom discussions and solutions need to be developed and tailored with the customer in mind.

Only when the customer is central to the business strategy and employees across the organisation are equipped with the right tools to meet customer expectations across the entire customer journey, will the company be able to create meaningful customer interactions and enhance the customer experience that drive business success.

Paula Sartini, founder and CEO of BrandQuantum, states that there are several factors that can cause serious reputational damage to brands, ranging from social media to fake news to cyber attacks. 

Companies must have measures in place to minimise the possibility of reputational damage. Brand consistency, which is critical to establishing trust, can provide a layer of brand security for both organisations and their customers.

THE VALUE OF BRAND CONSISTENCY

 Brand consistency is a key tool that helps customers and potential customers to recognise your brand and helps to establish relationships of trust with customers. Research findings from a survey conducted by Investis Digital and Forrester Consulting are that: ‘more than half of businesses see an improved reputation as a result of consistently communicating their brand values’.

By delivering a consistent experience in every interaction with your customers, they know what to expect when they engage with you. It also demonstrates that you take detail very seriously and gives customers confidence that you will deliver quality service to meet their needs.

This consistency can also be used to provide brand security in that should customers receive a phishing email which includes your company logo, for example, based on previous experience in dealing with your company, they would know that the email didn’t come from your organisation.

ACHIEVING BRAND CONSISTENCY

Brand consistency can only be achieved by establishing specific brand guidelines that are managed from a central department within an organisation and implemented by every employee throughout the organisation. These include the visual elements such as the logo and font colour to the tone of content used in communications. However, as employees have access to email and company materials across multiple devices and are able to create personalised customer communication as needed, achieving consistency is a great challenge for organisations.

To ensure brand security, every employee needs to know what the brand stands for, understand their role in delivering a consistent brand experience and be committed to delivering this experience in every customer communication. This will help to establish the brand’s reputation and build trust amongst its customers while aiding to secure the brand and even protect your customers from potential threats.

EASE THE PROCESS OF BRAND CONSISTENCY

While many companies have brand guidelines and standards in place, sharing these across an organisation and having all employees implement them is a real challenge for marketers today. This is supported by findings of a survey conducted by Investis Digital and Forrester Consulting which revealed that, ‘only 25 percent of businesses rate themselves as very effective at consistently managing their brand values across digital channels.’

To ease the process, employees need to be given tools that will help them to deliver consistent brand experiences at every customer touch point. All relevant documents from letterheads to sales collateral and presentations should be easy to access from a central location using the technology they have become accustomed to using daily.

Emails should be branded with beautifully designed email signatures and be written in the correct font type and colour. To provide added peace of mind for the recipient, emails should include the organisation’s unique font within the email signature as this is far harder to replicate than ordinary fonts and adds an additional layer of security.

The content should also align with the overall brand, with employees easily accessing previously developed and approved content that can be personalised to include specific client information. Attachments should be branded correctly and contain the correct information to ensure brand consistency in all communications and build brand trust.

ADHERING TO LEGAL REQUIREMENTS AND COMPLIANCY

To provide added security for both the recipient and sender, emails should adhere to legal requirements and compliancy acts such as the Privacy or Personal Information (POPI) Act and Electronic Communications Act (ECA). To achieve this, emails that contain personal information should not be shared with external parties but should only be sent via the organisation’s own internal server to the customer.

It is also important to include disclaimers with every email that the organisation sends in order to protect it against in terms of confidentiality, copyright, contract formation, defamation, discrimination, harassment, privilege and viruses. If the disclaimer is not included on the email the company could be faced with a possible lawsuit from recipients.

PUTTING THE BASICS IN PLACE

All content and branded materials should be easy to access regardless of the device or where the employee is based, whether local or global. The branded communications should be managed from a central location with tamperproof mechanisms built into the system to ensure that employees cannot make changes to documents, presentations, emails and other company information without the necessary approvals.

Ensuring brand consistency across several employees and different devices is a key challenge for several marketers today. However, it is a critical task in establishing trust with both employees and customers and requires a strategic approach to achieve success. However, technology also needs to be implemented across organisations to help ensure brand consistency in all customer engagements as this not only helps to build brand trust, but can provide a layer of added security for both the organisation and the customer.

Ensuring brand uniformity and accuracy in the digital world.

When Paula Sartini arrives for our interview, I’m momentarily taken aback. She’s wearing a little black dress with a lace overlay and elaborate fluff around the neckline, and killer heels perfect for dancing the tango.

She’s certainly turning heads on a sweaty Joburg morning. Then her make-up artist steps in and moves her hair a fraction so she’s picture-perfect.

It feels like overkill for a friendly chat in a café, but Sartini is the founder and CEO of BrandQuantum, and this time, the brand she’s promoting is herself. Smart marketing indeed. If you can’t make your own brand look good, how can you be trusted with the brands of your customers?

“Brands are built on trust. If you can’t even get your logo right, how can I trust the services you’re offering because it looks like you don’t know what you’re doing?”

Sartini looks gloriously exotic too, and tells me her parents are Argentinian. She’s fluent in Spanish and that Latin speaking style makes her conversation fast-paced and passionate.

A varied background has given her skills in marketing, accounting and art, and she learned coding as a kid when her engineer father brought home an Apple computer and helped her create a game where she calculated the profit on selling lemonade. “I learned the logic of programming, even though I just wanted to play with my dolls because I was really girly. But I’m very grateful now because that logical brain kicked in,” she says. “I’m not an engineer, but I’m very logical and I love statistics, accounting and numbers.”

All her skills have now combined in BrandQuantum, a business she launched in 2014 to help companies protect and promote their brands by making their communications consistent and secure.

She talks about gorgeous fonts and typefaces, and how you can spoil her beautiful design work on a logo by squashing and distorting it. It sounds a little precious, but she explains it well. “Brands are built on trust. If you can’t even get your logo right, how can I trust the services you’re offering because it looks like you don’t know what you’re doing? Maybe you’ll send me the wrong terms and conditions or the wrong information if you can’t get the simple things right,” she says. “If you’re a bank and you write to me in Comic Sans, I wonder if I can really trust you, because what you’re showing me isn’t very believable. It could be the difference between getting the business and losing it if you can’t even maintain your brand.”

AUTOMATE THE PROCESS

The BrandQuantum solution is based on software that was developed for her previous business when she was helping companies take their IT products to market. After about 150 projects, she realised it would be useful to have some software to take what she had learned and automate the process. “The work is quite analytical to determine if there’s a market opportunity. You look at the market factors and the offering, and put all the numbers into the software. Then the process is based on numbers, and not just the egos around the table.”

“One of our big shifts was in our own thinking about what we are, and now we know we’re a software company.” 

When clients call in BrandQuantum, they usually start by wanting tamperproof email signatures and letterheads to help avoid phishing scams and fraudulent communications. As part of the consulting process, Sartini monitors all the communications being sent out, and assesses the logos, advertising material and other corporate collateral.

Then the team can create consistency across all the documentation and store approved, up-to-date versions in a central repository in the cloud. The BrandOffice and BrandMail software give the employees instant access to these standardised communications, and if something needs to be changed or updated, it can be done overnight and the old material will disappear. This uniformity also helps companies meet the compliance, legal and risk management aspects of doing business.

Giving people instant access to the correct logos, letterheads and forms automates those tasks, eliminating errors that come from having old versions hanging around in the system. It also gives them more time to do strategic things like use their judgement and initiative to add a personal touch to their communications. The aim isn’t to stifle personal contact by making people rigidly adhere to corporate protocol, Sartini says.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

“Artificial intelligence and automation is where we want to go, but it must create opportunities to give us more time to talk to people because everyone wants an authentic relationship. One of the scarcest things is human attention,’ Sartini says. “We don’t shrink-wrap everything to where there’s no human intervention.”

In the past year, the IT side of her company has come to the fore, as clients adopting the products are now driving it through their IT departments as much as through the marketing side, and her team works with the client’s technicians to roll out the software and train them to support it.

“Our discussions have become more serious because we’re solving operational issues as well as brand issues. The CIOs are adopting it to solve their challenges and we have to dovetail into their systems. One of our big shifts was in our own thinking about what we are, and now we know we’re a software company.”

There doesn’t seem to be any international competition for what BrandQuantum offers, and Sartini believes the company can win business globally. New York State University could soon become a client, as it’s in discussions to implement the software to manage its brand across all departments and faculties. BrandQuantum has already started to go international on the back of clients with foreign operations, and New York State University would be an important win.

“We can take this South African software international,” Sartini says.

Entrepreneur Paula Sartini would love to see users of search giant Google and other platforms use her company’s solutions to make brand management easier in the digital world. Her products are already available on a cloud based add-on application that pairs with Microsoft’s Office Suite.

“The idea that you can go to any device and login to have everything you use to have on a laptop, that’s pretty cool,” says Sartini, founder and chief executive officer at BrandQuantum, in an exclusive interview with Techfinancials.co.za.

“That’s the part we are working on to make sure our products are available through the web interface, no matter what platform it is accessed from”

 Sartini says her company’s development map aims to shift from a desktop solution to working across all platforms.

“SO, BESIDES THE MICROSOFT’S OFFICE SUITE WE WILL BE IN A GMAIL, GOOGLE DOCS AS WELL THIS YEAR AND INTEGRATING WITH OTHER PLATFORMS AS WELL.”

Sartini is a highly-experienced brand management executive. She not only wants to work with established enterprises but also with start-ups and SMEs (small medium enterprises). Her ambition is to support these firms with solutions to deliver a consistent brand experience, which will, in turn, have a positive impact on any company’s bottom line.

BrandQuantum packages more than 20 years of branding experience into “online training software” tools that integrate seamlessly into Microsoft Office to help businesses overcome their branding challenges in the digital age. The South African based firm is making its clients’ employees brand ambassadors with easy and efficient access to branded documentation and communications. These tools enable employees to deliver a consistent brand experience at every customer touchpoint.

BrandQuantum is expanding its brand management solution to all devices. “Whether they (clients) are creating something on the phone or laptop or desktop that shouldn’t affect the output. They should be able to create consistency no matter what device they are coming from,” says Sartini.

BrandQuantum’s embedded encryption and verification tools provide added peace of mind that its client’s communications are always secure. The company’s brand consistency software suite that addresses many of the brand consistency and brand security challenges that companies face today is most used by financial services firms that are supporting BrandQuantum. Sartini said the company’s main clientele has been in the financial services space.

BrandQuantum Eyes Growth Opportunities in SMEs Market

Asked who BrandQuantum’s key clients are, Sartini said: “Nedbank Group … they are one of our key clients and have been a supportive client.” Sartini said the cloud-based platform for the company’s brand consistency solution, BrandQuantum, was getting a growing awareness from the SMEs market. “The SMEs market wants to get to a level of professionalism that we are able to give to big corporates; by that, I mean creating this brand consistency platform. So, you know smaller organisations want to leverage that.”

On SMEs market excitement, Sartini said: “What’s exciting is about giving the masses solutions that are good enough for big corporates that can put them on a level playing field. That’s the beauty of the space we are in.

“I mean in the past, it was the big that won, but now is the nimble and quick that get there. We can help SMEs to compete on an even kiln if you like – put them on a similar footing, giving them tools that bigger organisations have been able to leverage.” BrandQuantum’s BrandOffice is an add-on application for documents created within the Microsoft Office suite.

It ensures that all your branding, banner, formatting, and corporate identity specifications are automatically applied uniformly across all your business documents. If the user is creating documents in MS Word, MS Excel, or MS PowerPoint, BrandOffice provides a single toolbar that enables the user, at the touch of your mouse, to apply logos, colours, fonts, and illustrations quickly, uniformly, and consistently.

What’s more, the BrandOffice toolbar can be customised to accommodate as many brands as required. The South African-based start-up is planning to scale up the business and is moving into new offices to accommodate its growth.

“This next phase is scaling up quickly on the back of bigger financial services clients, who have a lot of users. We are talking about our user base growing 20-fold over the next 12 months,” said Sartini. She would not be drawn into revealing how many users her company has. The company’s solutions seem to encroach on Microsoft and Google territory, which might attract a hostile takeover bid from both global giants.

Johannesburg – An entrepreneur is taking her software concept and making it suitable for other small, medium and micro enterprises.