At this uncertain time, when businesses are cost-cutting and marketers are being tasked with reassessing their marketing campaigns, many marketing departments are questioning whether they should continue with their planned advertising campaigns and risk being seen as insensitive to the current situation, or go dark when customers are looking for familiarity and stability.

History shows us that companies typically opt to go dark during times of crisis to avoid positioning the brand negatively. However, this approach does more damage than good. Those companies that continue with their marketing campaigns are viewed more positively and survive a crisis better than those that don’t.

People have a personal connection with the brands they use regularly.  During uncertain times they rely on these brands to continue with their marketing campaigns and keep communication channels open to maintain a relationship of trust. This is supported by a Warc study, which found that in this period of the Covid-19 pandemic only 8% of consumers have expected brands to stop advertising.

The relationship customers have with brands is about more than a transaction and during a crisis or pandemic customers look for an indication that the brands they support will continue to exist beyond the current challenges. Engagement with customers at this time should go back to three fundamentals: brand, strategy and customer.

YOUR BRAND PURPOSE MATTERS

Branding at its core is about connecting with people and this remains true during a time of crisis or pandemic. At such a time it is most important for companies to live their brand purpose and for their customers to see this. The brand purpose reinforces the brand’s reason for being and is why customers connect with the brand on an emotional level.

It is also important that companies remain true to their brand values and use this time to add value to their customers’ lives.  According to research findings from Opinium during the coronavirus pandemic people are looking for brands to keep communicating about topics other than the pandemic and provide escapism through topics that are relevant to the brand. For example, Opinium found that customers want business updates, advice on dealing with the crisis and products and services that may be useful. However, beyond this customers want to know that the brands they trust are making a difference to the lives of the broader community, including their employees.

SHARE YOUR STRATEGY

Your strategy is important to your company and your customers. This is particularly true when they are surrounded by uncertainty. At this time customers are worried about job security, illness and poverty and are looking at brands to share insight into how they are dealing with the pandemic and what they are doing to get through the crisis.

Consumers are looking for good news stories amid the worry and want to know that companies have plans in place to protect the organisation, its employees and its brands. Customers want stories about innovations, are looking for inspiring ideas from a brand and want to know how companies are making a difference in their communities and within the organisation.

According to Opinium, customers want to hear from the CEO (30%) and frontline staff (37%) as they seek information about company strategy, and want to know that employees are being taken care of. This is supported by Fabrik Brands stating that customers want to see that you care about their needs as well as that of their employees and they are looking for evidence that leaders of companies are putting the needs of their employees first too.

CUSTOMERS WANT TO CONNECT

Branding is about connecting with people and building a relationship of trust. While the way we do business has changed how we connect with people, the connection still remains key for customers. With budgets being cut and customers being inundated with information about Covid-19, companies need to find cost-effective ways to connect with their customers through the clutter.

Customers are looking for sincere, authentic brand communications from the brands they trust. While budgets might be tight at this time, connecting with customers doesn’t need to be expensive. Simplicity and consistency in communications are sufficient to keep a connection with customers, providing certainty and making customers feel secure during these uncertain times.

With many customers moving to email and online platforms to engage with companies, it is important that branding and messaging are delivered consistently at every customer touchpoint, from the email signatures and banners to the attachments included in email communications.

While marketing departments strive to keep brands connected with their audiences, automation technologies can ease the process and deliver consistent, on-brand communications in every customer interaction to help build a relationship of trust with customers are looking to maintain a connection with their go-to brands.

With the fast-paced lives we lead today, consistency provides a sense of comfort that we strive for.

Children seek consistency in their everyday lives which helps them to know what to expect from their parents at all times and provides them with the security they need to develop into healthy, confident adults. This need for consistency remains with us throughout our lives and is critical in helping us to build relationships of trust.

This is demonstrated in all facets of life, right down to the brands we purchase when shopping. If a consumer trusts a brand, they are willing to pay a premium for it even though there are other similar offerings available to them at a lower price.

But why is consistency so important? Consistency is what psychologists call a ‘decision heuristic’, or shortcut for making decisions. This means that in the complex world we live in and where we are constantly inundated with information, consistency helps to ease our decision making, as once we have made a decision about a particular thing, such as a brand, we are likely to stick with our initial decision rather than have to think about it again at the risk of possibly being disappointed.

Consistency, which means doing things the same way time and time again, is viewed as a rational, trustworthy, stable and decisive trait. It also provides a level of certainty that the person or company that we are engaging with will be around for several years rather than fly-by-night. As such people are drawn to people, brands and companies that are consistent.

CONSISTENCY A CRITICAL TRAIT

People invest a significant amount of time and effort in selecting the right company to meet their needs from the brands selected when purchasing groceries to important matters such as life insurance and investments.  This time is invested upfront in the hopes that the person can trust the organisation to deliver on the end product when it matters. They also hope to not have to go through the process of finding a replacement in the event that things don’t work out as planned with the company.

While consistency is a critical trait to establishing relationships of trust, companies, and particularly larger organisations that have several employees engaging customers at any given time, can experience several challenges in delivering consistent experiences at every customer touchpoint. However, in today’s competitive business landscape, companies can increase revenues by up to 23% by always presenting a brand consistently, this is according to a 2016 study conducted by Demand Metric Research Corporation[1].

By delivering inconsistent experiences in customer engagements, companies are eroding the trust that customers so desperately seek in order to establish a relationship and continue to use the services of the organisation. Think of a brand as a team of Russian synchronised swimmers, if one of the swimmers is out of sync with the rest, the audience will notice immediately, however, none of the swimmers will be aware. In terms of brand delivery, while each employee may think they are delivering a consistent brand experience, only the customer will truly know the difference when engaging with various employees.

GET THE DETAILS RIGHT

As such if a company cannot get the small details right, such as the logo on email communications or documents and inconsistent fonts are used across all communications, how can a customer trust the company to meet its needs? Every detail, whether large or small counts and they all need to be delivered consistently in order to create brand certainty and trust.

It is for this reason that every employee within an organisation should be responsible for the customer experience and strive to deliver consistent experiences that align with the overall brand. What a company says it will deliver in its advertising, for example, has to be consistently delivered in all its customer engagements across the entire organisation, from the receptionist to the accounts team to the call centre agents handling a query.

While delivering consistent experiences can be challenging, often technology solutions, such as automation, can be implemented to help streamline the process and remove some of the inconsistencies that can occur from employees adding their own personal touches to brands. By implementing these solutions, employees are also freed up to focus on customer engagements and delight rather than performing repetitive tasks that hinder on productivity. 

There are several factors today that can cause serious reputational damage to brands, ranging from social media and fake news to cyber attacks. As such, 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. According to research findings from a survey conducted by Investis Digital and Forrester Consulting[1], “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 which 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 a consistent brand 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[2] which revealed that “only 25% 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 to the overall brand with employees easily accessing pre-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 onto every email that the organization 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.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can bring great benefits to businesses across various industries. Already companies such as Google and Microsoft have invested significantly in this technology and are benefiting from it.

Companies that don’t have AI solutions in place yet don’t need to rush off too quickly to implement it in an effort to catch up, but they should start planning for AI as to not fall too far behind the curve.

Marketing departments in particular stand to gain vast benefit from using AI, most notably in their ability to deliver consistent experiences and exceed customer expectations. However many marketers are cautious in adopting new technologies, and as AI can be a massive task to implement, marketers stand to benefit from easing into the process of AI adoption by following the steps below.

START WITH AUTOMATION

Automation software enables marketers to automate repetitive tasks such as applying the correct branding to company documents. Whilst these are important tasks, they can impact on productivity and detract employees from focusing on more pressing matters within the business. This is supported by research conducted by McKinsey[1] which found that 45% of work activities can be automated by implementing technology solutions. With automation, companies will benefit from cost savings, improved productivity and improved reliability.

Before implementing brand automation, marketers need to conduct a brand audit to determine how the brand compares to its competition, what the brand strengths are, how customers interact with the brand and where the key customer touchpoints are. It is important to look broadly beyond a specific department and include the “messy and complex” things too as this is often the stuff that no-one wants to do but that will provide the most valuable insights. For example, marketers may suggest that email signatures are the responsibility of the IT department, however, customers don’t discriminate between the internal departments within a company, they expect their needs to be met and view the organisation as a whole regardless of who they engage with. As such every element of the brand should be audited.

Once you have conducted a brand audit, the next step is to determine which functions can be automated. These are the functions that require a time investment from staff but deliver minimal return on the investment. For example, complex customer requests should be handled by employees but if a customer is calling for a statement, this process could be automated to free up employees to handle the more challenging customer issues. The most important thing to remember when automating tasks is that customers are often looking for human interaction, particularly when dealing with sensitive or complex issues. 

In the case of the customer experience, companies need to get the balance right between what can be automated and what should be handled by employees. Ultimately the best approach is to remove human intervention from the repetitive and menial tasks in order to free them up to handle the more important and complex functions that make the real difference to customers and ultimately build the brand. Once these function have been identified the next step is to identify patterns within customer engagement by analysing the data.

MOVING BEYOND AUTOMATION

For many years marketers have been collecting customer data but haven’t been able to use it effectively until now. With a mountain of data, combined with established parameters, technology is able to move beyond mere automation to bring marketers intelligent and intuitive offerings. For example, in the case of email, employees could select pre-developed content to drop into emails they send to customers.

Initially this would require these employees to make decisions in terms of which content to select, however, over time the technology would become intelligent and intuitive and combining the data with usage patterns, it would simplify the process even further for users by automatically inserting the correct content for the recipient.

However, marketers should also pay attention to unstructured data as this is where the real magic lies. By identifying patterns in unstructured data, you’ll be able to find opportunities to innovate and identify real behaviours rather than rely on what people say they are doing. With greater insight into who your customers are, and a clearer understanding of their needs, it is easier for employees to engage with them using relevant, personalised information, sent at the right time and improving the overall customer experience.

INTRODUCING AI TOOLS

Once marketers have become comfortable using these technologies, the next step would be to assess their business needs to determine which AI applications are the best suited to meet their specific needs. There are several AI solutions available and marketers should be cautious not to implement AI for AI’s sake but rather determine which solutions are best suited to help them achieve their business objectives.

It is also important that you consider the legacy systems within the organisation as this can often be a stumbling block to implementing new technologies. Marketers need to clearly articulate their requirements and collaborate with the IT department to implement solutions that meet the business needs.

The most imminent AI solutions available for marketers include anticipating future customer purchases and presenting offers accordingly, improving media buying, monitoring social media comments to determine brand affinity and tailoring promotions. However, this is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of what AI can bring to the marketing table. With the correct data combined with the right AI solutions, marketers are able to gain greater insight into customer sentiment and behaviour to more proactively plan and target campaigns that deliver the best results and enhance the customer experience across every customer touchpoint.

GET STARTED NOW

There is no doubt that AI brings about some uncertainty with the promise of great things for marketers and business. While still in its infancy, this is the time for marketers to slowly start implementing technologies that lay the foundation for AI at a later stage. Marketers should start getting familiar with automation technology and determine exactly what they expect from AI technology before making the leap and introducing AI solutions into the organisation.

While it can be tempting to jump in head first, by adopting a slow and steady approach to AI implementation, they will be setting themselves up for success in the long-term. But the time to start is now.

For many years marketing and technology departments have worked independently, each meeting a specific mandate. This is no longer the case.

Marketing has traditionally focused on creating awareness of brands and enticing the target market to select their brand over the competition. IT, on the other hand, focused on improving business efficiencies by providing the technologies that meet the company’s needs.

But the business environment in which we work today has evolved, and customer experience, which is becoming central to the success of every organisation, requires marketing and technology to work together.

According to market research company Forrester, customer experience (CX) is the discipline of defining the step-by-step customer journey from marketing through sales and service. It defines the key capabilities, content, and interfaces that need to be present at each customer touchpoint and how these touchpoints work together to form a cohesive experience.

Customer experience is a critical contributor to a company’s success. This was supported by the Forrester CX Index, which found that from 2011 to 2015, companies that scored near the top of the Index increased customer retention, had greater cross-selling opportunities and generated higher revenues than those companies that scored poorly on the index.

ROADBLOCK FOR DELIVERY

Some chief information officers would argue that CX should be the marketing department’s responsibility, as they already have so much to focus on and cannot afford to take on any extra responsibilities. In this scenario, it would make more sense for the marketing department to decide what it wants and let IT support it with the technology solutions needed to achieve the marketing goal. However, while this may seem like an efficient approach, it is a roadblock for the delivery of great customer experience.

To deliver great customer experiences, marketing departments agree it is critical that they embrace new technologies that enable them to meet customer expectations. It would be more beneficial to take the relationship a step further and have the marketing department work closely with the IT department to develop solutions to meet the needs of the customer throughout the full CX lifecycle. As such, IT would need to adapt from providing background support to being a part of the discussions to develop solutions that can improve the customer experience.

This isn’t a foreign concept, as leading companies such as Google and Uber have managed to bring the development teams and business teams together to work as a single unit, making decisions in unison about the customer experience and delivering solutions that consistently meet customer expectations.

While the use of technologies such as bots, for example, are being adopted at a rapid rate, it is important that technology does not replace the human element of the brand, as people strive for human connection and authenticity. As such, technology should be used to enhance the customer experience and make it easier for the customer to do business with you.

MEETING CUSTOMER EXPECTATIONS

For example, in the case of brand automation, technology should remove repetitive functions from employees so they are able to focus more attention on being strategic and meeting customer expectations. Equally important is empowering the entire organisation to deliver a consistent brand experience across every department by providing the right tools to help them to achieve this.

Another benefit that technology brings to the CX mix is the ability to personalise campaigns according to individual usage patterns. This includes engaging with customers on their preferred platforms, reaching out to them at the most convenient times and providing relevant information specific to their individual needs. For example, if a customer purchases the same meal every Wednesday, proactively reach out to them with additional offerings to add to the order.

However, with so many new technologies available, from artificial intelligence (AI) to virtual reality (VR), things can be complex for IT departments who are being asked to embrace these new technologies. Customer experience should be at the centre of everything an organisation does and technology should be used to drive and enhance these customer experiences, while at the same time freeing employees up to deliver the human touch in customer interactions.

Technology provides real-time data that can and should be used to help make relevant and timely business decisions for both improved customer experience and better business performance. After all, today the customer is still King and a tech-savvy one at that.