Guest Post: Is Your Customer Journey Aligned with Brand Expectations?

This week, we feature an article by Nick Bandy, Chief Marketing Officer at LiveVox, an omnichannel platform that helps brands seamlessly communicate with their customers. He shares how you can align your customer’s journey with their brand expectations.

The customer journey is essential to any company’s success. And in today’s digital age, customer service is now more important than ever before. So how can you make sure that your customer journey is aligned with your brand expectations? And more importantly, how can you ensure that it’s not costing you sales? We explore these questions and offer some tips on how to improve your customer journey. 

What do customers expect from contact centers? 

In order to provide an excellent customer experience, it’s important that your customer journey is aligned with customer expectations. But what exactly do customers expect from your contact center? And how can you make sure that your customer journey meets or exceeds those expectations? 

Customers want to be able to reach a live person when they need assistance. They also want their issue to be resolved quickly and efficiently. And, perhaps most importantly, they want to feel like they’re valued as a customer. 

There are a few key ways to ensure that your customer journey meets or exceeds customer expectations. First, make sure that your contact center is easily accessible and that customers can reach a live person when they need assistance. Second, make sure that your customer service reps are properly trained to resolve issues quickly and efficiently. And third, make sure that you’re showing your customers that you value their business. 

What are brand expectations? 

We know that your customer journey should be aligned with your brand’s expectations. But what exactly are brand expectations? Brand expectations are the standards that your customers expect you to meet. They’re based on your brand’s promise, and they’re influenced by customer perceptions of your brand. 

45% of consumers say they’d be less likely to purchase or not purchase at all if the experience a brand provides is different from their perceived ideals. 

Some examples of brand expectations include providing excellent customer service, having a well-designed website, and offering high-quality products or services. It’s important to note that brand expectations can vary depending on your industry, your customer base, and other factors. 

How to align your customer journey with brand expectations 

There are a few key ways to ensure that your customer journey is aligned with brand expectations.   

1. Get clear on what your brand promise is  
2. Regularly measure customer perceptions of your brand 
3. Consistently work to improve the customer experience 

Focus on matching your fulfillment journey to your client’s buying behavior  

When a client or customer interacts with your business, the information given to them by an agent or self-service channel needs to align with their expectations. This seems obvious but let’s look at a financial services use case: 

Let’s say you work in the financial services industry and your company advertises to current customers who actively use your mobile app and potential customers that interact with your digital content. The ad highlights how easy it is to open a checking account with your institution. 

A customer interacts with the ad, so an agent contacts them to give them more information. The customer responds by saying they want to open a checking account with your institution and asks for the next steps. The agent then tells them that they need to visit a local branch or complete the process via mail. At this point, you’ve most likely lost this customer. They feel misguided and dissatisfied with the interaction. 

The majority of consumers won’t respond well to a misaligned buying journey because they want a clear, digital-first approach to receiving services and products. 

The takeaway? If your customer journey isn’t aligned with customer expectations, you could be losing money every month. 

One way to align these two things is by providing omnichannel engagement or employing a contact center CRM. 

What is omnichannel engagement? 

Omnichannel engagement is the practice of providing customer service and support across multiple channels. This could include phone, email, live chat, social media, and more. The goal of omnichannel engagement is to provide a consistent experience for customers no matter how they choose to reach out. 

A study by Aspect Software found that companies that adopt omnichannel strategies achieve 91% greater year-over-year customer retention rates compared to companies that don’t. 

What is a contact center CRM? 

A contact center CRM is a customer relationship management system that’s designed specifically for contact centers. An effective contact center CRM will help you keep track of customer interactions, automate processes, and improve the customer experience.  

Some of the benefits of using a contact center CRM include:  

• Reduced customer churn 
• Increased customer satisfaction 
• Improved customer retention 
• Increased cross-selling and upselling opportunities 

Around 68% of customers say it’s important for customer service agents to be familiar with their service history – something that CRM software can offer. Additionally, 73% say they’re likely to switch brands if consistent service can’t be provided. 

If you want to ensure that your customer journey is aligned with brand expectations, consider implementing an omnichannel customer engagement strategy or using a contact center CRM. These two solutions will help you provide a consistent customer experience, improve customer satisfaction, and increase customer retention. 

Nick Bandy has over 25 years of executive leadership experience in the marketing and technology space, serving private, PE-backed, and public organizations. He founded and developed the SpeechIQ product, which was subsequently acquired by LiveVox in 2019.