Brick-and-mortar, face-to-face, desktop, mobile, social media. How do you create a consistent look and feel on all of these different customer touchpoints? The plethora of new channels has meant more time, consideration and cost goes into marketing materials. Brands have also had to find ways to balance their branding in relation to different mediums.
A good example of this would be the infamous Wendy’s twitter account which is known for replying in a snarky of insulting manner to other users. Whilst many people love this approach online, and it does a great job of cutting through the noise, they would not be so happy to receive this sort of treatment from a server in a real restaurant.
If you can understand how customer expectations relate to your brand positioning, it makes it much easier to adapt to different mediums.
"The timescale at which brands need to freshen up their image seems to be becoming shorter and shorter and the only way to ensure you are in line with shifting expectations is to ensure you are actively listening." Katie Clark, Creative Designer
Another issue with multiple channels is that they often become a silo. Whilst activity within each channel may be recorded, they are not always brought together to form a complete picture, or this must be done manually by copying notes to a centralised CRM. It is next to impossible to achieve a single customer vision when your interactions with them are split out. Use technology platforms which can unify different communications in one area, leverage automation to take away the busy-work.
When we start to think about the many different ways in which we interact with our customers, it’s easy to see how it’s an issue that affects every department in one way or another. Ongoing training at multiple levels is absolutely vital to this. Senior management need to go out to ‘the front lines’ and see what the real issues are on a regular basis (think monthly not yearly) which will help them to identify areas where communication could be improved or understand the practicalities of feedback given.
