Leadership and belief critical to consistent customer experience, building brand advocacy

CIM research reveals damaging disconnect between

boardroom, marketing departments and customer experience

 

Businesses are putting customer loyalty at risk, with brand promise failing to reach the front-line and deliver a consistent, integrated customer experience, new research from The Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) reveals.

Insights from 100 senior marketing and brand leaders across international organisations form the basis of the Branded Customer Experience Benchmark, which reports that only 13% of brand owners believe their company excels at delivering a day-to-day customer experience - suggesting a gap between brand promise and customer reality.   

This is despite seven out of ten marketers questioned rating investments in customer experience as more effective than those of marketing communications when building brands and driving marketing and customer performance. While customer insight and brand strategy are being successfully shared amongst senior leaders, this often fails to permeate the organisation and reach front-line employees who deliver the customer experience.  This disconnect questions the effectiveness of insight being shared and actually used internally amongst those responsible for delivering particular components of the customer experience.

Contributors to this benchmark reported positive representation and involvement of marketing and brand teams in a wide range of cross-business initiatives, from corporate strategy development (80%) to new product/service development (87%); new market entry (81%) to alliances and joint ventures (51%).  

It is also encouraging that, despite IT, internal communications and lack of budget being cited as barriers to delivering a branded customer experience, 80% of those companies questioned have a job role in their firm dedicated to effective customer service.  Brand values feature in recruitment in 90% of businesses and more than half of organisations surveyed confirm that all customer-facing employees are introduced to the brand promise and values when they join.

Against this positive backdrop, however, emerges vulnerability: only 15% of marketers report strength in innovation (anticipating customer needs with new products and services) and just 14% believe that customer insight and research are the main drivers of decision making in their business.

An additional concern, is a ‘superficial emphasis’ on brand management, with a number of organisations not leveraging tools such as customer experience or employee brand behaviour guidelines, despite investing significantly in brand and marketing communications.  

Overall, the research supports the correlation that leadership and belief are the key components in driving a customer performance, along with CEO reputation - with John Lewis, Virgin and Apple emerging as most highly regarded by participants, in delivering world-class customer experiences and building brand advocacy.   

Thomas Brown, head of insights at CIM said:  “Essentially, brands are built on promises but it’s the experience you have of an organisation that constitutes reality – and leaders recognise a gap between the two.  We set out to explore the key internal and external constraints for organisations when delivering an integrated positive customer experience.  This study shows that leadership and belief have the greatest impact on successfully delivering a branded customer experience – more so than improving measurement or operations, for example. In short – this suggests you can lead your way to a branded experience, but not manage your way there. “

“Our findings make clear the priorities for marketing and brand leaders: take a more active role in educating ‘up’ in the organisation, work through the business to build insight and understanding amongst all levels of employees and actively play the role of the ‘change agent’. Finally, understand that evolving culture takes time, but a focus on leadership and belief will yield results,” Brown added.