Match the DNA
Any claims you make about your products has to be overtly represented in the process someone goes through to buy and use them. Otherwise you have not only cast doubt on the intention of your customer experience, you have called into question the quality of the products themselves.
Always Do This
- What are the adjectives your company uses to describe any product’s reliable special features, quality standards and intention?
- Make sure that these same adjectives are applied to the customer experience – the process of buying and using the product.
The Components of a Brandable Customer Experience
Exaggerate the ExperienceCreate the Echo of a Thousand Good TimesRemain RelevantControl the Damage Ahead of TimeView All ResultsFocus on the Field of Awareness
You may understand your business very well, and marvel at the intelligence, discipline and complex mechanisms required to deliver it to your customers. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean your customers always understand these things or attach any importance to them.
Your customers are neither as knowledgeable about, nor infatuated by, your organization it is. The strategies that sound urgent and glorious in your conference rooms will often fail to even attract the notice of your customers in their own world. What your customers do understand and appreciate is what is most relevant to them, especially when they can compare and contrast quality between your company's version and other experiences.
The key is to focus on what your customers will immediately notice and care about – what they’ve seen before in the experience of buying on behalf of the enterprise and as a consumer themselves. Focus on what they do understand and they’ll grant you credibility for everything they don’t.
Always Ask Yourself This
- What do your customers care most about in their experience?
- What can they most easily understand in the experience?
- What in the experience would they be able to differentiate between typically (poorly) done by others or spectacularly well done by you?
Always Do This
- Focus highlights of the customer experience on the fields of awareness.
The Components of a Brandable Customer Experience
Exaggerate the ExperienceCreate the Echo of a Thousand Good TimesRemain RelevantControl the Damage Ahead of TimeView All ResultsExaggerate the Experience
There isn't a legendary customer experience feature from any company that made financial or operational sense when it was first suggested within the company. It only made sense when it made sense to the company's customer culture and served the company well. And that only happened if the feature made no sense at all.
The irony of communicating to a culture is that something has to be exaggerated to be believable. Any exaggerated protection or promotion of what your company says is important to you will become a legend in your customer culture. Legends are how a culture communicates and stores information.
Therefore, the customer experience has to feature exaggerated aspects that have no obvious connectivity to a financial return for your company - apparently an unnecessary, over-the-top waste of effort and money for the company. Your customers can see that this has no apparent financial gain for you. Why would you do this for them? It doesn't make any sense. Of course not; but not making sense is exactly the point. The only way to comprehend it is that it's a tangible proof point of your commitment to a spectacular and signature customer experience.
The keys are that the exaggerations have to be linked to your larger brand intention, activation categories and communications personality, and that they are obvious: overt, unavoidable and easy to understand.
Always Do This
- Develop exaggerated features (or events) of the customer experience that have no obvious relationship to your company benefit — only your customers' benefit.
- Focus exaggerated features on the customer fields of awareness.
- "Waste space" by providing something of pure customer benefit, unrelated to any financial transactions.
- Give something to customers after they have already bought something from you - when they least expect the brandable experience to continue.
We fail we pay - for every failed transaction we pay you | Exaggerate the Experience | Add To | |
Give houses to MoMo customers | Exaggerate the Experience | Add To | |
Give food voucher to all MoMo Customers | Exaggerate the Experience | Add To | |
Build Schools and Hospitals in rural areas and make them free | Exaggerate the Experience | Add To | |
Rural Electrification (Rural areas) MoMo Power | Exaggerate the Experience | Add To | |
Build a power Plant for Lagos State - The MoMo Power Plant | Exaggerate the Experience | Add To | |
Free ride on 3rd Mainland Bride and other high traffic routes | Exaggerate the Experience | Add To | |
Build and rename the coastal road to The MoMo Costal Road | Exaggerate the Experience | Add To | |
Fund agents and merchants and provide resources to expand their businesses | Exaggerate the Experience | Add To | |
Build the 4th mainland bridge and call it the momo bridge fully branded no tolls | Exaggerate the Experience | Add To | |
Give 50Million to a customers within the Dormant base | Exaggerate the Experience | Add To | |
Extend the Billionaire promo to make 100 billionaires | Exaggerate the Experience | Add To | |
Do a conditional cash transfer using the cash register | Exaggerate the Experience | Add To | |
Do something big in the IDP camp | Exaggerate the Experience | Add To | |
Pick a supermarket and shop on us | Exaggerate the Experience | Add To | |
Reward the shoppers at the food hub on a saturday ( shopping on MoMo) | Exaggerate the Experience | Add To | |
Give cash benefit to customers (5000) on a particular day | Exaggerate the Experience | Add To | |
We get you to work free on Monday ( Transport fare of fuel fill up) for MoMo Customers | Exaggerate the Experience | Add To | |
Give the customer an Open cheque to make a wish and we deliver in a waoh manner | Exaggerate the Experience | Add To | |
Give a paid vacation on the next National Independence celebration | Exaggerate the Experience | Add To | |
Give every MoMo Customer a smartphone | Exaggerate the Experience | Add To | |
Regionalise the experience. We have different cultures. Food, dress, greeting. Do an event in the region itself and incorporate the cultural elements into that event. | Exaggerate the Experience Can Do | Add To | |
Use IA to handle the volume of customers, to be onboarded easily and effectively. NB Analyse their spending, understand customer behaviour and find a solution to their need. It can be used to onboard the customer quicker and to provide support customers. | Exaggerate the Experience Can Do | Add To | |
Proactive support to customers - before they contact us, resolve the non-complex issues. System can pick up that there is a dead spot, send an SMS to restart your phone. | Exaggerate the Experience Can Do | Add To | |
Simplify the process. Reduce the turnaround time to serve the customers. We need a digital board with an AI to communicate to the customer about the requirements of the centres. They don't have to stand in a queue to get the requirements and move to another queue. | Exaggerate the Experience Can Do | Add To | |
We are connected to NIMC but they have "downtime" issues. That means we cant provide a service and partner service is not available. Can we have our own server with data on it to make it easier. | Exaggerate the Experience Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time | Add To | |
Seamless roaming from MTN Nigeria to MTN South Africa (eg.) Roaming partners should be on 1 platform to latch on to. For non-MTN providers, there should be an email or SMS code that someone in that other country can solve my problem. | Exaggerate the Experience Can Do | Add To | |
App dedicated to MTN customers to use it to log a complaint. Across countries, have 1 platform where any customer can see their profile, account, get support etc. Self-service trouble shooting. With an escalation option when needed. | Exaggerate the Experience Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time | Add To | |
E-commerce - the return policy should be seamless. We should pick-up the product not ask them to bring in to the shop. | Exaggerate the Experience Can Justify | Add To | |
Customer education and communication should be done in local languages. Currently, they switch between the local language and English. We struggle to explain our service or products in their own language. This should minimize the number of customer service sessions. They are loyal customers. We should be able to speak the language they best understand. We know that they don't understand our questions so now they rate us 1 on NPS because customers understand 1 as first, or the best, instead of understanding that 9 or 10 is the best. By creating understanding in their own language we will have better NPS scores. | Exaggerate the Experience Can Do | Add To | |
In the North, we have Niger etc that are neighbouring countries. There are lots of transactions and migrations across borders. Our calls go through to those countries but MTN does not have a specific bundle to call across the country. They switch to our competitor sim to make "international" calls. We need "neighbour bundles" so that we can keep our customers on our network. | Exaggerate the Experience Can Do | Add To | |
We are driving data, we want customers to use it all the time. There are customers who do not use data yet but they do use airtime. We should not just give data but airtime when they upgrade their line even when they don't use a 4G or 5G phone. Let it be 30% airtime and 70% data. This will encourage them to buy a new smartphone. | Exaggerate the Experience Can Do | Add To | |
- "Season of surprises" | Exaggerate the Experience Can Justify | Add To | |
- Christmas gifts | Exaggerate the Experience Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time | Add To | |
- Touch the lives of 76m customers | Exaggerate the Experience Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time | Add To | |
- Birthday messaging | Exaggerate the Experience Can Do | Add To | |
- Birthday gift boxes/ birthday flower delivery/ birthday cake delivery | Exaggerate the Experience Can Justify | Add To | |
- Mindblowing gift for 100th customer per store Fanfare, balloons, PA system, PARTY! | Exaggerate the Experience Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time | Add To | |
- make a store visit memorable. 5G Playstation stations. | Exaggerate the Experience Can Justify | Add To | |
- gamify the stores, make the waiting pleasurable | Exaggerate the Experience Can Justify | Add To | |
- charging ports in the stores | Exaggerate the Experience Can Do | Add To | |
- provide free wifi coverage to the new trains | Exaggerate the Experience Can Shift | Add To | |
- "free-phone hour" | Exaggerate the Experience Can Justify | Add To | |
- partnering with popular grocery stores and "gifting" a free shopping experience randomly | Exaggerate the Experience Can Justify | Add To | |
- fuel vouchers/ loyalty points to earn fuel points | Exaggerate the Experience Can Shift | Add To | |
- childrens celebrations in store | Exaggerate the Experience Can Justify | Add To |
The Components of a Brandable Customer Experience
Exaggerate the ExperienceCreate the Echo of a Thousand Good TimesRemain RelevantControl the Damage Ahead of TimeView All ResultsCreate the Echo of a Thousand Good Times
Two companies that sell exactly the same thing at the same price. In one, customers get an intuitively warm feeling, making them want to linger and return often. The other leaves customers intuitively cold, wanting to depart quickly and not return. It marks the difference between a company that leaves customers cold and a company that produces an intuitively warm feeling in its customer culture.
In the warmer, inviting company there is an intangible “echo of a thousand good times” as if you can feel the spirit of customers just like you who had been there before and been treated right. Translating this feeling means creating tangible proof points of three committed relationships that are clearly precious to the company: The relationship between your company and your customers, between your company and your employees, and between your company and your local communities.
The relationship between your company and its customers would be seen, for example, by celebration of any significant event in customer’s lives – the company is aware of these things because it is close enough to the customer and cares enough. It celebrates it to the customer and in some cases celebrates it about the customer in its own company. The relationship between a company and its employees is important because customers are made up of people who are employees of other companies themselves. They are naturally supportive of any company that treats its own staff with respect and affection. It is seen, for example, in the celebration of its own employees significant life events- a celebration that reaches the customer because a company this close to both its own people and its customer wouldn’t put a barrier between the two.
The relationship between a company and its communities is important because the customer belongs to these communities too and will notice if the company gives back to the environment from which it takes revenue. Support of local charities is an example of this but it’s not about giving money as much as giving time and intelligence – providing the expertise that it sells to the customer for free. And it’s not only the support of local charities but the communities themselves: spotlight what is right and stand up for what needs to be fixed.
These relationships slop over traditional lines of demarcation in the relationship between a company and its customer, but it isn’t sloppy in presentation – just enthusiastic and often informal – genuine, not calculated.
Always Do This
- Show tangible evidence of the relationship the company and its customers. Publicly celebrate customer life events so other customers can see it.
- Show tangible evidence of the relationship between the company and its employees. Place recruitment collateral in the branches and in customer sections of the website that show the respect and affection you have for your people. Publicly celebrate employee life events so customers can see it.
- Show tangible evidence of the relationship between the company and its local communities. Highlight both major employers and small businesses. Shine a light on the best of the community and advocate for – and participate in – improvement. Show that you intimately know what life is like within the communities you serve.
- opening up the learning platform (MTN U-Learn) to all stakeholders of MTN for FREE | Create the Echo of a Thousand Good Times Can Do | Add To | |
* Committed relationship - Meeting and exceeding the customer expectations. We know what the needs are. Our product and service should be differentiated. | Create the Echo of a Thousand Good Times Can Do | Add To | |
- Rural telephones that can be used for free to call for emergency services etc. Infrastructure that provides connectivity. | Create the Echo of a Thousand Good Times Can Do | Add To | |
* Committed relationship - Giving real feedback on the issue. Very NB. Show that we are committed. Even if it is not favourable. | Create the Echo of a Thousand Good Times Can Do | Add To | |
- Allow "single" employees to include parents or siblings on their medical plans | Create the Echo of a Thousand Good Times Can Shift | Add To | |
* Committed relationship - Always be there for our customers. Good and bad - network is down, we should show our concern and communicate to the customer. | Create the Echo of a Thousand Good Times Can Do | Add To | |
- commit to minimum turnaround times, and give HUGE gifts when we don't meet the target | Create the Echo of a Thousand Good Times Can Justify | Add To | |
* Committed relationship to employee - Training and personal development to employees. It has a benefit for the company too. It means we do better. | Create the Echo of a Thousand Good Times Can Do | Add To | |
* Committed relationship to communities - Giving back to the community, rural areas where we have never been. Education and life skills. Do more awareness around this. Skill education specifically. | Create the Echo of a Thousand Good Times Can Do | Add To | |
* Committed relationship to communities - network connectivity to the rural communities. Upgrade the rural telephone services to 3G. Depending on the size of the community. Add CSR to this process. | Create the Echo of a Thousand Good Times Can Justify | Add To | |
* Committed relationship to communities - Hybrid bundles for neighbouring countries. Data in place. Airtime to put in place. | Create the Echo of a Thousand Good Times Can Do | Add To | |
* Committed relationship to employees - we all want to own a home. Can MTN help us with a lifestyle benefit to build our own homes. We are here for 15yrs+ that benefit could help. | Create the Echo of a Thousand Good Times Can Do | Add To |
The Components of a Brandable Customer Experience
Exaggerate the ExperienceCreate the Echo of a Thousand Good TimesRemain RelevantControl the Damage Ahead of TimeView All ResultsRemain Relevant
Traditional business thinking says that a company will be successful if it has a great value proposition. In this age of massive consumer buying choices and immediately shared rating within a customer culture, going to market on value alone risks that a company will be perceived as a commodity. The companies that will be the most successful will go to market on both value and relevance.
The world is complex. There’s a lot happening in it and it happens to your customers. If your company only wants to be relevant to them when you’re trying to sell something and they’re somewhat interested in buying it, okay. But that means you are choosing to be irrelevant to them for the rest of the time, which is a dangerous strategy.
Your company may understandably want to stop short of taking a social activism position on world events, but your customer experience can still reflect an understanding that the world exists beyond the company-customer relationship. It can show some attitude about what is beautiful about the human condition and make some comment about when that human condition is despairing to any reasonable human being. After all, people don’t trust companies, they trust people.
Always Do This
- Take a social (humanistic, not political) stand on world events that significantly affect your customers’ lives. Don’t pretend that the world isn’t happening outside of your company.
- For B2B customers, offer support – empathy, insight, solutions, community -- for urgent and chronic business issues.
- For B2C customers, offer support for issues that affect customers’ lives, above and beyond their business with your company.
* Feedback to our customers, it brings loyalty and referral to MTN. Personal feedback. Linked to CRM system for personal information. Personalised service | Remain Relevant Can Do | Add To | |
* Identify with our customers when the need arises. The business communicates about emergencies, and extend it that to various areas. Flooded areas, find alternative routes. Community or environmental information. SMS. | Remain Relevant Can Do | Add To | |
* MTN Foundation - We need to speak about our social investment in the country and our customers. It is not seen or known. (TV show touch people's lives) I am so proud of what we do, why can't we use that in our marketing, tell our story. | Remain Relevant Can Do | Add To | |
* We are not telling our own story in the rural/outlying areas. Education, social welfare, water infrastructure projects. They don't know about us. Using the local language. | Remain Relevant Can Do | Add To | |
* Real engagement with our customers, Real engagement with our staff. | Remain Relevant Can Do | Add To | |
* Be flexible and simplify our processes. | Remain Relevant Can Do | Add To | |
* Understand the needs of society and provide tailored solutions. E.g. Develop 'n revision app for school children before their exams. That provides a service to the community and builds goodwill with the brand. | Remain Relevant Can Do | Add To | |
* Show our customers that we care about them. Send SMS, Christmas text to appreciate the customers. We need to have a CRM system to capture customer relevant information to build their story with us and we can use that to do focused marketing. Personalised messages. | Remain Relevant Can Do | Add To | |
How can you show relevance to your customers' lives? / How can you show relevance to the world your customers live in? | Remain Relevant Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time | Add To | |
Supporting medical services in accessing deep rural areas. | Remain Relevant Can Do | Add To | |
Supporting education and access to information in deep rural areas. | Remain Relevant Can Do | Add To | |
Canoe trasnportation for waterbased communities | Remain Relevant Can Shift | Add To | |
Sustained small-scale investment in community based entrepreneurs and organisations. | Remain Relevant Can Justify | Add To | |
Health, education and a roof over their heads are paramount to the Nigerian nation. | Remain Relevant Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time | Add To | |
Unlimited Scholarships for targeted communities. | Remain Relevant Can Shift | Add To | |
Assisting in building decent accommodation for students at universities. | Remain Relevant Can Justify | Add To | |
Parner with customers on how to get solar energy solutions at subsidised rates | Remain Relevant Can Justify | Add To |
The Components of a Brandable Customer Experience
Exaggerate the ExperienceCreate the Echo of a Thousand Good TimesRemain RelevantControl the Damage Ahead of TimeView All ResultsControl the Damage Ahead of Time
Your customers’ awareness of your company’s experience is most acute when something has gone wrong. This is the time when the experience means the most and when they’re most convinced they’ll be let down or forced to be their own vigorous advocate. By an unfortunate coincidence, this is typically the time when they’re fundamentally let down by most companies or forced to be their own vigorous advocate.
That it doesn’t happen at your company is the point; your customers have faced this from other companies and they anticipate and judge your company accordingly. Even the most advantaged customer has experienced more bad service than good service. To combat this misperception your experience has to be as spectacular and signature and sustainable when things go wrong as when things go right.
When things go wrong, companies are generally at their reactionary, defensive, uncoordinated worst. This will allow your company to be at its outstanding, coordinated best. You should almost be hoping for something to go wrong to prove how good your customer experience really is.
It includes exaggerating the response and resolution to any problem, for the same reason that exaggerating other facets of the support experience will create legends amongst customer cultures.
Always Do This
- Plan ahead for what can go wrong in the customer experience. Develop a brandable response for each situation. Write them down, make access immediately available to all involved employees, and practice responses like fire drills.
- Make your customers whole for the damage they’ve incurred. It’s not enough to simply rectify the problem; they’ve still had to endure that problem.
- Give authority to employees to resolve as many problems as possible. Management should be notified when the problems occur but not step in unless a situation has escalated to that level or the employee wants to show a customer that management is aware of the issue.
* Downtime affected 6mil customers. Within 10 hours our CEO sent out an apology video to customers. This was well received. | Control the Damage Ahead of Time Can Do | Add To | |
* Data and airtime to be replaced for downtime. | Control the Damage Ahead of Time Can Do | Add To | |
* I expect a personalise apology, that can also be a business opportunity. not just a generic compensation plan. | Control the Damage Ahead of Time Can Do | Add To | |
We need to deal with our employees who leave better. | Control the Damage Ahead of Time Can Do | Add To | |
Have a better / available telephone number to call | Control the Damage Ahead of Time Can Do | Add To | |
Create standards for when we will send a CEO apology | Control the Damage Ahead of Time Can Do | Add To | |
When customer's problem is not fixed, don't just replace data and airtime: come up with some kind of compensation for the time lost waiting, impacts of downtime. (Doesn't need to be literal compensation - how do we go beyond the transaction?) | Control the Damage Ahead of Time Can Do | Add To | |
Create standards for when someone is contacted by the most senior person (someone waiting 12 extra hours for sim swap). | Control the Damage Ahead of Time Can Do | Add To | |
Create "Boards of Honour" for impacted people who should receive special service anywhere at MTN. | Control the Damage Ahead of Time Can Do | Add To | |
For our corporate clients - come up with a way to help them as they are struggling through a problem. | Control the Damage Ahead of Time Can Do | Add To | |
- MTN will replace data and airtime to the equivalent of a whole day - for any amout of downtime | Control the Damage Ahead of Time Can Justify | Add To | |
- MTN will compensate customers for their time lost while waiting for service resolutions. Personalise compensation. | Control the Damage Ahead of Time Can Justify | Add To | |
- Special service at MTN EVERYWHERE for inconvenienced customers. | Control the Damage Ahead of Time Can Do | Add To | |
- MTN Won't charge for services until final confirmation has been received. | Control the Damage Ahead of Time Can Do | Add To | |
1. Create standards for when we will send a CEO apology | Control the Damage Ahead of Time | Add To | |
New idea | Control the Damage Ahead of Time | Add To |