Businesses need to sell experiences and not just commodities

“See what the brand believes in, then check if it delivers it in its CX.” — James Reece

Photo by Alex Ryder

“If you want to differentiate within the market, you need to sell an experience, not just a commodity” — one of James Reece’s opening lines at UCD Bristol 17. As a service designer at strategic design consultancy Sparck, James knows that delivering an excellent customer experience is key to a brand’s success and that the two vocations are inextricably intertwined.

Over the course of an hour through a mixture of talk and workshop exercises, James showed why business and product success can only truly happen when CX and brand combine to work together.

The age of experiences

“Differentiation is key to success.”

In a competitive environment, businesses need to sell experiences and not just commodities if they want to lead their market sector and a brilliant customer experience is KEY.

Mind the brand gap

“We judge brands on the experience they give us, not on what they promise.”

Brilliant customer experience needs to meet and exceed customer expectations, and meet organisational objectives too. James made this clear with a couple of real life examples:

1. KFC — glossy advertising and attractive food photography versus reality.
2. Deliveroo — great app, poor customer service.
3. Rolls Royce — stunning brand, design and production, beautiful head office and grounds, smooth sales process and luxurious handover experience all jar with the CAPTCHA image generator covering their website homepage.

After saying “UX can be too focused on ironing out creases and making things easy to use”, James went on to add that whilst this is important, it needs to be balanced with “identity, image and brand through emotional design”. This can often just be left to marketing, but should be part of the UX process.

Experience principles and the brand lens

Adhering to a set of experience principles can protect a brand and ultimately help it succeed. This is especially important with legacy organisations struggling to modernise.

James’s examples help explain this:

1. Lloyds Banking Group — their ‘By your side’ advertising campaign with the horses running along the beach doesn’t actually say anything concrete about your real life banking experience with them.
2. British Gas — emotional advertising cannot work forever and, through failing CX, they’re losing a lot of customers to competitors.
3. United Airlines — an outdated tag line ‘fly the friendly skies’ versus famously bad customer service and actions speaking louder than words. The airline overbooks their flights as standard so, at some point, they were going to run into trouble — service design could fix this.

In direct opposition, Monzo live and breathe their brand promise through their Beta programme, blog, open communications and great CX.

Another great example is Delta airlines. Their ‘keep climbing’ campaign and Hangar innovation team focus on pain points, as does their marketing. The focus is the customer and making them as comfortable and at ease as possible throughout the entire customer journey with the brand.

How do you fix the disconnect?

• Better use of data
• Propensity models
• Move conversation from loss aversion to reward
• Ultimately prioritise customers to meet brand promise!

James recommends creating a set of experience principles to express the team’s shared vision for great customer experience. These are as key as tone of voice and brand guidelines because they give a shared understanding of what good looks like for design and CX.

What do effective experience principles describe?

• Customer needs
• Organisational behaviour change
• Brand values

What factors make a good experience principle?

• Being memorable
• Something which helps you say no
• Not being a truism
• Something broadly applicable

In summary, James covered the following:

• Customer experience is key, but we are reaching functional parity.
• Brand is a differentiator of companies / products / services.
• We judge brands on the experience they give us and not on what they promise.
• Unique and desirable CX can be achieved by using brand as a differentiator.
• Experience principles can help translate brand into CX.

View James’s full presentation on Linkedin SlideShare.

Workshop activity

We then split into groups representing two high-end travel companies. Both brands offer the same thing (high-end holidays) to the same target audience, but with different tag lines.

Photo by Jessica Lewes

Using worksheets, we wrote out their principles, using our imagination to plot their CX in line with what their brand tagline promised its customers. We also plotted an experience map for each brand.

There were some great ideas from the room covering many of the same touchpoints such as familiarity, ease of purchase journey and having everything taken care of. It was nice to see how the two brands’ CX principles differed despite offering similar products to the same audience.

The video of James’s talk will soon be available on YouTube and will be added to this blog. UCD Bristol will be back on Wednesday 15th May. More information will soon be shared on our Meetup page.

We are currently accepting talk submissions, so if you would like to feature in one of our next meetups as a speaker, complete this short form. We can’t wait to hear about your awesome ideas!