For 99% of organisations, your brand reputation means everything. When managed effectively, it can help build trust and portray expertise among your audience. If left idle or unmonitored, inconsistency and insincerity can grow.
Ultimately, it’s where you win, or lose, both your new and existing clients.
Breaking it down, your reputation is your customer experience and your customer experience is your reputation. You simply cannot separate one from the other.
And when it comes to curating an outstanding reputation, a sure-fire route to success is providing a world class experience.
Building trust, and investing in how your audience perceive you and your actions, is how you can beat the competition.
Invariably, to narrow down such a complex issue to one particular aspect would be naïve. However, for modern organisations, customer experience is the new competitive battleground.
A survey of 15,000 consumers conducted by PwC reported that…
1 in 3 customers will leave a brand they love after just one bad experience.
92% would completely abandon a company after two or three negative interactions.
PWC
So what’s the secret to beating the competition? How do you build up emotional collateral across your customer base?
It’s as simple as trust.
Building Trust
Trust creates comfort. And, unsurprisingly, people like to feel comfortable.
Especially when it comes to making a significant investment. The rarity of such occasions can sometimes build apprehension and nervousness in the mind of your prospects.
This fear of a negative outcome is often overwhelming enough to postpone, or even in some cases quell, the desire to buy. This is known as status quo, or loss aversion, bias.
Losses loom larger than gains.
In other words, the potential for loss stands out in people’s minds much more prominently.
Kahneman & Taversky
Therefore, people, your audience included, lean towards what they are familiar with.
This means, that once that have the conviction to act, or buy, they will go with whoever they trust the most to deliver.
This subconscious bias was defined by economist Herbert A. Simon as “satisficing”. For organisations, the key takeaway is that customers pick what they perceive to be the least uncertain option.
As humans, we often settle for something that we consider good or satisfactory instead of working hard to find the best product for us.
This is absolutely critical to understand when looking at how you can become a leader in your field.
Developing Certainty
The idea, most simply expressed is this; people do not choose brand A over brand B because they think brand A is better, but because they are more certain that it is good.
This insight is vitally important, but equally important is the realisation that we do not do it consciously.
Rory Sutherland
In your day to day business scenarios, your prospective clients are more concerned with your service than your product.
Quality is, almost, a given. It’s superficial and easy to determine prior to engaging with a business.
If you’re actively exploring the opportunity together, the customer is already satisfied in your product itself.
Therefore, trust, is the secret to consistently beating the competition. It is the key ingredient, the differentiator that you will provide the outcome your clients desire with the highest degree of certainty.
To build this level of trust and develop certainty in the mind of your clients you need to invest in your customer experience.
Trust can be most effectively built through built through excellent service and subsequent reporting of it via outstanding customer testimonials.
Excelling in experience will inevitably curate a positive sentiment.
So when it comes to considering which company to go with, the emphasis we place on the experience of others will enable you to shine through as the option most worthy of a prospective customer’s trust.
Once this is solidified, the decision to choose you, over a competitor, becomes a no brainer.
So, for any business looking to stand out, emphasise not only the quality of your products, but more importantly, your trustworthiness to design, deliver and delight clients with your service.
Intrigued to learn more? Check out our Insights Hub to keep your business at the cutting edge.
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- June 17th, 2021