Shaun Smith is Senior Vice President, Customer Experience Practice, Forum, an FT Knowledge Company. Widely considered one of the leading authorities on helping organizations differentiate through customer service and deliver their brand through their people. His published works include Uncommon Practice: People who deliver a great brand experience. Joe Wheeler is Executive Vice President in the same practice, at the same firm, with Smith.
The core concept in this book can be summarized as follows: “Experience the brand” and “Brand the experience.” Obviously, customer relationship management (CRM) is a multi-stage process which begins with obtaining sufficient and relevant information about the target customer (or customer segments), proceeds through the design and implementation phases, continues with refinement and modification based on rigorous evaluation of CRM initiatives and measurement of their impact. Effective marketing creates or increases demand for whatever is offered whereas effective CRM ensures that “customer satisfaction” becomes “customer loyalty” which, eventually, becomes and remains “customer advocacy.”
Credit Smith and Wheeler with providing a remarkable analysis of how to manage the development of customer relationships evolving from their satisfaction to loyalty and advocacy. As Bernd Schmitt correctly notes in the Foreword, “Towards the beginning of this book, the authors distinguish two key routes toward a Branded Customer Experience: ‘experiencing the brand’ and ‘branding the experience.’ Experiencing the brand...begins with the brand, turns it into a promise, and delivers on it. Branding the experience is about creating an innovative experience for customers and then branding it.” Starbucks offers an excellent example. Under Howard Schultz’s leadership, the international chain of gourmet coffee shops demonstrates how to combine “experiencing the brand and “branding the experience.” The result is that Starbucks has become, as Schultz proudly notes, not a “trend” but a “lifestyle.” Perhaps no other organization treats its part-time employees better (both compensation and benefits), and the employees reciprocate with a consistency high level of service (both competence and cordiality) and thus function as–yes–advocates. According to Schultz, “What we’ve done is said the most important component in our brand is the employee. The people have created the magic. The people have created the experience.” Appropriately, Schultz entitled his autobiography Pour Your Heart Into It.
Most organizations that have problems retaining valued customers also have problems retaining valuable employees, usually for the same reasons. These reasons include not feeling appreciated and a lack of trust. Hence the even greater relevance and value of what Shaun Smith and Joe Wheeler share in this book. Peter Drucker once observed, “If you don’t have a customer, you don’t have a business.” There is a corollary to that insight: “If you don’t have employees who are competent and cordial as well as committed to the enterprise, you won’t have any customers.”
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