Most service providers consider the customer experience as the main driver of customer loyalty. Also, for telecommunications company Swisscom, the quality of customer-interactions is key. A great experience is one that is pleasant and helpful, prompting customer recommendation. Yet a good experience does not necessarily set a brand apart from other players in the same product category. So, on top of being pleasant and helpful, experiences need to be designed to create powerful moments where the brand’s promises are being met: Branded customer experiences. This way customers are first bound through the good experience and a second time by the satisfying experience of the promise delivered which originally resonated with them. For these reasons Swisscom asked us to look into the status-quo of the connection between brand and customer experience and help create a guideline for beneficial, yet brand-supporting service experiences.
At Swisscom, like in many other companies, brand and customer experience are managed by two different departments– namely Marketing and Human Centered Design. In order to establish a common understanding necessary to create a branded customer experience, we hosted a joint workshop. Here we introduced them to the interconnectedness of the topics by looking at best practice examples.
In a second workshop, we translated Swisscom’s brand values into concrete user benefits and defined customer reactions to those benefits. This was the starting point on which we formulated a framework for Swisscom’s branded customer experience, guiding human-to-human and interface-to-human interactions. Being easily understood by everyone in the company was a crucial need, as customer experiences, in contrast to media experiences, are often not created by external agencies but in-house in day-to-day interactions.
In the third phase, again together with members from Brand and Human Centered Design, we screened the end-to-end customer journey for gaps and pain points, but also for opportunities where a branded customer experiences could be delivered. We therefore ideated concrete solutions making use of service design and corporate behavior.
Concluding, we are confident to say that we brought more of the brand into Swisscom’s customer experience. We also brought two departments closer together that, while operating with different approaches, share the same goal: customer preference and loyalty. As a side effect, we were able to make the brand more actionable for all of its 19.000 employees.
Are you faced with similar corporate challenges? We would love to hear about them.