Your BRAND Promise Doesn’t Mean Squat …

If You Can’t Execute the 5-Factors of the RELIABE CARE™ Model!

Your Customer-Experience-Journey has Radically Changed Since the Great Reboot Economy of 2020-21 & Leadership Must Be CLUED In?

Amazing … It takes a COVID to wake-up businesses to how customers think, act and feel. It takes a major market disruption to wake-up consumers to how businesses care or don’t care about them. And the best-practice traits of start-up entrepreneurs and established industry leaders alike, can be melded together to ensure customer loyalty in the new Reboot Economy. While global market changes can impact your main street approach to how you find, source, engage and build your customer pipeline.

Amazingly, 100-percent of our clients were positioned for this Reboot and because they were already calibrated into a transformation mindset, they experience very little market disruption. However, the trend from most all global leadership “think tanks and experts” is that this Reboot has caused massive change issues for individuals, businesses and government leaders.

Two variables I have been working with my global clients on for three-decades, have been proven incredibly accurate during this Reboot, and, these alone will ensure your future growth, resiliency and sustainability:

Variable One: The psychology of a buyer’s decision illustrates consumers seek one of or a combination of four psychological drivers in their decisions to remain loyal, continue to buy or change their buying behaviors …

Variable Two: My research across 17-Countries and more than a decade of more than 10,000 interviews and survey samplings, clarifies that your scorecard must adhere to 5-guaranteed steps that customers reveal they want in their interactions with a business or from individuals. The Great Reboot has magnified and put the spotlight on those that 18-months into this Reboot are still determining who they are, what they do, and why that is their chosen trajectory – sad!

The adage of “if you don’t take care of the customer, your competition will gladly do so for you …!” And, for some businesses yelling on social media about their latest scorecard rankings and how they are #1 in their industry, they need to take stock of what scorecard they are really using and if they are living up to their Brand Promise? Or, if the reality is that at the present time consumers may not have real viable options, so they “take it or leave attitude” that is pervasive today, may be the long term death sentence one is writing for themselves. 

Let me illustrate the point – One major experience as a customer that I have on a regular basis as a global business traveler and professional, illustrates this point on a weekly basis since Summer 2020 (and sadly as you read this article, it is still sowing itself to customers). The customer-journey-experiences are magnified given my professional role globally. This experience illuminates the questions leadership should be asking of their:

1. Strategy
2. Systems
3. Processes
4. Procedures 
5. Activities/Actions
6. Scorecards
7. Every touchpoint along the customer-experience-journey today, not as it was before the Great Reboot
8. Benchmark our outward and internal Brand Promise to our customers and employees against the KPIs of #1 through #7

While the provider in question as our working Case Study here, may be ranked #1 within their respective industry at the time I am penning this article, it is interesting as one of their top tier customers to create a scorecard of expectations as to how their brand promise should be experienced. If I were to evaluate today’s service against what would have been scored as “unacceptable and even mediocre service” by the same provider in 2019 (which they would never had tolerated or condoned), today what is deemed as #1 is truly substandard to the scorecard of 2019. The difference, today consumers are held hostage by this provider and this actually has set in within the provider as a sense of complacent, ambivalent, self-absorbed pathology of greatness. It would appear that all of their customer contact professionals know this and have substantially lowered their customer engagement standards, created a massive customer-journey nightmare – but as the customer, one can’t say anything or one runs the risk of being deemed a problem customer.

What one tolerates one condones, and what one condones one tolerates. 

This then becomes the new lowered standard of benchmarked excellence.

As a top tier customer this provider says that as a customer you are valued, that their brand promise is essential. So, they started down a great solution feedback loop strategy. You have an APP on your cell phone and after every customer experience (that they can track from their side that goes right) your cell phone pings with a one question feedback survey. Interestingly, the same data collection never takes place when they know from their side that there has been a brand promise failure and that the customer-journey-experience was inferior. Data analytics is critical to sound leadership and sound business success decisions. Mapping out the customer-experience-journey from a leadership perspective (just one of the essential organizational success blocks addressed in our Dr. Jeffrey Magee | Leadership Mastery Leadership Academy of Excellence/1.0 Series). You must not fall in love with your own press releases (as the saying goes) and remain market-customer-experience-journey focused (both inwardly and outwardly), as it relates to your Brand Promise. 

So, why is this important? Consider that this Case Study is exactly the infancy of what took such industry giants out of the game, think: Montgomery-Wards, Sears, FAoSchwartz, Saturn, K-Mart, JCPenny, MySpace, etc.

So how do you ensure Brand Integrity and your Brand Promise?

Variable One: The psychology of a buyer’s decision illustrates consumers seek one of or a combination of four psychological drivers in their decisions to remain, buy or change their buying behaviors … Therefore, customers and prospects come to you or leave you for one of four psychological reasons. If you can market, demonstrate and ensure that your deliverable (Product/Service) are these over other market options … 

1. BETTER
2. FASTER (more efficient)
3. DIFFERENT 
4. COST-EFFECTIVE 

When you do this, over and above others, then any other market option, you win. If you can wrap something emotional around that proposition (a cause, added benefit, what someone else gets as a result of your actions), then you win even more!

And, after years of research and more than ten-thousand interviews and surveys, what has been learned is that your BRAND Promise doesn’t mean squat! … If you and your organization can’t execute the 5-Factors of the RELIABE CARE™ Model.

Variable Two: Research clarifies that your scorecard must adhere to 5-guaranteed factors or variables. Customers reveal what they value and want in their interactions with a business/others … 

Design your every business endeavor, initiative, talent development, compliance, brand experiences around R.C.A.R.E and then any matrix you use, apply a simple A-C-F grade score. Meaning if you as an organization or an individual within your organization are doing 100% of what your Brand Promise states, then that gets a grade or score of “C’s”. At any KPI, if one is not delivering the Brand Promise, that gets a grade or score of “F’s”. And, just as easy, anyone that delivers more than the Brand Promise must be awarded a grade or score of “A’s”. Now ask your most valued customers to use this simple scorecard and measure the KPIs off of your Brand Promise – see what score you get in real time?

So, now let’s apply the Reliable CARE Model™ to what you do internally and externally as your Brand Promise (Brand Promise can be what an organization articulates, a business unit articulates, or even what an individual articulates) – 

1. RELIABLE … If you say you are going to do “X” then you must be RELIABLE in doing so – every time!
2. CARE … If you say you are going to do “X” then you must demonstrate with integrity that you CARE (Appreciate) that customer and the opportunity to have served them – every time!
3. ATTRACTIVE … If you say you are going to do “X” then you must demonstrate with integrity that you are more ATTRACTIVE than any other alternative to that customer – every time!
4. RESPONSIVE … If you say you are going to do “X” then you must demonstrate with integrity that you have a sense of urgency today (not panic, stress, anxiety) and that your sense of RESPONSIVENESS for and to the customer is appropriate, anticipated and planned for in advance, so that the customer experience is WOW ’ed – every time!
5. EMPATHY … Everyone seems overwhelmed today, one of ,y clients calls this COVID Fog. If you say you are going to do “X” then you must demonstrate with empathy, integrity and sincere connection(s) that you have EMPATHY for that customers experience – every time!

As leaders and professionals when there is a Brand Promise failure, check your Strategy, Systems, Structure, Processes, Procedures, Feedback-Loops and/or Accountability measures for where an KPI failed? You can use this Reliable CARE Model™ as a scorecard in your every internal and external interaction, and as a continuous coaching tool for performance achievement and sustainment conversations.

The Customer-Experience-Journey has radically changed since the Great Reboot of 2020-21 and leadership must be CLUED In to Win – or you will lose more than just your great talent, you will lose the customers that you so much value and state through your Brand Promise are critical for your future!

Written by Dr. Jeffrey Magee.