How do customers feel, think about and engage with your brand?
Base East designs the interactions that your customers have with you through the entire journey to consistently maximise customer value: we call this 'branding'. We dive deep into a sequence of customer experiences, from how customers first hear about your brand, to their experiences with you, to the information they share about your services. Outstanding customer experiences lead to strong brand value, creating innovations in services, decreasing costs and gaining new customers. Focus on customer experience is indeed the foundation for sustainable business growth.
We would like to share the key three reasons why the focus on customer experience is increasing exponentially.
An era of experiences rather than things
In the age of digitisation, experiences make you stand out and differentiate you from the competition. In fact, science suggests people's sense of happiness comes from experience, not materialism.
An era where customers create your brand with you
Digitisation has enabled customers to access huge amounts of information, real time. This significantly impacts customer purchasing decisions as well as providing ideas for new services. It is an era where customers create brands with companies through their interactions.
A time to capture hearts
Until now, many have focussed on logical and analytical approaches (left side of the brain processing). However, even with deep analytical customer insights, there are blind spots. It is not easy to holistically understand customer behaviour without understanding their emotional and rational needs. We help you step into the customer’s shoes (engaging the right side of the brain, too) to exceed your customer's expectations and stand out in a crowded market.
Uniqlo
Take Uniqlo, a Japanese fashion company. It has over 1,000 stores in the world, and the online shop’s proportion of the total revenue (873 billion yen) is 9.5% for the year ending August 2019.
Take the example of a touchpoint of ‘outlets’, though the end-to-end customer journey is holistically analysed in our practice.
Here are some questions to start with:- How different are your experiences visiting the store in Tokyo and the one in London? How are outlets designed, e.g., signage, layout, displays? What experiences interact with the staff and products in-store? Would you have the same look and feel when visiting the physical outlet as you do when you visit the online shop?
I guess your experiences would be pretty coherent, starting from the distinctive red logo; shops are normally spacious; space makes product displays stand out. You rarely see a pile of clothes not displayed in order at Uniqulo shops: regardless of locations, you would see staff continue to fold garments and pay attention to tidiness.
When you look at products, you can find many colours and sizes, which can be easy to mix. Basic items with innovative technologies, e.g., AIRism and HEATTECH are explained in signage and displayed in heavy customer traffic areas.
Skilfully, online shopping experiences are aligned with those in outlets; it is also easier to navigate, and its design is clean. Every single touchpoint is orchestrated under the conductor called the Uniqlo brand; simple, versatile and high-quality everyday clothing.
It is no wonder that people often struggle to objectively review customer experiences with customers’ eyes, thereby, companies are hesitating to invest in it, assuming the ROI might not be high. At the same time, we often observe that staff enjoys putting themselves into customers’ shoes, i.e., to review customer experiences can be a valuable training programme, which can lead to innovation and new revenue generation, sustainably.