A Pit Stop Approach To Brand Implementation
There is a new catch phrase emerging in the corporate world: “How can we change the tires while the car is moving?”
BY TACTICALLY EVALUATING THE ROLE OF YOUR TOUCH POINTS IN THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE, YOU CAN ENSURE THAT EVERY ACTION TAKEN IS BUILDING COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE.
We seldom heard this question until recently, but now our clients in the C-suite are asking it frequently. The question brings to life the difficulty of executing change in a demanding business environment where performance and results cannot be compromised. Brand strategy once lived in the realm of the long-term investment: Developing and implementing brand programs might cost a lot of time and money in the short-term, but would yield long-term gains. But in more challenging economic times, the focus must be on short-term results—the car HAS to keep moving, now more than ever.
The problem with the dilemma posed by the “changing the tires while the car is moving” metaphor is that it is based on an outdated notion of the change management process, which has been described as “Unfreezing, Changing, and Refreezing.” (Fred Nickols, Change Management 101: A Primer.) The common conception of change management is that a company starts in a stable place, loosens up to prepare for change, implements change, and then stabilizes within a new paradigm.
A more contemporary view of change management suggests that change must occur constantly and in smaller increments for organizations to survive and thrive. Seth Godin suggests that organizations should consider an evolutionary model of change. “Evolution— defined as inheritable modifications over many generations—is the most powerful tool we have for dealing with change.” (Fast Company, December 19, 2007) “It is our fear of changing a winning strategy and our reliance on command-and-control tactics that make us miserable—not change. Change doesn’t have to be the enemy. We start bypassing our fear of change by constantly training people to make small changes.”
If your brand is not delivering real business value to the organization, you should not be afraid that change will require you to sacrifice business performance in the short-term. Whether you need to develop and deliver on a new brand promise and identity that is more relevant to customers, or whether you simply need to optimize your brand throughout the customer experience, taking a pit stop approach to change will yield results now and in the future.
Pit Stop Strategy
When most of us change our tires, we take the car to a dealership or tire center, wait in a greasy room, spend a great deal of money, and come out with an improved approach to the road. This isn’t a great process for us as tire consumers, and shouldn’t be the model our companies embrace. But what if we looked at brand implementation like an auto racing pit stop—well planned, efficient, and targeted to the car’s most urgent needs? You won’t take much time off the road, and skipping the pit stop may ultimately put you further behind in the race.
If your company is to pursue the “pit stop model” of brand change, strategic prioritization of touch points is crucial. There are two key steps to identify your highest priorities:
+ Touch point mapping
It is surprising how few companies, whether B2C or B2B, stop to consider their customer’s experience from the customer’s point of view. Many companies have maps of the customer process, but these evaluate how the company interacts with the customer. To prioritize the most important touch points to be addressed in our pit stop, we must look at how the customer interacts with the company.When creating your map, imagine every interaction customers have with your company, starting with their initial research into you and your competitors, and ending with the last bit of postsales communication they receive from you. Often, these maps will be circular, with the concluding step from one interaction leading into an introductory step for the next. Also, it may help to create different maps for distinct customer segments to understand how the experience may vary among segments.
Your primary objective during the mapping process should be to record the steps without any evaluative judgment about how effective you’ve been with the customer at each step. That evaluation comes next.
+ Leverage and gap analysis
Now that you have articulated each step (or touch point) from your customer’s point of view, you need to evaluate the steps on two dimensions:1. Leverage:
How important is the touch point in the customer’s overall experience? Clearly, some touch points will be more significant than others. When we helped Allstate measure leverage, it wasn’t too surprising that receiving a cancellation notice as a reminder of payment due had a negative impact on the customer’s experience. Other touch points might have surprisingly high leverage. A home building client found that one of their highest leverage touch points was construction site cleanliness—customers felt that having McDonald’s wrappers and beer cans left by the workers on the site represented a lack of attention to detail that might exist in other aspects of their home’s construction.Leverage can be measured quantitatively through customer surveys, but these surveys can be costly and can over-emphasize familiar communications touch points. We have found that internal teams responsible for the customer experience have deep insight into high leverage touch points, and often their qualitative assessment directly echoes separate customer data.
2. Gap Between Promise and Delivery:
The second dimension of a touch point’s priority is the gap between the brand promise you are trying to support, and your effectiveness delivering on the promise. Even if a brand promise is entirely new to your company, it should stem from organizational truths that are already in action at certain points of the customer experience. Since it is a new promise, there will be other touch points that have not been developed with the brand in mind. As with leverage, this gap can be measured quantitatively, but we also find that internal teams are effective at assessing how well the company is currently delivering on its promise throughout the customer experience.The result of this analysis will help you develop your “pit stop strategy.” You will identify some high-leverage touch points where you are already delivering on your promise, and your objective with these touch points should be to keep driving—continue to do what you’re already doing well. You will also discover some low-leverage touch points that need work, but because the touch points aren’t as meaningful to the customer experience, you should leave those changes for another time. The touch points that require strategic pit stops are your high-leverage customer experiences that are currently far from delivering on your brand promise. These are your priorities for change and can be tackled in a focused and efficient manner.
Changing the Tires
Once you’ve identified your highest priority touch points, you will likely need to change the customer experience to better deliver on your brand promise in one of two ways:
+ Employee empowerment
Many of your highest-leverage touch points will be those where people are involved in delivering aspects of the brand experience. Think bank tellers, call center representatives, or sales staff at a car dealership. The most common mistake companies make when trying to improve brand delivery at these touch points is to give a “brand behavior checklist” to employees and ask them to follow it to the letter. People generally don’t respond well to checklists and will, at best, provide a robotic delivery of the brand; at worst, they will ignore the checklist altogether and do what they’ve always done.Instead of providing a checklist of behaviors, you should educate and inspire employees about the outcomes they are trying to create for customers. Help them understand how the customer should feel at the touch point, and then empower them to do whatever is natural to create that outcome. Think about walking into a retail store and being greeted by a teenage worker who has been told to welcome you. The “checklist” teenager might say, “Hello ma’am, how are you today?” in his most bored and least gracious voice, leaving you feeling anything but welcome. Or, he could follow his own nature and give you a wink and a smile across the store that lets you know you can go to him for questions or sizes. The second approach, while not following a checklist, creates a much more meaningful brand outcome for the customer.
+ Tactical refinement
The nonhuman touch points are often easier to bring into alignment. Generally, when these touch points are underperforming against the brand, they have ceased to deliver on their core purpose in the customer-company relationship. Bringing them into alignment might involve simplification, improved design, or stronger messaging. Consider your website. Is it serving as merely an online brochure, or is it delivering real value to customers? Does it provide new ways to create a relationship with customers and deliver on your promise? Improving the tactical effectiveness of your critical touch points can reap tremendous dividends in the overall customer experience.
Redefining Change
Of course, it isn’t physically possible to change the tires while a car is moving. But it is possible, and advisable, to look at brand change with a pit stop mentality that requires minimal downtime and resources to achieve maximum results. By prioritizing the most critical touch points in your customer experience, you can create a strategic plan that will increase your effectiveness with customers, who are demanding more value for their money in this constrained economy. By empowering employees to deliver desired outcomes rather than proscribed processes, you will generate greater employee satisfaction and stronger customer loyalty. And, by tactically evaluating the role of your touch points in the customer experience, you can ensure that every action taken is building competitive advantage. By taking a brief, strategic pause in the action, you can achieve significant gains that will help you win the short race, and the long one.