Think about when customers interact with your business; what do they take away from the experience?
This is essentially the ‘story’ or ‘narrative’ of their experience of what you offer, and it goes a long way to shaping your overall reputation.
Ensuring this narrative is a positive one should be the focus of every successful business; better control of the narrative essentially means a better reputation, but many companies underestimate the role it plays in their success.
Customer experience and narrative
Customer buying decisions are not generally logical. Emotion plays a huge role in the whole customer experience.
Satisfying baseline customer expectations in terms of clarity, performance, and tangible value will deliver general satisfaction – but it won’t create the powerful narrative that market-leading companies generate. Think about the ‘buzz’ created when a new iPhone is released, for instance.
Even ‘marginal’ delight won’t create a new narrative. Only an intensely good or intensely bad experience does that. This means an emotional experience that connects a customer to your brand.
The importance of this ‘narrative’ is amplified by the social media effect, which has the power to rapidly build or destroy an organisation’s reputation.
A negative narrative is very damaging; if people are expecting a bad experience due to a poor reputation, the most you can do is challenge that; it is very hard to delight people who have been exposed to a negative narrative.
Any business not carefully considering how it can shape its customers’ narrative is leaving itself open to potential failure.
How to proactively change the narrative
Neuroscience can help businesses to proactively shape their customer narrative.
It shows us that all people possess an Experiencing Self and a Remembering Self – and both are involved in any experience.
The customer’s Experiencing Self is constantly monitoring ordinary situations (through their five senses) to make sure everything is going as expected. A typical customer response from the Experiencing Self might be “This tastes salty” or “the air conditioning is too cold in here”.
Their Remembering Self is engaged in interpreting the event and updating expectations; this is evidenced in customer responses such as “this tastes great… I can’t wait to tell my friends about it… “
If we want to be proactive in changing the customer narrative we must focus on engaging the customer’s Remembering Self.
This means we must connect them to our business, through engagement and emotional attachment.
Market leaders not only meet all the baseline expectations of the customers and reduce the likelihood of frustration; they go beyond this to connect on another level, by looking to delight, surprise, and stimulate their customers.
They positively influence the customer narrative and deliver exceptional customer experiences.
