A Customer Promise is the experience a company’s customers can expect to consistently receive when they interact with that company. Customer Promise is much more than just the physical product they are receiving. It includes the way the transaction will work, the amount of time it will take to deliver the product, how the product will impact their life and much more.
Customer Promise is not just a tag-line. It is about the whole experience they should expect to receive at every touch point in their customer journey.
How to develop your customer promise?
- Understand your customers’ needs and wants & Define the Experience
By carrying out qualitative and quantitative research you can understand what will resonate with your customers, what they expect from you and what will leave a positive impact on them when you deliver on your promise. While qualitative research will let you empathise with your customers and see your business through their perspective, quantitative research will help you see the bigger picture.
You will also be able to find out what is working already and what areas of your business needs improvement. Of course if during this stage you find that customers are expecting simply the impossible, it’s not a signal for you to put this into your Customer Promise!
In fact it can be the very opposite.
Your customer promise should create the right expectations – not high hopes that will be let down as you fall short trying to meet them. Over-promising is setting up your business to fail.
- Collaborate & Differentiate
Creating a clear Customer Promise gives your company a huge opportunity to differentiate. It’s important that people know why they would choose your company ahead of your competitors and clarity around that is vital. While you are creating the customer promise you should also think about what makes your company unique in an emotional and functional way.
Read more: Your Company Is Compared To Everyone
You can start by asking yourself & your team these questions:
- How do we want our customers to feel while doing business with us?
- What processes will we put in place to make this happen?
- What do we want our company to represent or stand for?
- How is our company different from our competitors?
Collaboration is key and ensuring you have the correct balance from across different departments within the business creates diversity of thought. To keep this in place you should include different levels from across the business to participate in this process.
- Clarity
Use clear, jargon-free language in the Customer Promise itself and any communications around the Customer Promise. Remember that the use of jargon creates doubt in customers and a potential loss of trust. The more trust your customers have in your Customer Promise the more likely that your business will succeed.
Read more: 6 Factors That Affect Customer Trust
While using fancy words that the average “Joe” won’t understand can sound sophisticated and authoritative, it will only be another obstacle that they have to overcome to connect with your brand. Obviously you won’t be able to create a customer promise that resonates with every person on earth – but that’s ok because your customer promise should be aimed at your distinct target audience.
Try to keep it short and concise to aid internal and external understanding of your promise.
- Shortlist & Decide
Create a shortlist of options. You then need to research this shortlist both internally and externally. Internally across the business in different departments and externally with customers, suppliers and partners to help with your final selection.
Lastly choose your final customer promise – it must be simple, relatable, easy to understand and memorable. It also needs to be something that your whole company feels connected to and that they can deliver on it.
If you would like to learn more about Customer Promise, The Benefits and How to keep it up, enrol in our Professional Diploma or Certificate today.
*The CX Academy Customer Promise Model is only available in the Professional Diploma Curriculum.
