Atlanta Company Surveys Consumers on Interactions with Leading Brands
Friday, July 10th, 2020
Who do you love? Consumers dish on their ‘Brand Beacons’
The COVID-19 pandemic is changing how the world interacts, and companies are transforming their digital offerings, while consumers are increasingly choosing how they want to interact with organizations.
The ExperienceBuilt™ Brand Index, from Atlanta-based MMR LIVE Experience Design, asked a nationally representative sample of 2,785 people to describe their interactions with leading brands in five industries to identify how those brands delivered against MMR LIVE’s Eight Principles of Experience Design - The LIVE 8.
Grounded in research, the LIVE 8 helps orchestrate experience improvements for businesses. They emerged from LIVE’s exploration into the hallmarks of organizations that create relevant, lasting, best-in-class relationships.
“ExperienceBuilt Brands win a share of heart, and they redefine loyalty because they lead beyond the confines of their own industry,” MMR LIVE Founder and COO Patricia Houston said. “They offer shining examples of what to do during the pandemic, and through their actions, they are building brand affinity for the future. They aren’t just listing customer-centric values on their website; they are demonstrating them through their actions.”
The index found marked differences in experience perceptions between optional interactions, like restaurants or retail, and ongoing ones, like telecom providers or banks.
While the “optional” industries receive leading average scores, the index shows opportunities for businesses in other categories, including telecom. These businesses can adapt to take a proactive approach and deliver the best experience possible for customers or fully respect their guests’ attention.
“Even when restaurants fall short of delivering a great experience, people are connecting with the brand as part of more casual interactions, so they often view the encounter in a different light and will often overlook any shortcomings they might notice with brands in other categories — but that’s a slippery slope,” Houston said. “The ultimate prize for a brand is their customers’ attention, but we are inundated by choice, and this is changing commerce and loyalty.
“‘Experience’ is ingrained in every aspect of an audience-brand encounter, and at no time is it more apparent than during a crisis,” Houston said. “The specific elements may be small, but each touch-point must be considered and designed to deliver the best experience. Sometimes key touch-points are apparent, and sometimes not, but we know when the attention to experience is absent or poorly designed.”
What are the Brands Customers Most Look Forward to Doing Business With?
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Restaurants: Chick-fil-A
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Retailers: Costco
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Grocery: Trader Joe’s
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Financial: USAA
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Telecom: T-Mobile
“Brands must forge emotional connections with their audiences to deliver an exceptional experience people want and will return to,” Houston said. “People value experience as much as a product or an offering itself. Brands have an opportunity to provide value in a way that sometimes feels intangible, but it elicits an emotional response from customers.
“The most successful brands in the Index know an experience doesn’t just happen; it’s designed to create the perfect moment,” Houston added. “Their consistency in execution builds trust, and leads to stronger emotional connections with their audiences.”
ExperienceBuilt™ Business Consulting
MMR LIVE conducted the survey as it launches its new ExperienceBuilt business consulting practice.
“We’ve worked with leading brands to refine their approach to incorporating user feedback into service and experience development, a discipline that will take on new resonance moving forward,” Houston said. “But, our goal is not to stop at actionable recommendations, we want to go further by creating and executing feedback-driven action plans.
“Launching a consultancy formalizes our core competencies as it’s a service we’ve been delivering with increasing frequency,” Houston said. “It’s a natural evolution of our solutions offering, and it answers a need in the marketplace by leveraging the existing experience on our team.”
For more information, visit mmr.live.