Understanding Customer Expectations is the Key to Driving Brand Growth

The Loyalty Marketing Association’s Loyalty 360 (News - Alert) think tank has coined a new term that it says is crucial to the growth of brand retailers. “Expectation matching,” according to spokesmen, is the ability of brands to create loyalty and engagement with their customers by engaging in an active dialogue about customers’ sometimes disparate expectations.

According to Loyalty 360 CEO Mark Johnson, customer expectations must be understood and refined through a process of interactive dialogue. Then, he states, “The expectation is matched, and mutually beneficial outcomes and financial benefits for the brand are created.”

The key to Johnson’s strategy is pro-active dialogue with customers, something that he believes cannot be obtained through endless customer experience surveys. He called customers “inherently irrational” and stated that what customers say on a feedback mechanism like a survey may not mirror actual behavior. The key, says Johnson, is “to get under the hood.”

The 360-degree customer view is a term that has long been recognized as the goal of CRM. However, social media have created a real-time opportunity to engage customers like never before. Social media fans, according to research, are 20 percent more likely to go to a store and then tell their friends about the store. However, dialogue is the key to understanding customer expectations.

Wendy Neuberger of IBM (News - Alert), writing about social media and customer engagement, points to the 90-9-1 principle. One percent of customers create content on social media, nine percent of customers comment and add to preexisting content, and 90 percent watch and consume content. “By fostering a conversation with 10 percent of the audience,” she states, “you are building value for the other 90 percent.” She calls the 10 percent “key influencers” and says that a business should have a goal of establishing mutually productive and enduring relationships with their influencers.

Social media empower customers who want to advocate specific products or capabilities. It creates community among brand loyalists and empowers loyalists to advocate on behalf of a brand or service. However, a recent social media survey by Conversocial found that two-thirds of customer complaints on Facebook (News - Alert) went unaddressed by large retailers. Even when retailers did respond, none of them responded within an hour of the complaint being posted. Unfortunately, at least via social media, the interactive dialogue proposed by Loyalty 360 has not yet been fully realized.

Johnson plans to develop his ideas about expectation matching further during Loyalty 360’s 5^th Annual Loyalty Expo, which will take place in Orlando March 18 through 20. Johnson promises to reveal how today’s most innovative brands are creating organizations that are truly customer-centric. One of the other topics on the agenda at the Loyalty Expo will be how to leverage influential customers and social media feedback. The key will be to persuade marketing teams to view social media as interaction channels, not just marketing channels.

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