Customer service expert and behaviouralist Ken Hughes on Tuesday (3 June) told ITT conference delegates the consumer of today "expects way more than they ever did before".
He ran delegates through a five-point brand ladder running from dissatisfaction upwards through satisfaction, delight, engagement and finally empowerment. Hughes said brands should, as a starting point, be aiming to delight their customers.
"But what happens if you keep going? If you go past delight?" he posited. "You get to an engaged, empowered consumer – an engaged consumer has a tribal sense of belonging, while an empowered consumer is one who sells your product for you."
He highlighted the likes of Harley Davidson, Red Bull and Apple as brands with which people appear happy to brand themselves – "the ultimate in tribal belonging".
However, he said businesses are only able to achieve this by always surpassing customers’ expectations. "Don’t just deliver on expectations, go beyond them."
Hughes suggested appointing an "excite and delight" director to achieve this, someone whose actual job it is to look at the customer journey at all times and find ways to make people smile and feel better.
"If you’ve done your job properly, everyone in your organisation becomes excite and delight directors because they [customers] believe in that connection. Connection is everything."
’Race for relevance’
Meanwhile, Hughes said travel and tourism brands had to be mindful that with the arrival this year of Generation Beta, they now had to meet the needs of seven different generations.
He warned that with each growing up in vastly different technological eras, brands risked quickly being left behind.
"If you look at those seven generations, you can see the impact of technology in terms of how we connect with customers," he said. "And the old ways become very irrelevant, very quickly."
Hughes added firms were in a "race for relevance" with their customers, and must evolve with them – not be arrogant and assume they can continue running them for the next 10 years in the same way they did for the previous 10.
