Recent trends show that many of the leading consumer-products companies are reacting more quickly and more frequently to the need for product revitalization and investing in brand packaging.

If you’ve been to the supermarket or chain pharmacy lately, you may have noticed those shelves are getting quite crowded. More and more choices, in every conceivable flavor, color and smell, assault the shopper’s senses and make it difficult to choose. Consumer-products companies know they need to update their packaging if they hope to achieve higher visibility. But for those companies who rebrand or repackage too often, this can have the opposite effect, raising suspicion in the consumer’s mind.

When sales begin to grind to a halt, it’s generally assumed that there is some type of disconnect between what the consumer wants and what the company thinks the consumer wants. Is the solution rebranding? Repackaging? New advertising? Cutting advertising? It’s important to know to avoid wasting resources.

Yet, how often do companies perform only a superficial search to uncover the problem? It’s painful to look inward. It’s much easier to hire a consultant. But what’s often needed is to dig deep, assessing and reassessing company policies, common practices, issues related to customer care, and the value of the actual product.

Even more important than gathering all of these metrics is to understand and know how to react to the customer’s experience with your brand and the customer’s perception about whether your brand is meeting its promises. All companies, whether online, offline, big or small, still rely on people—customers—for success. If the answers to these questions are “no”, all the advertising, repackaging and rebranding you can afford will make about as much difference as putting a band-aid on a shark bite.

Some of the biggest names in retail will soon begin sharing ideas via the Client Exchange, a one-of-a-kind complimentary educational program offered by ICC/Decision Services.

“We’re always looking for new ways to serve our clients, and this will increase their respective bottom lines and improve the experiences of their customers,” said David Rich, president of ICC/Decision Services. “We’re excited to keep pushing the envelope of what’s expected, and anticipate great things for our clients from this program.”

ICC/Decision Services offers the program exclusively to its well-known clients. The Client Exchange is a forum for sharing best practices related to customer experience management and learning from others. It features:
• Regular Webinars for sharing best practices.
• Conference calls in which clients can reach out to others to find solutions to their toughest challenges or just listen in on new ideas.
• The Mystery Shopping Matters blog, currently available at mysteryshoppingmatters.com, in which clients can read and comment on new ideas from ICC/Decision Services.
• An annual one-day user conference in New York City allowing clients to come together and spend time perfecting their customer experience by learning from other clients.

With retailers finding it increasingly demanding to compete globally and nationally, the client Exchange is just one more avenue through which companies who are usually competitors can learn about each other’s best practices, implement innovative strategies, and contribute to the retail community in a brand new way.

Every interaction with the customer is one more step towards strengthening your brand. Whether you sell ice cream cones or treat patients in a trauma center, each of these people is purchasing goods and services from your organization, and each step towards excellence in customer experience is another opportunity for brand strengthening.

Overall, there are three truisms about customers:
1) They don’t care about your problems.
2) They don’t understand ‘quality’.
3) They expect a controlled customer experience

Let’s look briefly at each of these points:

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Some time ago, I watched the movie Girl With a Pearl Earring, based very loosely upon a moment in time in the life of famous Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer. Set in the 16th century, Vermeer could not run down to the local art supply house to purchase his paints. Instead, he bought the necessary raw materials and made his own paints, a laborious and messy job. But no matter how hard he tried, it seemed that Vermeer, like many tortured artists, never had the time he wished for to create the ‘perfect’ painting and, even when he declared his painting finished, different people interpreted his painting in different ways. What one patron viewed as obscene, another saw as his best work yet.

This movie made me think about the art of customer satisfaction, specifically customer satisfaction surveys. For most companies, there’s never enough money to create the perfect ‘customer picture’, there is no specific deadline, and the final data is widely open to interpretation. Not to mention that the results can be skewed based on the population segment surveyed and their subjective opinions. If Vermeer took his painting to the town square, ten people would no doubt offer ten different opinions. The same is true for your customer survey. (According to the Forrester Consumer Technographics Retail Study of March 2006, those over 55 are more likely to report on negative experiences, while those 18-34 focus on good experiences.)

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