Chapters 4 through 9 explored six strategies to align your experience with your brand strategy and Chapter 10 examined several emerging trends that you should be thinking of when defining your future brand experience. The natural question to ask now is, “Where should I begin?” It can be a bit overwhelming to consider the complexity of your enterprise brand strategy, the equal complexity of the markets within which your brand operates, and finally the alignment of both of them with the initiatives that will generate the best impact and return in both the short and the long term. Most often, the best place to begin is with an assessment. I often tell my clients that the approach to assessments is a series of threes.

THREE APPROACHES TO ASSESSMENTS

There is always a reason to evaluate your experiences and look for opportunities to improve.

I've worked with a lot of organizations, and depending on their focus and needs, the practical approaches to assessments generally fall into three broad categories. All three of these approaches are valid and accretive to engagement and financial metrics.

I have worked with brands in multiple industries that were seeing a clear and measured negative result in a particular business, geography, customer segment, or channel, and the initial focus of the assessment is on the combination of experience touchpoints that service the area in decline. A negative result doesn't necessarily mean negative growth or high rates of defection – it could be an increase in call‐handling costs in the call center, a reduction in visit rates to the primary website, or an announcement by a competitor that they are introducing a new experience strategy that is gaining positive attention in the market. Regardless, if there's an acute need, there are obvious gains in focusing on that area and building the foundation of an experience modernization strategy around improving that individual performance metric.

Additionally, I have worked with more proactive enterprises that recognize that they need to keep a continuous finger on the pulse of the effectiveness and relevance of their experiences across channels, and they need to make a broader assessment to find the acute need. This type of broader market scan can be completed quite efficiently and can quickly lead to a roadmap of initiatives that can be implemented in successive order, with clear measurements of success defined to keep the team grounded to quantifiable goals.

Finally, I've worked with truly visionary enterprises that leverage the experience assessment to identify opportunities to differentiate their brand through new, novel, innovative, time‐saving experiences, engaging with their customers at a deeper level at every stage of the customer journey, separating themselves from their competitors. The example brands outlined in this book all fall into this category, which is why their stories, and the lessons gleaned from them, are so compelling.

THREE PREREQUISITES FOR ASSESSMENTS

Before you start with your assessment, there are three prerequisites that must be in place.

First and foremost, ensure that you have your latest identity guidelines for your brand, both to understand the brand strategy and the brand tone and messaging. This will allow you to effectively map your experiences to your overall brand voice. Sit down with the brand strategy team to thoroughly understand the proposition, voice, and personality of the brand.

Second you need a market analysis of your customers and prospective customers. If a relatively recent market segmentation study, identifying the motivations, needs and emotional triggers of detailed personas within segments, isn't available, this needs to be completed. This can be wide ranging or very specific, depending on the question that you're trying to solve. but for the initial stages of an assessment, specific is usually better than general, because the effort increases and the level of granularity decreases as you broaden the scope. If you don't have the time or budget to complete a full investment, there are agencies and analyst groups that can rapidly compile general insights of target markets, but if possible, a rapid survey and associated analysis is incredibly valuable, as understanding your market and the triggers that drive market behavior is key to any experience effort. Without this, you are relying on your instincts and, effectively, shooting into the dark with your planned improvements.

Finally, you need an understanding of the customer journey – the primary path that a customer takes through awareness, education and investigation, transaction, servicing, and loyalty. This is often referred to as the happy path, and it's highly probable that it already exists somewhere in the organization. If not, it can be built quickly. There may be some discussion of deviations from the happy path that are germane to the assessment itself, and it's possible that there are multiple happy paths to consider as the journey is evaluated across channels. However, most important is to build a foundational understanding, as it will ground much of the decisioning and analysis. As I often advise my clients, don't let perfect be the enemy of good. A general view of the journey will be sufficient for your initial assessment, and the journey itself can be continuously updated as you complete the initial assessment and, further, as you begin adjusting elements of the experience.

THREE AREAS OF ASSESSMENTS

With the three prerequisites from the previous section in hand, the assessment should address three specific areas.

For the first area of assessment, evaluate whether the channels, and the touchpoints within each channel, are properly expressing your brand. This is often done through a process known as an outside‐in or top‐down heuristic or, alternatively, as an experience teardown. Different agencies and consultancies will have their own vocabulary, but the process and the objectives are the same. This is a bit of a manual approach; user experience specialists from your team, or a digital agency partner, emulate your customer's experience by following the happy path from initial engagement through commitment and through to loyalty. They'll test multiple iterations of the happy path, for, as we discussed at length throughout this book, there are multiple paths of discovery and awareness. Exploring initial awareness paths set the context for the overall brand tone of the experience. These paths will likely land in different points across the physical and digital experience, so this process needs to be iterated several times to gain a complete understanding. For brands with a physical experience, running a secret shopper process, a silent observer process, or a series of interviews – ideally of both employees and customers – at key locations will provide the insight needed.

Beyond this direct evaluation of the experience, it's also valuable to scan social and web channels to complete a sentiment analysis of the brand. This is often done using digital listening tools that identify relevant web and social media posts, capturing and algorithmically evaluating the sentiment being expressed. As with any machine learning technology, the automated evaluation is not perfect or fully accurate, but it rapidly accelerates what would otherwise by a painfully manual process. There are many tools available in the marketplace offering this functionality and while I have my personal favorites, I'll abstain from providing recommendations here. I would work with your digital agency or consulting partner to select a tool that works best for your brand's needs.

It's also possible to leverage standard sentiment metrics such as net promoter score (NPS) or customer satisfaction (CSAT) to gain greater insight into perception of the brand, but these are broader measurements of brand loyalty and product satisfaction, and not specific to the brand voice, tone, and alignment to brand strategy. I would remain limited in the use of these measurement methodologies for this specific evaluation.

This exercise may sound extensive, but with an experienced set of practitioners, it can be completed over a span of weeks, drawing significant insights, and a prioritized roadmap of improvements, in a relatively short period of time.

The second area of assessment is the effectiveness of your experiences in meeting your customer's needs and expectations. This can and should be completed partially through the same heuristic process described earlier, but the evaluation is focused on completely different elements of the experience. Working methodically through the personas defined in the market assessment, the user experience specialist will assess not only whether the experience meets the specific need, but how effectively and clearly the need is met. Metrics such as click paths, page load speed, navigation efficiency, and interface layout will influence this assessment. Content and visualizations will be evaluated against known emotional triggers, in both the physical and digital environments. The same sentiment analysis tools and in‐store interviews will provide real‐time perspective on whether the expectations and needs are being met.

Adding to this, the team should complete a comprehensive review of analytics across digital channels, evaluating where visitors are engaging, the volume of engagement, and then the progressive metrics through the journey. With the imminent “death of the cookie,” which will eliminate the cross‐page tracking, and the asynchronous nature of customer engagement today – they may engage with the website, disengage, run a search, engage with another page, disengage, download the mobile app, link out to a social post, and ultimately end up in a physical location – running metrics to define a specific customer journey is becoming impossible, but engagement spikes and degradations will provide insight into what's working and what's not working. Again, this evaluation collectively will lead to a prioritized roadmap of initiatives, which can be reconciled together with the brand voice roadmap to create a prioritized set of initiatives and improvements.

Finally, the third area of assessment should measure the effectiveness of your brand experience in progressing your customer through their journey. The granularity, and overall accuracy, of this assessment will vary depending on the depth of data that you currently collect on prospective and existing customers and the depth of activity data across physical and digital channels. Most enterprise digital experiences have basic metrics that track the number of unique visits, unique opens, and unique source paths. Transactions can be measured both online and in store to measure trending, and then, when appropriate, recurrence and share of wallet growth of existing customers can be measured through the loyalty program. The objective is to find notable drop‐offs at stages of the journey, which will lead to additional prioritizations on the roadmap.

AGILE EXPERIENCE INNOVATION

Once the roadmap is finished, the next action is to establish a set of Agile‐based operating teams to address the documented actions. These teams should focus on both experience improvement and development – new experience innovation – and experience operations across the funnel.

The former focuses on the continuous improvement and modernization of every touchpoint, both physical and digital, taking in inputs from customers, from employees, from automated listening channels, and from the data itself. The roadmap should be converted into a backlog of initiatives, which are then broken down into tasks and rapid, iterative releases. Based on the market response, this backlog will continue to evolve, and priorities will change. Essentially, the market response will guide the prioritization and release schedule, and the innovation engine will be sparked.

The latter focuses on proactive communications to the market, both to prospective and existing customers. With an unprecedented range of channels available for communication, including physical, e‐mail, social, notification, streaming services, and others, the opportunity to progress a proactive discussion with customers across the funnel has never been richer, and it requires a test‐and‐learn, Agile‐based approach to determine what the best method of communication is by segment and by persona. Again, as discussed earlier, the response data will help direct the initiatives and the approach will continuously evolve with the market need.

For those not familiar with Agile methodologies, the fundamental tenets include working to create a minimum viable product, or MVP, and testing that product in the market, collecting real‐time feedback through direct communication and through analytics and responding to that market response to continuously refine the solution. Agile teams work in close collaboration with continuous communication, meeting daily in a stand‐up where they review the progress from the previous day and the tasks for the current day. Critical decisions are made within the team guided by the input of a product owner, who has ultimate accountability for the business requirements of the solution being developed, and, depending on whether the team is following Scrum or Kanban, there are different methodologies for managing the tasks and overall scope of the project.

That's a very quick and high‐level description of Agile methodologies, and if this is not an approach that your organization actively employs, I would strongly encourage your team to engage with an Agile coach who can help structure team roles and train the team on the ceremonies and processes that define the methodology. Agencies, consultancies, and direct‐hire experts can bring this insight and understanding to your teams. It can take time to grow comfortable with the approach, but the benefit of Agile is that it's designed for speed and efficiency, prioritizing market testing over internal design and iterative development over full solution development. For experience improvements, this is a natural fit, as the Agile approach encourages innovation and creative exploration while it, equally, allows the organization to roll back changes that don't have the desired brand impact.

Depending on your organization's operating structure and culture, this may be a common approach, or it may be a dramatic shift in thinking. Fortunately, for those organizations that are not naturally inclined to adopt Agile principles, there are several hybrid models that can provide some of the benefits of the methodology. Adopting as much of Agile principles as the organization allows will improve returns for certain, so I encourage you to help your organization stretch themselves as much as possible.

The key is to recognize that your brand experience can never be static, as the moment you stop evolving your experiences, your brand starts descending into antiquity and irrelevance. Your market and your customer will continuously evolve, and the approaches and technology that they use to engage with you will continue to improve. The pace of change that we experienced during the digital transformation age will likely feel slow in comparison with what is coming in this newly emerging post‐digital transformation age, and those brands that continue to evolve their experiences in response to the market, while remaining true to the brand's purpose, vision, and voice, will emerge from this era stronger than ever. With that, good luck, and I look forward to engaging with your brand in whatever environment the market takes us over the next several years!