By: Christien van de Sande

Chris Brogan, president of New Marketing Labs and author of Trust Agents: “At New Marketing Labs, we work with leading (and up-and-coming) brands to develop digital strategies and implement marketing campaigns that meet – and are measured against – quantifiable business objectives. We’ve learned one key fact about social media: Without analytics, you’re just shouting in the dark.” We talked with Brogan about Customer Experience.

Customer experience
Crhis Brogan: “Customer experience is what Disney developed with their Moment of Truth. It’s that any time a customer comes in contact with any element of the business, and receives an impression, good or bad. Does the service around the product give you the same feeling that you hope to have straight through the experience?”

Europe vs USA
“When I have a good customer experience in the States, it often seems to have elements of relationship building such that the rapport. It’s important that we have a rapport and we feel connected. And that the sales process is easy and has relationship elements in it. My experiences are a lot less in Europe. It feels a little cooler, emotions‑based. As Americans, there’s much more expectation and so the delivery has to meet an unrealistic expectation. When we bring that expectation to another country, it’s a lot more realistic, what the transaction will be like.”

Build a relationship
“Most businesses have the opportunity for a relationship, but a lot of them choose to have a transaction‑based measurement system, a transaction‑based delivery system and a tranaction‑based mindset about how many customers they really have. The data that’s inside of any organization should be enough to pull who are the relationships we’d like to foster. But we have to spend a lot of attention and focus on the customers who are givin the best business and the longest‑term business and who seem to feel that there’s a relationship with the goals.”

Be there before the sale
“With social media, there’s the opportunity not just to meet your friends from university but to meet local businesses and understand them and get to know the person behind the business. We call it ‘be there before the sale’. Julien Smith and I wrote a book called ‘Trust Agents’. In the book we said that if we have a relationship before the sale, we buy from people we like. Our emotions drive a lot of our experiences. We like not to feel like a number. Any sales experience that happens and then subsequent customer experience and service where we feel connected. And where we feel like we’re seen or there’s loyalty on both sides, we respond.”

This interview was held in April 2010 during SOBcon in Chicago. This year’ SOBcon starts April 29th, 2011. And -of course- we will be there!