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Have you ever had just one bad experience with a brand that has then completely tainted your view of them? It’s interesting how one bad experience can out-shadow many good experiences. You need to rigorously ensure every single interaction customers have with your business best represents your brand.

TRANSCRIPT – BRANDING BEFORE BREAKFAST EP83

Have you ever had one bad experience with a brand that’s completely changed your view of the brand? It’s interesting how one bad experience can out-shadow how you feel about that brand. Human beings seem to remember the bad for some reason.

So recently, I bought a lamp from a really great prestigious furniture company. Now my perception and my experience of the brand to date was excellent. They do beautiful furniture, their website is fantastic. Not only does it have great storytelling, but the UX and the overall user experience is great on the website all the way through to purchase. The problem for me came with the shipping. So this company outsources their shipping to a third party supplier, which is pretty normal practice, it’s pretty standard. But what they haven’t done is really scrutinise that shipping company to make sure that its customer experience values are aligned to their own. So I had the worst experience. The shipping company sent me a text message the day before that the lamp was supposed to arrive to say, letting you know that it was coming, but they didn’t give me any kind of time frame. So 20 minutes of that day I walked outside to get a coffee and apparently they tried to deliver the lamp in that 20 minutes. But I didn’t know because they didn’t leave any kind of calling card.

So the next day, the following day, when the lamp didn’t arrive, I followed up to try to find out what had happened. And I couldn’t speak to anyone. All I could do was speak to a bot. I didn’t get anywhere. Finally, about a week later, they sent me an email saying that, “sorry, you weren’t home so the product got delivered back to the furniture company.” And so, then I had to follow up with the furniture company, and then I had to start the whole process again. I actually still don’t have the lamp.

So that one experience was terrible for me. And now I feel so differently about this furniture company. So the point here is that you have to be rigorous in making sure every single touch point with your brand has a very good customer experience, or an experience that represents your brand effectively. That’s it for me. Time for brekkie.

Written by: Emma Scott
Published: August 17, 2021