They’re looking for someone who gets them.

Get to know what’s important to them. Almost universally (90%), customers agree that the companies delivering the best service products and experiences are the ones “who truly understand my needs.” (Service Marketing Brand Vulnerability Study, Mullen, 2009.) It’s not about “customer-centricity” lip service either – your best customers will see right through that – it’s about adopting truly customer-centric behavior.

You are not boring if you keep the basics covered. Don’t lose sight of the basics that probably made your business great from the start – like making it easy for customers to choose you and stay with you. According to our Brand Vulnerability Study, 89% of consumers agree that “the best service providers make it easy to do business with them,” and they operate with a keen understanding that “consistency is the name of the game.”

Define your stand out qualities, and you will be noticed. With more than 50% of consumers saying “most service providers’ products are the same,” it’s never been more important to define what sets you apart from the competition (Service Marketing Brand Vulnerability Study, Mullen, 2009). And don’t be shy about communicating that point of difference.

The virtual “you” should match the real “you.” When it comes to marketing, few things are more rewarded than the truth and more punished than inflated claims and over-promises. 83% of customers surveyed said one of their greatest disappointments with service providers is having their expectations raised based on the provider’s advertising or website only to be let down by the actual experience (Service Marketing Brand Vulnerability Study, Mullen, 2009). “It is futile for marketing to do an excellent job if they are, for example, to be let down by the customer service team, billing system or an executive who drags the brand through the gossip columns of the newspapers,” said Joe Stanhope, Vice President, Alterian, crm2day.com. So make sure your core marketing messages accurately portray your company and what you have to offer consumers.

Breaking up has gotten easier to do. More than half of consumers surveyed feel that service providers simply do not value them as customers. Our research indicates that increasingly, consumers are willing to breakup with a current service provider unless they see a real indication of change in that provider’s attitude and behavior. Some consumers are even working with their provider to find a compromise. “What I have learned is that these companies are really receptive to working with me to keep me as a customer,” said Alan Weinkrantz on ABCnews.com. Perhaps your customer’s personal ad really reads: “looking for someone who gets and values me.”

We put together a micro-site with more detail on how service brands can attract and retain their best customers. My colleague Taylor Bryant, Chief Strategy Officer, at Mullen, is also a great resource on this subject.

intangibility makes marketing service brands especially difficult

When it comes to building and maintaining a strong and distinctive brand in any category, the marketing terrain has never been more challenging. Arguably, the challenge is even more daunting for service brands. In part this reflects the power of today’s better-connected, highly empowered consumer to use digital word of mouth to spread the news about a bad experience with a service business, in an instant.

But the steeper climb for service brands also results from a unique and interesting set of characteristics and challenges that they share:

• Intangibility – relative to products that we can hold, use, and consume, people find it far more challenging to attach meaning to an intangible service offering, such as a checking account, an internet connection or life insurance. This makes defining a relevant and graspable brand promise all the more difficult, yet all the more essential. The goal for most service marketers: make sure the brand promise can be expressed in terms – verbally and visually – that make the service feel real – if not tangible. Sun Trust is a good example of a financial services company that has tackled this challenge by demonstrating what life on “solid financial ground” looks and feels like throughout their marketing communications initiatives.
• Commoditization – sustainable points of difference based on unique benefits are especially rare in service categories. With today’s technological advances, competitors can copy a service offering in just weeks.  Meaningful points of difference that do exist tend to perish quickly, which reinforces parity perceptions in most service categories. One consideration to combat this commoditization: use relevance itself as a differentiator. Service brands that are hyper-vigilant about doing the things – big and small – that keep their services relevant to their best customers, often manage to rise above the commodity label. American Express has been steadfast in its commitment to understanding what’s most relevant to its card members at any given time, and then delivering on it with laser like focus.
• Complexity – to battle the commodity problem, service brands often seek to differentiate themselves by adding complexity and nuance to their core offering. Yet often times the added layers result in a service offering that goes beyond the consumer’s personal expertise and comprehension and they simply cannot see or appreciate the added value. Services marketers must put themselves in their target’s shoes when constructing multi-level or multi-dimensional offerings to avoid running the risk of over-engineering the service and under-delivering on ROI.
• Inconsistency – a service brand is by definition an “experience-based” brand which illuminates what may be the key challenge:  there is almost no way to replicate the exact same experience each time for each customer. A detailed description of the desired brand experience at each touch point is a must, but still it can’t eliminate human inconsistency. An added defense is to ensure that you have an extraordinarily consistent brand story leading up to and coming out of the experience. Hotels such as Four Seasons and the W often have been envied for their ability to “script” the desired brand experience — then stick to the script flawlessly.
• Real-Time – thousands of times a day service brands face moments of truth – real time consumer interactions that are opportunities to strengthen the brand by exceeding expectations or weaken it by under-delivering. Which is why service brands must look at their brand-building resources and efforts through the lens of “real-time brand-building” moments. To be true brand ambassadors, front line employees must be able to not only articulate the brand promise, but be able to translate it to the “brand-right behavior” in their day-to-day, moment-to-moment customer interactions.

Each of these challenges weighs a bit differently on any given brand. Conducting a thorough assessment to clearly define and understand which of these challenges most impacts your brand and business is at least half the battle. It will make the task of building actionable strategies all the more manageable and set the table for a more successful outcome.

Women's High Service Demands

To fuel the female-centric creative that we’re developing for our clients, Mullen’s Frank About Women took a current pulse on how women are feeling about customer service and service brands. We fielded a national consumer study covering a wide spectrum of service-based categories, and our findings reinforce just how tenuous the relationship is between women and service brands today.

In this economic climate, women know they wield scarce buying power — and they’re not afraid to use that leverage. It’s more challenging than ever to foster loyalty, especially when women have so many choices.

The Male/Female Dynamic:

We asked both men and women about their service product expectations in 29 different categories from telecommunications to travel and health providers to financial services. Not surprisingly, we found that women continue to be far more likely than men to expect good service — sometimes beating men’s expectations by a 15+ point margin.

Interesting too, is that women are far more likely than men to say that there are major differences in service quality between companies. For example, 59% of women say there are major differences between different hotel chains, as compared to 47% of men; 41% of women recognize major differences between credit card companies versus 32% of men. The same gap exists in categories like pharmacies, phone services and many others. Service marketers take note — women notice everything.

Another important difference between the sexes: As the Chief Purchasing Officer of most households, the majority of women immediately took bold steps when the economic crisis hit and edited out nonessential services — while men were more likely to wait it out, saying they were considering cutting back their use of services. Even scarier to marketers is that the women in our study indicated they are considering cutting back even more.

Which Categories Have Women Seeing Red?

So who’s got them really steamed? Credit card companies, medical insurance/HMOs, airlines and cable providers share the dubious honor of making women downright angry (not a feeling anyone wants associated with their brand).

You know what they say, “hell hath no fury like a woman scorned!” But what about a few thousand or a few million women scorned? Women not only have spend-power, they wield friend-power. One snarky Facebook status or testy Tweet in response to a disappointing service experience can reach thousands of women and men and then what? Today, an apology may not be enough. The possible silver lining — women’s expectations for good service are so low in certain categories that there is plenty of opportunity to wow women … if you try a new approach.

Another Frank About Women finding:

• Women expect the highest level of service from hotels, insurance companies, pharmacies, hospitals, banks, utilities, ISPs and grocery stores.

Smart service marketers should be asking themselves these questions:

• How can we defy expectations and set new standards for service in our category?
• What strategies are we employing to ensure our consumers know they’re valued in this economy?
• What are we doing to solicit consumer feedback and use it to affect our business in real time?
• Are we actively following the social chatter about our service?
• What are we doing to become a part of that conversation?

Even if your target isn’t solely women – what could you learn from looking at women’s attitudes and behaviors to make your brand’s service experience better for men and women? Listening closely to female consumers can help a company or brand design an experience that appeals to all.

• What’s your plan for branding from the inside out? Are your employees steeped in the brand? They better be, because the strongest service brands today are built on an employee base that can consistently articulate the brand’s promise and values.  If that’s not the case, ask how your company can do a more effective job of engaging, activating and instilling pride in your employees.  By developing a unique online photo mosaic of employees that recognized their contributions and connected their work values to the brand’s core values,  CSC made huge strides in galvanizing it’s global workforce.

• Have you moved from a marketing in isolation to a multi-functional marketing mentality? When your best customers’ “enterprise-wide experience” is so central to business success, it’s all the more critical to realize that the entire company – across all functions – is on the marketing team. Have you taken down the internal walls and invited your HR and IT folks onto your brand management team?

• Have you scripted the desired brand experience at all points of contact? It’s one thing for employees to be able to articulate the brand promise it’s another thing for them to bring it to life consistently. Your brand “lives” (or not) with each customer at each touch point, everyday. Scripting the experience is key to brand consistency and can help transform a negative service experience into positive long-term outcome.

• Are you effectively pre-selling the desired brand experience? Given the inherent inconsistencies of delivering the desired experience, are you appropriately managing customer expectations as to what the experience can and should be? Are those same expectations being used to motivate your employees? Managing both sides of the expectations and experience equation is key to narrowing the gap between the perception and reality of your brand experience.

• Are you listening to and appropriately participating in your brand’s online conversation? The exploding social marketing landscape enables your customers (past, present and future) to have an influential voice on what your brand is or isn’t and whether your brand can be trusted or not to live up to its promises. Leveraging new communication channels to both listen to and engage in a proactive brand-building dialog is no longer optional. And the real-time earning, restoring and protecting of “brand trust” is increasingly essential for on-going service marketing success. Say what you want about Starbucks
  

  Are you actively participating in online conversations about your brand?

  challenges of the past two years, they have done a tremendous job of listening to and appropriately participating in the online discussions about their brand.

Now more than ever, service brands and businesses are being confronted by heightened customer expectations and frustrations, new customer empowering technologies, fragile customer loyalties and unexpected competitive offerings. Asking the right questions now just might be the difference between future success versus failure.