Consumer expectations are constantly being reset. And, with digital technologies and new data-driven value propositions disrupting markets seemingly on a daily basis, it can be hard to determine what is working for successful businesses today. But, when we take a hard look at what is helping companies achieve sustainable growth, we see one common characteristic: a focus on delivering a better customer experience.

“Companies that offer exceptional customer experiences are the fastest-growing, healthiest businesses.”

Prophet’s Brand Relevance Index^TM (BRI) confirms that companies that offer exceptional customer experiences are the fastest-growing, healthiest businesses. People don’t just admire these high-experience brands; they find them indispensable in their lives. And they are drawn to these companies not for the promises they make, but for the experiences they create.

Customer Experience Drives Relevance

Improving your existing customer experience and creating new, engaging ways to interact with customers should be your number one priority. And while there are countless ways to enrich an experience, we’ve found the changes that make the most impact can be categorized in two simple ways:

1. Make It Easy

Make using your product or service easy by streamlining the experience with simple processes, fewer steps and clear functionality. Changes should be intuitive and promote seamlessness and speed. Amazon, one of the most highly ranked brands in our BRI, is perhaps the best example, churning out ordering, payment and device innovations that have redefined what it means to shop.

2. Make It More Engaging

Enhance your connection with customers by adding new moments, personalization and content. Richer experiences intensify the relationship between people and products, and new ideas encourage discovery, loyalty and even advocacy. Netflix, another highly relevant brand from our Brand Relevance Index, achieves its off-the-chart levels of engagement with its exclusive, binge-worthy programming.

Doing at least one of these–and preferably some aspects of both–demonstrates that you understand what truly matters in people’s busy lives and that you’re able to provide products and services that keep pace as their needs and interests change.

Beyond Insights to Understanding

To create customer experiences that fuel growth, it’s important to have a holistic vision, one that helps you understand what matters in peoples’ lives beyond just their path to purchase. Creating a great customer experience is not just about removing the pain points along the customer journey (though that matters too!).

Rather, it is about seeing the big picture of what is important to consumers in their daily lives: how they interact with other people (and other brands), use technology, and spend their time, money and attention beyond their interactions with your product or service.

While what happens at any given touchpoint with your brand matters, a bigger picture emerges from a combination of those encounters:

• Where are your consumers coming from?
• What they are trying to accomplish?
• What is really interesting to them?

Awareness and understanding of this context should shape the interactions consumers have with your products, services, people or messages, which in turn will shape perceptions and feelings about your brand–it allows you to form a relationship with the customer beyond the transaction.

The right research can help uncover what is most valuable to customers–in their daily lives and in their experience with you. New tools, such as social media mining, purchase history data, and search, web and mobile analytics, allow you to get beyond surveys and ethnographies in order to see what is really driving consumer behavior.

Armed with this deeper understanding of the customer, businesses can start looking for ways to do more than make incremental improvements to the customer experience. There is an opportunity to transform the experience, creating a greater business–and brand–impact.

Transformational Customer Experiences

Our engagements with hundreds of companies have taught us what is important when creating the kinds of experiences that establish relevance and drive business growth. How you address these key considerations, however, is constantly evolving as new competitors, technologies and techniques emerge.

5 Questions to Consider About Your Customer Experiences

It is important to ask these five key questions as you evaluate existing customer experiences or contemplate creating new, more engaging ones:

1. Are we bringing rigor to our customer experience? Ideas should be grounded in consumer insights and business realities, and ensure improvements are linked to the business metrics that matter most.
2. Does the experience show empathy for customers? This requires looking past what is happening in the moment. It goes beyond the path to purchase, technology and pain points to see the human side of the customer experience, both for customers and employees. Great experiences are the enabler of great relationships.
3. Does it take into account the role brand plays in shaping the customer experience and vice versa? In this age of technological disruption, brands are now built by the experiences they create. It’s a virtuous cycle: As brand characteristics inform the experiences, experiences increasingly define the brand.
4. Do your innovations surprise and delight? The currency of keeping customers engaged in an experience is keeping it new. But newness alone is not enough—changes also have to be useful in order to build relevance.
5. Does it leverage tech-enabled intelligence? We believe the best experiences are not static solutions but something that are living and dynamic. This is why we help companies embrace the power of AI, advanced analytics, and big data to build experiences that are more contextual, adaptive, and personalized — to powerfully engage customers, again and again.

Operationalizing these dimensions will help you create brand experiences that matter. Interactions that are easier, more responsive, richer and more personalized drive relevance and sustainable growth.

Is Your Organization Ready?

An ambition to create great customer experiences will be unfulfilled if your organization is not prepared to develop and deliver them. And beyond technological readiness, what is needed is a customer experience strategy that pulls in operational expertise and customer insights from different parts of an organization that are often forgotten and not connected or coordinated in how they interact with customers, the market or each other.

My colleague, Charlene Li, Principal Analyst at our research company, Altimeter has just published a research report on the topic of “A Next Generation Customer Experience Strategy” for “next generation customers.” In it she describes the necessary inputs for developing compelling experiences that drive deep relationships with customers and the required organizational involvement from across the enterprise. She has also developed a maturity model that companies can use to assess their organizational readiness for adopting a more customer experience-centric approach to their business.

Nothing energizes sports fans like a brand-new stadium and behind-the-scenes access. So who better for Prophet to partner with to talk about customer experience than the Atlanta Braves, who made enriching the fan experience the focal point of their newly opened SunTrust Park?

A few weeks ago Prophet hosted approximately 40 clients and guests from companies like Coca-Cola, Equifax, UPS and Yahoo at SunTrust Park. Starting out in the expansive Hank Aaron Terrace, we took in a spectacular view of the ballpark from left field. Then we toured the dugout, clubhouse and even the ritzy Delta SKY360 Club, with behind-home-plate seating that offers the best game views in the Major Leagues.

Put the Fan Experience First

The $622 million park made a great spot to talk about what Prophet calls “next-generation customer experience,” especially as it’s lived by the Atlanta Braves staff. As the organization has been preparing for the move from Turner Field to the new park over the last four years, its also been rethinking what it wants a baseball game to mean to fans, adding exciting new elements to its rich game traditions.

This guests-first approach grew out of research that 40 percent more people in the Atlanta area rate the fan experience at a Braves’ game as ‘friendly,’ compared to other Atlanta sporting events, says Greg Mize, the Braves’ director of digital marketing, and Chandler Faccento, the guest services manager.

Enhance the Fan Experience with New Technology

People also rate the Braves as better value and more innovative. So the team is working to strengthen this notion with helpful new apps, such as a partnership with Waze and Uber that provides up-to-the-minute traffic and parking info and helps shuttle fans from parking to seats.

And it has also created a new, proprietary app called “Remedy,” which enhances the fan experience and provides guests with better customer service during games. In past years, the Braves would only hear about guest complaints at the ballpark in the days and weeks after an incident occurred. Now with Remedy, fans can report issues via the app in real-time, so the Braves and its guest services department can find a way to help the fan in the moment.

“If someone didn’t have an experience at SunTrust Park that met his or her standards, or our standards, it’s an opportunity for them to raise their hand, and for us, an opportunity to “remedy” the situation,” said Mize.

“If someone didn’t have an experience at SunTrust Park that met his or her standards, or our standards, it’s an opportunity for them to raise their hand, and for us, an opportunity to “remedy” the situation,” said Mize.

These digital connections go a long way toward enriching customer experience and resetting people’s expectations, says Peter Dixon, Prophet’s Chief Creative Officer. “Customer experience is the holistic end-to-end set of interactions–and resulting emotions and perceptions–that customers have with brands,” he says. That includes all the waypoints on the path to purchase, from how people buy tickets and park right down to the best mustard for their hot dogs.

But experience improvements have to extend beyond the obvious. “Brands need to understand what the customer is experiencing in all aspects of their lives and especially in the use of–and engagement with–their products and services,” he says. “This richer view of the customer experience will enable companies to provide greater customer value and drive sales impact.”

5 Critical Traits to Improving the Sports Fan Experience

When trying to improve customer experience, Prophet’s work with some 500 brands has shown that there are five critical traits:

• Discipline: Customer experience won’t improve with hit or miss initiatives, but requires thorough and exhaustive efforts to reach every touch point.
• Empathy: Putting yourself in people’s shoes means thinking about their entire lives, not just the few moments they interact with your brand.
• Relevance: What will make your customers feel like your brand is indispensable?
• Innovation: Brands must be constantly finding new ways to surprise and delight customers.
• Intelligence: Leveraging tech-enabled data throughout the customer experience will make the experience more personal and more valuable.

And while some of these considerations are functional, the underlying emotional components can’t be overlooked.

There is no doubt that Amazon is upending the retail landscape.  The number of retailers filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2017 is headed toward its highest annual tally since the Great Recession. Brands like HHGregg, The Limited, Wet Seal and Gander Mountain have already filed, and Sears recently stated it doesn’t know how much longer it can survive.

Consumers’ love for Amazon is echoed in Prophet’s Brand Relevance Index^TM, which ranks Amazon as No. 2 among more than 300 brands.

But a closer look at our research reveals that many brands are, in effect, making themselves Amazon-proof. They gain relevance by excelling at aspects of retailing that Amazon—for all its pragmatic brilliance—just can’t touch. (At least not yet.)

Sephora, for example, places 10^th overall but moves even higher on our measures of customer obsession. So does Costco (No. 30). And while Etsy is No. 23, it zooms to No. 2 when ranked on the sentiment “makes me feel inspired.” Only Pinterest did better.

These brands are making themselves relevant to consumers in ways Amazon finds difficult since it is still (at the time of print at least!) primarily an online retailer.

5 Strategies to Improve Retail Customer Experience

Here are five lessons retailers—and in fact, many brands—can adapt to protect themselves against the Amazon effect:

1. Create a More Immersive, Engaging Customer Experience

The bliss of Amazon Prime, of course, is getting exactly what you want in a few clicks. But sometimes, people want to spend more time shopping, not less, and brands that understand that are way ahead of competitors. This is where retailers need to up the ante with customer experience.

Women want bras that fit, for instance. Based on that insight, Victoria’s Secret (No. 43) equips all associates with a tape measure, training and plenty of product solutions. Nike (No. 7) hosts weekly run clubs out of its stores, while Lululemon offers in-store yoga classes.

This engagement extends beyond the store, too, with digital technology that makes shopping more meaningful. For example:

• Sephora uses augmented reality to let women experiment with false eyelashes or learn how to use contouring makeup. Lowe’s has created holographic rooms for DIYers to explore layouts, fixtures and colors before they pick up a sledgehammer.
• Nike stores include run analyzers and basketball courts to photograph people in action, using the images to make more specific product recommendations.
• At The North Face (No. 46), IBM Watson’s AI capabilities help customers find the perfect product. Mirroring in-store conversations, Watson can take unstructured text such as “I need a jacket for biking in Chicago winters” and deliver personalized recommendations.

2. Reward the Treasure Hunters

Some shoppers love to think of themselves as treasure hunters, with each trip to a favorite store giving them a chance to “win” by finding something unexpected, beautiful, rare or maybe just a tremendous value.

Knowing how to reward these dedicated hunters is what fuels the success of brands as diverse as Etsy, Costco, Target, eBay and T.J.Maxx. These brands make the chase meaningful by constantly showcasing new merchandise, sharing valuable content about its source and making it clear that it won’t be available forever.

Target is reimagining its store with two entrances, each with a specific guest need in mind. For the guests that want to browse and discover, they’ll be able to enter through one entrance to find displays of exclusive brands and inspiring seasonal moments.

3. Inspire Consumers

The ability to distinctively inspire consumers is one of the four key drivers of relevance, and it is nearly as powerful as pragmatism. Specialty retailers have an innate advantage here because they’re steeped in passion points that no mass brand can match. The smart ones fuel those passions.

Visitors to the North Face stores, for example, get a chance to experience a world-class hiking experience through a virtual reality headset. At L.L.Bean, shoppers can watch speckled and rainbow trout swim in a vast aquarium.

Meaningful content creation also inspires, from the deeply educational (like Lowe’s how-to videos) to advocacy and purpose (such as Patagonia’s messages about protecting the planet). Content creates emotional connections. Retailers can learn from storytellers about building those bonds, and then stay current by delivering them on the best digital platforms: Victoria’s Secret is using 10-second clips to create stories on Snapchat, for example.

4. Shopping is Social, So Make It More Fun

Often, people want to share their shopping experiences with friends and family. A Chicago Nordstrom has added a bar to its menswear department, for example, making it even more fun to linger over that tie selection. Digitally, this works too: Smart mirrors in stores make it easy to send an image from a dressing room to a BFF for a second opinion.

5. Find New Ways to Save Customers’ Time

There’s no denying that the retail industry is undergoing painful contractions, due in large part to the scramble toward omnichannel retailing. Large department stores have spent aggressively to build up their e-commerce sites, and many are doing too little, too late—and they can’t match Amazon’s prices anyway. (While it’s still early, Walmart may be the exception.)

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of ways to save people time and that retailers shouldn’t be trying to aggressively close the gap with Amazon. Besides trying to establish itself in the “order online, pick up in store” grocery space, Walmart is exploring ways to save and enhance time in stores, too. A deli kiosk lets customers select meats and cheeses, choose the quantity either by weight or number of slices and select the thickness preference of each slice. Customers then can continue shopping while deli staff fill the order and place it in a special cooler next to the kiosk where the customer can pick it up.

Will it work? Eventually, we think, it will. “We’ve always been about saving people money,” a Walmart exec recently told investors. “Now we’re about saving people time.”

There is an elephant in the room when it comes to the Internet of Things. There is a critical element inherent to just about any IoT application that hardly ever sees the light of day in industry coverage of the topic. Some would say it’s because it’s just not as sexy, it’s a given, or it falls outside of the IoT deployment purview. But they would be wrong.

The role of content in the Internet of Things cannot be understated. By extension, the role of a culture of content has never been more important. In our report, we define and address the institutional imperative to meet the growing internal and external demand for content by fostering an authentic ‘culture of content;’ one that establishes evangelizes, and streamlines how brands use content to express themselves. As brands in every industry embrace how to better leverage sensors to enhance and streamline customer experience across any connected interface, it is content itself that becomes the ever more critical brand unifier.

From IoT to IoC: The Emergence of “Things” as Content Platforms

The Internet of Things introduces an entirely new ecosystem for content– one that historically has been offline, static, perhaps crinkled up and thrown into the trashcan. In the Internet of Things, content (paid, owned, earned media) and product can converge; that is, when [connected] products serve as dynamic content platforms. Here emerges a new channel, for owned, earned, and paid content activations. Enter the Internet of Content.

Products as content platforms are an extension of ‘mobile’ platform proliferation we have seen across smartphones, tablets, wearables, etc. When our cars, our thermostats, our appliances, our homes are connected, they transcend a life of stagnant hardware and become new vehicles through which brands can convey messages, even services. In fact, as connected product lifecycles transform to become enhanced, smarter, and more personalized over time, the content will increasingly define, even evolve how consumers interface with their products.

“We define and address the institutional imperative to meet the growing internal and external demand for content by fostering an authentic ‘culture of content.’”

A more connected world not only serves content more frequently, even in real-time, but it also generates more demand for content. Consumers themselves generate demand for content by interacting with brand properties/infrastructure such as beacons, kiosks, or a connected mirror in a fitting room, for example. The success of augmented reality applications -– agnostic to the platform -– are contingent upon rapid content accessibility, personalization, and integration with other systems. Additionally, products themselves may create more demand for content through automated algorithms or data-informed services, such as product malfunction notifications, troubleshooting guides, support channel options, or suggestions for upsell.

A Connected Brand Experience Requires a Connected View of Content

Many marketers already view content as the ‘atomic particle’ of all marketing, but the Internet of Things ushers in a new era in which content becomes the atomic particle of just about any brand interaction– sales, service, support, R&D, experience. As the Internet of Things gives products, events, even media itself a voice (i.e. a contextual data stream), content becomes the very glue or connective tissue connecting any brand experience across any platform.

Furthermore, as IoT forces historically separate constituencies to partner, even share data, assets, and experiences, content also serves a nuanced role of continuity in recognition. For example, when a shopper walks into a mall, the beacon-triggered notification they receive on their smartphone could be driven by any number of players– brand, manufacturer, telecom provider, the mall itself or holding company, etc. As each player vies for customer engagement, content serves as the cornerstone of brand recognition regardless of dynamic contextual elements such as location, time, or platform.