Only 14% of the unique benefits we tested achieve both relevance and consistent delivery.
Building loyalty with your customer experience is simple: identify a benefit your company provides that differs from that provided by the competition and deliver. Sounds easy enough. So why do B2B marketers get this right only 14% of the time?
Let’s assume we’re beyond the “innovative reliable partner” language and have identified a benefit that our company can claim is 100% unique. The next questions to ask become: 1) do customers care about the unique benefit? and 2) do we actually deliver on the promise of the benefit?
With regard to the first question, imagine UPS claimed “our trucks are brown” as their unique benefit. According to our definition, they’d be absolutely unique. Nobody has browner trucks than UPS – but does that matter to the experience? Probably not.
We recently surveyed tens of thousands of our B2B members’ customers to gauge how customer experience impacts preference and repurchase intentions. Surprisingly, only 57% of the unique benefits tested actually drove customer preference. While it’s unlikely we would ever get to 100%, I can’t imagine anybody deliberately throwing resources after an experience benefit that has little or no bearing on driving loyalty.
Even when we’re on a unique benefit that can be powerful, we’re not necessarily out of the woods. We need to make sure our customers actually experience that benefit. Our survey also looked at how consistently customers thought a company delivered on the benefit they claimed. Turns out, customers believed the company did a pretty good job on delivery 33% of the time. You might think 33% isn’t too bad (that’s customers scoring us at a 6 or 7 on a 7-point scale), but some of that 33% include benefits that aren’t relevant – (i.e., benefits that fall into the “brown trucks” category).
To get unique benefits to pay off, we need to solve for both relevance and delivery, and this happens only 14% of the time. But the picture needn’t be too bleak. We found that 43% of the benefits have the potential to drive preference – we just have to correct our delivery of them.
I’ll spend the next few posts delving into more detail about how we can make sure that the benefits that define our customer experience strategy are both relevant and consistently delivered.
on 3 December 09
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I think the term ‘Unique Benefits’ might be mis-leading. As the research shows, many companies fail when it comes to actually delivering the benefit, whatever it may be. Our learning has shown that the benefit may not be necessarily unique (or totally different from that being offered by competition) but what makes the difference is consistent and high quality execution of your basics. I think the key is to get your basics executed really well.
on 7 December 09
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@Gulam Razzak
We’re definitely on the same page here. We found that benefits fall into one of two categories: some are “common”, or, the types of benefits you’d want out of any commercial relationship regardless of industry. Here we include things like reliability, trustworthiness, or adapting to meet specific customer needs. To your point, excellent execution of these “basics” is critical for getting a customer to consider a company in the first place. But when we looked at companies with the highest levels of loyalty, they weren’t stopping at the basics … they ALSO provided a benefit that was distinct to their specific company. This is where “unique benefits” come into play. Highly preferred companies focus on delivering one or two benefits that the competition isn’t going after while performing strongly on a few common benefits as well. Check out my earlier post on this here: http://mlcwideangle.exbdblogs.com/2009/11/03/deliver-unique-benefits-and-customers-will-follow/