Five : Whose brand experience is your customer actually having?

Low texture is by choice, not by design. Imagine for a minute your relationship with your service provider. When you use their services you pick up your handset and connect your call or access your data – but you do it through your handset.

You are not having an STC, Batelco or Du experience. You are having an Apple, Samsung or HTC experience. If it is enjoyable it is because it is working, and you rarely if ever consciously appreciate that.

Most people only consciously think of their service provider when something goes wrong. When you get a big bill, when the line fails, when you are disconnected for non-payment. In other words, the only moments your brand reliably owns are the negative ones. No industry has ever achieved successful telecom branding on a diet of unhappy memories.

This was decided, not inherited
The problem service providers suffer is that they offer a texture-less brand experience with little or no enjoyability by which to forge a deep or lasting connection with consumers.

That is not an inevitable condition of the category and it is not an argument against successful telecom branding. It is a series of decisions, each of them entirely defensible on a spreadsheet and each of them quietly corrosive to the brand. Nobody ever chose to be forgettable. They chose forty separate efficiencies, and forgettable is what those efficiencies added up to. Successful telecom branding is mostly the discipline of noticing that sum before it is finished.

“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology.” — Steve Jobs

Most operators do precisely the reverse. They start with the network, work forwards to the billing system, arrive at the customer somewhere near the end and then wonder why the experience feels like something that happened to them rather than something designed for them.

The one moment loyalty is genuinely up for grabs

Here is the counterintuitive part. One of the best times to build brand loyalty is when something goes wrong.

It seems illogical but it is true. When something goes wrong the consumer is at their most vulnerable, and the service provider who gets it right and invests in fixing the problem surprises and delights the customer, and so creates a special bond. Service recovery is the highest value texture opportunity any operator owns, and almost nobody spends against it. If you fund one thing in the name of successful telecom branding this year, fund that.

Yet so many telco brands fail to deliver on the basics. They are so focused on cost competition that they forget the real focus needs to be on increasing the experiential quality of the few connection points they have.

Instead they funnel their callers through inhuman and infuriating IVR systems, force them to negotiate automated payment machines that seem to have a fundamental disagreement with all forms of bank note, and prime their customer service teams to provide as many disservices as possible.

And do not even get me started on the standard online and retail experiences. Which, as it happens, is exactly where part six is going.

Next in part six: the identity crisis at the heart of regional telecoms, and why the shop you already pay rent on is the most valuable asset you are currently wasting.