Starbucks vs. Dunkin' Donuts: when you translate your bank's brand and strategy into style and action that consistently engage target customers and gain their trust, you are designing a 'customer experience.'.

• Author: Marek, Rebecca
• Position: Customer Experience

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Starbucks and Dunkin' Donuts. Their basic coffees taste a little different; their customer experiences are significantly different--from store lighting to coffee options to food choices to team members' raps with customers--reflecting widely divergent company values, target markets and strategies. Like banks, the companies sell similar core products. Unlike banks, they have designed their customer experiences to appeal to some clearly defined customer segments and not others.

A designed customer experience translates a company's brand and strategy into activities and style that consistently engage target customers and gain their trust so they become loyal and buy more from the companies whose experiences they prefer.

For banks, the path to stronger differentiation, more loyal customers, and higher revenues lies in choosing specific target customer segments, carefully designing and choreographing even the smallest details that produce preferred experiences, rehearsing team members to ensure they perform their roles as designed, and managing the details of the process daily.

A success case

The mass affluent group of a major bank saw an opportunity to invite families holding a portion of their wealth with the bank to consolidate their holdings. The bank decided to offer a basic financial planning service as part of the package. Previous attempts involving pricing, products, and differential service levels had produced no result. They knew through focus group feedback that trust and "feeling involved" would be keys to the credibility of the offer. This time, though, they paid attention to each detail of the sales process, from the moment of first contact, through development of alternative plans to account maintenance. Yes, down even to the smallest details around how customers would be greeted, where they would sit and what customers would be handed to read while they waited for the financial planning adviser. This meticulous attention to detail paid off handsomely as the bank quickly exceeded its targets around numbers of completed financial plans. Fees earned per completed plan were four times initial estimates. Better yet, over the last six years portfolio sizes and fees have grown nicely.

Lessons from the story:

* Strategy. The bank identified a market objective and devised an approach offering a differentiated value proposition to specific target customers.

* Design. The bank crafted an end-to-end sales process. No detail was too small to consider.

* Deployment. The bank created scripts, presentation aids, guidelines about where and how meetings should be arranged, and outlines and other tools to ensure that "all staff "followed the script" to...