Harnessing Cx as a force for brand momentum

Principles for building dynamic Cx capabilities

In the rapidly evolving landscape of modern business, predictability and stability have become relics of the past. The need for dynamic, innovative, and sustainable strategies has never been more pressing. The lifespan of companies, both public and private, has been significantly shortened— necessitating a profound shift in the approach for brand success.

The Liquid x Avasta Challenger Index is a critical tool for understanding how brands navigate and thrive in this dynamic marketplace. It provides readers with a comprehensive view of a brand’s potential, not just a snapshot of its standing at a point in time. 

We see in the index that incumbent brands (trusted leaders who command one of the top three shares in the market) will always tend to lag and decline, driven by the gravitational pull back from their success. The staying power of an incumbent brand is mainly driven by the capabilities they cultivate in an ongoing way with their customers—not how well they can repeat their previous approaches.  

While incumbent brands are often the status quo, challenger brands are driven to disrupt it, working to elevate or change the category they’re in and redefine customer expectations. To do that, they must develop processes to continuously listen to their customers and quickly adapt to deliver on their needs.  

Having a competitive customer experience capability means being connected not only to customers’ needs and pain points, but also to how they imagine the future might be different and better than today. 

3 principles for dynamic and market-leading customer experiences

#1 – Breadth 

Many brands focus on niche markets and specialized verticals. This often presents an obstacle to maintaining brand momentum, which requires evolving beyond an original niche and a product-driven position, and delivering greater brand value across different layers of experience (usually service layers). 

Opportunities for greater breadth can be found by examining a brand’s offerings. From a Cx perspective, at Liquid Agency we think of offerings as solution ecosystems rather than point products. This means offerings should be connected, with one offering experience leading to the next, never dead-ending the relationship with customers–on the contrary, it is about continuously evolving that relationship. Think about how Apple connects digital and physical, hardware and software, product and service experiences with iPhone, Apple Watch, Apple TV, Apple Genius, etc. Challenger brands who create holistic experiences expand their market reach and deepen customer relationships to ascend as top-tier industry leaders. 

Another opportunity for greater breadth is to look at how broadly your brand’s value is being communicated and understood. A brand’s value should be defined and communicated to the full breadth of stakeholders in the ecosystem they serve. This is also relevant for B2B companies. For example, if you are niched in cybersecurity, you should be relevant to teams beyond the IT and security practitioners. You want to make sure the C-Suite and potentially policy makers also understand the business impact of a cybersecurity strategy. It is about gaining enterprise and category relevance.  

#2 – Consistency  

Another building block of Cx is consistency across verticals, offerings, and touchpoints.

Brands need to deliver consistent experiences so customers know and feel that it’s the same brand showing up in different ways, not different entities. Consistency is especially important for Cx because it is tied to trust–to how a brand delivers on its promise. That trust is what enables you to build a reputation and build a case for the solutions you deliver, grounded in reliable outcomes and results. 

This has been a key principle guiding B2C brands for a while. From consumer goods to retail, leaders in this space know how critical consistency is for customer loyalty. But this is also relevant for companies in the B2B space. Think about technology companies; while they push to disrupt and innovate to establish an advantage, it is equally important that they focus on producing consistent outcomes for their customers. Ensuring consistency is what creates a path to become the go-to option and a market leader. Salesforce, for example, is focused on breaking down silos to create a cohesive customer experience, unifying service, marketing and commerce under a single platform. Customers can easily purchase the product, learn about its features, and trouble-shoot— all while belonging to a shared customer community of “trailblazers.”

#3 – Future-focus 

You can’t look backward at what brands have done in the past for a strategy. So if industry leaders are not your reference point, then what is? We are at a moment now where many companies are building themselves up for a world that doesn’t yet exist. Post-pandemic, many B2B and B2C brands have quickly and dramatically shifted to serving a remote customer, without being able to draw from past data or experiences. A similar scenario is now happening with AI, and will happen with whatever comes next.

The only certain prerequisite for brand and Cx success is building the muscle to be able to shift quickly. No matter what context you’re in, you should be able to learn, develop, and iterate faster than anyone else based on what your customers want and what’s happening around you. If you can’t develop that muscle, your organization will simply lack the ability to create meaningful and impactful solutions for customers. Being future-focused today is not about your ability to be ahead of the curve, not anymore; it is about being continuously on the curve.

Cx Capabilities To Build as a Dynamic Brand Leader

A Cx capability is something you build across the organization. It encompasses four key business dimensions: how you know and learn, how you build relationships, what you offer, and how you do your work. Building and cultivating this capability takes time and intentionality. 

How you know and learn

Brands that deliver exceptional customer experiences build a foundation to continuously learn and understand their customers. They’re focused on understanding the people they’re creating value for and how they evaluate success.

Think about: 

• How can you build feedback loops to continuously capture customers’ needs or market signals and derive powerful insights? 
• Does your Cx measurement strategy include relevant metrics and KPIs across your organization? 
• How might you develop knowledge and know-how to enable your customers to enable your customers to do more?

How you build relationships

A Cx capability encompasses how to shape and design interactions and the touchpoints on which you will build relationships with customers. Make sure you build a foundation to continuously nurture positive connection and conversation as much as possible with your customers, the market you are in, your shareholders or even your employees.

Think about: 

• How can you build a “muscle” to continuously capture customers’ needs or market signals and derive powerful insights? 
• What is your Cx measurement strategy? 
• How you might develop knowledge and know-how to be shared with your customers?

What you offer

Cx helps you think about the products and services you deliver to proactively fulfill customer needs and exceed customer expectations. Whether B2B or B2C, brands that build momentum think of their offerings as a system.Thinking of them as a connected ecosystem can help you build greater value, consistency and resilience for your business–so if one part becomes compromised, the rest of the system sustains the organization because its value comes from connectivity, rather than individual components. And when you create greater value you start gaining the power to redefine customer expectations and reshape what your category looks like.

Think about: 

• How can you develop your offerings as a solution ecosystem? 
• How can you build your offerings to match the moments that matter most to your customers? 
• How can you come up with unexpected ways to deliver value across different and integrated formats, be it physical or digital?

How you do the work 

Cx should drive new organizational practices and behaviors. To be successful, Cx requires alignment around how we do our work, how companies build their processes, choose their tools, and make decisions. All of those impact a company’s ability to deliver the value and experience that they are promising. 

Think about: 

How can you create an environment and processes that directly facilitate the customer experience you’re building? 

What may be the decisions that matter the most when it comes to Cx? 

What does your problem-solving or collaboration approach look like?

As customers become increasingly discerning and results-driven, the brand battleground has shifted from mere marketing tactics to the realm of experience—the ability to deliver on the brand promise, consistently and dynamically. To build the momentum for sustained category leadership, brands need to implement customer-centric and future-focused strategies for their products, processes, relationships, and ways of knowing. Only then can they truly be ready to shift to what’s next for their customers before their competitors.