Are you Accidentally Introducing Doubt into Your Client Experience?
Picture this: you're shampooing your hair and basking in the scent of gardenia and as you go to add conditioner into this whole event and all of a sudden things smell like mint…
Ok so this is a slightly ridiculous, weirdly true story of accidentally introducing doubt into your client experience — I recently started using a shampoo and conditioner set that somehow has a different scent between the two. Not something you think would throw you off, and two scents I enjoy, but I immediately assumed that I'd purchased the wrong thing based on the scent. This was just not the experience I was expecting from a matched set of shampoo and conditioner. Now my mind has spiraled to a story where they accidentally filled the bottles with a different formula at the factory, maybe it was a practical joke, or maybe this was a one-off mistake? Who knows but I'm still wondering about it every time I use it. Just with this one scent change, purposeful or not, the brand has made me question whether they know what they're doing and made me a little cautious about a future purchase.
Are you accidentally introducing doubt into your own client experience? This could look like a few different things, seemingly innocuous, but it's something that can leave a client questioning if they should really invest with you. Even worse, it could leave a client regretting investing with you because now they feel like their experience isn't matching their expectation.
Consistency in your brand is the thing that encourages trust, so where can you make sure you're not accidentally creating a disconnect...
Do your names match?
I was once working with a highly successful marketer who had recently changed her branding and business name but whose emails were still coming through with an old email address. The old email was a different name with an old logo and email signature. Especially in the days of email scammers, this can really throw a client. Invoicing from an old business name? This could seriously concern a client, especially if you didn't give them a heads-up. Your brand name should be carried through on all of your platforms as best you can: social media, email, website, etc.
Do your visuals match?
Recently rebranded? Using templates? Make sure that your logos, colors, fonts, images, and patterns are all updated and consistent across not only your outward-facing touchpoints (website, social, etc.) as well as your client-facing ones (proposals, workbooks, onboarding/offboarding packets, etc.) This includes things like headshots, logos, colors, fonts, images, and patterns.
Is your messaging consistent?
Do you have a naming convention for your service offerings? Do you have key messages that you convey to your audience? Are you using the same words, phrasing, even grammar, and punctuation? This can be big (making sure when you talk about your services you are using the word package vs. offering). This can be small, you've made a choice to always use a + sign instead of an & as a symbol for and. This all builds up trust in your brand when your messaging is consistent across all your media and client touchpoints.
