Customer Experience Matters

J.P. Morgan Chase is planning to unveil a new campaign called “Chase What Matters” in an effort to reposition itself as being more customer friendly. Here’s a quote from a news release on the topic:

“We’re launching it across all lines of business at Chase, working in partnership with our retail side so all branches and all Chase-branded products will be under this campaign,” said Sangeeta Prasad, svp-branding and advertising for Chase

My take: First of all, lets look at some data that I’ve published about Chase:

• In Forrester’s Customer Experience Index, Chase came out 72nd for its credit cards and tied for 103rd for its banking, out of 112 firms. That’s 8th out of 11 credit card providers and 13th out of 14 banks.
• In an analysis of multi-channel customer experience of 4 large credit card issuers that we published last May, Chase did the poorest with it’s Website and the best with its IVR, email, and cross channel transitions. But overall, none of the four firms did very well.
• In an analysis of financial services brand perceptions that we published this past February, consumers were considerably less likely than the industry average to describe Chase using the following terms: “honest,” “friendly,” “family-oriented,” and ”helpful.”

Chase certainly has its work cut out to be viewed as customer friendly.

But is the firm’s problem really its advertising slogan? Will a high recall rate for “Chase What Matters” make customers think that Chase is customer-friendly? I doubt it. To change customer perception, Chase needs to follow the second principle of Experience-Based Differentiation:

• Reinforce brands with every interaction, not just communications. Traditional brand messaging is losing its power to influence consumers — that’s why branding efforts need to expand beyond marketing communications to help define how customers should be treated. To master EBD, firms must articulate their brand attributes to both customers and employees, clearly describing how the firm wants to be viewed. That’s just the first step, because companies must go on to translate brand attributes into requirements for how they’ll interact with customers.

The bottom line: Don’t waste money on brand promises that you can’t keep.