Creating Your Hot Center – Step 3: Quality Customers Join
Your selected customers join the center and help define your brand meaning.
Jim Stein
Published Date: May 19, 2023
Quality Customers are a key aspect of your company’s Hot Center. Once they join the center, their powerful voices help define your brand meaning.
Expand your company’s Hot Center to include your best customers by selecting those who are fans and significant purchasers of your services.
Your “Voice of the Customer” tour.
During my work at American Ratings Corporation, we’ve conducted customer satisfaction research for thousands of local companies, and they’re a great tool for Diamond Certified company owners. I advise owners to reread all of their past Diamond Certified Research Reports and put a check mark next to each survey response that aligns with their brand meaning and circle each that doesn’t. You can do the same thing by conducting an informal “Voice of the Customer” tour over the course of a month.
Meet with or call 10 to 30 of your best customers for feedback—first on their experience with your company and second to get their ideas on how it could be improved to best serve them. Come bearing gifts. At some point in each of the conversations, ask the four questions that follow. Download a Customer Feedback for Brand Meaning form from our Tools section. Be sure to note each customer’s meaning as well as her specific phrasing. Capture the exact words she uses when talking about your company.
1. Why do you use us?
2. Describe your best experience with our company.
3. What would you say to a friend about our company?
4. I’d like your advice. What can we do to improve?
These are better done on the phone, on a video call or in person because you want to feel their emotion and be able to ask follow-up questions in real time based specifically on what you’re hearing. It should flow like a conversation, not a survey. By personally interacting with your best customers and hearing their stories, you’ll get a richer feel for how your brand is perceived.
By the end of your “Voice of the Customer” tour, you should have a stack of best customer responses. Put these into a single document named Customer Feedback for Brand Meaning. Print it out, and as you read through it, checkmark key phrases and descriptions of your brand’s meaning. Circle what may be customer confusion or brand meanings that seem mediocre, undifferentiated, or bad. Now, with your completed Customer Feedback for Brand Meaning in hand, you’re ready to dive into improving and optimizing your company’s brand meaning. But why is this important and what does the term “Brand Meaning” even mean?