Partnering With Vendors Providing Custom Branding
By Kelly Wilson - Jan 16, 2019
Have you ever visited a company website, clicked on a link from a call to action, and been redirected over to a web page that no longer looked or felt like the brand? If so, did you continue along the customer journey? Or did you bounce? Inconsistent branding can lead to brand confusion as well as a poor customer experience. Your organization’s branding is its public representation. Ensuring that your third-party partner can offer custom branding that matches your guidelines is crucial when you’re aiming to create a cohesive journey for your customers.
Here are the benefits of partnering with a vendor that fully supports custom branding and the risks of choosing a solution that fails to do so.
Create a Cohesive Customer Journey
Customers expect to have pleasant, streamlined interactions with their service providers, and with the increased demand for efficient customer experience, it is imperative that your organization provides the high level of service customers are beginning to demand. Creating a cohesive journey for your customers includes keeping your company messaging and visual appearance consistent, no matter what steps they take through your customer-facing channels.
The Importance of Custom Branding with Third-Party Tools
When your organization builds the customer journey with touchpoints powered by third-party vendors it is crucial that those platforms can support your organization’s custom branding to keep the customer journey as consistent as possible. For example, let’s say you have implemented a scheduling solution into your organization’s online platform. When a customer clicks on ‘Schedule an Appointment’, it will take them off your website and into the third-party tool. If the branding on the page is not consistent with your company’s branding guidelines, the customer could abandon the process, thinking the site is not affiliated with your organization due to lack of branding consistency. This can lead to lost revenue due to your customer abandoning their appointment scheduling journey, and leaves you open to the risk of churn.
Losing customers to something as simple as inconsistent branding is a scary thought, but it’s something that is easy to avoid. When the vendors you choose to partner with offer full support for custom branding, your customers will not be able to distinguish between your home platform and the third-party solution, providing them with an enhanced yet consistent experience. According to Capgemini, 91% of banks already want to collaborate with FinTechs to provide their customers with an enhanced experience.
Why Brand Messaging and Tone is Important with Third-Party Tools
Consistency in brand messaging is just as important as a consistent appearance for third-party solutions. For example, if your brand’s voice is friendly and whimsical, yet the tone used in the third-party solution is cold and stark, it can quickly change your customer’s attitude towards your organization, potentially causing them to abandon their journey and costing you business.
Whether you are using a third-party vendor within your online platform or using it to communicate with customers through email or social media, it is crucial that you have the ability to provide consistent brand messaging to create a cohesive experience for your customers.
Custom Branding ROI
When you invest in a solution that fully supports custom branding your organization will experience a return on investment. The main benefits that come with custom branding are that it reduces churn by creating a cohesive experience for your customers, as well as helps acquire new business due to brand recognition. In fact, 77% of B2B marketing leaders state branding is critical to the growth of an organization.
Recognition for Current Customers
Marketing efforts are not just for acquiring new customers. They also help promote new services and products to your current customers.
If you are using a third-party solution to communicate with customers via email or social media, consistent branding is crucial so customers recognize and acknowledge the information you are trying to communicate. If the branding of your customer messaging is off, it could cause customers to disregard your message entirely since they do not recognize who the content is coming from. Another scenario is that the customer does see the content, but is wary of the source due to the inconsistent branding and proceeds to ignore it.
Brand Recognition and Customer Acquisition
When an organization is recognizable due to their consistent branding, they are perceived as more dependable and reliable. According to BrandExtract, “A consistent brand helps increase the overall value of your company by reinforcing your position in the marketplace, attracting better-quality customers with higher retention rates and raising the perceived value of your products or services.”
When partnering with a vendor that does not support full branding, you are placing your organization at risk of customers ignoring or not recognizing your communication efforts. This is problematic because if customers do not recognize your communication efforts they might feel as though your organization is dropping the ball in terms of providing a premium customer service. Additionally, this could result in a loss of potential revenue because your customers are missing out on communications regarding promotions or new service offerings.
Experience Full Support for Custom Branding with Coconut
Coconut Software’s enterprise appointment scheduling solution fully supports your organization’s branding, from the messaging style for email and SMS notifications, to the shape and colour of the buttons in your scheduling solution.
With our solution, customers can schedule appointments directly through your organization’s website. They’ll also receive confirmation messages after the appointment is scheduled and reminder notifications leading up to the appointment. With full support for custom branding, the look of the scheduling interface will match the rest of your company’s website, and the custom emails will follow your brand guidelines so that your customers recognize the consistent look and feel they are used to and know which organization is contacting them.
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