Branded Customer Service: The New Competitive Edge

These exercises are designed for managers to consider how your organizational culture impacts branded service delivery by your staff. They consider staff support, communication about the brand, and brand alignment with your mission and vision.

Brand Support for Staff

If your staff do not work in an environment that reflects your brand promise, it will be difficult to gain their support for branded customer service. How you reward and recognize your staff, recruit for new staff, and conduct performance reviews all impact whether you can feel assured that staff will deliver your brand—even when you are not there to supervise service behavior.

REWARDS AND RECOGNITION

Most managers understand the importance of rewarding and recognizing the actions they want taken. In a branded service environment, rewarding and recognizing specific brand-coherent behaviors is extremely important. If "generic" service behaviors are recognized, then staff will tend to deliver these. But when specific branded service behaviors are recognized, such as those described below, there is a much greater likelihood that staff will pay attention to delivering your brand while offering service to customers.

• How does your management team recognize and then reward on-brand behaviors? In order to be more conscious about this, first identify what on-brand staff behaviors look like.

• Then be on the lookout for these behaviors so they can be specifically recognized.

• Sit down at the end of each week and recall when you saw staff, colleagues, and upper management be brand consistent. Note at least five examples of on-brand behavior. Throughout the next week, say something about what you saw. For example, to an employee of a salon named The Glass Ceiling: "Good work. I noticed the way you complimented Ms. Jordan after she had her makeup and hair done. You told her she looked 'Serene, confident, and very professional.' I'll bet that meant something significant to her as she was just promoted to her first executive position. Your statement really highlighted the salon's brand of 'Taking you higher as you move up.' Good work!"

• Consider whether it would be a good idea for your organization to link specific rewards to demonstrations of on-brand behavior. For example, if you promise "unlimited possibilities," could your rewards be linked to when that happens?

STAFF RECRUITMENT

If you could hire people who possess specific qualities to represent your brand, for what qualities would you look? Make a list of these, and then explore how you can test for these qualities.

If "helpfulness" is part of your brand promise, for example, could you set up a test so that applicants walk past someone who is struggling to lift a heavy object? See how many applicants stop to help the person.

If you can hire people who have a natural resonance with your brand, half the battle is won in terms of encouraging them to consistently deliver on-brand interactions.

ON-BRAND PERFORMANCE REVIEWS

Most managers struggle with performance reviews. When asked to write them in an on-brand manner, they really struggle. The review process needs to be broken down and carefully explained, and examples need to be provided for managers to see that performance reviews can be as much a part of supporting the brand promise as anything else.

To begin with, what are you measuring in your performance reviews? Are you measuring the same behaviors that you promise your customers? That is a good beginning point.

Get a group of managers together and ask them to brainstorm all the possible ways to conduct on-brand performance reviews. Questions to consider include the

• frequency of reviews

• style (360 degrees, in person, written)

• location (Where are the reviews conducted? You send a negative message about staff development if you conduct your performance reviews in the hallways whenever you can catch people.)

• rewards

HUMAN RESOURCE POLICIES

Take a look at all your personnel policies to see whether they interfere with on-brand behaviors.

• Are your HR policies aligned with your brand?

• Do you tie the hands of your staff with internal rules that make it difficult for them to deliver on-brand service?

• Are your policies brand friendly?

• Does your brand stress possibilities you create for your customers, while you, at the same time, behave restrictively toward staff? We know one internationally branded shop that emphasizes "unique possibilities" for a shopping experience, while the clerks' handbags are searched for stolen articles as they leave at the end of the day.

• If part of your brand promise necessitates empowered staff for delivery of that promise to your customers, how do your HR policies support the required empowerment? For example, if staff make mistakes in their empowered decisions, how are they treated? Can you and do you fire staff for these types of mistakes? Or are mechanisms in place to allow staff to learn from these mistakes?

ADVERTISING AND TRAINING RATIO

An internal branding process can be carried out for the same cost as a few major ad placements or campaigns. Consider that one off-brand experience can be repeated dozens of times, perhaps spreading far wider through word of mouth than the single showing of a television ad. And people believe their own experiences more than an ad. After all, they reason, the company has a vested interest in advertising itself in the best light. What really counts is what they experience and what their friends and family say.

Multiple surveys suggest that organizations spend a great deal more money on advertising and marketing than they do on staff training, especially brand values training.

• Ask your department heads and human resource personnel how much money they spend on training (separate out technical skills training from service or brand training) in one year.

• Compare this figure with your marketing and advertising budget. No doubt the correct ratio needs to be a floating ratio, but if you look at the two figures and say, "Something is not right here," it probably isn't!