Branded Customer Service: The New Competitive Edge

This book is, to a large degree, about brand alignment: aligning the brand with the mission, the vision, advertising, supplier relationships, and survey measurements. The following exercises will help your management team consider possible ways that your brand can be better aligned with everything you do as an organization.

MISSION, VISION, BUSINESS STRATEGY, AND BRAND ALIGNMENT

At least once a year (preferably at an off-site retreat so you can really focus on the topic), look carefully at your mission, vision, and business strategy. See how they line up with the changes that have taken place with your brand over the past year.

• Is your brand pulling you away from your mission and vision or vice versa?

• How does your business strategy support your brand strategy?

• Where is it off course?

• Ask your marketing department to provide you with data to help you see precisely what is happening with this important alignment.

ADVERTISING AND YOUR BRAND DELIVERY

Collect copies of your television, print, and radio advertising. Pretend you are an outsider being introduced to your company. What does your advertising tell you that you could expect from your organization if you were a customer?

• Make a checklist of your expectations.

• Invite a team of people to conduct this exercise so you have a variety of responses to consider.

• Ask several people to be mystery shoppers of your organization. For example, they could call your telephone numbers, visit your stores, send an e-mail question to your information desk, or order something online from your Web site.

• Check off the items in your expectations list to see how close your organization is to delivering the brand promises that are promoted in your advertising.

ARE YOUR SUPPLIER PARTNERS ON-BRAND?

Your suppliers have the potential to impact your brand as strongly as any of your staff. This exercise will enable you to assess whether your supplier partners are on-brand or off-brand.

• Make up a list of your suppliers. (If you need to talk with someone in your organization who knows these suppliers, do that.) You want to find out how close your suppliers are to your own brand values. If there is a big disconnect, there will no doubt be some contamination of the on-brand interactions you are attempting to create for your customers. This is particularly true if your customers need to deal with your suppliers in their total product or service experience. For example, some companies outsource their product service contracts. When your customers have a problem with the service provider, they do not distinguish between one of your suppliers and you.

• Insist that your suppliers deliver their services or products to you in the same way you deliver your services and products to your own customers. You may need to set up a brand orientation for your suppliers when you sign contracts with them.

• While studying your suppliers, investigate how you treat them. It is difficult for suppliers to be consistently on-brand with you if you mistreat them. TMI has clients who expect immediate action from us. They tell us that is what they deliver to their customers. Yet we can make dozens of phone calls to them that go unanswered and write countless e-mails that are not responded to. When we finally do reach such a company's representatives, they assure us they are very sorry this has happened, but then they repeat the behavior. It makes us wonder what they do to their customers.

USING METRICS THAT MEASURE WHAT YOU WANT TO ACCOMPLISH

The old maxim "What gets measured is what earns attention" applies here. If you believe that being on-brand is critical to your organization, are you measuring specific customer reactions to your brand behaviors? In fact, very few companies do this. Rather, they ask customers if they are satisfied, a word that many psychologists doubt is an emotion at all. Satisfaction is probably an intellectual judgment. We also know how meaningless it is in driving loyalty.

Brand-engaged customers are loyal customers.

• Visit departments that are gathering data about your organization.

• Carry a checklist of brand promises, emotions, and values with you.

• Ask what is being measured, and then ask to see the data. Carefully consider it so everyone knows you take it seriously.