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Do Your Employees Generate Brand Believers?
June 12, 2008
"Welcome to the Friendly Bank," says the sign where the tellers barely acknowledge customers. "Your call is very important to us," chimes the recorded phone announcement as you're placed on hold. "We try harder," promises a well-known car rental company who tries harder to charge more for unnecessary insurance…
By Larry Oakner
All of us have experienced the disconnects between what a company preaches and what it practices. Yet, customer service gurus have known for years that employees are the critical link in the interaction between customer and company.
In his landmark book, "Moments of Truth," published in 1987,Jan Carlson, former CEO and president of Scandinavian Airlines, confirmed the importance of capitalizing on what are now called customer "touchpoints"—the moments when a company's employees can make or break the company's reputation with the consumer.
Living the Brand
Change management and customer service experts swear by the importance of the thousands of interactions between employees and customers. And, as companies become more savvy about their brands, they're realizing that employee actions demonstrate their brand more than any ads or brochures can.
Nordstrom is often recognized as the epitome of a brand dedicated to customer service. When the manager of the fragrance department offered to fill and sell me a small atomizer with a fragrance from a tester because a sale bottle was out of stock, I complimented her on her perfect demonstration of what everyone has always said about the brand…to her surprise!
Here's another example: While chatting with a flight attendant on a Jet Blue flight, I asked her what the company’s brand values were and she rattled all four of them off from memory. Quite a rare phenomenon for any customer to experience.
There's no doubt that employee behaviors can demonstrate a brand. It's become part of the fabric of those well-managed companies that are known for people "living the brand." Think of Disney cast members, McDonald's counter people, USAA phone agents, Saturn car dealers, and Ritz-Carlton registration clerks—they all exhibit the attributes of their company brands through their greetings, actions, scripts and responses.
But the big question is how to get beyond a fake smile or a pre-scripted greeting so that employees truly believe in their brand, all the time. And that will make customers believe in the brand because of the employees' behavior.
Go Beyond the Script
It's easy to train someone to follow a script, but how do you align daily job activities with the brand? How do you turn altruistic brand values into individual day-to-day choices?
• Translate your brand attributes and values into actionable ideas. Innovation is an honorable brand attribute to have, but it’s difficult to tell someone who is not in R&D to go be innovative. You need to translate altruistic values into actions that can be demonstrated measured, and taught.
• Make it personal. Corporate values are just that—corporate. If you want them to be living, breathing demonstrations of what your brand represents, you have to make your brand values personal. If integrity is essential to your brand, does it mean sales people don't take bribes, or for an executive to follow through to meet with her team members once a month? Define values for people.
• Rewrite your job descriptions. Most job descriptions are written only about the duties and responsibilities of a position based on the required competencies. By incorporating how a person's actions on the job can align with a company's brand, there'll be closer ties between how a person’s performance measures up to the brand.
• Live the brand every day. Every day we all make conscious choices doing our jobs. Writers choose words, designers pick colors and images, managers determine strategies. By raising your awareness of the choices you make, you will be living the brand more consciously and conscientiously.
Not only will your behavior prove why your customers should believe in your brand, but you'll also come to believe in it more yourself.
Larry Oakner is a Senior Brand Director at CoreBrand. www.CoreBrand.com
Sales & Marketing Management Magazine
This article is brought to you by Sales & Marketing Management, the leading authority for executives in the sales and marketing field.
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