Customer Experience Articles
Internal Branding – the Key to reconnecting your Customers and Employees
Customers drive sales and profitability. So how do your employees interact with and engage customers? How would your customers describe their experience? Do your customers have an expectation on how your employee will represent your brand?
So how does an organisation manage its customer experience to ensure its people, processes and culture are reinforcing customer expectations? A key foundation of customer experience management is internal branding.
Internal branding in essence is ‘living’ and ‘delivering on’ your organisation’s brand promises. It is an organisation-wide initiative that enables all employees to understand how they can personally impact on a customer’s experience and contribute to building the company’s reputation and brand.
Brand is Image and Image is Brand….
For those that believe brand and image are separate and in no way linked may need to rethink their position. In the media recently have been two prime examples of how brand and image are closely interrelated, albeit almost the same thing. Brand in its simplest context are those attributes that makes one product or company stand apart from another. Image is how products and companies present themselves, through logos, colours and artefacts.
The definition of brand needs to go one step deeper because those attributes that make a product or company stand out from others stems from something beyond image and below the surface of what we see – that part of the iceberg that lays underneath the waterline. These are normally considered core values. That is, those values that help us create a relationship with products, services and companies so we then grow to know and trust them.
Data or Analysis: What gives the greater edge? The debate continues…
In part two of this debate, the question of what truly gives a competitive edge is explored through looking at the types of data captured, and poses a further conundrum of what is the better type of data, quantitative or qualitative?
In the previous blog (posted 12th August, 2011), the position was taken that it is the uniqueness of data that can provide quality insights that help establish a sustainable competitive advantage; but in saying this, the unique data needs to be matched by quality analysis. However this raises the question of how data can be “unique”? Should you look for the hard, quantifiable and crunchable analytics or the more “soft touch” that is afforded with qualitative data?
When Brands get Branded
The difference between having a brand and being branded is an issue that has arisen in the news recently. The plight of Tiger Airways and The News of the World are examples where a company has lost the brand reputation and, as a consequence, have now been branded by the public. A quote from billionaire businessman Warren Buffett comes to mind and managers at the top and middle ranks of the two companies could have heeded its warning. Buffett was quoted as saying, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that you’ll do things differently”.
Committed Employees Make Happy Customers
How satisfied are your employees with their jobs and their company? When did you last ask yourself or them this question? Workers who are not satisfied will not only be looking for a new job, they will be disinterested, underperforming and more destructively in some cases, transferring negativity to their fellow workers.
On the other hand, engaged employees who are satisfied and committed will continuously strive to foster a motivated environment and have their hard work rewarded. They’ll take personal ownership of the company brand and their customers’ experience. Happy employees are a great source of valuable word of mouth advocacy and goodwill. It is crucial that before an organisation looks to concentrate on elevating customer satisfaction levels, the employee level of satisfaction needs to be addressed first. Do this through great communication, listening, focusing on the good and training & development of your people. These are all important facets of a robust and effective employer brand.
Turning Customer Service into a Positive Customer Experience
When organisations are espousing commitment to customer service, shouldn’t they really be talking about the customer experience? Commitment to delivering a positive experience will build loyalty to your brand and ensure you hold the heart and mind of your customer. This in turn will differentiate your business from competitors and create clear advantage, at same time realising positive impact on the bottom-line.
It’s very important to distinguish service from experience because, in this context, service is just the mechanism for delivering the experience to the customer; whilst it’s the experience itself which builds an emotional connection between your customer and the brand. The customer experience will encompass every aspect of your brand’s offering. Therefore good products backed up by quality service will result in a positive experience. For example, Dell managed to turn the risky process of buying a computer over the internet into a reliable and positive experience by making improvements that focused on mitigating their customer’s perceived risk.