Service your brand
It is no secret that people interact most directly with a brand through the employees that represent it. Customer or Client Service is simply a way of describing their experience of your brand - good service exceeds expectations and poor service disappoints them.
But, the real problem is indifferent service (we all know the signs of indifferent service - the tone, lack of personal responsibility, no eye-contact and rote responses.) When a business projects the impression that they don’t care, through the attitude and behaviour of their employees, then the customer or client feels a natural resentment to the brand.
How people experience your staff therefore becomes their experience of your brand.
However, Service is an attitude that is embedded in organisational culture. Consequently, we need an organisational culture that encourages employees to understand the target market and their expectations. Activating your brand is in part making your employees more aware. Through their interactions and in developing a practical service-oriented approach, they generate and share the intellectual property that characterises your business. They become ambassadors of your brand.
If a sound strategy is used to activate the brand promise into actual service delivery, internal customer service must improve. Once internal processes are working with empathy, then external customer service will improve too. Employees can project their own experiences to external customers and understand the broader context of their behaviour and attitude. These shifts in attitude, behaviour and processes save money and time.
Through better service comes stronger relationships and loyalty, and a far more attractive return on marketing costs. It’s an old, true, cliché: it costs less to keep a customer than attract a new one.