PeopleAchieve provides certified Branded Customer Service Consultants.
If you could raise the income premium on your services by 100% or even 200% would you be interested. We know that if you create a strong brand you can create your own market-space and raise the money you charge for your products. You can almost create a monopoly if clients and customers are so committed to your brand that they will only buy your products. What I will introduce is the idea that you can do that for your services and your people and this tidy looks at the ways of doing it.
This article is inspired by the best-seller Branded Costumer Service by Janelle Barlow and Paul Stewart were you can find more details (http://www.brandedcustomerservice.com/).
Through a comprehensive branding of not only your products but your company, its culture, values and behavior and its people you can transform an organization and create a unique competitive advantage that others will find extremely difficult to match. Though branding I would like to show how you can meet the following challenges:
- Branding your product or service at the very top
- Releasing your people s full potential
- Truly aligning your organization
- Creating your own market space
- Adding true value to the Balance Sheet
- The brand touches every aspect of the business as this diagram shows.
The brand touch every aspect of the business as this diagram shows.
One of the challenges is maintaining consistency at all these touch points and giving the same Brand Story. But perhaps a greater challenge is that the market does not stand still and especially in Dubai the expectations promised in the heavy advertising are rising at an incredible rate. To deliver great service you have to rise above expectations raised by the advertising.
Do the companies always deliver on their promise of their advertising? Property Development is booming and whenever you turn there seems to be a new development being promoted. Do they deliver within the time frames promised and to the build-quality?
We know how difficult it is to deliver on promises even simple things like our relationships. When we get married we make a vow, we promise a number of things both consciously and implied. We won't go into what we consciously promise to do, however what are some of the implied promises? For men, it might be never to put on weight, lose our hair or always listen lovingly to our partners. For women it might be never to lose their beauty, nag and look like their mothers!
Products make many promises about how they are going to make you feel .. and that is important. Because 80% of our purchases are determined by feeling. So, if a certain brand gives you the feeling that you need, then you will purchase it every time. It should be easier with services because people deliver services and people can far more quickly get us to feel something than an ad board. Yet many companies fail to maximize their human capital, spend millions on advertising and don't spend a fraction of that on leveraging their people to deliver positive buying emotions.
1. Branding your Product or Service the very top.
Not much has to be said about this as we experience on a daily basis the power of branding. If you drink Evian water in Switzerland out of the tap it costs less than 1 cent per liter and if you buy it in a bottle it can cost over $2 per bottle (20,000% mark-up). If you go into the home sites of some of Switzerland famous watch-makes you will see glamour models dressed to kill. (The watch can be barely made out Why?). Because what they sell is a life-style. Everybody knows that a $58 Quartz watch is always going to be more accurate than a $10,000 Swiss made brand. And some of the watches don't even look that good. Yet people buy them for the status of owing the Brand (even those its less accurate, doesn't look good and costs a fraction of the price to manufacture!) They buy them for the feeling they get when they wear it on their hands Some are buying self-image and self-esteem! It s the same with expensive fast cars. If you brand your service at the very top then you can truly command a highly premium for your service. However, just advertising does not do it. In service you have to deliver your promise!
2. Releasing your peoples full potential
Most companies focus on measuring and counting money in organizations and how much is made. Think about how big the Accounting industry is in helping companies count money. Yet less is invested on what produces the money people. At any given point in time in an average company: - 10% are looking for a new job (probably higher in Dubai)
- 40% do not feel positive about their employer
- 80% do a routine job and only
- 20% put their full heart and soul into their job
So, people walk into work and leave their heart and soul at home. You can use your Brand to symbolize not only the logical purpose of people s endeavors at work but also to capture the emotional connection.
So, every employee should know the following about their company brand, which should symbolize the unique strategy of the company: - What are we aiming for?
- How will we do it?
- What my role?
- (As a company) Are we serious?
- How are we doing?
Richard Branson s comment on the value of the Virgin Brand demonstrates more than anything the power of Branded Costumer Services.
The idea that business is strictly a numbers affair has always struck me as preposterous.
I'm convinced that it is feelings and feelings alone that account for the success of the Virgin brand.
It is my conviction that what we call shareholder value is best defined by how strongly employees and customers feel about your brand.
Nothing seems more obvious to me than a product or service only becomes a brand when it is imbued with profound values that translate into fact and feeling that employees can project and customers can embrace.
3. Truly Aligning Your Organization
You can use your Brand DNA to truly align everybody within the organization. If you take any part of the human body its DNA will give you the unique strengths of the person. In the same way the unique strategy of an organization should be captured in its Brand DNA.
So, our Brand:
It's an emotional process of engagement
It's a promise delivered time and time again in an aligned way
It's observed in our behavior
It's what we say is special about what we do and who our customers are
It's about the perceptions our customers have of our business and the people in it
It's our reputation!
4. Creating Your Own Market Space
So, by carefully branding your service you can capture your uniqueness in the market-place and the Business Strategy within the Brand DNA. That way, every person in the organization knows the purpose of the organization and the outcome he is trying to achieve. The eventual outcome of any commercial Brand is to add consumer value and by doing so grow the unique trust of the service brand. The more people trust the brand, the more premium can be charged. Brand tools should grow the reputation by enhancing the likeability of the brand, to continuously reinforce it and to deliver the service consistently. How well this is done is determined by the Expectations set by the advertising and promotion and more importantly what the client, guest or costumers experience the service delivery of the brand.
5. Adding True Value to your Balance Sheet
The chart below shows the market value of the top brands in the world. Clearly the best return on investment can be a very strong well-known brand.
There has been a strong movement in Accounting firms and all their stakeholders to capture on the balance sheet the intangibles of an organization. Because, we as a company, demonstrate return on investment in our services we are focused on delivery value in the seven areas of the intangible balance sheet as defined by the Department of Trade & Industry in the U.K. These are:
In summary, the Branded Costumer Service Approach looks at 5 main phases of branding service in an organization:
1. Define: the Brand DNA, explore brand possibilities, define the optimum customer experience and the future strategic action plan.
2. Measure: at many different levels the current Brand delivery and identify how aligned HR is currently to delivering the Brand through people.
3. Communication: designing a comprehensive plan communications, media and identifying and training Brand Champions to deliver through behavior the Brand.
4. Manage: looking at all the different Management Systems such as Recruiting On-Brand, Managing On-Brand, Empowering Staff to Deliver the Brand, and Recovering Off-Brand.
5. Engage: engaging the hearts and minds of all the employees to deliver the Brand on a daily basis.
People are the key and as Helena Rubenstein of HR Lab U.K. said:
In a competitive world, organizations are realizing that only people can brand products or services.
Jack Welch is considered one of the most successful CEO s and I daily think of this quote.
'The essence of competitiveness is liberated when we make people believe that what they do is important and then get out of the way while they do it'
To summarize this, by the correct Branded Customer Service Approach you can:
- Raise significantly revenue through superior branding
- Energise and inspire your staff
- Create increased Loyalty amongst your Clients
- Add Brand Value to your Balance Sheet
- Identify your unique DNA success criteria defined as the Brand
- Align the Organization around that successful Brand
- Improve your image and brand delivery at all the stakeholder touch-points
