Category Archives: Branded Customer Service

Branded Customer Service: Don’t lose the customers you already have

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About Piper Smith

Lead Customer Experience Analyst at Interaction Metrics
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When you think about branding you may think about logos, billboards and ads—mostly directed at enticing new customers. But customer acquisition is expensive, and while you are busy attracting new consumers, your current customers could be slipping out the back door.

So how do you shift your focus to customer retention? You could try the usual approach, which is to probe customers’ thoughts by sending yet another customer feedback survey. But the problem is that most customer feedback surveys don’t show you how to create a rewarding experience that engages customers through their hearts, minds and senses.

For this, consider branding customer service. Branding customer service is a way to support your advertising and marketing messages. Perhaps more importantly, branding customer service is a proactive way to demonstrate your core value and key differentiating points to your current customers.

In Branded Customer Service: The New Competitive Edge, Jenelle Barlow and Paul Stewart make a great case for branded customer service. Their book outlines how customer service can be more than just good or bad; it can embody the values of your company by being “on-brand” or “off-brand.” They argue (and we agree) that when brand promises and the actual customer experience align, customer service multiplies the effect of advertising. Conversely, when the two are mismatched, your advertising is completely undermined. Basically, customers are more likely to get your brand and remember your company when your messaging is consistent.

For companies trying to maximize value by branding customer service, Barlow and Stewart’s book gets you started. However, their approach is lacking because they don’t explain how to accurately and objectively measure whether you are succeeding in your endeavor to brand customer service. As Peter Drucker so aptly quipped, you can’t manage what you don’t measure.

In the weeks to come, I’ll further explore branding customer service with an emphasis on how to measure success in this area.

Branding Customer Touchpoints: Why Most Companies Aren’t Cutting it

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About Martha Brooke

Program Director and Founder, Interaction Metrics
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With the dramatic success of startups like Dropbox, Groupon and Twitter, many people are wondering, what’s their secret? Forrester’s Kerry Bodine took note of one innovative approach shared by all three companies: these newer companies seek to actively brand and engage customer feelings at even minor customer touchpoints such as the confirmation email, bill, etc. This attention to managing brand detail could be driving heightened loyalty and advocacy levels.

Certainly, this idea of branding customer touchpoints has made its way into the zeitgeist with Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh describing the “telephone as one of best branding devices out there” and other marketers quick to point to the power of customer experience branding.

But the biggest companies mostly leave their customer touchpoints untapped for their brand value and when it comes to customer service (the most memorable of all touchpoints), branding is often completely ignored.

Bodine argues that these opportunities are squandered because large corporations are crippled by too many silos, over-concerned with the demands of ROI and lacking customer focus.

As Customer Experience Analysts, we find these factors are contributive, but hardly the root cause. The real reason why large corporations tend to lag when it comes to touchpoint branding is that corporations largely subscribe to an antiquated notion that engaging customers’ feelings belongs in the back room, not the board room.

Until CEOs and COOs start asking essential customer experience branding questions, like “what percent of our customer interactions are branded?” “how engaging are our frontline reps?” or “have we trained our customer service reps to deliver our core marketing messages?”, these large companies won’t have the institutional inertia to carry their big marketing ideas through to the front line.  And that means they won’t be able to keep up with the hip Zappos-types and Dropboxes of the world.