Deliver a Better Brand Experience: A Customer Relationship Skills Tune-Up

(Adapted from the Integrated Training Solutions employee development programs by D. Bertoni and J. Hogen)

You have probably had a great experience buying something or receiving a service. In these rare instances, the company just seems to understand you, what you need, and performs beyond expectations. Experiences like these leave an impact, because they are such pleasant surprises. Performing consistently at that level is not an accident - it requires serious attention to team development. The good news is: 1) there are only three primary skills to focus on, and; 2) each of your employees is probably proficient at one or more of them.

Consistent delivery of an outstanding brand experience requires the effort of all managers to develop their team into first class performers. For some, delivering a great customer experience is natural - for others it is a matter of improving one or more of these basic skills: Relating, Authenticity and Steering.

The following is a short introduction to the three basic skills that form the foundation of positive customer relationships and superior brand experiences. The intention is to make your team development a little easier, by focusing on three identifiable proficiencies. Thus, instead of seeing a team member as a customer relations liability and a loss, you see an achievable skill development tune-up.

Relating
Before a customer can form a bond with the product, service or brand he or she has to feel at ease with the company. Customers rarely arrive at your door in that mental place. Understand that customers, vendors, and others often have a pre-formed notion about your brand, product and service, and come hauling their own emotional baggage from the previous events of the day. Each visitor has an agenda or a purpose for visiting or calling – the problem is to know what it is so you can deliver. Until your caller’s intentions are clear, all that is necessary is to make him or her feel welcomed, at ease and the focus of attention.

In the first minutes of an interaction, it is hard to know much about the visitors’ agenda, so the fail-safe position is to be a “mirror.” That is, mirror the customer’s behavior, i.e. - if the caller or visitor seems in a hurry, you should be too, etc. It is important to listen carefully and gather clues as the caller’s point of view and goals reveal themselves. Then it is time to demonstrate the next important skill – Authenticity.

Authenticity
Authenticity is being a knowledgeable representative of the company and seeming a vital part of the customer’s company visit and experience. It’s knowing the job, doing it well and understanding how the organization can solve problems for customers.

Authenticity includes product knowledge. Armed with a large volume of product knowledge, you can decide what information to share to help inform a customer and what to keep in reserve. The skill of Relating moderates the tendency to recite every excruciating detail of a product’s virtues and arcane attributes.

How competently each individual and team performs their role (which we call a Pivot Point, or simply “Pivot”) determines in large part the visitor’s perception of the company. While most managers and employees feel that Authenticity (how well I know my job) is the central skill, without ample measures of Relating and the last skill – Steering – the customer’s experience can still be quite unsatisfactory.

Steering
The Steering skill involves expanding the customer’s relationship with the company. Each customer has limited time to discover the company’s hidden product and service gems. The process of informing customers and potential customers about the uniqueness of the company and the value of the product requires a skilled guide, sometimes drawing on other team members at critical moments. Sometimes called “closing the sale”, “creating a customer relationship” or “developing a lead” – guiding a customer through that company discovery requires a person accomplished in the Steering skill to keep the process moving efficiently and deliver.


The stakes are high, don’t leave this to chance
Success in the marketplace comes from repeated success with customers and other visitors. The cost of customer acquisition is so high that losing customers due to repeated customer disappointment is simply deadly for a business. Satisfied customers are like free advertising. Angry customers are also free advertising - though definitely not the kind you want. Angry or dissatisfied customers retain the scars of a bad experience for a long time, while spreading the warning call to others. Tales of bad customer experiences travel quickly and far.


Once is never enough
A good brand experience should not depend on which employee a customer happens to tumble onto. Management must strive to have all employees represent the brand well. Simply look down the company roster and identify the employees that have strengths or weaknesses in Relating, Authenticity and Steering skills. Have the CMO (Chief Mentoring Officer) – that’s you! – explain the skills, and do a little coaching. Ask each individual to perform his or her own self-analysis – which is the strongest skill which is the weakest. Identify the stars, point out some of their best performances and let their actions be the guide. You’re on your way!

Remember that we live in an entropic world, where employee development usually returns to chaos and randomness! Monitor the progress, expect a certain return to old habits and make improvement tune-ups part of your company routine and culture.

The Broken Brand of the Month

Broken Brand of the Week Month

In February, a new feature appeared called the “Broken Brand of the Week.” Voting continued for about two weeks and the results were (in order of most damaged to least):

1. Toyota
2. President Obama
3. Tied: Congress, Tiger Woods, Democrats and Anthem Blue Cross

Republican's, Take a Victory Lap!

The “winner” Toyota seemed a bit of an upset to me, especially because the media was having a picnic on the remains of the Tiger Woods carcass that week. Tiger had just given his first press conference after the brouhaha, and in spite of the fact that it was a media feeding frenzy, the readers of The Marketer’s Almanac saw Toyota and President Obama as more deserving of a damaged brand award. The GOP – the only nominee that did not receive a single vote - scores a big win, or at least it is the Party of No Self-inflicted Fiasco this week.

The Envelope, Please!

Admittedly, this poll was not scientific, the vote count didn’t quite break into double-digits, but the respondents were the erudite cream of the intellectual crop and brand cognoscenti, who are the readers of The Marketer’s Almanac. (I cast an errant vote for Anthem Blue Cross, but soon we shall see how and why my vote was so misguided. See, I learned something reading this blog!)

Post Poll Analysis: It Takes More Than Stupidity and Law Breaking to Break a Brand

We expect shady behavior from shady characters, so ruining a crime syndicate brand into the ground would take extraordinary indiscretions (maybe a string of good deeds). When the transgression is a flagrant violation of the explicit promise of the brand (not necessarily the law or morals of the land) the crowd starts throwing stones. That appears to be our readers’ definition of a “Broken Brand.” Thus, the votes of our learned readers (and, my misguided ballot) can be viewed as follows:

• Toyota positioned its brand as the auto company that had the lock on design and production quality, while it was trying to sweep dangerous flaws under the rug;
• The “change you can believe in” and “Yes we can” presidential brand got mired in the mud of governing, and seems too comfortable with the status quo;
• Tiger posed as the clean cut, All-American dedicated to his craft, family and the American way – the archetype of sports hero – NOT!
• Democrats given the power they wanted to change the paradigm and cowering;
• And, congress’s insistence that they are doing the people’s bidding yet only focused on raising money for the next campaign.

As for Anthem Blue Cross, while their action to raise rates at that particular moment was impressively stupid from a public relations point of view, it really didn’t break the brand. It was just a for profit company, striving for greater profits – that’s what they do.

The Crowd Hates Hypocrites

Watching a poll like this causes one to ponder what a broken brand is and how a winner manages to claim that prize when there is so much competition. Recall the brand implosion of the decade - the Catholic Church’s decade long scandal of sexual abuse and cover up. There are many examples of senators, congressman and others that have been caught in compromising situations – sending toe-tapping signals from stall-to-stall in an airport men’s room comes to mind – and, a host of other financial, sexual and other imaginative “indiscretions” of public figures and institutions, some of them even serial offenders. However, none of those stories seemed to last long nor create anything more than a partisan scramble for points in the intramural game of politics. Furthermore, institutions are rarely shaken at the foundation from the actions of the fringe minority of individuals and the efforts to cover up the scandal. The difference could be that violent public reaction seems reserved for payback for lying and/or hubris, not for the transgression even when it is considered quite serious.

The lesson? Live up to your brand bargain. There are two ways to do that: pay particular attention to policies that tread near the line of promise breaking; and, do not make brand promises that the company cannot keep.

There Are Plenty More Where These Came From

The “Broken Brand” feature is going to become a regular item of The Almanac, but we are going to change to “The Broken Brand of the Month.” In addition, there needs to be a way to do write-ins, which the blog gadget does not handle in the most efficient manner. To do a write in, post a comment on the Brand of the Month posting with the name of your choice and put a vote in the generic “Write In” slot and your candidate will appear in a few days with a vote next to his, her or its name.

Need a Gig? Fix a Brand!

The ultimate challenge is rehabilitation of the broken brand (think, Richard Nixon). This is where The Almanac’s army of creative thinkers and marketers has a forum to showcase its prodigious talent. When Akio Toyota reads your visionary plan to rescue his family and brand name from the gutter of busted images and brands, he may just decide to fire that good-for-nothing-white-shoe firm and hire YOU!

The Great Brand Experience - It's a Dream Away

Every entrepreneur or inventor dreams big dreams. That is what keeps entrepreneurs going, an idea that won’t let them stop no matter how many obstacles are in the way. There are those that struggle along and those whose success was so large that that their dream transformed business or the lives of millions around the globe, and are often rewarded with fantastic wealth. Each of these success stories ends in the creation of a great brand. So, my hypothesis is this: folks that dream in brands take a more direct route to success.

What’s in a Name? Nothing and Everything.
Here are two definitions of the word brand as it pertains to business:

• “A brand is a name used to identify and distinguish a specific product, service, or business. A legally protected brand name is called a proprietary name.”

and,

• “A brand is the essence or promise of what will be delivered or experienced.”

Many people think of brands in the first and more limited sense, and conger up names like Coca-Cola, GE, Johnson & Johnson, Disney, Mercedes-Benz, Apple, IKEA, Nokia, McDonalds, Google, MTV, Visa, etc. Business Week and Interbrand annually publish a list of the year’s 100 top global brands. Brands that have global name recognition seem to fall into three categories: industrial and large commercial companies, ultra-exclusive luxury brands and consumer product makers. The Industrial leaders are brands like Siemens, JP Morgan, Oracle and the like that have gobbled up hundreds of up-and-comers to become the global behemoths they now are. The ultra-sheik Louis Vitton, Gucci, Rolex brands occupy positions in the stratosphere due to exclusive distribution in a very high-priced luxury market. Consumer mega brands such as Coca-Cola, Marlboro, Budweiser and Gillette typically crush the up-and-comers with the weight of their advertising budgets.

Products have their own brand recognition that can be quite impactful, sometimes having as much impact as the company name: Procter & Gamble’s Colgate, Apple’s iPod, Microsoft’s Windows, J&J’s Band-Aid, etc. In most cases, buyers are not interested in the company’s stock or committing to all its products, but only buying a product with a trusted name.

Dream Name Today – Gone tomorrow!
Global brands pay a king’s ransom to the most influential advertising agencies and public relations firms to create and manage a brand image. Then they have to spend the queen’s ransom to the media outlets that shoehorn the message into the minds of potential buyers. All that, to encourage someone to end his or her affair with a competing product and try theirs. After a purchase, products will get a test result from buyers on a scale that goes from WOW, through YAWN, and all the way to LET DOWN and OFFENDED.

Stories about bad brand experiences travel faster than positive ones and that the negative experience has the half-life of plutonium, and an effect that is just as toxic. The long slog of creating a great brand from hard work on product quality and service can be undone incredibly quickly. How many friends did you tell about your latest good product experience, versus the latest product disaster, and after two years which one is still the freshest in your mind? The negative experience? Yep, me too. Recall the fall of one of the strongest global brands in sports – Tiger Woods. The eventual resurrection of his image will be a case study in brand marketing, and you can bet he has the best and brightest on the case.

Brand Wars – Kick ‘em in the Experience!!
Most of us are competing against other company brand reputations and known product names, and let’s face it, if it were just a question of brand recognition, new products and companies would not stand a snowball’s chance in hell. Pan Am would still be in business and Jet Blue would have been stillborn along with Southwest and Virgin. There would not be a FedEx, Toyota, iPhone, Subway, or Dell. The reason new products and companies emerge, overwhelm the market and drive their competitors to extinction is due to the second and more important element of a brand - the essence or promise of what will be delivered or experienced – the brand experience! The buyer’s true experience with a product is simply much more powerful than a company’s expensive and carefully crafted hologram of its brand. You can’t compete with the 100 top brands in the world or the top branded products on brand awareness, but your brand and product CAN compete effectively against their brand experience.

Senior management simply must focus its attention, and the attention of the entire organization, on the experience a buyer or user has with the brand. The experience extends to all levels of interactions with the product and company: the feel of the controls, the quality of the finish, durability, its precision, perception of weight, the packaging, the user manual, customer service, billing, answering inquiries, the website, even the ambience in the office if there is ever a reason to visit. Does that sound daunting, or does it sound like a competition that you are ready to take on? I believe it is a winnable battle and one that I would rather fight than how much I can pay for PR and advertising, or having the cleverest arguments spoken by the most well known celebrities.

If your company’s attention is focused on your customer’s experience, you and your customer’s goals will be aligned, and that puts you on the surest path to business success.

When Management Killed the Dream – Bonuses All Around!!
If it is that simple, why do big brands with the best talent and the best credentials fail? In many cases, the company’s leaders have put the primary focus on the wrong goals.

Consider this scenario. A few years back engineering found a way to significantly reduce the cost of the product, operations cut logistical costs, there was a killer PR campaign and the rate of product returns showed a significant decline. Great year! The managers all took huge bonuses and the company was on the skids a few years later. This scenario is remarkably common with companies churned by private equity firms.

When engineering is primarily focused on ways to reduce the cost of the product, rather than trying to trying to solve new customer demands with creative (and, lower cost) solutions, the company’s most creative talent is no longer focused on the ultimate brand experience. When logistics is optimizes the flow of materials to minimize warehouse space, but doesn’t get the goods where and when the market needs them, orders will flow to the competitors. When marketing is spending more time with the PR firm than with customers, they may get out-flanked by a ground swell buzz in the streets about a new, agile competitor. When customer service is judged on how well it decreased the company’s warranty replacement rate, rather than how well it found creative solutions to a customer problems, your client’s next call may be to your competitor. As management succeeds in getting all of the company’s functions to focus less on the customer’s experience, the cumulative effect leads to poor sales, which leads to more cost cutting, and if the focus does not get back to the customer’s brand experience, such short-sighted focus can lead a company to the brink of extinction.

That is not to say that cutting costs and expanding the reach of the company through advertising and public relations to build sales is not important. A financially healthy company with solid margins can focus more resources on developing new products, and afford top-notch employees to innovate. Never forget that the customer’s buying power is selfishly concerned with satisfaction with the product, service and experience. The customer is ultimately quite fickle and brand loyalty has its limits. It is often said that business would be so much easier if it weren’t for the customers.


Brand Dreaming is Like Going on a Blind Date
Brand dreaming is visioning ideal customer/brand experiences with your company and products, even if (and, maybe especially if) today’s reality is a lo-o-o-o-o-o-ng way from ideal. Dreaming in brands is an exercise in perspective and awareness. The hardest change is the perspective shift – from seeing your product or service from your normal point of intimate understanding, which can cloud perception of the most obvious, to the point of view of a person seeing it for the first time. The familiar becomes new. Try to imagine that it is a blind date and you have just opened the front door. Imagine the process of product discovery from the beginning, when the product is seen at a distance for the first time. Does the first impression suggest that the product features and benefits meet the requirements of the purchaser, and does it look like does what your sales material says it does? Does it look functional and efficient? As a buyer moves closer, he or she will begin to discover the details and form an opinion of the quality. Now in hand, what is the first impression of weight, finish and feel? That first, brief interaction is so important, because if the impression isn’t very good, it’s all you are going to get. The potential buyer didn’t even make it to the point where he or she begins to learn about all of your product’s abilities, fine qualities and charms.

If you are lucky enough to make it past the speed-dating, beauty pageant of the first impression, the discovery begins in earnest. If the product is technical and complex, there is so much to learn about all of the uses, features and capabilities (and so little time). Does your product speak for its self or does it require a matchmaking sales aid? Hopefully, your brand dream visualized the product so that its most important features stand out and lead naturally to the discovery of the next layer of features. Often, the most relevant benefits to the buyer remain safely hidden away from all but the technical support staff and the most tenacious customer. If a point-of-purchase aid, video or interactive demo tool is required, it is as important as the product itself – don’t skimp!

Getting the idea? How was your imagined first date with your own product? Take the point of view of the least informed and most attentive potential customer and you will discover much about your own products. It doesn’t matter if it is a piece of hardware, software or a service. Once the process of brand experience dreaming becomes more comfortable, imagine the same uninformed and attentive customer calling or visiting your place of business, from first greeting to follow-up. Every touch point leaves an impression. Why not make the impression a good one.

When Your Blind Date is in a Bad Mood – It’s Normal!
It is enough of a challenge to envision converting a neutral potential customer into an advocate of your brand. Lucky you if you should ever encounter a neutral prospective customer. If your PR, advertising, word-of-mouth and sales effort are hitting on all cylinders, the prospective customers might be neutral about your company at the first meeting. However, that is not the normal state of affairs in today’s business environment. More often, at first meeting the person is distrustful of another sales pitch, dismissive of some new gadget, or anticipating another broken promise from another flimflam sales person. When you can dream with great clarity how to take the typically cantankerous American customer from combatant to advocate, you win your black-belt in the Jujitsu of brand dreaming.

Dreams Need Fuel – Fill ‘Er Up!
You need to feed the dream machine, and the fuel comes from customers. You must spend time in the field with customers, potential customers and your competitors’ customers. That is where you see people using products in ways that could never have been imagined is a design meeting. Your product, which you crafted to be the pinnacle of efficiency will be used up-side-down, inside-out, backwards, at half speed, double time and inverted, all to the horror of the designer, but maybe to the delight of buyer. Inventive misuse is often the inspiration for the next R&D meeting.

Hail to the Chief – The Chief Dreaming Officer
Brand dreaming is like a gym membership, the first few visits may be tough, but soon the results begin to show off that new and fabulous you. The first brand advocate converts need to come from your own company before imagining that you are going to convert the masses. Everybody’s trip will be much smoother if the company is on the same compass heading as the market. Then as your improved brand experience first date leads to more lasting relationships, you may create some distance between you and the competition. When others in the company begin to see the competition in the rearview mirror, everyone becomes a brand advocate. If engineering is going to find a way to reduce the cost of materials and production, that’s great, but don’t let them loose site of the objective – a win-win improvement – more WOW for the money. Brands loyal to their customers create customers loyal to the brand. Why would a customer whose buying power is selfishly concerned with satisfaction with the product, service and experience do anything else?

And, when the competition has you backed into a corner – Kick ‘em in the Brand Experience!

Product Naming Is Not For The Timid - Naming The Baby

Anyone who is responsible for finding suitable product and brand names knows that it is a difficult task. It is a lot harder than picking a name for a child because it has to be unique enough to obtain the rights to trademark and advertise, but the idea is the same – it is permanent and can do great damage to your product or child (remember the boy named Sue).

It’s later than you think. Start yesterday.
Like most things, the way to get a name that does more good than harm is a matter of using a good process or being really lucky, and maybe some of both. Let’s say that you won’t always be lucky, so it’s a good idea to pay some attention to the process. The first common mistake is choosing a name when you need it. Imagine if a young couple came up with the name of their precious bundle of joy at the moment the hospital official set to filling in the birth certificate. Well, that is pretty much what you see most companies do. Lot’s of time is spent making projections about the trajectory of sales for the first few years (most of which is wrong and later discarded), but very little time is spent thinking about a name for a product during the development phase. So when is the right time to start searching for a name? The answer is: as soon as product development begins. Serious development begins when the product specs are being established.

It may just grow on you.
My method is to create a “blastoff brochure” as soon as I have a fairly good idea of what the product (company or category) is going to be. A blastoff brochure is an inexpensively produced sales piece for the product that I plan to roll out x-years from now. It includes all the category, product and component names presented in a cogent sales presentation. It serves as a document that engineering, management, investors, external vendors, etc can use for design and communication briefs. Stand back because the complaints about the name and the product story are about to begin - and a good thing too because you still have time to react (or enough time for the organization to get used to it).

“Great idea, Boss!”
For the time being, let’s avoid a discussion of how to research names and move right to name validation process. The most common process, particularly for small companies and start-ups, is the founders, senior management or a board member thinks of something “clever that they really like.” The clever creator does the typical validation, “Hey, I came up with a name for the alpha project: (fill in the blank). What do you think?” If it is an employee who likes his or her job, the name will probably sound great. If it is someone else that has had seven entire nano-seconds to consider it, the idea will seem, “hmm, yea – okay”, maybe even good. Then, when it has to be applied to signage, products, communication and the vicious death-squid in the trademark registration office, the idea may not seem so clever.

If you want it done right, pay a lot!
“Alright,” you say. “The pressure is too great, the stakes are too high. I’ll hire a professional naming company!” Not so fast. I’ve seen that movie and it didn’t end so well. I once hired a company that advertised a creative staff of polyglots with a crack legal department. They promised they would present us with a long list of great names that were sure to please and be available to trademark in worldwide markets. Outcome? After a month of creative invention, their presentation was funnier than on open-mic night at the local comedy club, but a lot more expensive. We were out many thousands of dollars (francs, in this case), had an unusable list of polyglot gibberish and were a month closer to launch – and still no name. After all, it was a professional naming company that gave the name Nova to Chevrolet, a name that means “doesn’t go” in some romance languages!

It ain’t legal ‘till Legal says it’s legal!
Imagine that by some stroke of incredible luck a name falls from the heavens. It is a perfect expression of the product’s intrinsic value and is totally in phase with the company’s brand message – it is PERFECT. The CEO and the sales force thinks it’s great and the customers think it will be the new category name – the next Kleenex. You’re done. No so fast!! What about Legal (or, your lawyer brother-in-law)? How many times have great names gotten dashed on these rocky shoals! Our lawyer actually had a form for name submission that asked for an estimate of sales that would be generated by products bearing this name and how many years before the name and its derivatives would be retired. Yea, right – like I know! Against those certainties, he calculated how much it would cost to defend this name in all markets, versus some imaginary neutral name like “Khonsekag.” Yea, right – like he knows! In fact, the legal department started to license any combination of letters and sounds that they thought were “clever, and they really liked” and were available for worldwide registration. The names were put in a name bank for us lucky marketers to draw on. Let’s just say, there were not a lot of withdrawals from this stash of treasures.

The four P’s of naming!
Is there hope? Well, yes – sure! Give yourself enough time, get a basket of candidates and input from everyone you can – especially the market. Test the concept with as many customers as you can, give the legal department a heads-up and check it out with the sales force (they serve as early detection of unforeseen, unpleasant nicknames). And, remember the cardinal rule of naming products: If the product is REALLY GOOD the name will work out just fine!

Was “Barak” any better than “John?” I don’t think a marketer in his or her right mind would have picked Barak Hussein as a name for an American presidential candidate, but a good story, a great ground campaign and two years of tireless promotion – and it’s a sale!