From our Pushing Barrows series: The Brand or The Bland
Why generic customer service is simply no longer enough!
Dissatisfaction with customer service is burgeoning. Not only is this discontent reflected in many nationwide and individual organisational surveys, but it’s now the talk of the Internet with entire Web sites devoted to slamming different brands. Even as businesses struggle to improve their customer service and top management aims at a strong brand, the word is out that service standards have fallen. In fact, if you believe what’s being said, service stinks and it’s getting worse.
Surely it can’t be that bad? How has it got to this? Surprisingly easily, as you’ll see ...
Some time ago one of New Zealand’s leading banks ran a major television advertising campaign with the tagline “Knowledge Makes the Difference.” The implication was clear: this bank had more information, ideas, and expertise that allowed them to better meet the specific needs of individual customers than their competitors.
One of my former colleagues heard the bank’s radio ad, offering a free “Hot-Tips” brochure for residential property investors. Although he was not a customer of the bank, he was hooked. He stopped by a branch to pick up both bank literature and the brochure. To his dismay, not only was the brochure not available (he needed to call an 0800 number), but a very pleasant customer service representative had “no idea what he was talking about”. “They never tell us about these things,” she said apologetically. Needless to say this prospective customer was not swayed to set up an account with the “knowledge makes a difference” bank.
Organisations spend millions to tell the world how they would like consumers to think about their offerings, and then a human being with a few simple words shatters the illusion. In this case, “I have no idea” flew straight in the face of the bank’s promise.
Now we know this bank trains its staff in customer service, but it is safe to bet that they did little or nothing to appropriately prepare their thousands of staff on how to be “on-brand” for the influx of customers coming to try out their new offerings.
Is that so surprising? Not according to David Burrows of The Design Agency in England, who says that “40 percent of marketing investment is wasted, as ill-informed or demotivated behaviour by staff unwittingly undermines the promotional promise. The result is that 68 percent of those who do buy go away because of how they were treated.”1
One major cause of this may be simple, but it is too often overlooked in the rush to develop a strong brand. Many branding agencies, and the companies for whom these brands are created, are so focused on the physical product and articulation of the product’s brand promise that they pay inadequate attention to (read: forget about, overlook, choose to ignore, or are afraid to address) the largest and most important part of delivering a service brand — namely, the interaction service providers directly have with customers.
First-hand experience strongly influences consumers’ repurchase decisions. That’s because customers become primed by every experience to create more positive memories of earlier brand experiences. Based on their research, Richard Elliott and Kritsadarat Wattanasuwan at Oxford University in England, conclude, “lived experience with a brand, through purchase and usage over the life cycle, will tend to dominate the mediated experience of advertising…”2 Reinforcing a brand through every customer touch-point, therefore, can provide the repetition necessary to inspire repeat purchasing decisions.
Indeed, the Gallup Organisation polled 6,000 passengers and discovered that, by a ratio of between three and four to one, employees of airlines are more important than advertising messages in building brand loyalty. Banking customers are more likely to return, by a ratio of 10 to 20 times, if the organisation has outstanding employees. And in the telecommunications industry, the loyalty of customers is influenced by employees of the organisation at a ratio of between three and five to one, compared to advertising.3
As I said, these dynamics are constantly ignored. TMI recently worked with a large company to develop a complaint handling solution. After meeting with the marketing department, I suggested building the staff workshop content around the new brand position that was about to be launched in a nationwide advertising campaign. The relief expressed by the marketers was almost overwhelming. They knew the organisation’s service needed to be aligned with the brand and the new campaign, but they simply did not have the time or resources to do anything about it and meet their own deadlines. The need to grab new customers was given greater priority by the executive team than ensuring that new and existing customers would experience what they had been promised.
In many ways, branding can be best understood as a business strategy in great part to gain consumer trust. We also know that trust is hard to come by in today’s world. A recent study put a large exclamation mark on this point. A survey of 4,000 customers of nine Blue Chip Australian organisations sponsored by the respected Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals revealed that only one in 20 customers trusts the organisations that serve them; even worse, only one in 40 believes organisations trust them!4
So, consumers do ask: Can I trust this organisation? Are promises met when it actually delivers its products and services? Is this organisation following through on commitments, or is its advertising just so many words and images with no action behind them? Clearly, a company’s ability to deliver what it declares is fundamental to its reputation. Therefore, the ability to move from a credible strategy to authentic delivery is paramount in building trust.
In fact, branding ultimately shapes organisations precisely because it is trust based: we promise, we deliver. When this is not done, customer relationships are more likely to be short-term, immediate, and transactional—and to contribute little to building brand trust.
To achieve meaningful customer-staff interaction that enhances your brand, you must offer more than lip service to the value of trust. Harvard Professor Gerald Zaltman cautions that people who manage customer relationships must grasp how consumers store, retrieve, and reconstruct memories of every interaction with a firm. These interactions may be direct, as when customers deal with a global account manager. They may also be indirect, e.g. through word-of-mouth. And every new encounter alters a customer’s recall of a prior encounter—often in trivial, but sometimes in significant ways. Zaltman relates the unlikely example of a manufacturer of paints, a commodity product. The organisation discovered that purchasing agents were willing to pay premium prices for branded paint when sales people linked self-esteem to the sale. Who would have thought that volume paint sales and self-esteem could be linked?5
Ever since Jan Carlzon, former CEO of Scandinavian Airlines, wrote the book, the “moments of truth” phrase has become de rigueur in customer service.6 It has come to mean those defining moments when customers evaluate products and services and pronounce, “This is good.” or “I don’t like this.” Industries, such as the hospitality industry with many complex customer interactions, can have thousands of Moments of Truth every day.
In fact, the term has become so integrated into customer service language that many do not know it originated in bullfighting. The defining Moment of Truth is that critical point in the bullfight when the matador faces the bull. Is the matador going to defeat the bull or be defeated? Fighting live, angry bulls is admittedly dangerous work, and matadors clearly understand the essence of their Moments of Truth. They have rehearsed pictures of just about everything that can happen and behave precisely with those pictures in mind ... or they are matadors no longer.
Unfortunately, too many organisations simply put their customer-facing staff into the service ring without an ounce of education about the brand and leave them to it. At best, they receive generic service training that many refer to as “smile training.” Facing live, sometimes angry customers may not be as dangerous physically as bullfighting, but the effect on brand reputation can be deadly.
Most organisations assume that people who interact with customers are knowledgeable about basic human interaction and will therefore intuit the appropriate way to behave towards customers. That could be the situation if your aspiration is simply good generic service, but there is no way to intuit appropriate on-brand behaviors without at least rudimentary brand knowledge. Since, in many cases, employees do not even know what the brand promise is, through no fault of their own they simply do not have enough information to deliver a branded level of service. They can only offer what they know.
And who do you suppose notices that? Who do you suppose is experiencing that off-brand Moment of Truth? The motivation for those disillusioned websites is becoming increasingly clear.
The heart of the challenge is delivering brands through branded customer service experiences. The most successful brands in the world, most of which are product brands, are tightly managed. By employing precise guidelines, it is comparatively easy for marketers to manage consumer brands such as Coca-Cola, Colgate toothpaste, or Bayer aspirin.
But making sure a consistent container of Coca-Cola will end up in the consumer’s hands is considerably different than guaranteeing what will happen when customers and service providers have either direct or indirect contact.
The reason is simple. In the world of products, you want everything to be the same. Consistency is king. It’s a symbol of true achievement. By contrast in the world of service, being the same is a death knell. If your service is not distinguishable, then it’s wallpaper. And that’s why generic customer service – service that is the same as everyone else – is bland not brand.
Sadly, few managers who purchase customer service programs for their staff think they are buying generic customer service skills training programs. In fact, that is exactly what many of them are doing. Most customer service training companies have service programs (delivered on tape, CD, or in person) that they offer to a wide range of high-end and low-end companies across a variety of industries. They sell the same program to multiple companies based on the idea that the same style of service delivery is going to create loyalty to an infinite range of different brands.
The public has leaped ahead of organisations on this one. Consumers do not hold one idea of service in their minds; the public is not generic when it comes to service. When evaluating customer service, consumers hold a multitude of personal, specific, and unique expectations about services and products relating to specific brands.
Brand experts Bob Tyrell and Tim Westall make the same point with a slightly different caution. “Branding customer service requires something much more complex than the bolt-on activities currently parading as ‘relationship’ building. It implies developing a recognizable style and personality, and that has important implications for brand marketing.”7
Think about it. If you want to distinguish your brand position from another organisation’s brand, it is difficult to do that when offering advertising that looks like everyone else’s. In the same way, generic service will not enhance your customer’s experience about the uniqueness of your brand. Customer exchanges must reflect and illuminate features of the brand promise and brand values.
It is possible to offer a commodity product, such as coffee, and then create such a unique brand position that the average consumer visits a location 18 times a month—as Starbucks has done.8 But you cannot wrap that coffee service in generic packaging or experiences and expect to stand out from the local cafe. And you miss a real opportunity to distinguish your brand if your staff offers generic service, even if it’s good generic service. The reason is obvious from a business perspective. Without specific and branded customer service to entice and engage people, there is no motivation for consumers to feel that they absolutely must return to Starbucks despite long lines and coffee twice as expensive as that of some competitors.
There are those who say that branded service is too expensive and too difficult. But ironically, the big expense for organisations is in shifting from poor generic customer service to excellent generic customer service. The cost lies not just in training people service skills, but investing in all systems and technology required to deliver quick, assured, high quality, error-free service.
By contrast, if you are at the point where you know what your brand promise is, then it is more likely that your internal structure and systems are coherent with that branded understanding, and a relatively low investment is required to move from generic customer service to branded customer service. That’s the service that’s going to get you noticed and more profitable. That’s the service that is “on-brand” and therefore “on-customer”.
How do you get your people to understand the difference? Answer: give them a lens. The lens through which your staff evaluates their service delivery drives their behaviour. If you place a branded service lens in front of your organisation, you make it easier for your staff to evaluate whether they are on-brand or off-brand. Contrast this with a generic service lens approach where service is only seen through the lens of satisfaction. Then the service standard drops to: Did I offer good service or bad service?
Why’s that so bad? Because the “customer satisfaction” lens produces behaviours that tend to gravitate to the ordinary; i.e., delivering the same generic service standard as competitors—and honestly believing that is good enough. By contrast, viewing service through a branded service lens amplifies branded service uniqueness. The questions staff ask become: “Did I create a brand experience for my customers? Did I reinforce our brand? Did I deliver on our brand promise?” Behind these questions lies the most powerful latent question: “Am I helping our customers to love what we do and keep coming back?”
© Paul Stewart, 2004 All Rights Reserved
This article is based on extracts from Branded Customer Service – the new competitive edge, by Janelle Barlow and Paul Stewart, publishers Berrett-Koehler (San Francisco), due for release in October 2004. If you would like more information or to pre-order the book, you can contact pauls@tmi.co.nz or go to www.tmi.co.nz
1 David Burrows and Juliet Williams, “Who is Killing CRM?”, Admap, July 2001.
2 Richard Elliott and Kritsadarat Wattanasuwan, “Brands as Symbolic Resources for the Construction of Identity,” International Journal of Advertising, Vol. 17, No. 2, 1998.
3 As reported in the London Sunday Times, May 12, 2002, op cit.
4 Consumer Emotions Study, by SOCAP (Australia, 2003):
5 Gerald Zaltman, How Customers Think, Chapter 10. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Business School Press, 2003.
6 Jan Carlzon, Moments of Truth, Ballinger Publishing, 1987
7 Bob Tyrell and Tim Westall, “The New Service Ethos, A Post-Brand Future—And How to Avoid It,” Market Leader, The Journal of the Marketing Society, Issue 2, 1998.
8 Statistic cited in Elizabeth Goodgold, “Talking Shop,” Entrepreneur (September 2003):
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