How much are you spending to promote your brand, acquire new customers, and earn more business from your current ones?
Whatever the amount, it’s not insignificant. It’s an investment – and a mighty one, at that.
But too often, companies skip right past one of their most critical branding partners: their very own customer service teams. As a result, their customers often experience a wide, gaping disconnect between the company’s brand promise – and the reality of their experience with customer care.
Whether your customer care team is in-house or outsourced, your customers’ experience with your brand, from initial purchase, to customer service, to repeat purchase, to 5-star reviews, needs to be seamless. If it’s not, here are 5 ways you can change that, starting now.
1. Share the Brand with Your Customer Care Team
If you ask anyone on a marketing team to recite their organization’s vision or describe their brand, they can. They should! Their jobs revolve around developing, articulating, and promoting the brand promise. Meanwhile, however, most customer service departments are busy training agents on systems, problem-resolution scripts, and compliance. Their jobs revolve around those things – and they should. But if you don’t also immerse your customer care team in your marketing vision and brand guidelines, how in the world can they reinforce it when your customers call?
2. Keep Training Brand-Specific, and Keep it Coming
Turning your customer care agents into true brand ambassadors doesn’t happen overnight. And it doesn’t happen after one meeting. Take a long, hard look at all of your training. Incorporate your brand messaging into new hire training and be sure to include sales and service success stories in ongoing training. Use case studies and role playing to drive home the difference between simply providing an accurate answer and earning a customer’s trust.
3. Involve Your Customer Care Teams in Social Media
Customer care agents should never feel excluded from – or surprised by – the messaging you post on social media. But you can’t just force your agents to hop online and catch up on everything. Turn them into stakeholders by inviting them into the process. Create contests that feature winners on your social media accounts. Invite employees to submit ideas for social media campaigns. The key here is to build consistent communication and a sense of shared vision across all departments.
4. Integrate Scripts with Your Brand Promise
You might have the most caring, invested, talented customer care agent in the world. But if they’re bound to a script that sounds like a robot reciting the rules, your customers will be turned off. Inject some warmth, humanity and branding into your scripts by including your marketing team.
5. Build Long-Term Collaboration Across All Departments
One of the most powerful ways to build stronger partnerships across all stakeholder groups is to begin by creating a common forum for communicating across departments. With a framework for sharing success stories, asking questions, and brainstorming solutions, you’ll drive a greater sense of ownership for your brand’s success and turn every customer care agent into a great brand ambassador.
At Skybridge Americas, we specialize in driving brand success through superior customer experience. If you’re ready to partner with a customer care team who will bring your brand promise to life on every call, please reach out. We would love to talk!
Bobby Matthews
Senior Vice President, Sales and Marketing
Skybridge Americas
bmatthews@skybridgeamericas.com
Find out how Skybridge Americas can help you delight your customers and grow your business.
We seamlessly integrate our superior customer care skills with your brand messaging. For more information, contact us at 763-299-4570 or submit our contact form.
