Employees are a critical yet under-emphasized element in delivering the positive customer experience necessary to build a strong brand. Tareq J. Kour highlights why a strategic approach to human capital will enable employees to deliver to their fullest potential.
Many companies fail to deliver on the promise that their brand, implicitly or explicitly, makes to customers.
Local automotive dealers promise a whole new experience in car ownership, but perpetuate the same old sales pressure and haggling at the dealership. Jordanian banks promise one-stop shopping then require multiple conversations and handoffs for opening accounts and offering financial products. Airlines tout their kid-gloves treatment for business travelers, then put them through the overbooking and lost-baggage circles of hell, with the "customer service representative" either powerless or otherwise engaged.
Domestic computer software makers promise to raise office productivity then understaff their technical support teams.
This brand "bait and switch" the raising of customer expectations that are then dashed seriously erodes the power of a brand over even short time periods. It certainly does more harm than simply delivering an unsatisfactory experience without having promised something better. Jordan's telecom firms, in particular, are learning the dangers of delivering to customers an experience that falls far short of the one they expect.
A brand promise can be unmasked as a hollow boast at almost any point during a customer's experience with a company, product, or service. Each interaction represents a "moment of truth" that can enhance or erode the brand, heighten or undermine customer loyalty, and affect business results for better or worse.
End to end customer management recognizes that when the customer needs a solution, he or she cares about the result, not the messy process of getting there. Consumers and business customers alike expect fast service, convenience, appropriate cross-selling, and solutions to their problems.And they want consistent treatment across all the sales channels through which they interact.
Delivering a seamless experience that pleases customers, however, is becoming increasingly difficult if not impossible in Jordan. Customer satisfaction has been declining in many industries for the past years, in part because the bar is rising customers have higher service expectations, expanded options, more cross-industry benchmarks, and lower switching costs. At the same time, execution challenges are intensifying, due to product proliferation, cost pressures, and talent scarcity in most sectors here in Jordan.
Companies that succeed in this challenging environment can distinguish themselves and reap significant rewards. Because consistent delivery of the brand promise tends to be costly and time consuming for competitors to replicate, it reinforces the ability of a brand to serve as a potent source of strategic control.
Consider Aramex or Four Seasons as classic examples.
Bringing a well-designed customer experience to life requires aligning every point of customer contact with the brand promise, from the storefronts to the call centers to the Web site, from the first contact to ongoing service interactions. The most important factor in creating a successful customer experience, however, is a company's workforce. The moments of truth involving human interaction often have the greatest impact on how a customer feels about the brand. So it is crucial for Jordanian companies to ensure that their employees continually reinforce the brand.
A major local insurance company came to this realization in the early 2000s. The company wanted to stem attrition of auto and homeowners insurance customers to competing brands, and it also hoped to cross-sell life insurance. Customer research revealed that by far the most critical driver of retention, and ultimately brand equity, was how customers were treated in the claims process, in which customers interact with several employees, notably their agent. That experience represents a "day of reckoning" for a product that a customer has long been paying for but is only now tangibly benefiting from. Consequently, the quality of the experience has a dramatic impact on customer retention, on word of mouth communication about the brand, and on the insurer's ability to cross-sell.
Delivery on the brand's promise may even involve employees outside of the organization. The different brands that offer home delivery are highly dependent on the experience a customer has in selecting, ordering, and receiving meals or merchandise. Indeed, a furniture company's brand hinges on the premise and promise of the ease of buying a sofa and the value of testing the softness of the cushions at any showroom.
A decisive face to face interaction that a customer has during the buying process, however, is with one of the independent truckers on contract to deliver and assemble its products. If that driver is rude, scratches walls, or has difficulty setting up the sofa, the company's brand will suffer.
The superior service challenge
Despite the importance of delivering a customer experience that supports the brand, most Jordanian companies do not understand what enables and what hinders employee effectiveness at the key moments of truth. As a result, employees often cannot deliver to their fullest potential.
Senior Jordanian executives cannot simply mandate that employees support the brand promise. It takes a deep understanding of what these employees value, how they experience the brand, and how they contribute to delivering the customer experience in order to convert them to a new approach. Most local executives acknowledge the economic rationale of improving employee effectiveness and the rationale for improving customer loyalty. What's they miss is that the two are linked. Employee commitment and capability have a significant, quantifiable impact on the customer experience, which in turn has a major impact on brand equity and company performance value.
When human interactions undermine a company's brand promise, the problem often is not bad intentions or lack of interest among employees. Rather, employees on the front line tend to misunderstand the priorities implied by the promise or do not have the wherewithal the training, tools, time, or latitude to deliver.
They often face severe gaps between what customers expect and what they are able to do for customers.
In my experience, among Jordan's most prevalent organizational barriers to delivering on the brand promise are:
Inadequate staffing and training. Clearly, employees who are poorly trained or whose numbers are insufficient to do a job properly will deliver an inferior experience. This is particularly true if they are in a key customer-facing position.
Staffing and training issues have become more pressing as the ongoing shift to a digital economy, where customers engage in transactions over the Internet, is changing the skill set required of many front-line employees. Where once they were order-takers, employees increasingly add value by being effective advisors, or even advocates, for the customer. To perform this role, they must thoroughly understand how to mobilize other parts of the organization to deliver a unified experience to the customer.
Inefficient business processes. Unresponsive back-office staff, departments that operate in silos, or computer systems that do not mesh well tend to generate time-consuming, morale-sapping "workarounds."
A related problem is when employees lack the authority to solve the customer's problems themselves. For all the hype surrounding flatter hierarchies, top-down bureaucracy remains entrenched at many Jordanian organizations. Only a minority of companies give front-line workers appropriate leeway to exercise their own judgment in serving customers.
Lack of information. Without detailed information on individual customers, accessible in real time, employees are shackled. If a customer calls with a problem, the phone representative can't respond quickly. The single phone call, possibly the only human interaction the customer has with the firm over the course of a year, represents a source of irritation for the customer, who must wait for a solution to his or her problem. It also represents a missed opportunity for the customer service representative to move from solving the problem to making the customer aware of other services.
Misaligned incentives. Jordanian company cultures and reward systems may emphasize sales over service, or servicing as many customers as possible rather than solving a customer's problem. Another problem is poor responsiveness by back-office staff, who often have different incentives from front-line employees.
Poor communications. This applies both within the company and between employees and customers; in fact, the two are often linked. Management sends mixed signals about the brand promise or never articulates the standards designed to reinforce the promise. So employees feel isolated, confused, and improvise as best they can in turn jeopardizing their ability to deliver on the promise.
Connecting with customers
Jordanian managers can brilliantly position a brand to appeal to the most valuable customers today's and tomorrow's. They can identify those elements of the brand that drive customer choice. You can design a customer experience that should enhance those brand equity elements in all the interactions between customer and company. But if the entire business does not deliver on the brand promise made to customers, brand-building efforts go for naught. And because such an effort hinges on the commitment and capabilities of employees, companies must learn to unleash the full force of their human capital.
Developing employees into enthusiastic, knowledgeable brand ambassadors is not easy to do. It requires internal marketing that is as sophisticated as external marketing. It requires metrics that trace and quantify the linkages between customer-employee interactions and the brand promise. It requires a constant reassessment of employee skills and tools so that workers are equipped to anticipate changing customer priorities and how the brand must evolve in response.
Indeed, this approach to aligning human capital strategy with brand strategy has one overarching benefit: customer priorities end up driving the whole enterprise. The needs of key customers shape the brand promise, which in turn determines how the company invests in its human capital and what tasks employees do each day. At Nuqul Automotive, customers have suggested a majority of the car models that the company eventually has stocked. The main reason for any firm to deploy technology and other physical assets is to enable employees to deliver a customer experience that drives brand equity ever higher.
Human capital strategy and tactics are not usually included in most discussions about brand building. Clearly, however, brand-building activities need to be integrated into a company's overall business strategy in order to capture mindshare among customers, employees, and investors.The successful brand today is embedded in every aspect of the business design, starting with customer selection and moving right through to a company's organizational systems in particular, how employees interact with customers. This integrated approach ensures that the brand will be a powerful tool for achieving sustainable competitive advantage.
In the end, the Blue Fig imprint and the Fastlink tattoo represent more than the memory of a product transaction; they celebrate a cherished experience. Achieving that visceral connection between customer and company is the essence of a successful brand strategy.
Tareq J. Kour is managing partner at Kour&Kour, a strategic branding and marketing consulting company. (tareq.j@kourkour.com)
© Jordan Business 2006
