The definition of our brand, when boiled down to its simplest form, is what our customers and prospective customers think and feel about our service and our organizations. We all have a brand. The question is, did we choose it, or did we let others choose it for us?
Our Brand Promises a Certain Customer Experience
We communicate our brand through every customer touch point, including through our websites, promotional materials and our written proposals for example. Our brand promises a certain customer experience. The delivery of our brand promise comes through the interaction between our field service team and our customers. It is critical that our field team acts and communicates in a way that is consistent with our brand and its promise because those interactions are our customer’s reality.
Here are six steps you can take to ensure that your field service representatives deliver your brand promise.
1. Define – Define your brand
By clearly articulating your brand and your brand promise, you can set the foundation to guide your technicians’ actions so that they are consistent with your brand promise. Start by answering these three questions:
- How do you want others to think about you?
- How do you want others to feel about you?
- What do you want others to say about you?
For example, a service organization that wishes to build their brand promise around the proactive efforts of their field service team may define their brand as follows:
- How we want others to think about us: “Our service provider does more than simply keeping our equipment/facilities/processes running well, they take steps to help us achieve our business goals.”
- How we want others to feel about us: “We feel assured / We are in good hands”
- What we want other to say about us: “We are better off for having engaged our service provider.”
2. Translate – Translate the brand into actions
Having a brand promise is not enough. We must translate that promise into action. What specifically do we expect our field service team to do to? How do we want our team to conduct themselves in order to communicate and reinforce our brand?
In our example above, one of the actions we would define for our field service technicians are what steps to take to identify and recommend opportunities that will help the customer. One large waste management firm who positions itself as an integral part of the community which they serve, teaches their drivers to be courteous and helpful to their “neighbours” as they go about their routes. They also train their drivers to look for and report any suspicious activity they see along their routes in an effort to prevent crime.
3. Train – Ensure your team has the skills to execute on the brand
F. Fournes, in his book Coaching for Improving Work Performance noted that the most significant reasons why employees don’t do what they are supposed to do are because they don’t know what to do or they don’t know how to do it. Once we have clearly defined the actions, it is important that we ensure that our team has the knowledge and the skills to execute them.
4. Leverage – Use technology and processes to support your brand
We need to evaluate the technology, tools and processes that we have at our disposal to determine how we can utilize them to support the efforts of our field service team. For example, how can the hand-held devices be used to help keep the field professional focused on delivering on the brand? What processes need to be modified to facilitate our field service professionals’ actions.
5. Model – Model the behaviour you would like to see
What we say and how we act are important indicators of how serious we are about the initiative. We must take care that our words and deeds are consistent with the brand promise. Our team will pick up on our behaviours and match them accordingly.
6. Measure – Measure
If we don’t measure how well we are delivering on our brand promise, how can we possibly know if we are successful, let alone have the information to allow us to continually improve? This measurement is more than simply asking if the customer is satisfied or if they would recommend us to others, but delves into how well we have met the promise that we made through our brand. For example, you might ask, “How well did we … [insert brand promise here]?”
As always, I welcome your comments and questions. You can connect with me via telephone or email or leave a comment right here on the site. And as always, please feel free to leave a link back to your own blog if you have one via the commentluv feature here on the site. If you are reading this blog post via email, you will need to locate this post on my website by clicking here. Scroll down to the bottom of the page where you will find the comment section.
Jim Baston
“Be the change that you want to see in the world.”
– M. Ghandi
I received an important reminder about giving customers our hearts as well and our heads. I was having lunch with a good friend and client last week and we got onto the topic of the benefits and pitfalls of engaging technicians in business development activities. In particularly we were talking about how sales people can use the proactive promotion of services by their technicians to differentiate themselves when selling contract services. I mentioned that while most companies give their customers their hands (i.e. do good work), proactive service companies provide customers with their heads as well. By looking out for their customers and making helpful suggestions to allow them to be more effective at operating their facilities, they are providing the highest level of service.
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The next and final webinar in the CMCEF Webinar Series is called Maintaining the Service Experience and will take place on Tuesday, February 26th, 2013. On February 12th, 2013, I presented the second webinar in the Transforming the Service Experience series hosted by the Canadian Mechanical Contractors Education Foundation. The Webinar was called Creating the Service Experience. In the webinar, we considered the five key hurdles to successfully engaging our technicians in activities to transform the service experience resulting in more revenues and higher customer satisfaction and retention. The hurdles that can prevent our technicians from doing what we would like them to do are:
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