Employer branding: Creating a framework for branding your organisation
Section three of the Personnel Today Management Resources one stop guide to employer branding, covering how to create and implement an employer branding framework, including an example based on a customer-focused approach. Other sections .
|
|
One area that is intrinsically linked to branding is customer service. In the eyes of the customer, any contact with any part of the organisation will affect their perception of the brand.
"Emotional branding is based on that unique trust that is established with an audience. It elevates purchases based on need into the realm of desire. The commitment to a product or an institution, the pride we feel upon receiving a wonderful gift of a brand we love, or having a positive shopping experience in an inspiring environment where someone knows our name, or brings an unexpected cup of coffee - these feelings are at the core of emotional branding."
Marc Gobé, Emotional Branding (see Resources ).
Over the years, much has been written about customer service - some of it anecdotal, some based on hard evidence. One very interesting challenge that has been made by a number of people is about the effectiveness of customer care training.
Way back in 1990, Clutterbuck, Clark and Armistead stated in Inspired Customer Service: "Customer care usually doesn't work." They carried out a survey that found that the majority of the programmes failed to meet their objectives, with only 2 per cent doing it fully. Their findings were supported by a similar study carried out by A T Kearney and TQM magazine.
If you review the case study examples in Section 8 , you will see a number of approaches to the development of the relationship with customers. Much of it is based on creating the right environment and reinforcing the behaviours of honesty, trust and integrity.
In today's business environment of outsourcing and automating key parts of the business, developing relationships with customers is even more of a challenge. Programmes like the BBC's Watchdog, or more recently, Brassed Off Britain, demonstrate how vulnerable an organisation's reputation with its customers can be. The current development of offshore call centres is another example of the challenge of managing customer satisfaction and expectation together with cost savings. How do you protect your brand when it is being handled by another organisation?
Clutterbuck et al stated that they believed the effectiveness of service quality approaches depends on where an organisation was positioned in the quality spectrum. They identified four categories of approach in tackling service quality issues:
Naturals: These are companies that have institutionalised service quality from their earliest days, and have so inculcated service values that employees would not consider operating in any other way. The reputation these companies carry is a strong reinforcement of service values. It helps them to acquire high-calibre staff, it develops expectations among customers that are automatically reflected in staff behaviour, and it promotes word of mouth advertising. A strong service reputation can take a long time to dissipate.
Aspirants: These are companies that have strong ambitions towards achieving an in-built company orientation and are determined to become service quality leaders within their own market niches. These companies are typified by committed, visionary leaders who set challenging service goals and expend a great deal of personal energy ensuring that each initiative along the quality path receives the resources and support it needs. In common with naturals, aspirants have recognised the two facets of service delivery; exceptional flexibility in the front-line to meet varied customer needs; and exceptional efficiency in the back room systems to ensure that the customer promise is met every time.
Followers: These are companies that have been forced into service quality, largely against their inclination. While top management pays lip-service to the concepts and may spend large sums of money on service quality initiatives, it lacks the passionate belief that service improvement is the only way forward - hence so do all other layers in the organisation. There is no shared vision among top management of what achieving service goals would mean to the organisation. Followers often embark on campaigns because large customers have told them to, or because their competitors have programmes. In doing so, they fail to acquire the emotional commitment that is so essential to achieving drastic culture change. Followers often are seen by their customers as being more interested in price or profit than service.
Laggards: These are the companies that have developed such poor reputations for service quality that they have to work twice as hard as aspirants. Just as a high reputation for service lingers, so does a poor one. They are typically bedevilled by a culture that supports very different objectives than service, and a workforce with a high level of cynicism towards management and any new initiative that requires an input from them. Customer expectations and employee cynicism combine to create a major initial barrier for any changes towards service orientation to overcome.
Where does your organisation sit? Creating a respected employer brand can help in every aspect of your business. Corporate reputations can be destroyed almost overnight, but investors and customers can be more forgiving if, historically, you have developed a respected brand.
Unfortunately, overcoming a negative perception can take much longer. If your brand develops a reputation for being uncaring, lacking in integrity, or inefficiency, it will take much longer to shift public opinionand, equally, employee perception, and so it becomes almost a self-fulfilling prophesy.
"The customer is the reason for our business," Nordstrom quoted in Fabled Service (see Resources ).
Nordstrom's level of service was for many years the benchmark of customer service. What Nordstrom recognised was the importance of leading by example - it believed that if your goal is service, but you don't model, measure or reward service, what role model do your people have to follow?
It is a similar theme endorsed by research undertaken by Goleman in The New Leaders (see Resources): "Common wisdom, of course, holds that employees who feel upbeat will likely go that extra mile to please customers and therefore improve the bottom line. But there is actually a logarithm that predicts that relationship: for every 1 per cent improvement in the service climate, there's a 2 per cent increase in revenue." (Paper by Lyle Spencer - see Resources ).
The research went on to suggest that 'overall, the climate - how people feel about working at a company - can account for 20 to 30 per cent of business performance. Getting the best out of people pays off with hard results.'
In the report that Goleman quoted, the style of the manager was found to account for 53 to 72 per cent of the variance in organisational climate. (See Resources ).
Nordstrom believed that your very best people will respond to what you actually do, what you evidently measure and what you openly reward every single time. They believed in translating vision into reality by asking four questions:
Why are we in business?
What do we believe in?
Where are we going?
How are we going to get there?
There was one rule in Nordstrom: use your good judgement in all situations. As a result, people at all levels came up with solutions to problems and improvements to processes. There was an 'absolutely no problem' attitude on the part of the Nordstrom staff. They take the challenge of sending the customer away delighted very seriously.
It was in 1971 that Nordstrom first drew up its organisation chart as an inverted triangle, with the customer at the top and the board of directors at the bottom. This was way in advance of any of the other later organisations that attempted to follow this approach. What is interesting about the Nordstrom example was that in the 1990s, many UK companies, particularly in retail, were heavily influenced by what may have been perceived as an 'American' model of customer service, but what is the level of customer satisfaction in today's environment? How many employees could answer the four questions above about their organisations? There are equally many stakeholders asking similar questions about some of today's leading organisations.
Putting employer branding into practice - enhancing a customer-focused approach
What follows is a sample approach to examining a customer-focused approach to employer branding. There are also other examples in Section 8 .
It will be essential that any initiative reaches the hearts and minds of each employee if it is to have any long-lasting impact. Whatever terms, or descriptors, are used to describe the initiative, it must reflect behaviours that each employee would want to aspire to achieve. It must not be seen as a 'wish list', which is unattainable and unrealistic and destined to fail.
Instead it must be realistic, progressive and set in the context of the organisation, as people currently perceive it. It must have senior management endorsement and active demonstration of the underpinning philosophy.
It must be allowed time to develop and succeed, significant change will not occur overnight, it should be kept on the agenda for development and seen as a contribution to an ongoing process of organisational excellence.
Employees should be encouraged to develop the approach not just for the organisation, but also for themselves to engender personal pride.
Sample approach
Employees need to recognise what they could stand for through the eyes of your customers:
Helpful
Professional
Responsive.
There is the need to identify what your customers want and to create an environment which is:
Inviting
Welcoming
Recognising the different needs of individuals.
Combining the traditional qualities of:
Integrity
Service
Professionalism.
With the customer-focused qualities of:
Empathy and responsiveness
Effective communication
Commitment to action.
This will be supported by team-building, the right administrative back-up and support for each other.
If you want to be remembered for consistency, responsiveness, and quality of service, and to enable all employees to achieve their full potential, it is important to clearly identify the common goals, values and aspirations and to share this through the development of an organisational excellence model.
The proposal
Recognising the importance and integrity of the services provided, and the desire to achieve a quality of service that is consistent, respected and demonstrated by all your employees.
Step 1: Background research
To meet with senior team and identify:
Vision, values and measures of success. The desired service of the future
Current assessment of where you are now and where you want to be
Agree the key messages and expectations to be shared with:
- internal team (short term, long term)
- external, your customers, visitors, suppliers other stakeholders (short and long term)
Identify hopes and aspirations - what will success look like?
Agree action plan for implementation
Meet with a representative sample of employees to:
- gain an overview by assessing the current levels of customer service
- identify potential areas of improvement
- use this data as a basis of recommendations
- ensure 'buy-in' from all partners as findings will be based on their assessment of the current situation.
Key areas of consideration
What levels of service are you offering your customers?
Do people live the values?
What good practice has been identified?
Who is doing it differently? Where is the innovation?
What is working really well?
What about back-up support?
What are the issues? How are people overcoming them?
What are the blocks to delivering excellence?
Outcomes
To prepare a report summarising the key findings, together with a 'next stage' action plan. Without making assumptions about the potential outcomes, this could include:
The identification of the behaviours required
The suggestion of appropriate learning and development solutions to create an enhanced level of customer service and overall quality ofservice
To suggest ways of developing the customer-focused behaviours and offering a clearly defined service to your customers
Recommendations of how to reinforce the changes in behaviour in an ongoing manner
Recommendations of the overall changes required to meet an organisational excellence model.
Step 2: Share the key messages and measures of success with the internal team to ensure commitment
While it is inappropriate to detail the specific content without undertaking the research, here are some initial thoughts:
Input for management
The vision, values and measures of success. Focus on the team management role in developing new standards of service
Promoting and supporting cultural change
Models of organisational excellence
Self and team development
Roles and responsibilities
Setting standards and measuringperformance
Coaching and giving feedback.
Thought needs to be given to the most appropriate way of delivering this. It may include short-focused sessions, part of a broader programme of blended learning development, mirroring and reinforcing key behaviours and one-to-one coaching.
Step 3: Transmit the key messages to rest of team:
Keynote message from CEO/senior team
Support from management team
Vision, values and measures of success. Focus on the individual and team role in developing new standards of service
The customer and their needs
Models of organisational excellence
Roles and responsibilities
Skill development
Communication skills
Building relationships
Handling difficult situations and difficult people
Action planning, how can it be different in the future?
Again, thought needs to be given to the best way of delivering this: short-focused sessions, part of a broader programme of blended learning development, mirroring and reinforcing key behaviours and one-to-one coaching.
Step 4: Set up improvement projects based on outcomes from the research and feedback, with the aim of improving responsiveness to customers and other employees, backed by clear communication and efficient administration
Step 5: Review outcomes, give feedback on performance
Step 6: Ongoing support and reinforcement of key messages
Based on research and experience, any development in the area of CRM/customer service has to focus on the following:
A realistic assessment of the current provision, the identification of what people are doing well, but highlighting how it could be even better
A clear and demonstrable commitment from the top of the organisation, through active demonstration of the preferred behaviours
An introduction and illustration of the key features of the customer's expectation - for example, to develop a 'through the eyes of the customer' perspective. This is particularly helpful when employees are encouraged to recognise the differing expectations of customers
A clear identification of customer-responsive behaviour and to encourage it in employees, to coach and help people to develop new skills
Positive reinforcement and support for those who demonstrate it naturally and encouragement to them to take it further
The recognition that the emphasis on customers is not just a one-off initiative, but is an integral part of the organisation with an ongoing importance
An acceptance that the most fundamental part of the process is built on positive behaviours, based on self-esteem, developing each individual's confidence and pride in the offer
The need for people to take responsibility for meeting challenges and providing innovative and creative solutions
The desire to create an energy for improvement, to rise above the mundane and to gain tremendous personal and team satisfaction from providing excellent customer service.
All the best customer-focused organisations encourage individuals to take the initiative, to respond positively to challenge and to recognise the threat posed by competitors, being driven to improve.Those who adopt a 'me too' philosophy will always be the ones who are in the slipstream of others.
|
- Enterprise - Motivation - Energy - Self esteem |
|
A survey undertaken by Ventura (see Resources) identified the following reasons why customers defect:
Involuntary switching
|
|
Remember the last point of contact is as important as the first.
|
|
Section one: What it is and why it matters Section three: Creating a framework for branding your organisation Section four: Developing your people Section five: How to communicate the employer brand message internally Section six: Using employer branding to gain competitive advantage Section seven: What is the future for employer branding?
|
