Tag: Strategic Implementation

How to Create an Encouraging Workplace Culture

April 12, 2022

Creating a culture of encouragement and support in your organization can be a challenge. Successful culture isn’t about maintaining positivity 100% of the time. It is more about employees feeling a sense of belonging, being part of something and contributing that is valued. They need to feel that they can engage with leadership in a common cause to achieve the organization’s vision and objectives. When employees feel seen and heard, it bolsters confidence to face challenges and improves resilience to overcome setbacks, knowing they are supported.

The pitfalls of positivity

It is not possible to maintain a positive attitude 100% of the time, group-wide or individually. It is also important to understand that everyone is unique and does not fit a standard mould when it comes to positive thought and action.

Leaders have a responsibility as well as a privilege to ‘set the tone’ in an organization. Encouragement at an individual level is key. When positivity is enforced without focusing on encouragement at an individual level, employees can lose their sense of self-worth and self-belief, leading to potential burn out. Toxic positivity is a leading cause of demotivation among employees. Telling someone to be happy, doesn’t make it a reality. On the other side of the coin, leaders can exert significant positive impact on any event. Employees welcome honest presentation of the facts (even when this might not be comfortable), an inclusive approach to identifying potential solutions and are generally motivated to make an improvement. If your employees are struggling to maintain a natural and balanced sense of positivity in the workplace, it is your role as a leader to discover why this is the case.

Leaders lead… in practice

It can be tempting for leaders in organizations to think that their role is to focus on the future and planning. Of course, this is true… but not at the expense of becoming disconnected from the need to support day to day operational delivery. Employees need the right tools to do the job alongside the encouragement to overcome challenges. It is a key leadership role to make this happen, and, if or where this is not possible, to agree another approach. Pretending the challenge does not exist is not an option. In general, employees want to do a good job. Of course, human error happens but usually when something goes wrong, the reason is a business process that is not fit for purpose, inadequate tools, poor communication or similar. When you face these situations, resist the temptation to place blame and, instead, encourage people to understand what went wrong, why this happened, the impact of the situation, the importance of identifying a solution and how future repetition can be avoided.

Every voice matters

Building an encouraging organizational culture starts with listening. This can be scary for leaders who sometimes think there will be an expectation for them to address every issue raised. However, an open and practical approach is generally appreciated “It is so helpful that, with your valuable input, we have now identified a wide variety of issues that need to be addressed. The XYZ team has reviewed the list and conducted a high-level assessment to identify how we can focus our efforts for the best impact. I will share this plan, so you know what we are planning to do and when. Your ongoing input will be critical as we progress to get the best results.”

Employees are often our first point of contact with customers and service users. What they say and do, has a dramatic impact on how the organization is perceived by customers. Because of this proximity to customers, these employees are also the first people to know when something is not working, unfair or causing problems. These ‘eyes and ears on the ground’ are priceless, so grasp the opportunity to tap into this rich seam of knowledge and make employees an integral part of the decision-making process.

When you encourage your employees to speak up and practice listening to what they have to say, you’ll keep your fingers on the pulse of your organization. Recognise, affirm, and reward employees for bringing their voices and positive contributions to the table.

On another practical note, there will be a minority of outlandish or even inappropriate requests. Don’t allow these to knock you of course by giving them to much attention or airtime. This is where your judgement as a leader comes into play – humour can be a valuable tool in some (but not all!) situations.

Teamwork makes the dream work

Teams made up of people that think and act the same can be stagnant, uninspiring, and blind. Diversity of thought breeds innovation. What can you do to create more difference of people, background, character, and ideas?
Team building exercises and challenges are a well-established way to simulate the stress of a real crisis and give people the opportunity to bond, trust each other, and begin to trust their ability to get the job done. These kinds of exercises also give you the chance to model the kind of encouraging behaviour that you wish your employees to model – no derision if they make an error and, instead, supportive, and constructive feedback, encouraging them to try again when facing difficulties.

To create real value from this sort of activity, consider two points. First, team building shouldn’t only work horizontally. Vertical integration is pivotal in building the kind of lasting culture that sees strong teams trained to believe in their abilities and achieve greater results for the organization. Marriott’s Spirit to Serve program was a powerful global initiative founded on cross-functional and hierarchy workshops. The second point is to make sure that the team building experience and lessons is taken back into the organization, applied, and developed. Otherwise, these events can become a fond memory with no lasting impact on the organization.

SERVICEBRAND GLOBAL

At SERVICEBRAND GLOBAL we believe in the power of encouragement to create a healthy, flourishing and long lasting positive organizational culture. Perhaps you have an aspiration to build the kind of teams and culture proven to improve profitability, retention, and longevity or maybe you are struggling with your current organizational culture. Either way, why not see how SERVICEBRAND GLOBAL can help you create new and more meaningful ways of engaging with your employees.

The Future of Customer Experience

April 5, 2022

Getting customer experience (CX) right is not always straightforward and often challenging. What made for good customer experience in the 90’s is vastly different from the kinds of experiences customers expect to have in 2022.

Changes in culture, society, availability, technology, and financial status have always impacted customer experience. Trends often only last as long as the moment or time frame that created them. So, what does this mean for creating a long-term customer experience strategy?

It’s just a sauce!?

In order to create a successful CX strategy, you must first consider how to add value to the customer journey. The more value you add to your customers’ experience, the more likely they are to remain a loyal customer and become an ambassador for your brand.

Predicting and planning for new trends is almost impossible. Fad’s pop up seemingly out of nowhere and disappear just as quickly as they arrive on the scene. But despite their rapid disappearance, they leave indelible marks on the cultural landscape. Some even carry on far longer than the trend itself. Consider the hype around McDonald’s Szechuan dipping sauce. So intense was the memory of the short-lived product, that 20 years later people still talk about it. A whole new generation of customers was created: people who had never tried the product clamoured and fought for it during a one-day re-release in 2017.

When customers are saying, ‘You had to be there’ when describing their inside knowledge to others, this is, perhaps, the epitome of the term ‘customer experience’.

Strategies that work for you

The pandemic forced a major change in the way customers access products and services. Organizations that were hesitant to digitize their channels may have survived the pandemic, but certainly haven’t thrived in the same way that early adopters have.

Finding the right strategy to build a great customer experience starts with how you engage with your customers and service users. When you provide an omnichannel experience, are customers able to move between each of those channels with minimal effort and achieve the same style of experience?

One of the biggest detractors to customer experience comes from the implementation of channels before they are ready. We all have painful experiences of talking to chat bot on the phone that just doesn’t understand the request we are trying to make. Or talking to an AI in a browsing window that just can’t figure out how to answer our question.

The more options you give customers in the ways they can connect and interact with you, the more likely you are to better service the market with your product or service. But your channels are often the first point of contact for customers with problems or queries and, if your services are gimmicky and not fit for purpose, nothing will turn a customer away faster.

AI is great, and often an almost free way of handling massive amounts of information. But make sure you have humans capable of resolving complex queries. When customers can trust they are being truly heard, it will build a more positive impression in their minds.

Managing the moment

Everyone wants to feel important, to feel special. Thanks to predictive AI, the relationship between organizations and consumers has never been more individual and certainly never so intimate. Sometimes advertising agencies know more about us through our search histories and online usage than even our partners, family and friends do.

This level of hyper targeted individualisation has heightened our expectations from the organizations and services we engage with. We feel good when we are understood. When services cater to our needs without our having asked, we feel valued and connected to the organization in a deeper and more meaningful way.

Customer experience used to be easier to manage with advertisers tasked with creating campaigns to target and direct products and services at people. Effectively telling them what they want. This is no longer the case; there are so many products, so many services, and billions of hours of adverts streaming every day. This bombardment means your customer experience strategy has to be tailor made to hook and keep the customer happy within seconds of engaging them.

Cheap AI and poor customer service agents are not the way to achieve experiences that will keep customers connected and interested in your organization for long.

Is this what you are looking for?

The future of customer experience is tied to an organization’s ability to create personal yet repeatable customer purchases. Organizations that dial into tailoring subscriptions and services directly to specific customers, are far more likely to create long lasting customer loyalty through engaging and personal experiences. 91% more likely in fact!

By targeting individual customers in this way, you ensure that although every customer will have a different experience. They all get the best experience for them.

SERVICEBRAND GLOBAL

Navigating customer experience and building effective strategies to build and keep a loyal customer base can be tricky. At SERVICEBRAND GLOBAL we believe in a personal and omnichannel approach to building quality customer experience. If you are struggling to create meaningful relationships with your customers or service users, we can help you develop strategies that fulfil all your customers experience needs.

The Power of Organizational Alignment

March 29, 2022

ca. 2001 — Rowers Rowing Boat — Image by © Royalty-Free/Corbis

Vision is the compass that points people in organizations towards the fulfilment of their purpose. But as with all things, knowing the right direction, and being able to get there are two very different things. Making your dream happen is dependent on the alignment of plans and people all being in alignment. Otherwise, the organization will fall short as it fails to maximise synergies or, in some cases, even works against itself.

All of us can dream, have a vision or a design on how we wish to shape the world. But without the support of likeminded individuals, our grand visions often come to nothing. The risks of scaling up your organization, of expanding and undertaking new projects are heavily mitigated when everyone is aligned with your values, vision, and purpose.

First steps

Some organizations love measurement metrics, others fly by the seat of their pants. But how can you find the right balance for your organization? This all comes down to how well you plan.

Time spent on planning can sometimes feel like an added burden on resources. However, deciding how you will take everyone in your organization forward, in alignment with your purpose and vision, is key to driving continued success.

The first step in unlocking the power of organizational alignment is settling on your values and having a clear purpose. Once this is done, everybody can ‘board the bus’ knowing what the direction is.

Plan for others

While your plan may contain some sensitive company strategies, on the whole it will be a statement of desired intent. Showing where the company is now, and where your plan will take it if all the steps are fulfilled correctly is a powerful tool.

Make sure that your plan does includes the relevant people, departments, or partners, so they are involved (rather than feeling left out, or like the work they do isn’t important). Self-esteem plays a crucial role in how well engaged we are with the people around us. Failing to plan and account for each department is a sure-fire way to drive a wedge into any attempts at organizational alignment.

Also, it is important that you don’t only focus your alignment strategies on your executive team alone. Everyone has a part to play in executing the strategic plan in an aligned way that achieves the organization’s vision.

If you find you have employees or partners that aren’t part of your organization’s plan, you need to consider if this is because of a lack of insight on your part, or if they are superfluous in achieving the goal. In which case, even harder conversations about those employees or teams need to be had.

Find your rhythm

Once you have you plan, it is then about finding the right rhythm to monitor and adjust as necessary. Consider breaking the plan into segments such as a 3–5-year organisational strategy plan, an annual plan, quarterly and finally weekly or month team meetings.

The crucial element in finding your flow, is understanding that your plan will work from the top down, and from the bottom up simultaneously. The information and data gathered at weekly team meetings is pivotal in informing the larger business strategy.

The employees that have the most customer, or service user contact, are the ones best informed on what your audience is thinking and feeling about your business. Make sure you have ways of getting this feedback and have scheduled time to discuss what it means for the organization and its plan.

Your organization, and the teams within it, will work far more efficiently and effectively when they know their place in the plan and can feel secure in the rhythm of its expectations. Make sure that you communicate frequently to reassure everyone that there is strong leadership.

The sum of all parts

Smart businesses know that to achieve a goal, every element of the business must be aligned with achieving that purpose. Highlighting the interdependency between all areas of your organization is a strength rather than a weakness.

Examine how each part comes together, what its function is and how it might be improved to better meet the plan and achieve the desired goals. This is what innovative organizations do: remove any friction to make operations as smooth as possible, reduce time wasted and prevent the need for work to be done multiple times.

SERVICEBRAND GLOBAL

When your organization is not aligned, the best plans will always have a part missing, face resistance or simply fail. At SERVICEBRAND GLOBAL our goal is to help you achieve organizational alignment, by working with you to create a bespoke plan for your desired vision.

We want to help you create an organization that thrives on honest and open communication, that builds functional and useful plans that include everyone, whether they are executives, customer facing employees, or service partners. Let us help you unlock your future potential, by realizing the power of organizational alignment… in practice.

Engagement Focused Leadership

March 22, 2022

Whether you are new to a leadership role or have been in one for many years, finding the right tone and balance with your team is crucial. Sometimes you might have been leading the same team of people for a long time. Other times you might have more change in the team. Whatever the situation, it is important to be able to assess each person’s abilities and motivation, and balance that with your own and the pressures of delivering on achievable goals.

This blog looks at three key areas for leaders to consider improving engagement with their employees.

1 on 1

Far too often, 1 on 1 meetings are viewed as a waste of time. Something to get through that doesn’t really contribute anything meaningful to the organization. 67% of employees feel like meetings inhibit their ability to get on with being productive at work.

As a manager and a leader, it is your responsibility to come to 1 to 1 meetings prepared to engage and get the most from your employee. Use this valuable time wisely eg avoid giving organizational updates that could be sent en masse in an email or given in a group huddle.

Also remember to respect your employees and that it is not their responsibility to manage your time. Setting up meetings that you frequently rearrange or cancel at the last minute due to other ‘priorities’ will send your employee engagement plummeting. If employees don’t feel like their time is being valued, they will disengage.

Word of mouth spreads quickly in any organization. If your employees feel like their time is being wasted in these meetings, be sure that everyone else will rapidly hear about it. On the positive side, the news of productive meetings will also spread fast.

Leading with the right questions

Knowing what questions to ask members of a new team can be a challenge. As Stephanie Perkins says, “You only have one chance to make a first impression.” These early experiences
will often set the tone for your team’s perception about the kind of leader you are going to be. When you are in a one-to-one conversation with an employee you can be business-like and make it personal at the same time. You and the employee are both performing roles for the organization… and you are both people.

A critical mistake that is often made is trying to give the employee too much time to share their views and opinions, out of a desire to be a good listener. This can put pressure on the employee and result in them talking for the sake of it and in different directions. As a leader, you can lead the conversation with questions that are designed to get the most from the interaction.

If you are coming to a new organization or team, here are some general work-focused questions you can consider beginning with:

What brought you to this organization?
More importantly what is your best hope for working here?
In your opinion, what do we need to start doing here?
What do we need to stop doing?
What is important that we continue to do?
What one change would improve the customer experience most?
What one change would make this a better place for people to work at?
What are you most proud of about working here?
What irritates you about working here?

The most important way you can build engagement is by showing your employees that you trust their knowledge, experience, and opinion.

The Value of listening

Once you know the right questions to ask, it becomes a matter of practicing truly concentrated listening. Managers often get stuck on the first level of active listening. Have you been in a 1 to 1 meeting, that feels like you are talking to a parrot? The other person just repeats back what you are saying. Repetition shows that you have been heard, but that doesn’t mean the person you are talking to has really listened.

If you want to engage your employees into deeper and more meaningful conversations, you must show them you fully understand what they are trying to say to you. Take what they have told you and reflect it back them in your own words. Show them how you understand what they have said and make sure your way of understanding it, is in line with what they were trying to express.

Self-expression is complicated. Youmight feel like you are the best explainer on the planet and yet someone else might not understand what you are explaining. There is no harm in being sure that what has been said is what was actually meant.

This applies even if you don’t agree with what you are hearing. The goal is to build a trusting relationship that is more likely to keep your employees engaged and willing to share their views and opinions with you.

By actively listening, employees will trust that they can bring issues to you while they are still small. This can be so much more beneficial than employees holding off until it is a big problem before being able to count on your attention.

SERVICEBRAND

At SERVICEBRAND GLOBAL, we believe in the power of values-driven employee engagement to improve retention, productivity, loyalty, and advocacy. We help managers and leaders appreciate the value of listening to and understanding what their employees have to say. Too often businesses fail because of a poor attitude to the importance of having employees engaged, motivated, and directed towards achieving your organization’s mission or purpose.

If you feel like you are struggling to connect with your team, or your employees, we can help you create effective planning strategies to greatly improve the way you interact with them. This can only have positive and beneficial results!

CX Looking to the Future

March 17, 2022

The quality of a customer’s experience sits at the heart of successful organizations. Every customer needs to receive an excellent experience at every point of service, irrespective of time, geography, and channel. This can seem like an overwhelming and perhaps even unachievable aspiration. But with the right approach, it is possible to ensure that every customer and service user that interacts with your organization, has a positive experience.

The implementation and use of AI services and functions has exploded in the last ten years. In particular, it is a powerful tool for data collection, targeted marketing, and the management of ever more complicated automation processes.

Organizations are now increasingly seeing the opportunity to deliver great customer experiences every time by using more advanced AI: to connect with customers and to address their problems and queries. In one-way, Artificial Intelligence might be the future of customer experience.

Access any time

The world is no longer a Monday to Friday, 9-5 place. This has been evolving for some time but has been accelerated dramatically by the impact of COVID-19. Hybrid working schemes are enabling people to work to their own rhythms. This is changing when customers usually engage with products and services.

In a world that doesn’t sleep, keeping up with providing a positive customer experience, can be challenging. This is one area where AI will always have the upper hand on humanity. It needs no sleep, rest, or breaks.

AI that is consistently accessible and able to deal with multi-layered queries, problems or concerns is pivotal in the digital age. Customers don’t want to wait until your opening hours for a response. If they can’t get it from you, a competitor will surely address their needs.

Values-aligned AI

How your customers and service users feel about your organization is largely down to the experience they have, not only of the goods or services they purchase, but the experience of buying from start to finish. If they encounter difficulties on this journey, they are less likely to make a purchase or become loyal customers.

The same is true of implementing AI systems and processes into your organization. If they aren’t aligned with your values, they will not generate positive customer experience. Consider Virgin Media, who prize heartfelt service as one of their core values. And yet, it is next to impossible for customers to reach them. An unending complaints system does nothing but create digital feedback loops, sending customers round and round in circles.

AI can be of incredible benefit to your organization when used innovatively to create benefit/value. But not when used as a cost saving exercise to replace humans that could more satisfactorily solve complaints and queries.

Individual Service

AI is vastly superior to humans in learning and storing information. The more experiences it is given, the better and more adaptive it becomes at resolving problems. Herein lies one of the key benefits for using it to enhance customer experience.

Human service agents are of course still far better at providing a positive sense of feeling and engagement with the customers. But this is often only done at the point of service. AI can improve all elements of the customer journey. From initial contact to complaint resolution, and most importantly into post purchase relationships. It can provide highly specific and targeted advertising content to individual customers across a range of platforms instantly.

The best human customer experience manager might be able to keep up with hundreds of personal preference, desires, and personalities. AI can handle millions of data points, predicting behaviour and acting on it in real time.

The space when customers think about your organization might only be for five minutes of their day. Having the ability to target specific advertisements and offers directly to this window is an incredible powerful tool in driving organizational awareness and sales growth. Done well, it simultaneously gives the customer a positive experience of your offering.

The Future

There is a reason that Amazon is so popular. It is not luck, but innovation driving its success. Putting AI to work, knowing what we want before we want it, and ensuring we get it within a day, has driven huge financial success at Amazon.

Their offer and performance even cause some people to look past our social and environmental responsibilities because the customer journey has become so positive, we know it will feel good to keep ordering the things we want.

The next big question is coming because of this era of instant gratification, where anything we want is available: Will AI continue to facilitate customer experience, or has it already begun to lead and direct it?

SERVICEBRAND GLOBAL

At SERVICEBRAND GLOBAL we take a positive and forward-thinking approach to the future. It can be anxiety inducing to face the challenges of the coming decades. If you are struggling to identify the right way to engage with your customers, the way that best fits your organisation, we can help.

How to Build Unshakeable Customer Trust

March 10, 2022

Building customer trust is a complicated process that takes time and patience to achieve. When you get customer trust right, your customers become ambassadors for your brand. In turn, other customers are more likely to purchase your offering based on their recommendations. More consistent customer interactions can only lead to increased sales.

Where to begin?

The foundation of any trust relationship is empathy. This is the ability to recognise and understand the difficulties of your consumers. Your entire organizational policy should centre around the consumer viewpoint. Remember who you are trying to serve. Without customers, there can be no success and, ultimately, no business.

When building strategies and hiring new employees, be sure to select people that are empathic to the customers’ point of view. People that can consider the situation from both sides are key in building trust and bridging the gap between customers and organizations.

Practicing Empathy

Understanding the experiences of others can be a challenge. How do we put ourselves in the shoes of people, that have lived experiences vastly different from our own? Sometimes it best to take a practical and hands on approach. Take Barclays bank for example. They have been training their employees with an age simulation suit (weighted with decreased visibility) to provide the experience of someone with vision problems and mobility issues trying to access their services. These suits are even capable of inducing temporary joint pain!

Building the experience of your organization around the people that struggle most to engage is a genuine and fulfilling way to build trust with those customers. The elderly and disabled people should be treated as equally entitled to access your products or services without having to face unnecessary barriers like poor access.

Training in empathy and awareness is far from straightforward. How can you simulate the pain sometimes experienced by elderly and disabled people? But If you make the effort to do the most for all of your customers, not just the ones that are easy to serve, the returns in customer loyalty and trust can be enormous.

The right thing at the right time

Organizations flouting customer trust has become an ever more common occurrence. Worse still are organizations that only act with decency and morality when it suits them. Consumers often forget how much power they hold over the organizations and institutions that serve them.

Activism can be polarising. That is why understanding your organization’s core values and purpose is so important. Embracing causes or any of the fights for social justice must be woven into the very fabric of what you do, not paid lip service to for moral clout.

Fashion outlet BooHoo is an example of getting it wrong in terms of building customer trust. In the wake of the BLM movement on social media, the company committed to support more diversity and inclusion. At the same time, they were linked to illegal sweat shops in the background.

One of the biggest metrics for customer engagement is the extent to which customers trust the organization to do the right thing. That is not to say you must take up the torch for every cause, that is not always possible. But you can design your strategies around the issues that represent your values and organizational goals. If you are a coffee company, you might commit to sustainable and fair-trade products. If you are a clothing company, you might commit to reducing fasting fashion and ban slave labour practices.

Tell the Truth

Customers and service users are not fools. They will be able to tell the authentic from those that are not. If your organization makes a mistake, be honest with your customers about it. Trust is built through cycles of trial and error, growth and expansion.

Too often toxic company culture prevents people from owning their mistakes, by overly punishing a single mistake, rather than the consistency or frequency with which mistakes occur. One mistake is not a problem, it is a learning experience.

When you come down hard on a first-time mistake, it doesn’t correct the offending behaviour, it only teaches more subversive behaviours. When there is no room for growth, employees are less willing to step into the line of fire and have a growth moment.

And it is always the customers that pay for these learned behaviours. If your employees are so fearful of making a mistake they pass the blame onto the customer, trust will be permanently damaged.

Building a better future

Customer trust is a tricky subject. It requires understanding, empathy, and honesty. At SERVICEBRAND our three goals are
1) To help you understand your core values and purpose.
2) To create plans and strategies to empathically connect with your customer and service user base.
3) Help you create an honest and open company culture to facilitate trust building internally and externally.

Why not see what SERVICEBRAND can do for you?

Communicating Organizational Values

March 3, 2022

Organizations are becoming more switched on to the importance of aligning their vision and purpose with their values. A set of clearly defined values can directly contribute to the creation of an inclusive, engaging, and strong organizational culture.

How well these values are understood has a direct impact on employee alignment. And also how well connected your customers and services users feel about your organization’s identity/brand as a whole.

The next hurdle

Defining these values can be a complicated task. We have dived into deeper discussions on how to identify the right values for your organization in previous blogs. The process, however, doesn’t end with a neat list of values. What comes next is the most difficult part. Successfully communicating them to your employees and to your wider audience as a whole.

Building understanding in a consistent and well explained manner is a keystone to developing company culture that supports your purpose and vision. This can be done by aligning everyone with actionable, values-led behaviours to embody while representing your organization.

Values are for living

Values are for living, not laminating. Of course, visual reminders can play a useful role in reinforcing the message around expected behaviours. Avoid falling into the trap of thinking that this is the job done. The key is to focus on the specific behaviours you are looking to employ within your organization. For example if one of your stated values is ‘integrity’, you might put energy into ensuring that ‘We treat all of our service users equally.’

The words used as Values are nothing more than a label. They are highly subjective; each person might have a different idea about which behaviours they most readily associate with the words selected to represent the organization. That is why clear communication of the definition of the value word and the kinds of behaviour expected to reflect those values is so important.

The Leadership Shadow

The next important step in the effective communication of values, is also the most critical. People learn by example. Employees’ and customers’ perception is strongly influenced by the way employees in management and leadership roles behave. If the behaviour is in line with the stated values, then the perception of the brand is enhanced. If the behaviour doesn’t reflect the stated values, they will become, at best, confused, and, at worst, disenfranchised.

Anyone in a position of leadership must embody the values of the organization as a matter of personal behaviour. If you have disruption and discomfort in your leadership team around behaving accordingly, they might not be the right people to carry your vision and purpose forward.

Positive reinforcement from leaders will help employees feel supported and encouraged to adopt the right behaviours to best reflect the company’s desired image. Actions do indeed speak far louder than words. A key leadership role is to set the right tone of speech and behaviour for other employees to emulate.

Recognition and reward

Recognition (and sometimes rewards) is important in encouraging people to adopt new behaviours. It is not practical to fire people that don’t immediately fit and replace them with people that do. Change can and does happen, but it takes time, leadership, encouragement and sometimes incentives to change behaviours and perceptions.

When you see employees truly living your desired values, spotlight them with recognition and celebrate this widely to positively reinforce the desired behaviour. Other employees will understand the behaviours that are expected and those that are not accepted. Over time the desirable behaviours become the norm.

But be careful when instituting rewards programs, as they can and often do generate devious behaviours in order to secure a reward. They are great for spotlighting the right desired behaviours in the short term, but don’t have as much of a long-lasting effect as visual ques and learning by example.

SERVICEBRAND

It can be a challenge to identify the kind of organizational culture that would best fit your purpose. Figuring out how to communicate the values effectively and efficiently to everyone can present additional challenges. If you have already started or thinking to start down the path of a values, vision, and purpose assessment of your organization, and want to make sure that they are effectively communicated and embedded, SERVICEBRAND Global can help.

Improving Customer Experience

February 24, 2022

Customer satisfaction happy feedback rating checklist and business quality evaluation concept 3D illustration.

Defining improvement can be a tricky subject. At the most basic level, anything that is measurably better than it was before, can be considered as having made an improvement. The real issue is what we choose to measure.

Most of us love making improvements, whether they are personal ones to improve our health, or equipping ourselves better to perform the tasks that generate our financial stability.

Understanding customer experience (CX) and how to create successful CX strategies, is complicated by the vast range of potential measurables and how to implement actions that generate the desired changes.

Starting small

One common mistake in implementing effective CX strategies, is to take a top-down approach trying to implement ambitious changes all at once. This can create an enormous feedback loop in the system that can lead to a domino effect of challenges that had not originally been foreseen.

Making huge changes to improve one area can also negatively impact the more stable and successful areas of your organization.

You might try an alternative more basic approach by simply starting with the customer. Make sure there are ways to gather feedback, and record complaints to deal with the individual as soon as any issue happens. Analyse the information and decide if the feedback is contextually valid and requires further action. Then ensure that action is taken to fix the problem, address it and most importantly, let the customer know the problem is being taken care of. So much customer loyalty can be won by simply letting customers know their complaints have been taken seriously and addressed. And a customer who has a complaint resolved well is more loyal than a customer who didn’t have a complaint at all.

So, what do I measure?

There are several ways to go about this, but the basics are the same. You might choose measurable data points that paint a simple picture of your successes in managing customer experience. Or you might focus on problem resolution, measuring just the negative comments from customers or service users.

Of course, it doesn’t have to be one or the other. There is a middle ground, achievable by looking at the positive and the negative, as well as how they affect each other.

For example, focus too much on only resolving issues customers complain about and you will miss out on feedback around the things you are doing to successfully engage them.

If you want strong and useful data, metrics should be chosen that reflect your organizations values, vision, and purpose. 60% of new business in the UK go bust in the first three years; a poor understanding of data metrics and how to pick and apply them is one of factors that contributes to such high rates of failure.

Everyone wants to make money quickly, but outlasting the competition, building a strong brand identity, and most importantly developing a loyal consumer base, will pay off far more in the long run than two or three years of in a business relying on quick profits over customer experience.

Measure profit, in terms of revenue and sales growth, but also make sure to measure customer satisfaction, loyalty and retention. Measure how your customers are interacting with your organization and find a way to do this where they feel comfortable engaging. Automated options only work if the customer base will use them.

What if its unmeasurable?

Sometimes there are too many variables and getting an accurate numeric measure on the success of a project can be ambiguous. Customer experience is a highly subjective area. Soft as well as hard measures can be a valuable way to establish the whole story; in the hotel sector, there might be a guest satisfaction survey in the rooms and, at the same time, VIP guests might be invited to a drinks reception hosted by the hotel manager to share their feedback.

You can use the tangible data to build strategies and tactics that give you more room to take risks on some of the more subjective elements of customer service.

SERVICEBRAND GLOBAL

At SERVICEBRAND GLOBAL, we believe in understanding the customers’ journey, from start to finish. Not simply understanding the impact on profit margins, but developing those personally subjective relationships with each and every customer but connecting the organizations values and purpose to the way it then engages with its consumer base. If you are struggling to navigate the complexities of building great customer experience, we can help you create strategies and systems of measurement that will give you greater insight into where you are and help you get to where you want to be.

Disruptive innovation

February 3, 2022

Disruptive innovation is a term first defined by Clayton M. Christensen in his book “The Innovator’s Dilemma”. Today his concept of ‘disruptive innovation’ is present in our everyday language about innovation. It is also applied to describe many situations relating to industry changes.

“If you defer investing your time and energy until you see that you need to, chances are it will already be too late.” Clayton Christensen

Understanding disruptive business

To explain his theory, Christensen uses a comparison of Netflix and Uber. A disruptive business is able to gain a foothold in a low-end market that has been ignored by established companies.
These disruptive organizations must in their own way create an entirely new market. One that turns non-customers in customers.

Despite these theories. Uber didn’t create a new market but sought customers who were already using taxi services. If it is true also that truly disruptive businesses start with a low-quality product that covers the mainstream market by improving quality, Uber does not fit this theory either.

” You’re not that disruptive. Stop lying to yourself!” Rameet Chawla

Christensen uses Netflix as a classic example of a disruptive business. The initial Netflix mail-in subscription service wasn’t attractive to Blockbuster’s mainstream customers who rented new releases ‘on-demand’. Netflix attracted only those who didn’t care about new releases, were early adopters of DVD players or shopped online.

They targeted segments of the population previously overlooked by competitors, delivering an inferior (but tailored) alternative, at a lower price. Eventually, Netflix moved upmarket by adding the things mainstream customers wanted. Then one day, there was no reason to use Blockbuster anymore. We agree that this is a great example of true disruption.

We think Christensen’s examples help to explain what disruption is and is not. However, we also believe that there could be a better example to use than Uber because it is a business which is platform-based (rather than linear) and, at one level, we believe that Uber has caused disruption.

Networks of Disruption

Once a platform has established a strong network around its core offering. It can easily tap into that network to unlock new customer groups and create new markets. Networks are extensible in a way that traditional supply chains are not. In fact, most platforms create new markets. They succeed not by building sustainable innovations but by introducing disruptive innovations. These are the things that build new networks, communities, and marketplaces.

This is what Uber has done.

We also challenge the technology obsessed view of disruption. It might be true that new technology uproots, and eventually replaces, an existing technology. Consider the way video streaming has replaced video rentals.

However, this description still misses the point because disruption is not driven just by technology. Instead, it is driven by customers. They are the ones behind the decisions to adopt or reject new technologies or new products and services.

Let’s look at Uber again. Customers valued the convenience and value of the Uber service. The driver community valued the flexibility of hours and service delivery model. Large companies should therefore focus on the changing needs of customers to respond more effectively to digital disruption.

“Those who disrupt their industries change consumer behaviour, alter economics, and transform lives.” Heather Simmons

Innovation is an important aspect in the conversation on disruption. But it is not always the case that newer technology makes for better business. This is why we prefer to take a broader view of the topic.

The Bigger Picture

We are rapidly facing an oncoming future of colliding megatrends. From rapid urbanisation, climate change, resource scarcity, and technological breakthroughs, to shifts in economic global power. All the while, navigating the currents of demographic and social change.

We know that these shifts are reshaping societies, economies, and behavioural norms across the world and redefining whole industries at a breath-taking pace.

We also know that technology is a game changer. But business leaders cannot be sure how they should be planning for what’s to come. The past is no longer a reasonable guide to the future. There is so much hype now, so many unknowns, and such a degree of volatility in every area.

Research shows that the ‘pace of change’ and related threats from business model disruption has become the top emerging risk for CEOs, with health care, insurance and industrials fearing its consequences the most.

“Most industries experience disruption not from the sudden impact of a single force, but rather from a collision of interacting forces, and often with multiple, related consequences.” Sean Murphy

The Future is Now

The notion of an organization with a fixed structure and supply chain offering a well-defined range of products or services in a stable market with a set of known competitors is disappearing fast. Now, and in the future, organizations should ‘create their next cutting-edge’ by embracing new technologies to develop potentially disruptive ideas, in and outside of their current industry.

Secondly, they should ‘fund their future bets’ by putting more time, money and energy into innovations that can test and turn new ideas into commercial realities faster.

Third, if organizations cannot build or fund the necessary skills and resources internally, they should find partners (including third parties and suppliers) to scale new ideas and provide access to technologies and specialized talent.

Finally, organizations should ‘disrupt from the inside’ by fostering an internal culture that views innovation as a benefit and establishing an ‘innovation lab’ or ‘digital factory’ to test new ideas. Successful companies like Google and Microsoft still spend billions of dollars trying to find new ways to avoid disruption by leaning into disruptive technologies, testing new ideas and learning how to remain close to the innovation frontier.

SERVICEBRAND

We also believe that we will increasingly see the development of collaborative ecosystems replacing the traditional organization concept. In this every changing world, why not see how the SERVICEBRAND approach can help you navigate, innovate and disrupt the competition!

Navigating Brand Identity

January 13, 2022

“Your brand is what people say about you when you are not in the room” Jeff Bezos

The terms ‘brand’, ‘branding’, and ‘brand identity’ are sometimes treated as interchangeable. The first ‘Element’ of the SERVICEBRAND approach is Brand Identity and we refer to this as the collection of all the brand elements that the company creates to describe its personality and character. The brand identity is what makes an organization instantly recognizable to different stakeholder groups (customers, employees, service partners, local communities etc), creates the connection with these stakeholders and determines how the organization is perceived.

Some leaders in organizations think that their brand is simply the name and logo. Of course, the name and logo are important parts of the visual identity and yet there is so much more to an organization’s complete brand identity. It consists of intangible elements such as the organization’s purpose and values as well as tangible elements such as visual identity and tone of voice. Ultimately, we think Jeff Bezos’ description above captures perfectly what a brand is.

Component parts

In practical terms, the Brand Identity is a combination of purpose/vision, values, brand attributes, unique positioning, SERVICEBRANDSignatures, visual identity and tone of voice. The starting point is to identify and articulate the organization’s purpose and values. The brand purpose or vision captures what the brand desires or promises to accomplish (usually for the buyer).

The organization can use positioning and differentiation to communicate the brand’s purpose and ultimately enrich the brand’s identity. And this purpose can transcend the functional purpose to also express the brand’s higher purpose or reason for being. The higher purpose suggests emotional and social benefits for the customer by choosing that brand. A strong purpose and values set the tone for the organization’s purpose and code of conduct.

The changing tide

In the past, it was commonly accepted that organizations owned their brand identity. The marketing function usually took the lead, deciding what the brand identity was and the used their marketing or public relations department/campaigns to ‘pump out’ directed messages to their target audience.

In the Values Economy, this is no longer the case and an organization’s brand identity is now co-owned by the various stakeholder groups e.g. customers, employees, service partner, local communities, investors etc. In the future, we believe that the most successful brands will not be focussed on direct control of brand messaging. Instead, they will invest energy in being true to their brand identity, led by their purpose and values. They will then focus on enabling their stakeholder groups to communicate how they feel about the brand with these stakeholders effectively acting as the marketing department.

“A brand is no longer what we tell the consumer it is—it is what consumers tell each other it is.” Scott Cook

Positive and Negative

When organizations have a strong brand identity, it gives them an edge of their competitors. When you successfully attract a customer or service user and give them a positive experience of your organization, they often become brand ambassadors, offering free marketing via social media and word of mouth, to encourage others to choose you as well.

Whether you put much time and attention into brand identity or not, customers and service users, will still get an impression from you, one way or the other. Considering the power individuals have in this day and age to influence others for or against you, it is well worth putting the time into creating a strong brand identity, one that raises your brand awareness in the minds of others, in a positive and lasting way.

When done well, a strong brand identity can generate a halo effect or a Midas touch, that makes launching new products or services much easier, as those that have already had a positive experience with your organisation are far more likely to trust you when it comes to new releases.

Your customers’ experience of your brand can also lead to damaging or negative effects. Once a brand is tarnished, customers and service users are far less likely to trust or engage with future products or promotions. This negative association can even lead organizations to rebrand and separate themselves from the core brand identity, consider Facebook’s recent name change.

SERVICEBRAND GLOBAL

Your brand lives in everything your organization does… whether you like it or not. If you treat your brand identity as a lip service campaign designed to attract people, but do not then offer consistency or substance, you will fail, sooner or later. At SERVICEBRAND GLOBAL, we help progressive leaders of organizations to create strong brand identities through careful examination of their purpose, vision, and values. From this we are able to create SERVICEBRANDSignatures, that set organizations apart from the competition. Your brand identity is what people say about you when you’re not there, so how important is this to you?