When the final bill arrived following a recent family dinner at a national chain restaurant, our server “Bob” made the plea for us to go on-line and fill out a customer survey.  He had provided decent service although not extremely notable. In his plea regarding the survey, he told us he would soon be going on vacation for a couple of weeks to visit family across the country. If he doesn’t get good survey results, he said his boss may cut his shifts when he’s back from vacation.

The customer survey is becoming very common in the world of retail and service-oriented businesses.  I’m frequently asked when making a purchase to go on-line and rate my experience.  It’s also common for the associate to request the rating they think they should receive.  Sometimes it comes with a plea like Bob’s that the associate may face a cut in shifts or possibly won’t get a raise if they don’t get top-notch results.

For many employees, it seems to be all about the survey results.  Associates probably get frequent reminders from managers that good survey results are imperative.  If that’s the case, then the focus for employees becomes the survey results themselves while the experience they’re creating for customers that supports the company’s brand promise becomes secondary or even forgotten. Are these employees being truly trained on how to deliver excellent service or a good customer experience…or are they simply being trained to ask for a specific rating from a customer?  Isn’t this the wrong message to send employees? 

If employees know how to deliver an excellent customer experience, the rest should take care of itself.  Sure, you can use surveys or mystery shops to confirm and validate. But the rubber truly meets the road if employees understand the experience your brand is aiming to create and how their role in your organization contributes to your customer promise. 

If they’re only being trained to ask for survey results, that may be the last memorable impression made on the customer.  The emotion you create for your customer might be one of pity, sympathy (“I sure hope Bob doesn’t get his shifts cut when he returns from vacation”), irritation (“Why should I give Bob 5 stars when his service only ranked 2 or 3?!”) rather than excitement over a delightful experience.

Do you want your brand to be known as the one that badgers customers to give good survey results or the one that delivers an outstanding experience every time?

January is the time that many of us make resolutions to get healthier.  Have you made these same resolutions for your company?  Is your company healthy and aligned so that you can make 2011 your best year ever? 

Here are five key areas within your company that you can examine to see how healthy you are at the beginning of 2011.

1. Customer Promise.  What are you promising your customers, and are you sure you’re fulfilling that promise? Take a step back and see if your promise is really clear and that your employees understand the promise.  If your promise is muddled, fragmented, or confusing, now is the perfect time to clean it up.  If it’s clear already, great job!  Now you can figure out a way to see if you’re delivering on that promise. It doesn’t have to be a formal survey. Find a few key customers and get their anecdotal feedback. 

2. Business Results.  What are the key business results you’re committed to delivering that are tied to your customer promise?  Make sure your results are realistic while also providing a gap that will help you and your teams play a big game. Have you effectively communicated the results to your teams, and do they know what role they play in delivering those results? 

3. Cultural Pillars.  Your company culture is the foundation that supports everything you do.  A strong company culture can empower your teams to deliver on a common mission. A weak company culture can derail your results before you’re even out of the starting blocks. Does your company have a powerful culture that everyone is aligned behind?  The New Year is an excellent time to shape up your culture if it’s not as strong as it could be.

4. Business Functions.  If your culture is strong within your organization, each separate business function should have a clear vision for how they contribute to and support the culture and your customer promise.   January is a great time for each department to review how well they’re doing.  For example, are you hiring the right people (human resources), and are you training them (learning & development)  in how to support your brand? Are you making it as easy as possible for your customers to do business with you (operations or customer service) or have unnecessary policies and procedures gotten in the way? Sometimes the departments that don’t directly interact with customers can let themselves off the hook too easily, but they’re as accountable for delivering the customer promise as anyone else.

5. Tactics and Tools. Are the tactics and tools within your organization contributing to your customer promise and the delivery of your business results? This could include your hiring process, employment brand, product training, sales and service models, coaching and mentorship programs, and more. Everything needs to be aligned up through your organization so that messages are consistent and the customer promise is being fulfilled.

How is your company shaping up in 2011? Are you on track to make 2011 your best year ever?  Share your ideas and thoughts.

Do you love your own brand?  Are you your brand’s own biggest fan?  If not, then you should be. And your teams should be too!  How can you expect customers to love your brand if you don’t love it first?

A little brand narcissism is a good thing, and it starts at the top. When the leadership team actively loves the brand and freely expresses that love, it’s infectious to teams below. It’s not about indoctrination or mind-control.  You can’t tell your teams how and what they should feel, but when your employees hear the leaders actively and enthusiastically loving the brand, they’re more likely to jump on the bandwagon and love your brand too.

A little brand self-love can go a long way toward internal-external marketing alignment. Building a culture within your organization that expresses that self-love can be an excellent first step toward aligning your internal messages with your external ones.

While it may feel like you’re asking your teams to drink the Kool-Aid, the other valuable point about brand self-love is that it can quickly weed out the people who aren’t on board with you.  Employees who are skeptical, cynical, or resistant are not the people you want on your team who might leak their feelings onto a customer. Figure out who your biggest cheerleaders are and then let them express their passion to their colleagues and to your customers.

Who are your brand’s biggest internal cheerleaders? How do they express their love of your brand?  Leave us your comments and share your story.

Effective onboarding goes beyond tactical training and integrates new employees in a brand-right, comprehensive, and strategic program.

Every new employee reflects time and money – not only in the recruiting and interviewing process but in the time it takes to bring them up to speed and make them productive.  Creating an engaging and comprehensive onboarding program will maximize your investment, reduce your overall training time, and generate motivated and enthusiastic new employees who are ready to help your company thrive.

How can Onboarding align your brand and marketing messages?

Many companies view onboarding as simply “orientation” – those first few days on the job where new hires learn how to use the phones, find the bathrooms, and fill out paperwork.  This completely misses the bigger picture.

Onboarding is an opportunity to immerse your new team member in every element of your company – from the basic and tactical to the strategic and cultural.  An effective program will help new employees become ambassadors of your brand and company, which is especially crucial if they have contact with customers, vendors, partners, or anyone outside the company. They will reflect and deliver your brand to the outside world so it’s imperative they do so in a brand-right way.

By integrating brand, culture, and marketing messages into your onboarding program, you will generate alignment and consistency throughout your organization and support the delivery of your brand.

Ten On-boarding Best Practices

1. Reflect the brand. The strength of your brand plays a huge role in recruiting and retaining top talent. The on-boarding process should reflect your brand seamlessly and consistently.
2. Reduce time to productivity. How fast can your new hire be up-to-speed? The sooner they’re productive, the sooner the company will benefit from their contributions.
3. Unify all on-boarding efforts.  There are multiple components and agendas that make up on-boarding – everything from payroll and benefits to security, IT, branding, customer service, and more. A unified and integrated program that covers all on-boarding elements will ensure each topic is trained consistently and according to company standards.
4. Introduce company culture. New employees can impact an organization’s culture. Now’s the time to introduce the company culture, and help new hires understand how they will be expected to meld into it.
5. Roll-out for maximum retention. Don’t overwhelm new hires by cramming all on-boarding into the first few days or weeks on the job. Spread it out to improve retention and provide on-the-job experience that can build better context.
6. Provide coaching & mentorship. It’s easy for new-hires to get frustrated, overwhelmed, and simply throw in the towel. If you lose them, you’ve also lost time and money. Give new employees an appropriate and safe outlet to vent, ask questions, and get coached.
7. Include evaluation and go/no-go checkpoints. Sometimes that person who shined in the hiring process turns out to be not the best fit after all. Build in checkpoints and measures for evaluation to help identify and de-select a poor fit early in the process, before you’ve invested a lot of time and money.
8. Involve managers. Don’t pass off on-boarding to the training or HR departments. Involve managers to establish rapport quicker and help them identify strengths and weaknesses, communication styles, motivation factors, growth opportunities, and more.
9. Keep employees in the work environment. It’s tempting to ship your new employees off to a classroom for onboarding, but they’ll learn faster and retain more if you provide as much training as possible in the actual work environment.
10. Map to a larger plan. Onboarding should connect to and reflect your overall business objectives to support long-term company success. Also, development plans for each employee that are initiated in the onboarding process will improve motivation while building upon larger business goals.

In any business, there will be problems.  A deadline will be missed, a product won’t function to the glory of its glossy advertising promise, a customer will have to wait in line longer than they should.  Problems will happen – they’re inevitable.  By training your employees how to react and respond when there’s a problem, you can minimize the damage ahead of time and help your brand be prepared to weather any storm.

Recently, my husband & I experienced a problem when we took a roadtrip to our old college town to attend a football game. After a hot day of traipsing around to visit our youthful haunts, we arrived at our hotel, ready to check in and freshen up before the big game.  It was nearly 90 minutes after check-in, and our room wasn’t ready.

While the desk staff fumbled around trying to find a room that we could check into, several employees stood in front of us and had a conversation amongst themselves about why housekeeping was being so slow and that rooms were not being turned fast enough.

A problem was occurring for this hotel, which was threatening its brand – and the employees were making it even worse by engaging in idle banter and gossip about housekeeping in front of customers.

When there are problems, your employees can be your best and your worst asset.  They’re the front-line to your customers and how they handle and manage problems can make or break your brand.

By empowering your employees with three simple steps, they can manage problems in the moment, helping to minimize any long term damage to your brand.

1. Acknowledge your customer’s concern. When a customer is upset, it can really take the charge off of a situation when you “get” them – you let them know you understand why they’re upset. In my situation at the hotel, the manager could have said something like “I understand you must be tired and ready to check into your room, and that you were supposed to be able to check into your room over an hour ago.”
2. Communicate your commitment to your customer, and let them know what you’re doing to fix the problem. At the hotel, the manager could have said “We are committed to getting you checked into a clean and comfortable room as quickly as possible so that you can make it to the game on time.”
3. Compensate by finding some way to make it up to your customer, no matter how small it may seem. Standing at the hotel desk while they tried to find us a room, it must have been pretty obvious that we were hot and tired. The manager could have found us a couple of cold bottles of water to drink while they found us a room. It would have been a small gesture, but one that would have gone a long way toward making me believe in their commitment to me – the customer.

Most importantly, when you’re having a problem, employees should know it’s not okay to engage in idle gossip in front of customers or complain about the problem to the customer or anyone else.  Your message to your customers should be one of accountability and confidence.  You’re taking accountability for the issue, and you’re displaying confidence in how you are responding to and correcting the issue.

How do you handle problems for your customers?  What problems have you run into as a customer yourself?  And how have they been handled?  Leave us your comments, and tell us about your experiences.

“They’re throwing guitars out there!” exclaimed the astonished airline passenger as she watched United Airlines baggage handlers on the tarmac clumsily hucking guitar cases off the plane and onto the carts.

Musician Dave Carroll heard these words from his seatmate and braced himself for the worst.  While on tour with his band last year, Dave’s $3500 guitar was severely damaged by United Airlines baggage handlers in a story that makes the perfect case for the importance of internal-external brand alignment. Dave went through an arduous process of trying to be compensated for the damage. He talked to person after person at United – finally to be told they would offer nothing more than some travel vouchers for his loss. You can read the complete customer service saga on Dave’s blog.

To make a point and tell the world that he was wronged by United, Dave proclaimed that he would write and produce three music videos illustrating his misadventures and post them on YouTube for voting by the general public.  The first video (see below) has recently been published and has become an overnight sensation on YouTube. It’s also being actively discussed in the blogosphere, on Twitter, and Dave’s story has been told through multiple media channels including the CBS Early Show, Rolling Stone, and more. His song is now available for download on iTunes.

Dave’s experience is a classic demonstration of how a company like United has a lot to lose by disregarding the importance of internal-external brand alignment.  There are several issues at play that add up to Dave’s misaligned experience, which is ultimately doing damage to United’s brand:

Failure to live up to service promise.
A basic principle of internal-external marketing alignment is the expectation that you will deliver a service experience that aligns with your brand promise. United’s website offers a very detailed statement of the company’s customer commitment. Among other things, it asserts that United’s customers “have the right to expect – to demand – respect, courtesy, fairness and honesty from the airline they have selected for travel.” According to Dave’s story, he was continually given the runaround by multiple United personnel in several cities as he tried to receive compensation for his demolished $3500 guitar. It sounds like this was not just one poorly trained or disgruntled employee, but a general failure by multiple United personnel to take accountability for a mistake and try to live up to the customer service commitment by handling the issue with “courtesy, fairness, and honesty.” In an aligned company, employees would be given the tools, resources, and training they need to handle customer complaints in a way that lives up to the brand promise.

Cultural issues – “it’s not my problem.”
Dave claims he was repeatedly told by multiple United personnel that the issue “is not my problem” or that the paperwork he submitted was not received. This general lack of accountability can perpetuate an internal culture where employees feel powerless or unmotivated to handle customer concerns. Every time a customer encounters the fallout from this kind of culture, the brand will continue to erode.

The transparency of the social media world.
In the old days, it was easy for companies to sweep complaining customers under the rug. In today’s world of the social web, one irritated customer can quickly communicate to millions through Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, the blogosphere and more. For this reason, companies need to not only be prepared to engage with their customers in the social space before there’s an issue, but they need to react quickly when trouble arises to avoid a wildfire.

A customer’s heart was broken.
If you believe that a brand is not what the execs in the marketing department say, but it’s an emotional connection that lives in the hearts and minds of customers – then you will understand the magnitude of Dave’s final verse in his song where he says United broke his heart. When he asks himself in the song if he’d ever fly United again, he said he might if saving the world were on the line, and then he goes on to say:

“…And if I did, I wouldn’t bring my luggage
‘Cause you’d just go and break it,
Into a thousand pieces,
Just like you broke my heart.”

When you break that emotional connection with your customer, you may never get them back again.

Dave’s story of the broken guitar ends on an upnote, although it certainly seems a bit too little too late. The damage has already been done – not just to Dave as a customer, but to the United Airlines brand.  Dave posted a subsequent response on YouTube where he says United is offering reimbursement for the guitar.  Although he says reimbursement is not the point anymore, and he’s encouraging United to donate the money to charity. He says “United has demonstrated they know how to keep their airline in the forefront of their customer’s minds, and I wanted this project to expand upon that satirically.”

In fairness, I also have to point out that Dave is building his own brand as a musician through this tale. We’ll see what happens to his personal brand and to United when the second and third videos come out in the future.

Has a brand ever broken your heart? What did you do about it?  Leave us a comment and tell us about your experiences.

A colleague of mine shared a recent story that I believe illustrates one of the new challenges companies face in managing their brands in the age of the social web.  It also points to the importance of building true internal-external brand alignment in your organization.

Our tale begins at a recent large international tradeshow in Las Vegas where a leading US-based technology company had a major booth.  I am sure the executives who authorized the substantial cost to exhibit at the show viewed it as a fantastic opportunity to connect with customers and promote the many great technologies the company produces.

My colleague, who is a well regarded member of the industry, was touring the show floor and happened across the above company’s booth where she had a rather negative experience. She was treated in a very dismissive way, and she left the booth disappointed and a little irritated.

In the heat of the moment she communicated her disappointment and irritation in a rather sharply worded “tweet” on Twitter through her cell phone, then went on with her day without giving it another thought.

The next day she received several urgent voicemail messages from the Director of Marketing from this particular company, demanding a call back. When they finally connected she was admonished for daring to write a negative tweet about the company, threatened that this company could make her life difficult if she ever said another negative thing about them, and then made to feel guilty for putting the Director of Marketing’s job at risk.  Apparently the senior executives had been monitoring Twitter and were not happy with what they heard in the “tweet” about the experience in their booth.

In so many ways this experience did not surprise me. Many large companies have been able to manage their brand for decades by using their size and industry stature to intimidate and quickly stamp out potential damage to their brand.  These behaviors are often well entrenched in the culture of the organization and employees are encouraged to respond quickly to quiet dissention.  After all, isn’t that one of the benefits of being large?

The leveling quality of the social web has shifted the balance of power forever, yet many companies are still caught in old cultural models that no longer work. Customers and employees now have a variety of channels to communicate both positive and negative messages about the brands they come into contact with. Progressive companies are quickly finding ways to harness the power of the social web to create meaningful connections with customers and employees. They are also educating their teams on how to respond effectively to the comments that inevitably will get made in the social space.

How much more effective it would have been for the tech company in our story to engage my colleague about her comment in a transparent way in the social space. They could have thanked her for her feedback with a quick Twitter reply and worked to turn her negative experience into a positive in front of the social community. No company is perfect.  We all know that. But seeing a company walk the talk and work to truly listen to a customer is reassuring and allows the company to take the high road and further build the brand.

Here is the irony of the story. My colleague is a new member of Twitter with a very small current following, most of whom are family and friends.  Any “damage” done from her tweet was minimal.  But this same colleague has a blog that is read by thousands of industry members each week.  Hmmm, now that this major tech company has decided to use intimidation tactics over a small tweet, I wonder if they have a much bigger problem ahead from a fiery blog post.

The rules have changed and aligning your team behind what your brand stands for is more important than ever.