Brand building is attitude - don’t delay, empower your customer service team today.

Brand-building so often brings to mind fancy agency presentations and font police but at heart it is truly about personality and attitude. It waits for no one and no slide decks.

What does your brand convey and what things can you do today to build it whether you are a startup or are a mature corporate?

When people interact with you, your team? or your company what qualities can they expect? Trustworthy? Reliable? Prompt? Helps solve problems? Engaging? Fun? Caring?

Each individual in your business can make an impact on your brand today.

As you grow, your marketing team and agencies can help codify your brand and share standards, expectations and communication norms to aid alignment but the truest brands are a reflection of the team’s personalities, aspirations and delivery. Brands account for an estimated? 30% of the stock market value of companies in the S&P 500 according to Millward Brown, so getting it right is very valuable.

Initially, brands are a reflection of the founders, then their team as it grows. Marketing helps bring consistency and common language and imagery to help tell that story to the world better. If there is much divergence between what the brand tries to convey and the true culture in the team it usually shows and feels inauthentic and fails to deliver. When I was part of the management team that established the 118118 brand in the UK, the ionic runners imagery was drawn from an insight by our agency (WCRS). They felt that our company culture was based on relentlessly pursuing ways to find the best answers to customers questions, stopping at nothing, like ultra endurance runners.

You impact your brand daily by how you act from the moment you start a business, so don’t delay, start today.

As you develop and grow, your customer service team are constantly on the front line of interacting with customers and they can have massive impact.

Here is a tale of 2 recent brand interactions, the impact they created and the personality they conveyed:

The vanilla corporate let-down

I contacted 索尼 to find some replacement silicon tips for my excellent earbuds I have raved about (and probably bored my friends about). The model were released less than 2 years ago, the sound quality is amazing and I love them. Sony had none of the tips? available and could not initially identify anywhere to buy them.

Then a helpful customer care team member suggested they could send me a free pair as none were available to buy. Amazing! This was about to be the best brand moment ever.? I started telling my friends how impressed I was (my poor long suffering friends).

10 emails and various required proofs of purchase, VAT receipt provision etc later, they said no. I had missed a line that said they would be free if the earbuds are still in warranty. I had had them 18 months and so was outside warranty. Very disappointing (I am sure these only cost pennies to make) but my oversight, my fault.

I returned to the original question…I still needed replacements but they didn’t seem to have any to buy in the UK and I was happy to pay for them. After some pushing they referred me to a spare parts company they recommended which could sell me a pair for a whopping ￡25! But they were out of stock in my size…so not much use.

I pushed Sony further, to find out how I could make sure my ￡250 earbuds were not about to become redundant due to lack of availability of a consumable item. they referred me to another 3rd party site, selling each tip for ￡25. So ￡50 to get working headphones for items sold for a fraction of that by competitors and made for pennies!

I kicked up a big fuss with Sony, showed they clearly had stock of their own (as they had offered me free ones initially) and persuaded them eventually and reluctantly to let me buy a pair from them direct (not available for purchase on a site) for ￡25.

It took 20 emails, 5 weeks and a bunch of customer care staff costs to get there. At one point they had a massive brand goodwill win in their hands, but they snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

For all the years of technical development, Audio R&D, brand team and marketing, my view of Sony (and likelihood to repurchase) had been massively negatively influenced by the customer care team and how to handle an item worth pennies.

My take away is Sony is a great tech brand with crappy service and may not be worth the hassle for my next purchase - big Life Time Value (LTV) risk to them. There are other great headphones out there so Sony may not be my next choice now.

The second story is much shorter.

Surprise, delight and deliver

The day before yesterday, following an unplanned bathroom redesign need, I was trying to quickly order some decorative ‘slat wall’ wood panels to stick on the wall. I found a site called Naturewall . Unsure which item to choose, they offered next day samples costing ￡5 each. There was no mention of being able to get that deducted from a purchase, but the 3 samples arrived by 9.30am the next day exactly as planned so I kind of forgave them for the sheer time saving and hassle saving.

I chose the colour that would work, went to order and found there was a Black Friday deal if you bought 3 panels. My wall needed 10. The site did not offer to give me all 10 at the deal price, so the 10th panel was going to add 25% to the overall price.

I contacted customer care to see if I could get the 10th at the same price as the first 9. Not only did they quickly say yes, but they offered to make the 10th panel free.

Amazed and impressed, I ordered immediately and have now told several friends about this amazing service, one of whom is already considering a purchase.

The simple attitude and empowerment of 1 customer service person has done a massive amount to build my view of their brand. Yes, the pretty website helped and executional delivery matters (the samples arriving fast) but never forget the importance of delighting your customers and building your brand with each interaction and a great attitude.

You may be thinking that that’s the difference between a start-up and a big company and it can’t scale, but attitude, personality and culture can be achieved in companies big and small and don’t always cost money.

What are examples of great and terrible brand interactions you have had over the last month that have influenced your view of brands?

How do you empower your team send encourage them to delight customers and build your brand?

Nik Hole (Start-ups and scale-ups. CEO / CCO / Board Advisor. Delighting customers through insights, products and service delivery.)

P.S. Whilst I have been writing this, my groceries got delivered at 7.20am. The person handing them over explained which bags were for freezer, which for the fridge, which are for the cupboard. No one has mentioned that before. It cost nothing extra to the company. His great attitude and service focus added an extra helpful touch today that adds a brand-halo effect for Ocado Retail whilst I am rushing around getting kids ready for school and now knowing which bags to put into the fridge quickly and which can wait until it’s calm later.