Building Trust in your Brand

Chapter 2, Part 3 - Corporate Brand Personality

In the hospitality and retail industries, TripAdvisor is widely relied upon by consumers to assess the quality of a product or service. Yelp has a wider reach outside of just retail and hospitality. They both have a huge impact on purchasing behaviour. I don’t know about you, but I always look for the negative comments first before I really consider going to or experiencing that particular service or venue. Yes, the positive ones reinforce; but the negative ones certainly cause me not to try that company. As media and corporate reputation coach, Alan Stevens says: ‘There are three ways in which potential customers learn about companies:

1. Paid - traditional print and broadcast advertising, Google and Facebook adverts
2. Owned - websites, brochures
3. Earned - review sites and social media

In terms of trust and decision-making, it is the third of these that now holds sway. There is far less trust in what companies, or their PR and advertising agencies say, than in the views of former and existing customers”.

Alan goes on to say, ‘There is only one thing that customers write reviews about, and that is customer service. There is no product or service good enough to overcome a bad customer experience.?

The experience that gets written about will always come from, or at the very least be influenced by an interaction with a person or a people experience. I recently took friends to a very inviting-looking outdoor restaurant/bar in my hometown. I had been there before, a couple of years previously and received average service. However, I decided to try it again as the surroundings were welcoming this particular evening. After only ten minutes we experienced slow and unfriendly service and a less than cheerful waitress who made us feel like we were an inconvenience. We stayed, but left much sooner than we would have done, had the service been in line with what the restaurant seemed to offer from the outside.

Needless to say, I added a TripAdvisor review about the negative service experience we had. It was nothing to do with the food or the environment, which were both good. But the overall experience was so badly tainted by the service that it wouldn’t have mattered to me how good the product – I will not be going back again. I would guess that a number of other people will also avoid going due to reading the review.

Consumers will be driven to express their views on TripAdvisor or Yelp when the experience differs from that expected, positive or negative. Whilst I try and keep a good balance between good and bad reviews, respondents who suffered a bad interaction are 50% more likely to share it on social media, not just TripAdvisor or Yelp, but X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, Instagram etc. too, than those who had good experiences (Dimensional Research – Marketingcharts.com April 2013).? The same survey shows that 54% of respondents who had shared a bad experience said they shared it more than five times, compared to 33% of those who had shared a good interaction.

The important point here is that customer experience has superseded the quality of the product for causing consumers to talk about that product. Customers write good reviews when something happens to make them feel good, therefore this should give you a good indication of what needs to be addressed and considered. ?Furthermore, it is an excellent opportunity to improve your ratings on-line and how people talk about you to their contacts, directly and via social media.

Responding to bad reviews as well as good reviews should be a strategic process followed in your organization – it’s another great opportunity to express your true qualities as a company and goes a long way to diluting a negative comment. No response at all suggests that you really don’t care and we know that apathy can lead to lost customers.

In our work with JW Marriott Grosvenor House London in London, we learned just how much emphasis is put on having a great customer experience and how this can be effectively monitored in part by independent travel websites.

The Guest Satisfaction Survey (also known as Guest Voice) within Marriott Hotels is combined with other feedback from websites like TripAdvisor and Booking. com, by an external company to create another metric, Brand Karma.? This provides benchmarking with their competitor hotels.

Interestingly in addition, Grosvenor House metrics for ‘Satisfactory’ guest experience have now been raised from 8 to a 9. 9 or 10 to be deemed satisfactory and anything below is not counted. Therefore, standards of excellence have been raised.

This seems to be indicative of trends in many service-driven industries – the levels of expectation are rising and possibly at a time when standards are falling".

Case Study

A few years ago, I was delivering a Personal Branding programme for the Management Team at the The Langham Hotel London , one of London’s 5-star luxury hotels and one of the ‘Leading Hotels of the World’. On day one I had lunch in the restaurant with the HR Director. On the drinks menu I quickly spotted one of my favourite soft drinks that I grew up with and you don’t see that often on menus – Ginger Beer! So I ordered my Ginger Beer with great enthusiasm and a vision of a long, cool, iced drink with a slice of lime – it would of course be presented beautifully being the Langham Hotel. However, a few minutes later, the waiter returned looking a little uncomfortable and said “I’m so sorry Madam, we don’t have any Ginger Beer today!”? Massive disappointment of course, but we had a bit of a laugh about the expectation being shattered.

My car had been valet-parked for the duration of the 2-day programme. When my car was brought back to me, on the passenger seat was a bottle of Ginger Beer and a note that said “Enjoy”, and a bottle opener so I could have it on the way home. ?Wow, what an impact that made on me! However, it didn’t end there. Four months later I had organised a conference in London and brought some international speaker friends over. We all stayed at the Langham Hotel.? You can guess what was in my room when I checked in that night – yes two bottles of Ginger Beer on ice, and a note that said ‘Enjoy’.

The reason of course, that this had such an impact on me was because it related to me personally, and it created an experience I would certainly remember and talk about.? I have told this story in many keynotes around the world, to many thousands of people and I know it makes an impact and gets remembered because I often get cards, pictures, photos and even gifts of Ginger Beer sent through the mail to me, referring to the Langham Hotel experience!

One of the Langham Hotel’s strongest values is providing exceptional guest experience. Mike, the Waiter, certainly achieved it that day for me and provided an experience that was special and remembered and went above the expectation.?

Yet again another great example of my belief that the most valuable part of your brand today is what your customers and clients say about your brand to their contacts.

The other important aspect of this story is that The Langham Hotel has created an environment that allowed and empowered the waiter to make a decision himself to do this, communicate this to his colleagues in valet service and then update this on the CRM system for four months later.? Do you truly empower and encourage your staff to make decisions that are right for your customers at the time, and furthermore do you recognise them for it? Luxury standards are almost the easy bit – it’s going to that next level of excellence that takes thought, intuition and a degree of customer focus beyond the norm.

Anders Bouvin , CEO of Handelsbanken in the UK says ‘People tend to blossom when they are empowered. Recruit the right people and treat them like grown-ups. Respect them – they know their customers best.

?As consumers and business people, we are constantly looking now to ensure that we get ‘what we pay for’ rather than necessarily the cheapest option. This is due to our desire to ‘trust’ a product, service or company, more so than ever before. ?We feel we need to know that the company has personality, is authentic, not just full of great words and promises. They need to live and breathe the values via their people across all disciplines in the organisation.

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Copyright Lesley Everett 2024

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