CHAT BACK: Next generation brand engagement

With all the money that gets poured into marketing and all the effort that goes into designing a new logo or a new store, it’s amazing how little thought goes into designing the service aspect of the customer experience.

We all know that a brand is a promise made in the mind, and delivered consistently at every touch-point.

We all know that the brand needs to come through in the behaviour and choices of every employee: answering the phone, handling a customer question, programming the software, driving the delivery truck, writing the contracts, everything.

If you’re going to win the battle for the hearts and minds of consumers, you have to win the hearts and minds of your employees first.

Your team quite simply determines the reputation of your brand. So how can you connect with your employees, and engage them in delivering intelligent, personal, creative customer experiences – the kind of customer experiences that build your brand, support price premiums and strengthen your business?

The creation of brand ambassadors won’t happen through staff meetings and company newsletters alone.

You need them to genuinely understand your business, brand and customer service strategies, and to see their own individual roles in making those strategies successful. And to do that we need a new kind of dialogue in the workplace.

The old PR-based approach to internal communications doesn’t work. Corporate training is boring and the occasional event won’t change a thing.

Cutting through the cynicism and apathy was never easy and it’s a whole lot harder now, because teams are made up of people and people have changed. We could point to Gen Y attitudes but actually we’ve all changed our expectations.

Staff engagement needs to change if it’s going to hit home with us now. It needs to be more:

Honest

We expect transparency, not spin. We are all the WikiLeaks generation. We’ve all learned to Google a fact, mid-conversation, sitting at a café table. Don’t hide the problems or avoid the tough questions. Start a conversation about the most difficult challenges to executing your strategy and engage your teams in finding solutions.

Interesting

Hold our attention or we’re gone. We’re all the remote control, DVR generation. Marketers and ad teams are wrestling with the need to entertain, but managers and communicators within the workplace also have to come to terms with it. Draw inspiration from the design and showmanship of next-gen retail techniques.

Two-way

We’ve all come to expect a voice, our fifteen daily minutes of fame. We’re all the reality-TV, facebook, blog generation. Why should I listen to your strategy if you don’t want to hear my ideas for how to improve the way things are done?

But be bold. You can’t use old, one-way communication approaches for the new internal audiences. And you can’t build a great brand, without first building an engaged, empowered team.