Tell Your Team What Customers Should Say About Them

How do you get employees to behave in ways that differentiate your brand to the people that matter most to your business: customer prospects, clients, partners, colleagues, and recruits?

Too many companies are still trying to create thick manuals that lay out every possible scenario and a corresponding brand-appropriate response — an “if they do this, you do that” kind of approach. Very reactive.

With the world a messy place filled with unexpected situations, it’s just not possible to anticipate everything.  (I’d argue it’s not even desirable.) So if you can’t script every interaction, what are some ways to drive a consistent customer experience from a diverse range of employees across an even more varied range of interactions? In preparing for a brand experience workshop with a retail banking customer recently one key element became pretty clear: You have to work from the outcomes back. And the best way to do that is to work back and from a single question: What do you want them to say after they walk away?

Changed the accountability. It’s no longer about ticking a box. Your responsibility doesn’t end once you’ve said or done something from a list I gave you. It ends when you’ve driven the outcome we’re looking for.

Accounted for the unexpected. If the focus is on what someone is going to say when they walk away, then it really doesn’t matter what the situation is that they’re walking away from. The consistency is not in the behavior but in the goal.

Activated their cultural knowledge. This is a big one. Everyone is different. And how you interact with someone to make them think you’re honest or hardworking or well behaved, may be very different from how I would do it. It’s the whole freedom-within-a-framework idea and puts the onus on them to figure it out.

Made it specific. By identifying the audience and the outcome, I’ve moved brand behavior from the land of the vague to the world of the concrete.