Envelop You: Successful (Fictionalized) Branded Customer Service


While we see these three service offerings (generic service, branded customer service, and themed customer experience) as related, they are also different from each other. We can best demonstrate this relationship by creating a fictionalized company.

We start an envelope and packaging materials company, a commodity business. To succeed, we have to manufacture envelopes and packaging material that meet our targeted market's needs. Regardless of how limited our customer interactions are (maybe we start out as a manufacturer and work through distributors and retailers), we still have to provide good supportive customer service (ServQual: reliability, assuredness, tangibility, empathy, and responsiveness) or our distributors will become tired of us. They will go someplace else to get their envelopes unless we have the cheapest prices.

We become so successful at our commodity business that we decide to differentiate our envelopes and packaging material by branding our products and service. We even open a few stores called Envelop You. Our brand proposition is "Packaging that envelops you with vintage, variety, and value." To enhance and deepen the knowledge of our brand, we communicate the brand through effective advertising, good product positioning, and clever public relations.

We have a lot of customer interaction with our direct customers, and we are careful to enhance the brand every time someone interacts with us. Our goal is to have people at least think of us when they have packaging needs. We want to become a household name. Our tagline is "If it's worth giving, it's worth enveloping." We have worked hard to get our staff to understand the uniqueness of the brand they represent. We not only offer training programs that emphasize excellent generic customer service skills, but we also pay particular attention to Envelop You brand service skills.

We have an on-brand internal culture. We have been very careful to make sure that the Envelop You brand concept is part of our human resources strategy, as for example in our employee benefits and recruitment. We know what "vintage, variety, and value" means at Envelop You. One unique strategy we use is to rotate people through all the positions in our shops, so no one gets bored.

Our staff know how to support our values because they live them every day in their work. To our customers they might say, "Oh, we have many choices that will work for you. And you'll be surprised at how little it costs." "Yes, this ribbon is of very high quality. In fact, many of our customers take this bow and put it at the top of their Christmas tree." And when customers pick up their packages, we serve them hot chocolate while they wait. We ask them if they would like our brand sticker, "Enveloped with Care by Envelop You," on their package. In addition, the staff do all of this with excellent generic customer skills; that is, they are reliable, assured, tangible, empathic, and responsive.

We get so good at this with our now dozens of Envelop You stores that we decide to create an innovative experience for our retail shops and online customers. We redesign our stores so they actually look like beautifully wrapped boxes. When people bring in something to be packaged, they get to watch the entire process accomplished with very fancy machines and highly trained package designers that we call Artistes. Customers choose every aspect of their packaging and walk out with pieces of enveloped art that they created. These packages are beautiful, we know for certain that some people keep the packaging intact and never look at the gift inside the box!




Branded Customer Service(c) The New Competitive Edge
Branded Customer Service: The New Competitive Edge
ISBN: 1576752984
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 134

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