What Flocking Birds Can Teach Us About Branded Service

As customer service consultants, we know it is possible, though not easy, to align personal service behaviors with brand promises in a memorable way that is not scripted. A metaphor we find inspiring is the rapid, darting, swirling patterns that large flocks of flying birds produce without colliding into each other. The red-billed quelea, the most common wild bird on this planet, is known to swarm in flocks a million strong and at the same time display eye-popping swirling patterns. While the physics that explains this remarkable phenomenon is complex, basically the birds follow three simple self-organizing principles that enable this complex group activity—even though each single bird's pattern is individual. Using their keen eyesight and rapid turning ability, the birds follow three simple rules: (1) avoid bumping into each other, (2) fly at the same speed, and (3) head towards the center of their group. ^[4]

We believe the way flocking birds do this can bring understanding to how service can both be branded and yet also utilize the potentiality that unique human-to-human contact enjoys. While marketers can fairly easily present one consistent external face of the brand, delivering consistent customer service that enhances the brand is another matter altogether. Customer service is offered by humans, who are highly individualistic. As a result, the temptation is strong to script service in order to control its variation. We argue that this is not a good idea—even to honor the brand.

The historical bias toward the tightly managed approach for fast-moving consumer goods no doubt explains why the same tight controls are frequently applied to customer service exchanges. Most marketing professionals cut their teeth managing FMCG using rigid mandates that work well with products that are relatively inexpensive and purchased in high quantities. All too often, they extend this practice by scripting what service providers say to customers and by defining precise service behaviors. Many marketing professionals really believe that if you print "thank you" on a sales slip it deftly handles the issue of gratitude for a customer's business. Unfortunately, this rule-driven scripting can lead to inauthentic exchanges that leave customers either feeling ambivalent or scratching their heads in wonderment about the service they have received. It can also lead to bored, underutilized, and frustrated staff.

We believe that it is possible to use brand promises, which are generally presented in easy-to-understand and uncluttered concepts, as the self-organizing "flocking" guidelines to focus on-brand customer service delivered by thousands of employees in large organizations. In this way, branded customer service can be presented in a patterned way, an on-brand way that still takes advantage of individual input.

It is possible, in fact, to get so good at delivering branded customer service that your staff-customer interactions can cover a multitude of material deficits in your product offering. Even when this happens, brand-congruent service interactions enable customers to walk away with crystal clarity and trust that they received the promises of your advertising and marketing efforts. However, simply delivering good service, or as we refer to it, generic customer service, no longer is enough to distinguish a business's products and services.

Advertising agencies focus carefully on all the nuances of ads they create for clients and their brands. They pay attention to precise color hues, every single word, voice tonality, music, images, spokespeople. They do this to enhance and manage unique images. The cover of this book, as a case in point, was designed by a brand image consultant. While someone who picks up this book may not understand all the dynamics that have been elegantly designed into the words, word placement, typesetting, and colors, the designer had a clear sense of creating a cover that enhances the content of this book. Branded customer service is also about subtlety of emphasis, the subtlety of staff behavior that reinforces an image and brand in every way possible.

Mercedes-Benz, for example, is concerned with luxury and solid engineering and focuses heavily on the passenger's experience. BMW, by contrast, is focused on performance and the driver's experience. Because each company delivers on its product promises and large population niches like what each offers, both brands command price premiums. When you walk into a BMW dealership, you will more than likely be treated to a service experience that is also about performance. Someone will normally be at your side in thirty seconds, focused, and fast in both behavior and speech. Chris Howe, with the UK company ChangeMaker, labels the BMW process as "engineered." ^[5] He describes the Mercedes experience as more relaxed, smoother, unobtrusive, and professional, in a way so you know you have "just spoken to Mercedes-Benz." BMW and Mercedes staff have to understand branding messages very well to be able to deliver consistent experiences like this.

Many times customers are not able to describe exactly what happens in branded service exchanges. For example, most people cannot articulate the difference between a BMW and a Mercedes sales pitch. But customers walk away from these dealerships with their perceptions of these auto brands intensified in the same way as actually test-driving a BMW or Mercedes reinforces brand promises. Using the simple, elegantly designed, organizing principles that describe their brands, BMW and Mercedes are both good at inspiring their sales teams and service departments to deliver their brand pledges.

As generic copies of brand-name products are slowly chipping away at the name-recognition advantage that well-known brands enjoy, many companies have learned that the impact of advertising and marketing alone is not enough to push revenue growth. Because generic brands can cleverly cash in on a branded product's cachet by imitating packaging and lowering prices, brands today have to be bigger than the label, bigger than the box, bigger than the product.

Branded Customer Service provides hands-on, tested processes and ideas that can be adapted to make unique brands bigger. Some of these are simple and easy to implement. Others require extensive integration of brand values within your organizational culture.

A number of companies have branded their service. Some of them are mentioned in this book. Others are making the attempt. But most are mired in their efforts to offer good, generic customer service that is frankly insufficiently related to the brand they represent. Most brand and marketing experts do not understand how to brand service. On the other hand, while most customer service experts are able to delineate components of good customer service, they rarely take this concept a step further to focus on brand-specific customer service. They are, therefore, neglecting a key part of business strategy. This book was written to bridge this large gap and make a unique contribution to the fields of branding and customer service.

^[4]See Craig Reynolds, "Boids: Background and Update," http://www.red3d.com/cwr/boids/ and Yuhai Tu and John Toner, "How Birds Fly Together: Long-Range Order in a Two-Dimensional Dynamical XY Model," Physical Review Letters 75 (December 4, 1995): 4326–4329.

^[5]Private interview, New Orleans, July 2003.