How to Use this Book

This book walks you through a wide array of ideas, research, strategies, and techniques to facilitate your understanding and delivery of your brand through service. It is divided into three parts:

• Part I: Linking the Big World of Branding to Customer Service

• Part II: Embedding On-Brand Service into Your Organizational DNA

• Part III: The Branded Customer Service Toolbox

While each of the three parts of this book can stand alone, we encourage you to at least skim the contents even if you find yourself concentrating on one part more than another. We have organized the material in a way that makes logical sense to us. However, your own expertise may inspire you to explore it in a different order.

Part I: Linking the Big World of Branding to Customer Service covers the evolution and power of brands and argues that generic customer service does not take advantage of the uniqueness of each brand's values and promises. We contend that generic customer service is minimally competitive in today's service economy and look at what is necessary for you to develop a strategy that integrates your brand into the heart of your customer service delivery. This part of the book links branding concepts to the idea of branded customer service. Challenges to branding your customer service are highlighted, and a road map is presented to start you on your way. Examples of on-brand service and off-brand service are sprinkled throughout this section.

Most research journals are filled with articles that are detailed, complex, and often incomprehensible to anyone who is not a marketing or brand expert or someone not well versed in statistical methods. Therefore, we have summarized branding literature to make it more accessible to those primarily interested in customer service or management. For those who are well versed in the literature, we have linked branding with customer service concepts to provide a new view for brand experts.

Part II: Embedding On-Brand Service into Your Organizational DNA explores ways to support and promote your branded customer service through initiatives involving culture change, leadership communication, the manager's role, and brand champions. In this part, we also place special emphasis on the importance of human resources (HR) strategies and functions in ensuring brand alignment. We endorse the groundswell to house the function of brand building in both marketing and HR departments. In fact, we firmly believe that HR has the potential to play a make-or-break role in successful branded service initiatives. Managers, human resource professionals, and trainers will find this section of the book particularly valuable.

We begin the second part of this book with a full explanation of the model that TMI, our training and consulting company, uses. The chapter called "Defining Your Brand DNA" describes our philosophy and explains how we work at staying on-brand ourselves.

Part III: The Branded Customer Service Toolbox is designed as a toolbox of methodologies and practical ideas that will guide you in delivering service that is aligned to your brand. Just as branding techniques need to be adapted for each product or service, there is no one best way to brand your customer service. We offer many exercises in part III, which are all most effective when adapted to your unique brand offering. The dozens of exercises and ideas we share, tested for more than two decades, are representative of the types we use with our own clients and should be seen as prototypes. We always adapt these ideas to the unique brand promises of the organizations with which we work, and you must do the same for your own organization. Think of these exercises as engines that gain power as they are customized to your specific brand.

We also cover the imperative of sales, service, and brand linkage in part III. We look at what happens when salespeople focus on delivering their brand to customers instead of focusing on whether they have met their quotas. Service staff also better deliver the brand to customers when they understand that they, too, directly influence sales.

If you read part III first to get to the Toolbox section, we encourage you to then read parts I and II. The context for these exercises is provided in parts I and II, and context is important to fully understand and implement them.