Consistency and On-Brand Selling


Obviously, when customers deal with a single salesperson, they can expect some degree of consistency. For this reason, many high-volume customers in business-to-business relationships demand one point of contact. They do this to ensure consistent answers; otherwise, customers may receive as many different answers as people with whom they speak. Low-volume, ordinary consumers cannot normally make this demand.

Consistency is important to customers as they seek a comfort level that is difficult to create when they are passed from one person to another. To the degree that an organization can create consistent customer relationships instead of customer transactions, it is a good strategy—especially if the brand promotes personalization.

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on-brand

Janelle shops at a store selling one brand of high-quality German clothing and normally deals with the same salesperson each time. On the day after Christmas, when the store was filled with customers, another sales clerk walked up to her as soon as she entered the store, shook her hand, and said, "Hi, Janelle. Julie is not here today, so I'll help you today." And she did! When Janelle checked out her purchases, she was told, "I'll be sure to tell Julie you were in."

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For many companies, this type of customer knowledge simply is not possible. For example, when you go to McDonald's, you rarely will place your order for a hamburger and a Coke with the same person you ordered from on your last trip to the Golden Arches. Under these circumstances, the sales process needs to be dissected and analyzed so that a consistent feeling can be created for customers—even if the customer is rarely known by name—whether this means always flashing a smile, offering a distinct greeting, or employing a process that feels familiar. Otherwise, customers are constantly walking into a "new" establishment, and they will not feel at home. Starbucks creates a consistent feeling very well in the way its staff call out each order to their coffee baristas. The order is precise: size, quality, style, and add-ons. Wherever you place an order at any Starbucks outlet, you will hear your request stated in the exact same order.

Delivering a consistent feeling creates a platform where previous positive emotions can be re-experienced. For example, if we want our customers to feel important and the most our staff will likely deal with the same person is once, then we must educate staff about how to be customer-centered, rather than self-centered or organization-centered. To do this requires education that goes way beyond taking an order, processing a request, knowing the price of merchandise, and understanding technical specifications of products. It requires a real emotional sophistication on the part of salespeople.

The genuine challenge for organizations is to educate hourly staff, many being paid at minimum wage, about the complexity of delivering human reactions that reinforce a brand. Dr. Maureen O'Hara, president of Saybrook Institute, throws the gauntlet down for modern organizations.

All this puts pressure on people to be a lot more psychologically flexible than ever before. People need what I call group empathy encompassing a whole set of higher-order mental skills; openness to learning, a capacity for self-criticism, low defensiveness, and the ability to process multiple realities and values. [11]

In addition, salespeople have to be effective communicators of the brand's attitudes, values, positioning, and promise. When you consider that most managers, and many executives, cannot tell you what their brand's attitudes, values, positioning, and promise are, we have a huge task ahead of us to get all levels of salespeople consistently communicating these messages.

Exercises follow in chapter 12 that will help your staff think through your sales process in relationship to your brand.

[11]As quoted in Fast Company (September 1988): 54.




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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