Train the Brand Culture to Maximize Customer Care

Part 2 in a series: The Top 5 Factors to Delivering Exceptional Customer Care

By Lori Boyce
Senior Director, AFFINA

As the second in a series of The Top 5 Factors to Delivering Exceptional Customer Care, I want to share a few insights into the value and benefit of spending the time to train front-line employees on your brand and company culture.

Stop to consider who interacts with your customers? The list can be long – inbound contact center agents, retail sales representatives, in-home service professionals, you name it – they all have a role to play in reinforcing your brand and ensuring brand promises hold true.

Here’s what we suggest: Train the culture.

Helping employees understand the company culture and brand personality of the products and services they are supporting makes all the difference in their approach, passion, and enthusiasm when interacting with customers. As a customer care partner, I can tell you that at AFFINA, we are interested in our agents feeling connected to our clients’ brands and cultures even more than to our own.

Recreating your corporate culture starts in training. A few simple ways to infuse a culture transfer into the training experience include:

1. Describe your products and services with as much passion as you feel about them. Energy is contagious! When your front line employees know that you believe your brand is the best thing since sliced bread (or even better), they will have a reason to believe it too!
   
   
2. Share advertising and marketing efforts. Use advertising collateral and point-of-purchase displays in the training environment and on the production floor. Surround the team with your brand images. Be sure they understand the latest and greatest features and benefits of your product/services!
   
   
3. Be sure front-line employees can experience what customers experience. Let them test the product, use it according to the package instructions or owners manual, and even make some mistakes with it. These tactics help employees empathize with customers’ experiences and create connections.
   
   
4. Convey the role that front-line employees have in building and protecting brand loyalty. Share with them how customer insights are integrated into new products or marketing campaigns and what happens to the data they have captured after they close a case or transmit an order.
   
   
5. Use lots of role-play, and reward creative and enthusiastic participation.
   
   
6. Be present and engaging … employees feel part of the culture and are motivated to maximize the customer experience when they understand that they are part of an overall strategy.
   

What tactics have worked for you in your efforts to extend your company and brand culture to front-line teams? Any challenges you have encountered? We want to hear from you.

AFFINA – Your Customers. Our Priority.