The success is a branding campaign is never absolute. There are times when branding attempts also tend to fail. With this, organizations and companies should know the basic things they need to do for them to immediately cope with this failure. If attended right away, this failure may not manifest right away that helps in minimizing the damage that may arise.
It is always important to meet customer brand expectations as well as the necessary steps to take toward service recovery:
Use TLC. No, this is not just about Tender Loving Care.
TLC means in The Lens of the Customer, and this should be used in examining your own customer service. This is often described as the toughest part of service performance. Each member of an organization should take effort in assessing how organizational or personal actions affect consumers. This may revolve around the benefits and what most customers buy.
Identify brand expectations from different directions.
Often, brands like asking their customers directly on what they expect from a service or product. However, customers may not be in the best position to answer this kind of question. Given this, it is always important to investigate properly on customer brand expectations. Some have misconceptions in getting customer expectations. For instance, pink hotels for business women travellers do not absolutely work.
Transform the garnered customer expectations into subjective and objective standards to help improve the brand.
Most companies find the whole brain metrics approach effective. Setting our both subjective and objective standards is necessary in order to monitor performance in terms of meeting customer expectations. While there is apparently a preference for the easily measured objective metrics, business owners should not neglect the subjective standards as they have roles too in beefing up a brand name’s performance in the market.
Make sure that members of your organization actually live the brand you are promoting.
This has something to do with the credibility of the brand. If the members of the company do not trust the brand, then what is the sense of promoting it publicly? The people of a given organization should always bring their brand to life each day. With this, it means organizations have to make their own people as their own brand ambassadors. Before this, companies need to work on role clarity and motivation among employees.
Recognize your failure if it happens.
While failure can be very depressing, companies should always be ready to admit failure. This is necessary since solutions start with admission. How can you solve a problem if you do not even recognize its existence in the first place? Imposing metrics and standards about service issues are just part of the entire equation. According to researches, only about 3 to 4 % of customers in the United States take effort to send it complaints to companies whenever they see a service failure. Some bring their complaints to other channels, which can even worsen the situation and bring negative effects to the business. Business should encourage clients to voice out their concerns through accessible means. For instance, British Airways tried installing video booths at the baggage claim area to let passengers record their concerns if any before they leave the airport.
Respond to complaints, break the silence.
Whenever customers send in their complaints, it means they are not in the process of breaking the relationship; otherwise, they might just simply walk away. Despite this, you still have to respond to each complaint as this may just be the tip of the iceberg. More similar complaints might just be there but some clients are just too shy to tell you about it. If you break your silence on a given issue, it shows that you are always willing to solve any problem involving customer relations and your actual service.
Appoint a customer “advocate.”
For any business, it is crucial to prevent and address each complaint or service failure—regardless of how minor or major it is. If you have a designated customer advocate who can look into each matter, you are most likely heading toward the improvement of your company in general.
Coping with branding failure may not be always easy, but it always pays if you know these important steps.
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