Managing Your Company’s Brand with Employee Engagement
What is a Consumer Experience?
Not to be confused with customer service, the consumer experience is the perception a customer has of your brand. A customer’s perception of a brand is formed over the duration of your relationship with that customer.
What is a Brand?
Traditionally, we have understood brand to refer to a company’s logo (i.e., the identifying mark assigned to a product or service). However, a brand is so much more than a logo. Simply put, the consumer’s experience with a company is the brand.
“… a logo is purely for identification. Logos derive their meaning from the product or service it symbolizes and therefore seek to identify, not explain or sell. A logo is not a strategy, but rather a company’s “avatar” in a way. Logos should be memorable, simple and timeless, leaving room for what the logo actually represents – you.”
Fatrabbit Creative
How to Manage Your Company’s Brand
According to HubSpot, the two primary touchpoints that go into creating the consumer experience are people and product. As products and services become more and more alike, the most important then of these touchpoints are the people in your company.
A company’s front-line employees (customer service/support & sales staff) play a critical role in managing a company’s brand. Their access to customer feedback, and the way in which they handle that feedback is key to a brand’s reputation. Well-trained and professional front-line staff can do much to negate bad product and service feedback. Conversely, impatient, disengaged and improperly trained support staff have the power to damage an otherwise stellar product or service.
The ability to achieve a positive-brand reputation increases when management makes the effort to ensure that their front-line employees are engaged.
What is Employee Engagement?
“Organizations that are the best in engaging their employees achieve earnings-per-share growth that is more than four times that of their competitors.
Forbes
Employee engagement is the emotional commitment that an employee has for an organization and its goals. In a 2018 study conducted by Gallup, employee engagement while recorded at its highest level ever (i.e., 34%), still meant that over two-thirds (66%) of all employees are either not engaged, or actively disengaged.
Employee engagement, or lack thereof, is the greatest contributor to an employee’s overall sense of workplace satisfaction. When employers are focused on enhancing their employees’ workplace experience, that same care is more likely to be passed on to the customer, enhancing the consumer experience and increasing brand stature.
7 Tips to Increase Employee Engagement
There are many ways to improve an employee’s experience in the workplace. In our attempt to compile a listing of our own in-house experiences as well as research conducted online, good and greater ideas abounded. However, the one list we could all agree on, and that most resonates with what works for our own workplace, is the one put forth by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM). Following are their “7 Tips to Increase Employee Engagement …” To read the full descriptions for every point listed below, please visit this SHRM link:
- Supply the right tools.
- Give individual attention.
- Provide training and coaching.
- Listen to employees.
- Get social.
- Serve others.
- Recognize proudly & loudly.
Have Questions? Get in Touch!
A good consumer experience is not possible without engaged employees, and that begins with ensuring that your front-line staff have the technological tools they need to perform at their best.
