Category: Marketing

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Engagement Marketing

From Employee to Brand Champion

A trend I’ve noticed from my internal marketing workshops is attendees’ increased interest in engaging their employees as brand advocates/ambassadors/champions/evangelists or whatever preferred term is used to describe highly engaged employees who positively represent the company brand. More and more companies are moving from lip-service to genuinely recognizing their employees’ role in competitive differentiation. These organizations have come to understand that innovation isn’t sustainable. While today’s new products & services can become tomorrow’s commodities, the one thing your competitors cannot copy is your employees’ relationship with your customers.

I’m thrilled that more companies get the concept that their brand “walks on two feet.” At the same time, I’m concerned because developing and sustaining such brand champions cannot be a superficial endeavor. The process starts with corporate and nonprofit leaders answering these critical questions:

  1. WHY do we want and/or need brand champions?
  2. WHAT DO WE EXPECT to happen as a result of engaging our employees in this manner?
  3. HOW will we recognize the employees in these roles and reinforce their efforts?

Collaborative Commitment
Addressing these key questions requires bridging internal silos to generate collaborative discussion among Marketing, Human Resources, Operations, Brand Management, and other key business functions. You’ll need everyone’s agreement and commitment to work together to foster employee engagement.

Once your firm’s leaders identify the rationale and expectations of its brand champions, you can start the process of engaging (all or some of) your employees accordingly. Here’s a sample overview of what’s involved in this process.

  • Clarify what your brand is all about, what your brand values are, and what your brand means to customers. Then communicate and repeatedly reinforce this information with employees.
  • Help employees understand all the touch points that impact your customers’ experience with the brand. Then educate and train employees so they have the requisite skills and tools to effectively deliver on the brand promise.
  • Make sure your internal operations are aligned with and support your brand; eliminate any internal barriers that hamper employees’ ability to serve customers.
  • Solicit and respond to both customer and employee input on how the brand experience can be improved.

Creating a workplace culture that transforms employees to serve as brand advocates requires an ongoing collaborative commitment that is well worth the effort to effectively engage both employees and customers.

If you’re not sure your organization can go the distance here, take time out to reflect on your company’s short- and long-term competitive position. What would you rather have: brand champions or bland champions?

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Customer service Engagement Marketing

“The Rock and Roll Guide to Customer Loyalty”

Seriously, it’s an e-book about customer service with a rock & roll twist written by Joe Heuer, the Rock and Roll Guru.

I fell in love with The Rock and Roll Guide to Customer Loyalty because it’s a fun read that carries a meaningful message about customer service. As a baby-boomer, I enjoy classic ‘60s music. As an advocate of internal marketing, I also love that Joe gets the value of engaging employees in generating customer loyalty.

Some of the groovy gems from this complimentary e-book (yes, it’s free!) include:

  • “Lip-synching: The rock & roll equivalent of the fake customer service smile.”
  • Concerts = encounters with customers, aka moments of truth wherein “your challenge is to create a memorable moment that makes your customer say, ‘WOW!’”
  • Band = employees who are your internal customers and coworkers. “Customer loyalty begins with internal loyalty. … What are you currently doing to make your workplace one that attracts and retains radically happy and loyal band members?”
  • A standing ovation = appreciation. “Be outrageous in demonstrating your love and appreciation for your customers … [and] internal customers.”

And my favorite quote: “Treating your internal customers like rock stars goes beyond providing red M&M’s and Dom Perignon. But that’s a good start.”

Pass around those M&Ms and champagne, and rock on!

[Note: Special thanks to Phil Gerbyshak for introducing me to Joe.]

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Marketing

Why Nonprofits Need to Look Backward as Well as Forward

Talking about nonprofit marketing with colleagues recently sparked an interesting discussion on using an organization’s history (aka “heritage marketing”) – for example, celebrating a notable anniversary of a nonprofit’s founding to kick-off a fundraising drive or reinforce an organization’s longevity and brand.

Given the dynamic pace of change today, some might question whether this approach is outmoded. Shouldn’t nonprofits focus on the future rather than the past?

My answer is that an organization’s history shouldn’t be ignored because the past is tangible, the future is not. Through historic records, past meeting minutes and reports, photos, audio visuals, and printed matter, you can:

  • revisit, review, and explore the past as a way to understand what worked and what didn’t
  • gain insight into how the organization, its mission, and its culture have evolved
  • and leverage this knowledge to help the organization continue to evolve and adapt in a changing world.

It’s the reason we consider both the past and the future in strategic planning – to reflect on an organization’s history as part of a situational analysis and use it as a bridge to help envision the future.

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Engagement Marketing Training & Development

Valuable Career Insights

2011 year marks my 36th year in the workplace (excluding part-time and summer jobs I held as a teen). I can honestly say I’ve enjoyed most of it, especially these past 23 years in business as Quality Service Marketing.

I’ve learned a tremendous amount as my career evolved. Reflecting on my experience, I can highlight valuable insights and lessons learned in the key roles I serve.

  • As a services marketer, I learned that customer-focus begins with employee-focus because, quite simply, employees ARE the brand. The need to recognize and reinforce employee value continues to drive my passion for internal marketing.
  • As a speaker & trainer, I learned:
    • It’s all about respect for my audience – understanding who they are and what about the topic appeals to them so I can target my presentation accordingly.
    • Equally important, it’s all about application – engaging and enabling audience members to consider how the information applies to their situation and how they can use it.
  • As a facilitator, I learned it’s all about the questions. I believe my clients have most of the answers they seek, they just don’t realize it. So my primary role is to engage them in discovery by asking the right questions.
  • Above all, as a business professional, I learned it’s all about demonstrating respect and integrity in working with my clients, my colleagues, and all the other important professionals (suppliers, printers, accountants, etc.), I partner with.

These valuable insights have served me well throughout my career, and they continue to influence how I do what I do.

What insights and lessons have made the most impact in your career?

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Engagement Marketing

Quality Service Marketing Joins the World Wide Web

I’m happy to introduce my new website! Until now I resisted the idea, using this blog in lieu of a separate website. So why now – especially given social media’s blending of internet marketing tools?

The decision to have my own website was necessitated by two key factors:

  • the growth of my business – in the past several years since my book was published, I’ve been researched and contacted by more organizations interested in employee-customer care. While my blog contains a wealth of such content written over the past six years, prospects told me they preferred a site where they could get a quicker overview of my work.
  • the growth of social media and my involvement in it (including my recent foray in Twitter) – here, again, I needed a better way to convey my brand to new network contacts.

Special thanks to Spectyr Media for designing and developing www.qualityservicemarketing.net. Yes, Spectyr Media’s principal is my son, Jason … and yes, I insisted on paying him for his professional services and web-hosting. Just don’t ask him about the extra pay he deserved for his patience in putting up with my technophobia!

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Customer service Engagement Marketing Training & Development

What Still Matters: Three Years Later

I’ve been so busy traveling the past few weeks, I forgot to celebrate the third anniversary of my book’s release. Taking Care of the People Who Matter Most: A Guide to Employee-Customer Care was published in October 2007, and sales are still going strong – despite the economy and because of it. As companies struggle to hold onto their business in this downturn, employee and customer engagement are more critical than ever.

In the past three years I traveled coast–to-coast to speak with business and nonprofit professionals who want to strengthen this engagement through internal marketing. What surprised me most is that while I met with marketing and human resources staff (as expected), my audiences were also filled with engineers, nonprofit managers, social workers, association executives, healthcare practice managers, municipal administrators, educators, and software consultants. They willingly shared “the good, the bad, and the ugly” of workplace engagement. (Little shocks me anymore … at the same time, I continue to be encouraged to hear what works.)

Looking back over the past three years, here’s what I’ve learned from these diverse audiences:

  1. Engaging employees and customers with internal marketing is intuitive, but not intentional enough – managers need reminders to “take care of employees to take care of customers.”
  2. Even with restructuring/downsizing/hierarchical flattening, too many organizational silos remain – employees continue to feel disconnected and disenfranchised.
  3. Management-by-wandering-around (MBWA) is making a comeback – while this practice isn’t as popular as it used to be, it hasn’t gone out of style.

Employees want and need to feel their work matters. Together with customers, they want to know that they are respected and valued.Why is this so difficult?

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Categories
Engagement Marketing

Workplace Success Starts Here

A strong culture depends on leaders who strive for success from the inside out. They truly recognize and respect their employees and are diligent in engaging and partnering with them. Unfortunately, some CEOs only recognize their people as a “most valued asset” in the company’s annual report.

Note: Debra Semans and I will address how to build a strong workplace culture at the Internal Branding & Internal Marketing: Strategic Integration for Market Leadership program we’re presenting this week in San Francisco and again in Atlanta in February 2011.

“Companies that had a strong culture going into this terrible time over the last 18 months and companies that really do care for their employees are the ones that did much better through this difficult time.” 
– Diana Oreck, VP-Ritz-Carlton Hotel Global Learning & Leadership Center,
Marketing News interview

Re-Engage authors Leigh Branham and Mark Hirschfeld said it best:

“If you begin your branding process by declaring an ‘aspirational brand’ without aligning it with the reality of employees’ daily work experience, you are in danger of writing a check your culture can’t cash.”

 

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Marketing

Stop Fundraising!

Attention certain nonprofits:

You already have me as a friend & supporter/donor, and I’m happy to send you a contribution once a year.

In the meantime, PLEASE stop sending me continuous solicitations!

  • I don’t want/need frequent reminders to give to your cause.
  • I don’t want you to send me any more pins, note cards, mailing labels, decals, etc.
  • I don’t want you to waste any more paper and postage.
  • Most of all, I don’t want you to waste precious time (mine and yours) – especially when you can take whatever time and expense you’re spending on these unnecessary mailings and reallocate them to  furthering your mission.

I’m not saying that you should stop all your fundraising efforts – just the multiple ones to me … unless you no longer want my contribution.

So I urge you to stop.

Consider this fair warning: donor alienation is just one mailing away.

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Engagement Marketing

Engaging Volunteers (6): Helpful Resources

Here’s a compiled list of resources I found in researching & writing this series on volunteer engagement and management. Since this list is far from comprehensive, I invite you to share additional resource links.

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Engagement Marketing

Engaging Volunteers (5): The Volunteer-Staff Connection

“Without a disciplined and respectful approach to recruitment, orientation, support, assessment, and recognition, we will have lower performance and a disenchanted volunteer.”
– Francis Hesselbein in Hesselbein on Leadership.

The same can be said of employees.

Staff and volunteers require:

  • an investment of time for training and ongoing communication
  • attention in terms of feedback and recognition
  • and the tools (applicable resources) needed to accomplish the organization’s goals and advance its mission.

The challenge for nonprofit managers is that internal issues regarding staff engagement also impact volunteer engagement. Like it or not, volunteers pay close attention to the staff they work with and are sensitive to employee satisfaction cues. As one frustrated volunteer told me recently: “The organization seems to expect the volunteers to be a subset of their staff and we know how they treat their staff. So in retrospect, why do we expect them to treat us volunteers any differently?!”

Volunteer relations “mirror” employee relations – if your employees don’t feel valued, neither will your volunteers.

Coming up: in my last post in this series I’ll share a list of resource links for volunteer engagement and management.