In a company, you have many different departments and positions within those departments. Regardless of the department or each individual position, everyone within the organization needs to understand ultimately why they are there for. It is critical how each staff sees their job to be.

You have an admin team, a finance team, HR, marketing, IT, etc.. Each department and each staff member within those departments have clearly identified roles and a set of goals they must deliver on.  But at the end of the day, each individual, no matter from what department or team, are there to deliver the product you sell or the service you provide. They are there to satisfy your clients. To ensure your potential clients know about you, want to buy your product or service and when they do, their experience surpasses their expectations. 

If one member of your organization does not see their job to ultimately be about customer service and satisfaction you have a problem and it will affect your brand image and reputation and yes your bottom line.

A few days ago I came across an article in Fast Company’s design newsletter depicting an issue IBM had a few years ago.

The articles read: “Some years ago, IBM had a problem. They made a giant mainframe computer, or Big Iron, as they call it in the industry. IBM’s Big Iron was acknowledged to be the best in the business, a generation ahead of its rivals. It was perfect, except for one thing: It wasn’t selling. So IBM’s ad agency did some one-on-one interviews with the kind of people who go shopping for Big Iron.

Big Blue reeled from what it heard. “Sure,” said the CIOs, “this bad boy is the best thing for us to buy. But if I recommend IBM, the conversation in the washroom will go, ‘Joe’s one of those old-school IT guys. We need somebody from the next generation.’ And that’s game over for my career.””

CIOs buy or don’t buy multimillion-dollar computers not because of its features or benefits, quality reliability, etc., but because of the brand image it has.

No matter what you’re selling, you are a label. Most of us think of brands when it is a consumer end product (cars, perfumes, clothes, pop, etc.) not as much as B2B or products such as IBM’s Big Iron or drilling machines, but the fact is, if you’re selling a product or service, someone is buying it, and therefore you have an audience and that audience judges you and makes their decision based on your brand image and reputation.

Weather you like it or not, you are a label. The sooner you start paying attention to your label (your brand) the better it will work for you. 

When was the last time you stepped in your customer shoes?

I don’t mean just trying to think of what your customer experience must be like or analyze your processes to see if they can be better. I mean to literally engage with your organization as a client does.  Try to book a service, buy a product, register to an event, look for information on your site or send a customer service request.

We’re so busy running our companies that we don’t have time to check how it is like to deal with our company, to be a client.

Client surveys, are important. But there are many things, details and frustrations that you may not find through customer satisfaction surveys but that you can definitely see through your own experiences as being a client.

I often see, broken links on websites, incomplete information, acronyms that don’t mean anything or content that is not clear. It’s not a good idea to make your customers have to look for information, wait for a response or have to decipher your messages.

Putting yourself, from time to time in your customer’s shoes will not only help you avoid customer issues but it will guide you on how to provide for more intuitive, clear and streamlined interactions. Improving the customer experience will not only help you retain your clients but it will translate into new clients.

Most of all, putting yourself in your client’s shoes, will give a very real sense of what your customers really need, how and when to offer these products and services, how you can really improve them and what you need to be focusing in for the future. Being a customer of your company is the best way to know which direction your company needs to go in the future.  It is the best way to be in sync with your customers and to remain relevant and in demand.

Strong brands can have a lot of leeway. A strong brand positions you in the minds of your target audience with a strong positive image. It builds a solid reputation for your company which inevitably translates into increased market share and profits.

Some brands, the really strong ones, can go even further. They are positioned not only in the heads of your customers, but in their hearts as well. They create loyalists, customers, that are not only users but convert others to your brand.

These loyalists, are people who have bought into your brand, they believe in you and what you stand for. They share similar views and values. Loyalists, in moments of crisis, will give you the benefit of the doubt. But when if you lie to them, then its over as even strong brands can’t sustain deceit and wrong doing. The Livestrong brand is a great example of that. 

Part of what makes some brands so strong is that we want to have heroes, people we look up to, people that inspire us. We want to believe that we too can achieve our dreams. These heroes are examples of what we can become.

These brands connect with our beliefs, our dreams and aspirations. They make us believe that we can shape ourselves, our lives and create a better future. We all want heroes to cheer, values to stand for and ideals to strive towards.

We don’t want to see our heroes, our beliefs, fail. In the case of Livestrong, many of us hoped, despite the mounting of evidence, that somehow Lance Armstrong did not lie to us, that he was the man, the athlete we thought he was. 

Brands, to sustain the test of time, must be authentic. You can make mistakes. In fact, when you make a mistake or a problem occurs, if you handle it well your brand may even come out stronger. Mistakes can be a great opportunity to really show your true colours and to prove you stand by your values and are prepared to act and live by them. But deceit is different.

And no brand, no matter how strong, can deceit their audience and not pay a steep price.