Your Brand Is Served. #TakeCare
These creatives care about Customer Service. (That’s weird, right?)
Your brand is served. #TakeCare
When you think about being a creative in ad and marketing world, most of us think about “making cool stuff.”
Even to this day, where most of life happens digitally and organically and on a smaller scale, creatives are still obsessed with making cool stuff that they can see and show off. We Netflix and we fast forward through TV ads, but people are still obsessed with producing them. Print magazines are getting smaller and smaller as media goes online, but we’re still jonesing to shoot full-bleed ads with killer photographers. We’re mostly staring at our phones in a Lyft, but everyone wants to do a billboard.
And for most creatives, nothing is as unsexy as customer service.
But we are very, very into it. Because it’s the voice of a brand. And it’s where conversion happens. And it’s often where evangelism is born.
All Voice Is Brand Voice
I learned the value of customer service at Rue La La, working with Cheryl Kaplan, who is now the president of M.Gemi (and I still get to work with her today). She cares deeply in every fiber of her being about the customer experience. And she made Rue La La into a transformative brand in part through this dedication. By writing personal notes, by putting ourselves in the customer’s shoes, by empowering team members to surprise and delight, Rue created client service that everyone talked about on social, that became a linchpin of the brand. As the then leader of the voice and a steward of the brand, client service -- how it sounded, felt, what it encompassed -- was considered part of my world, not just the customer service team’s world, and I am so grateful for that.
It always mystifies me that brands will pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to create guidelines for a voice and visual, but then they don’t care about the disconnect that’s happening when your voice is represented through customer service. Customer service representatives are often paid on an hourly basis, separated from corporate (even in another state), working for multiple brands at once, and not honored or briefed or directed or nurtured on how to speak for a brand.
And yet every day they make a brand impression. Often times they’re using that form letter language, like: “We’re sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused.” Your online customer likely won’t see your billboard. But they’ll see that -- the stiff lack of caring, the robotic aloofness -- as your brand.
Authenticity 101
At Rue La La, one of the things I did as the leader of voice (and one of the offerings we do now at Honor Code Creative) was go out and visit with Customer Service, and I did it as often as possible. I created a training guide to teach reps how to speak and the brand voice. I rewrote every form letter. And taught reps how to customize each one. I also asked reps for the form letters they needed and didn’t have. They know best!
Yes empathy and authenticity can be trained. We analogize the situations encountered with clients to things in reps’ own lives and help them understand what customers feel. After a group session, we sit side-by-side with reps and show them how to respond in real time, drafting the actual letters together. We break down what’s been ingrained by other brands, the stiffness, formality, syrupy-ness, etc. (And we learn from them and carry the insights back, too.) We get feedback that they feel empowered and enjoy every moment of training, sharing their joy (really) to be part of the brand and understand the bigger picture.
And the results are huge. More passionate, engaged reps stay working for the brand longer and develop expertise. They actually make sales in real time. And care about it. And your brand can have that Norstrom level (but on brand for you) service, with the kind of stories that get passed around on social and lead people to want to refer friends.
#TakeCare
There’s more at stake here, ultimately, than an annoyed customer or two. A mistake can turn into an opportunity when it’s handled in a genuine way. We’ve seen it happen time and again. When it’s tossed aside with a cold form letter, it inevitably leads to a customer who never comes back. We’ve all been there as consumers ourselves. And it’s incredibly easy to click over to a competitor, pay with PayPal and poof, move on for good. It also just leaves a bad taste in our mouths. We’re all human beings, and these small moments of community, even around something that in itself can feel inconsequential, have the power to make us feel good or bad. We want to work with brands who care about that. We care about that.