Train Your Staff to Be Your Brand Ambassadors

Building your company’s brand, a core vision, values and customer promise takes time, effort and resource. But to make your brand come alive for your customers it takes more than just the marketing department to be engaged.

Every member of staff is an ambassador for your brand. Every interaction with customers, whether it is with your retail staff in store, your call centre employees dealing with a service problem, the technical people helping a customer with the operation of your product or your finance department dealing with an invoicing issue, leaves a mark that can enhance your brand or undermine it.

The question is how do you equip your employees with the knowledge, attitudes, beliefs and the skills to behave in a consistent and meaningful way? The answer favoured by many organisations is to have senior executives write articles in the company newspaper and to send frontline employees on generic customer service training courses.

The problem with generic training is that most likely your competitors are doing the same thing. This kind of training investment will do nothing to make customers more loyal to you than to the competition. So, what is the answer? It is what we call Branded Training.

‘Branded Training’ addresses:

• Strategic focus on the customer – The strategic context for the changed or renewed focus on the customer. Employees are intelligent people and we have always found they respond well to having an informed, grown-up dialogue around the rationale for the changes the company is making. That dialogue also needs to be two-way.

• Attitudes and beliefs – We cannot force employees to behave in ways they do not want to, and so the focus of Branded Training is to inspire people to be the best they can be in a way that is consistent with the company’s brand values and customer strategy. And that may involve some tough decisions relating to those who do not buy in to the new direction.

• Building the skills – this training builds the skills and provides the tools to enable your people to deliver a new and distinctive customer experience that will set your company apart from the competition and build value for your brand.

Put simply, Branded Training addresses Head, Heart and Hands:

• Head: knowing what to do and why it is important
• Heart: being motivated to do it
• Hands: having the skills and tools to behave in that way

There is a world of difference between generic and Branded Training. The former may get you to par with your competitors but it is only by aligning all employees with the strategic intent, the values and helping them be the best they can be that you create an army of brand ambassadors who become your best sales people, whatever department they represent.