How To Keep Your Brand Promise
What is your brand promise? People, stakeholders, employees, or owners; how often are you reflecting on your brand promise? The most important work you do every day should be connected with keeping your brand promise.
What is in the quality of your product? What is important and valuable about the service you provide?
Exceed Expectations
Many organizations put plenty of effort into exceeding customer expectations. It is common to see it written in the mission statement, be included in value statements, or contained in guiding principles. Can you always exceed expectations?
People often talk about touch points or moments-of-truth and they are part of understanding the service process. However, one of the most important aspects of exceptional customer service is what you do that makes the service moment memorable.
Can you do it every time? Each and every transaction? It is unlikely. Even when you can do it often, every time may be unrealistic. Besides, every time may also imply average and so it starts all over again.
Keep Your Brand Promise
When your brand promise includes delivering excellence, keeping that promise may not require exceeding it. What makes you memorable is often being better than average, it may not always be a surprise.
Memorable moments are, well, priceless. When you are consciously committed to the habit of making the moment memorable you’ll likely have more success at achieving excellence.
The magical part about memorable moments may be that they are often random. An opportunity is there, and taken. When the culture seeks priceless memorable moments a whole lot more of them will occur, but they’ll never occur every time.
Average is Easy
Consistently trying to achieve the higher mark is a behavioral habit that separates exceptional results from the average. At some point, average becomes too easy.
Performing at the level of delivering just of enough service is not the same as delivering just in time. People might be delighted with just in time, but just enough sets the bar for average.
If your brand promise includes delivering at the highest level, remember that it is a moving target. You’ll need to keep showing up and you’ll need work outside of the averages.
Make it memorable. Keep your promise.
– DEG
Dennis E. Gilbert is a business consultant, speaker (CSPTM), and corporate trainer that specializes in helping businesses and individuals accelerate their leadership, their team, and their success. He is a five-time author and some of his work includes, #CustServ The Customer Service Culture, and Forgotten Respect, Navigating A Multigenerational Workforce. Reach him through his website at Dennis-Gilbert.com or by calling +1 646.546.5553.
