Six Ways to Build Your Brand Through Customer Service

How can a growing business stand apart from the competition? Bigger companies have bigger budgets and even bigger resources to keep their brands relevant. Then, how can you leave your mark? Startups like Netflix, Airbnb, and Uber stood out due to their disruptive nature. Others stand out because they either have a unique personality or a unique take on a product. All these aspects can surely attract an audience. However, there is one factor that promises the greatest growth potential for any brand.

Customer Delight!

Unluckily, customer service is often overlooked when companies make brand building strategies. That is a big mistake. When you align customer service with your brand, you can create a valuable differentiator for your brand. Great customer service is the ideal way to attract and retain customers and boost brand loyalty.

These approaches can be helpful in building your brand through customer service:

Make customer service your USP

How do you sell a product, especially when there are similar products available in the market? You sell its value and its USP (Unique Selling Proposition). Your USP is what makes your business better than the others. Make customer service your USP, and you will have happy customers who will hang around for longer.

When customers see your brand, the first thing they think of should be customer satisfaction. Once that happens, it will automatically boost your customer loyalty.

Your USP is the biggest factor why customers choose to do business with you. When customer service is your USP, there is no stopping your brand marketing from commercial success. Great customer service is key to fostering customer loyalty, but also in attracting new customers through word-of-mouth.

Involve your teams

Every customer interaction is an opportunity for customer delight. This means that every employee has the opportunity to delight customers. Customer delight is about finding the "wow" factor in everything you do. Involve your teams, speak to your employees to understand what an outstanding customer experience feels like for your company. Challenge your employees to think of ways to enhance the customer experience at every customer touchpoint.

Figure out the things you could do to make customers return and prevent them from leaving. Ask yourself, "What will keep your customers coming back and talking to others about your brand?" Brainstorming with your teams can help you identify gaps in service, and show you how employees and teams can play a vital role in delighting customers.

A popular quote says "happy employees make happy customers." That is indeed true. Take steps to empower your employees with the authority and tools to improve customer experience. Do this and you will see your customer engagement soar.

Use customer insight

Putting your customers first is one thing, but how do you improve your customer service if you do not know what the customer wants?

To become more customer-centric, more and more companies are adopting a data-driven approach. Thanks to advances in big data technology, organizations now have customer insights at their fingertips. With big data, you no longer have to rely only on your gut feeling to understand what your customer wants. It gives you a deeper understanding of customer behavior, preferences, and psychology helping you better serve your customers, improving customer experience.

Customer insights help you develop new product lines and improve customer service. By understanding your customer behavior and needs, you can improve your products and services to outshine your competition. Customer insights also provide valuable feedback on the quality of your service to refine your overall customer experience.

Test various customer delight ideas

The key to enhanced brand recognition is being memorable. However, being memorable is not as easy as it sounds. Customer satisfaction and customer delight are not the same things. Customer delight happens when you surpass customer expectations and create a lasting impression. Keeping your customers satisfied still makes it easy for them to leave. However, when customers are delighted, they do not take their business elsewhere. Customer loyalty comes not by giving them the status quo but by going above and beyond, surpassing their expectations.

When you have adequate customer insight, you need to start testing out various customer delight ideas. By ideating with your employees you may even be able to create a laundry list of ideas. You can start by prioritizing these ideas by their potential, rollout time, and implementation costs. This will help you remove ideas from your list which are risky or need too many resources to implement. Every time you test an idea, you need to ensure that you measure customer satisfaction.

Measure customer satisfaction

There are various metrics to measure customer satisfaction. CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Scores), NPS (Net Promoter Scores), and CES (Customer Efforts Score) are some of the most common ones. Measuring customer satisfaction gives you a better understanding of your customers and their expectations. The success of a company depends on its ability to offer products and services that meet customer needs. Measuring customer satisfaction helps you keep track of those demands and find out what they like. You may also be able to find out what your customers dislike, leading to dissatisfaction. Customer dissatisfaction is something that all companies should be wary of as it can cause them to lose customers.

Measuring customer satisfaction is also critical if you want to boost your brand image. You cannot deny the fact that word-of-mouth is a top factor that influences brand image. By measuring and managing customer satisfaction through corrective measures can increase positive word-of-mouth, and subsequently, customer delight.

Bring more autonomy into your workflow

Your customer service team perhaps plays the biggest role in customer satisfaction. In most cases, they directly face the customers, which means that they should have the necessary tools and resources to delight every customer.

Most companies have a strict set of rules on how to resolve common customer issues. Instead, companies should offer more autonomy to the customer service team to develop customized solutions for individual customers. Every customer is different and so should be their solutions. Providing a customized solution to each customer makes them feel special and valued. By providing your employees with more autonomy, you make them feel that they can make a positive impact on your company. They feel more responsible for customer satisfaction, and that leads to customer delight and a better brand image.

Do you need help to create a better brand image? Brandstar is a leading sports branding agency that follows a strategic approach for building better brand awareness. It is a reputed entertainment marketing company that offers a wide array of branding, marketing, content creation, social media, and technology solutions.