When you think of your brand, what comes to mind?
For most, you’ll think of your logo, your brand colors, or perhaps a slogan or jingle of your brand. Many elements of brand are visual in nature—but some of the most important elements are the ones you can’t see. Things like:
- your mission and vision
- your brand voice and tone
- the personality of your brand
- your key messaging
- your branded experience
All of these elements of branding are invisible, and yet they affect the customers’ experience of your brand even more than your logo, your name or other, more visible elements. Something that affects how your customer views all of the above elements of your brand?
Your call center.
And without a consistent brand experience from your call center, your brand consistency will decline overall. That’s a big problem, because consistent branding:
- makes your company memorable and increases brand recognition
- improves brand trust and loyalty
- correlates with higher purchase values and frequency
- improves customer satisfaction and retention
The right call center partner should help solidify and communicate your brand to your audience, through the right scripting, messaging, personality, customer experiences and more. But how do you ensure and empower your call center to solidify your brand identity? We’ll show you how in this article.
Defining Your Brand Identity
Before you can create brand consistency through your call center, you need to have a clear vision and definition for your brand identity. This includes more than just visual branding, although that’s what most companies begin with. Brand identity includes:
- your unique value proposition
- a clear mission and vision
- your brand’s core values
- a brand personality
- your brand’s voice and tone
That is, you need to decide who your brand is, what your brand stands for, and why your brand exists. In today’s world, the majority of customers—63%—prefer to make purchases from companies and brands that “stand for a shared purpose that reflects their personal values and beliefs.” To convey this sense of shared purpose and values to your customers, you have to know what your values actually are.
To do so, reflect on the following questions with your team:
- Why does your brand exist? What does your brand offer customers that other competitors don’t?
- What is the mission and vision of your brand? What do you stand for and believe in?
- What difference does your brand want to make in the world? How will the world, or your industry, or your audience, be different for having used your brand?
- What should an interaction with your brand feel like? How do you talk, interact or engage with customers?
Patagonia is a popular brand that has nailed its brand identity—it’s known as an outdoor retailer that really cares about sustainability, protecting the planet, and prioritizing purpose over profit. They have dozens of initiatives and company policies that reflect these core values, and customers get a taste of these values, mission and vision through every product purchased, webpage and company communications.
Consistency in Visual Branding
Of course, that doesn’t mean that visual branding isn’t important. Once you’ve determined your brand identity, your visual brand should express that in a consistent way—that is, your visual branding needs to not only be consistent within itself, but also reflect the identity of your brand.
This can include elements like:
- a cohesive and memorable logo
- consistent color schemes and typography
- brand guidelines for consistent marketing
- branded images or graphics
“But what does all of this have to do with our call center?!,” you may be thinking.
More than you might think.
For one thing, if you haven’t really defined your brand identity and the visual representation of that, it will be difficult for your call center to provide experiences that are consistent—and consistent with your brand’s vision and values.
Secondly, a strong visual identity can help make your contact center experiences more consistent with other experiences across your brand, through elements such as:
- using consistent typography, colors and graphics in customer service and support emails as well as marketing emails
- designing the customer service pages of your website in a brand-consistent way
- using visually consistent branding on FAQs or Help Center pages or documents
However, one of the biggest ways your call center can help improve your brand consistency is through messaging, tone and customer experience. We’ll cover these aspects next.
Consistency in Messaging and Tone
Consistency in brand goes beyond just visual consistency—it also involves consistency in tone, messaging and voice. This is a major way that your call center supports—or undermines—your brand consistency.
With Global Response, we take pride in training our agents to become an extension of your brand, serving as brand specialists who know your brand inside and out. Here’s four ways we make this possible:
Define key messages and elevator pitches. With concise and clear messaging about your brand—who you are, how you speak, what you offer, and so on—it’s easier to train agents to adopt your brand in their speaking and communications. Key messaging and elevator pitches can also be used for the basis of on-brand scripts and training materials.
Create a consistent tone of voice for customer interactions. Once you’ve established your brand’s voice and tone, ensure that all customer interactions adhere to the branded voice and tone. Is your brand playful and conversational, or formal and serious? Do you use an academic and knowledgeable tone and language, or short sentences and plain language? Whatever your voice and tone, your customer interactions should match—both written and oral, individual and mass communications.
Align messaging with brand values. Ensure that your most common messaging aligns with your brand values. If your brand is a strong supporter of learning foreign languages, then your messaging should match that—and you should offer a significant number of language options for service and support. In addition, your customer interactions should align with brand values in both word and deed.
Align messaging with customer expectations. What do customers expect from your brand, based on audience, industry, visual branding, product, value propositions and other elements? Ensure that your customer service and interactions align with these expectations. If your customers are used to seeing fun, playful messaging online and then call your support line and speak to a monotone, disinterested agent, the brand experience will be inconsistent and unsatisfying.
Consistency in Customer Experience
Not only should your customer experiences be consistent with the rest of your branding and your customer expectations, but they should also be consistent across other channels and other customer experiences.
For example, if customers know that calling your brand is a major drag, but that they can get great service via Facebook messenger, it provides an unsatisfying and frustrating experience. They’ll likely have to end up trying to use channels that are inconvenient for them, or switching between channels to get good service—or worse, simply giving up or receiving inconsistent experiences, eroding brand trust over time.
Instead, you should ensure that all of your customer experiences are consistent across channels, and that all of your customer experiences maintain brand standards.
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What does this look like? It can involve:
- implementing quality assurance measures to maintain brand standards
- developing guidelines to make customer interactions consistent across different channels and agents
- aligning call center processes with brand experience goals
- monitoring customer interactions for consistency
- providing additional training for agents on branding and messaging
For example, if one of your brand experience goals is that all customers feel valued by your company, prioritizing quick and personalized service is probably at the top of your customer service goals list. As such, you should be sure to align your call center processes with these goals—such as implementing advanced IVR systems to ensure callers get to the best agent right away, focusing on reducing Time in Queue and improving FCR rate, and so on.
Improving training, enhancing quality assurance processes and monitoring customer interactions regularly can also ensure consistency between agents, as well as cross-channel. After all, if not all of your agents are delivering the same experience, your customer service—and brand consistency—will suffer as a result.
Training and Onboarding
Speaking of agent training, brand consistency starts early. Want a call center partner that will prioritize your branding and provide a consistent customer experience?
Look for one that prioritizes effective training and onboarding.
At Global Response, our training for brand consistency includes:
- training agents on brand guidelines during onboarding processes
- educating agents on brand values, voice and tone
- incorporating brand voice and tone into agent scripts and practice calls
- training agents on the importance of brand consistency
- educating agents on your customers’ needs and values
- and more!
With comprehensive training on your brand and audience, it’s easier for agents to speak in your voice, with your brand’s personality, and deliver a level of service consistent with your brand. Keep in mind that this training shouldn’t be a one-time event at onboarding—for agents to be most effective, there should be regular training on brand voice, tone, messaging and products. With ongoing practice and regular training and reviews, responding and interacting with customers in a brand-consistent way can become second-nature to your agents.
Scripting and Messaging
Finally, your scripting and messaging from your call center absolutely must align with your branding, other marketing and other messaging from your brand.
If it doesn’t, customers will pick up on it right away, and it will erode brand trust. To do this effectively, use the following tried-and-true tactics:
Develop standard on-brand scripts. Scripts do not need to be followed “to a T” in every conversation, but they’re an effective way of both training new agents and keeping them on-brand as well as keeping experienced agents in check. As agents internalize your branding and messaging, scripts can be a way to ensure they are staying consistent.
Monitor interactions for consistent and on-brand messaging. The only way to ensure that your agents are delivering consistent and on-brand messaging is to regularly monitor and review customer interactions. A solid QA process can make this easier, but you should monitor for consistency and branding as well as quality metrics.
Provide agents with message templates and key talking points. Whether you’re working with inbound or outbound calling, providing agents with templates, key talking points, and other scripts and messaging guides will help ensure things stay consistent. Of course, experienced agents will know how to go “off book” while staying on brand, but consistent scripts that can be used by everyone help ensure consistent experiences.
Omnichannel Consistency
Now that we’ve covered internal brand consistency, messaging and visual consistency, and consistency between agents, there’s one more aspect of brand consistency you should be focusing on to ensure a great customer experience—and this one is almost completely dependent on your call center for execution.
It’s cross-channel consistency. If customers contact you via email, over the phone, through live chat, on social media, at a store in-person, on a self-service page, or any other way, their experience should be consistent. Your phone service should be just as good as email, and your social media channels should be just as reliable as your live chat.
Customers should get the same information, level of service, quality and knowledge through any channel they turn to.
Your call center can deliver this through offering omnichannel support. Omnichannel support uses support software and multi-channel training and capabilities to ensure that the experience, messaging, quality and solutions are the same no matter where the customers turn.
In addition, omnichannel support ensures that every call center agent has access to the entire range of customer history—previous interactions, past purchases, support calls and so on—so that customers don’t have to repeat themselves. Instead, each interaction flows seamlessly from the one before it, creating a straightforward and effortless experience for the customer.
Omnichannel support also helps bridge the gap between online and in-person interactions, as omnichannel software can help log in-person interactions, purchases and engagement so that online support agents are familiar with the entire history—and vice versa.
At Global Response, we implement omnichannel experiences to provide seamless, streamlined experiences for our clients’ customers that ensure a consistent brand experience across any channel the client is using. An omnichannel strategy also allows us to coordinate brand messaging and tone across channels, ensuring that every interaction feels true to your brand, regardless of where it happens.
Ready to Improve your Brand Consistency?
Improving your brand consistency through your call center provides heaps of benefits for your business, including:
- stronger customer trust and retention
- higher customer loyalty
- improved customer satisfaction and NPS scores
- increased purchase frequency and value
- greater brand recognition
- and more!
If you’re ready to take the next steps to improve brand consistency, Global Response can help. Our world-class employees are trained to become ambassadors for your brand, and we focused on making every single customer touchpoint perfect—consistent with your brand, satisfying for your customer, and designed to deliver conversions and loyalty for your company.
Reach out to a Global Response expert today and we’ll show you how we can help improve your brand consistency.