The Importance of Brand Consistency (and how the right call center partner can help!)

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.