How to ReBuild your Company’s Brand Leadership

Every company has competitors. Today’s customer tends to be fickle more than loyal, fancies themselves the greatest critic of customer service or products, and will Twitter or Facebook your company’s shortcomings before you even have an inkling something might not be right. Will they switch to the next best solution or stay with your offerings?

Some companies will throw their hands in the air and blame the Internet. Savvy business owners will ask “is there something else we can do to keep customers?” How fast your ‘loyal’ clientele dumps you for your competitor is actually within your control. In fact, if you and your team decide to take back this control, it may have a huge side benefit: greater profitability.

1. LIVE YOUR CUSTOMERS’ EXPERIENCE –

Many companies have forgotten the golden rule of business: Your existence is due entirely to your ability to solve a real problem for your target market. Not the problem you want to solve, the problem that the people that buy from you have. It’s often not the product, but the process that flattens sales. Try standing in their shoes with their concerns. How hard is it to solve their problem with your solution? How many hassles are there? Have you ever investigated what it is really like to patronize your establishment through all your communication and distribution channels? Listen to the promises your company makes at the beginning of the client engagement. Go through the entire buying experience and then compare what is delivered and see how it matches the promise made. Problems, hassles?

2. ACCEPT AND RESOLVE THE HASSLES –

Like the children’s game of Password we played at birthday parties, one word becomes skewed and distorted by the time it is whispered to the last child. The same communication challenges happen within companies. This is especially true in companies that are attempting rapid growth. The real problem is not well understood and then the sales process makes it worse. The promises made by sales people do not hold up through operations, accounting and delivery. And it is not for lack of effort, laziness, or poor performance generally. It is because of process gaps, communication barriers, mis-alignment of needs vs incentives with company strategy, mis-understandings between departments, accountability gaps, and the big one: what was delivered does meet the needs of buyer because no one has checked lately to see if needs have changed. Such systemic issues often get batted from voice mail to email to Facebook. Who should they talk to when a customer has a problem?

3. GET BACK BRAND AND PRICING POWER –

Let the hassles live in your internal systems too long and you start to lose your reputation as the leader in your market niche. When your product is not the premium brand anymore, you lose ability to command higher prices. Volume slips and now you are competing on price, not because what you offer does the right thing in the right way. Reclaim your brand leadership by getting the hassles out of your customer experience and you will find ways to reduce redundancies, increase productivity and restore pricing power and profitability. This is a great opportunity to empower your managers. Put together a team with managers from all departments. Give them a mandate to find and remove the hassles so that customers love how you do business with them. While you listen to the customer experience, you will discover much more about what they really need from your product, service and company experience. Expect the project to take at least a year. You will be surprised how small changes rebuild trust and big returns across the organization. Your employees will be self-responsible, engaged and customers will know you listen and really care. Translation? It all flows to the bottom line.

Lorraine Rieger McGregor is the founder and CEO Spirit West Management Inc. McGregor has worked with more than 100 organizations on integration planning and preparation. She is the current president of the Association for Corporate Growth—Vancouver.