This month I’m delighted to welcome Nicolette Wuring as a guest blogger. Nicolette runs Customer Management Services from Amstelveen in Holland. She is author of Customer Advocacy; When You Care, People Notice, and she regularly speaks at conferences on Customer and Employee Advocacy and Transformational Leadership.
Nicolette got in touch after reading our last guest post by Julia Benbow all about inconsistency. Here she talks powerfully about brand, bringing yourself to work (an old favourite of ours) and how others see you. Over to you Nicolette.
“From REAL LIFE experience, I can tell you that any company that sets out to create game changing experiences, increase or revive it’s sustainable competitive advantage through service, will never be able to achieve that goal through ‘old-fashioned’ (industrial paradigm) consistency.
Daniel Pink wrote in his book “A whole new mind” that we now live in a society of creators & empathizers. In today’s competitive playing field, where customers (B2B and B2C) have an abundance of choice, consistency on the operating level (operational excellence) is just a prerequisite to be a player at all. But the playing starts with what the people in the business are able to CREATE ‘on top of that’ in their interactions with customers, which is also where empathy comes in.
Consistency here is much more defined by consistency in the way the people in a business make other people feel, be it customers, but also co-workers. And not just once, but, consistently, every day, time and again.
It starts with a dream, one that doesn’t instruct people what to feel, think, say and do, but inspires them to bring their whole self to work, not just the part of them that executes tasks, and feel and take ownership for their own contribution to the bigger whole.
It requires an environment in which people feel acknowledged and respected, as human beings (instead of human doings, managed at a task level). Where, to quote Pink again, people feel ‘freedom to be’ and ‘room for play’.
It requires significant changes to governance, from managing on quantitative KPI’s only to adding qualitative KPI’s, and balancing quantitative and qualitative KPI’s.
It requires managers to change their focus from control, managing at a task level, to facilitating the environment their team works in. An environment where the sum is larger than its parts. TEAM, as Tom Peters translates the acronym, Together Everyone Achieves More. Where the TEAM is the father of the success, and everybody feels their contribution is equally important.
But, it also requires consistency between ‘who you are’ (the DNA of the company), ‘who you say you are’ (in marketing communication etc.) and ‘who ‘people’ say you are’ (employees, customers; social media etc.; in the online & off line world).
Inconsistency at this level gets found out nowadays rather sooner than later, spreads faster across larger geographic areas than any marketing budget will ever be able to buy, chasing away existing and potential customers and creating a company or brand image that is potentially a danger to the company’s existence.
Well, I’m just getting started…
I hope my view on ‘inconsistency’ will inspire you! Because, as I see it, in a world where products and services are completely commoditized, markets are saturated, and we are overwhelmed with an abundance of choice, inconsistency is what will make companies stand out from the crowd. For better or worse. People have experiences all the time. Markets have become conversations. So, why not make sure when people talk about your brand, it’s positive!
With grace, Nicolette”