How to deliver a consistent brand experience across an extended organisation

Reading Time: 2 minutes.

One of the challenges we’re seeing at Pecan Partnership, is how to deliver a consistent, high quality brand experience across an extended organisation – which, these days, is likely to include contracted third-parties working under a brand.

These contracted third parties often deliver a service, but not always an extension of the brand experience. There is a huge difference, of course, and as change consultants we’re masters at observing brand experiences.

I come across this often when dealing with Financial Services companies that have outsourced parts of their customer service to third-parties.

It can be hard enough within organisations to deliver a consistently good customer service experience across multiple sites, channels and touchpoints with one’s own staff, let alone the employees who work for another third-party contracted organisation.

What’s the solution?

Here’s a few tips from our leading change agency on how to protect and nurture a brand experience in an extended organisation:

• Senior management buy-in and relationship management:  Most service providers are motivated to retain clients, so engaging senior people on more than just the basics – such as terms of a contract – and instead developing their skills in true partnership rather than the traditional client/supplier model is critically important.
• Assume that everyone wants to deliver a great brand experience: Use this as the starting point – people aren’t stupid, and they know if they’re delivering a poor service level. Help them with people-engaged change.
• Creative thinking and good execution in engaging staff: It can be a challenge due to location, language, culture, time, management capability and organisational identities, but there’s no excuse for not sending out strong commercial messages, clear examples of a unified organisational attitude, and experiential case studies for increased employee engagement.
• Clear and simple success measure everybody understands: These need to be reported on and made visible, so that people understand certain changes are permanent, and not part of the latest marketing campaign.
• Reinforcement and workplace embedding: Catching an employee doing something well and recognising it is a fundamental and powerful way to build positivity and good habits over time.

If you’d like to find out more about what we do at Pecan Partnership please feel free to contact us.

Photo by Nathan Dumlao