Dwayne J. Clark is the Founder, CEO and Chairman of Aegis Living, a best-selling author and longevity expert.
The time has finally come. It’s the day you look forward to every year: Your birthday meal at your favorite steakhouse—the one with the perfect ribeye and that decadent chocolate molten cake that dreams are made of.
You arrive dressed in your birthday best, but it appears they have “lost” your reservation. Unwilling to let this get in the way of you and your perfect cut of meat, you carry on unphased. Once you are finally seated, no one has come to your table for at least 10 minutes.
Still carrying on, determined not to tarnish the best day of the year, you order and can hardly contain yourself as the hot plates approach the table. But then, the icing on your birthday cake: Your medium-rare steak arrives well done, and no one thinks of offering a birthday dessert.
Far worse things could happen. Yet, you’re stuck with one important question: Was this just a bad night at the restaurant, or have things gone downhill?
Maintaining Your Brand Integrity
Brand integrity and its detrimental counterpart, brand dilution, can really be boiled down to these questions: Is your brand delivering on its promise? And if not, are you making every effort to repair your customer relationships? Brands can become diluted as companies grow or go through rough patches—like a pandemic or recession. When we aren’t consistent, our customers often find that the value they gain from our services no longer meets their expectations or feel they can’t trust us to deliver the desired experience.
If you’re a company still bouncing back from the pandemic or, more fortunately, a company that has seen massive growth in the past few years, it’s likely time to consider the Triple-A approach: analyze, action plan and audit. This is a tried-and-true philosophy I created for my business years ago. When paired with a continued focus on hiring best practices, team engagement and effective customer repair approaches, you can up your game from four stars to five—ensuring that you avoid those dreaded one-star reviews. Here are some steps to do this.
Analyze Where You Are
Take stock of the value you are really delivering to your customers. Are there areas where you are excelling? What about places you are slipping? Perhaps sales trends are giving you strong indicators of what you could be changing. Are you learning anything from recent employee surveys? Leave no stone left unturned.
Being proactive helps ward off bigger issues down the road. If you think about the top brands of our time—from Four Seasons to Rolls-Royce and Louis Vuitton—they all share deep brand integrity. They don’t let even the slightest detail slip because they know it could damage their brand for a lifetime. You’ll never find a speck of dirt or flower petal on the floor of a Four Seasons lobby. Not once will you find a last-season Louis Vuitton purse on the floor of their store.
Action Your Plans
Embracing your strengths and areas of weakness will allow you to quickly action plan and address any identified issues or areas of improvement head-on. While each team member will play a critical role, assign your managers as your first line of defense to uphold brand standards, flag any hurdles and ensure that you and your leadership are informed every step of the way.
Self-Audit
Continuously audit your performance to ensure your consumer experience standards are high. When your company drops in perceived value due to your reputation, the only way to remain competitive—as you no longer garner the trust built on fulfilled brand promises—is by price. I find that to fall from high-competency services into low-competency price competition is nothing short of a terminal diagnosis for your brand; there is no bottom line. By setting a schedule and committing to staying on top of your auditing, you set yourself up to catch issues before they have the chance to take hold.
Even with these approaches, it is important not to lose sight of your team and core customer service principles, especially when it comes to correcting and repairing missteps.
Hire Well
Be extra judicious in how you hire—aiming for both high competency and trust in your employees. It’s also vital to establish with your team the kind of candidate that you need to avoid during this process. In my experience, the combination that’s often hardest to weed out yet most detrimental to your company is high competency but low trust. These people wow you with their incredible work but show that they can’t be reliable brand ambassadors and likely lack the motivation to lift up the company or fellow team members.
Prioritize Team Training And Onboarding
Don’t let training and onboarding fall to the wayside, even when you are busy and understaffed. Consider establishing a good balance of training without handholding, allowing independence but with clear expectations on performance outlined every time you conduct hiring or internal transitions. This offers a strong foundation for your employees to understand your brand and how you want it represented while allowing them to show you their initiative.
Repair When You’ve Misstepped
Renowned psychologists and relationship experts Dr. John Gottman and Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman often discuss how repairing is a critical step in a healthy relationship. I find that almost nothing is more important to your brand and customer trust than repair. If you catch a problem early, address it head-on with appropriate next steps.
Every issue—even the seemingly small issues—should be taken seriously and paired with a solution. The follow-up is possibly even more important than the initial repair, and it also must be appropriate to the mistake that transpired.
It’s almost never too soon to analyze, action plan and audit again. The minute you get too comfortable, you might just find yourself—or your customers—sitting smack dab in the middle of an overbooked restaurant, paying a hefty price for a mediocre steak.
Forbes Business Council is the foremost growth and networking organization for business owners and leaders. Do I qualify?
Read the full article here
