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Whose Brand is it Anyway? - Ensuring Your Brand is Paramount in a BPO Relationship

by Tom Christenson, President of Contact Center Solutions, CGS - September 18, 2013

Whose Brand is it Anyway?

Ensuring Your Brand is Paramount in a BPO Relationship

Tom Christenson, President of Contact Center Solutions, CGS

tchristenson@cgsinc.com

212-408-3800

Far too often, BPO providers invest more into their own brand rather than the brands of their customers. These outsourcers point to “good” reasons for these investments – lower recruiting costs, higher employee engagement or reduced attrition. However, more often than not, investments in their own brand are motivated more by ambition, peer and industry recognition, or cocktail party pride, rather than tangible customer related benefits. The risks and costs of this are bourne by those outsourcers’ customers. What they don’t seem to realize is that the same employee engagement benefits can be achieved when an outsourcer makes that same investment in their customer’s brands.

Why Brand Identification is Important

Your customers selected you because they identify with what your company represents. They have formed part of their own identity based on their consumption of your products and services. With that identification comes expectations. Expectations for service, for quality, for value, for how your company speaks to their own personal brand.

A successful brand reinforces its values and culture with every point of contact – whether that’s with customers, employees, partners or investors. Engaged, loyal, and happy customers are repeat customers. Repeat customers become your ambassador, and are the catalyst for sustainable growth for any successful business, driving competitive advantage in today’s ultra-competitive, social media-driven landscape.

Assessing Your Vendor’s Brand Loyalty

In business and in life, they say it’s all about the little things. Nothing can be closer to the truth when it comes to assessing where your vendor or potential vendor’s loyalty lies.

· Presentations: Which logo is more prominent on the documents you receive from your vendor? Yours or theirs? The best brand ambassador partner knows that their customer’s brand comes first.

· Locations: When you visit your team or conduct a site visit, which brand is more prominent? Your vendor must embrace you and your brand, and physical identification of their agents with your brand is critical to building teams that are passionate about your company and your customers.

· Language: Does your vendor use your language? It’s a subtle cue, but every level of your vendor’s management should know how you refer to your products, customers, and employees, and they should use this language. If you call your employees “team members” then your vendor should call your agents “team members,” etc.

· Celebrations: Do agent celebrations and rewards reflect your brand as well as your vendor’s brand? This is a critical aspect of employee engagement and your vendor should share the spotlight with you.

Next time you meet with your vendor, keep your eyes and ears open and see how they measure up.

Maximizing Brand Identification with Your BPO Provider

There is a misconception that building a great brand costs a great amount of money. Sure, a Super Bowl ad runs millions of dollars per second, but building a brand is more than a catchy phrase, some good music and an animated talking squirrel. Building your brand and engaging your customers can start with a single point of contact. After thousands of repeated, high-quality points of contact you begin to engage and build loyalty to you and your company.

We all know business school teaches that your brand consists of the three Ps – product, place and promotion. Expanding on this, your brand represents the following five elements:

· Perception

· Customer experience

· Value

· Prestige

· Desirability

All five elements go into developing the integrity of your brand, and the balance of positive versus negative will determine your brand’s effectiveness and success. For companies that leverage BPO vendors, it is critical that you understand how your vendor will be a positive extension of your brand. Your vendor’s employees promote your company and have the ability to impact all five of these elements of brand success.

Steps to Extend Your Brand through Your Outsourcer

For organizations that utilize outsourced vendors, making sure they accept your brand’s culture is a critical process in the path to establishing brand identification, because the vendor’s employees are an extension of your company.

Establishing your brand identification with your vendor requires some planning, smart decision making, and consistent execution. It can be accomplished by adhering to the following six steps:

1) Make a smart choice. Do your research and due diligence before you make the move, and think about how you will access the vendor’s brand loyalty.

2) Start at the very beginning (a very good place to start). During the onboarding process, you should provide your outsourcer with a thorough education of your company culture. This is achieved through offering the same training materials, videos, pep talks, etc., that you would for your own employees.

3) Keep it going. It is also important to extend to your outsourcing provider the “flavor of your brand.” This means providing them with the same (non-HR) perks, discounts, and promotional items on a consistent basis.

4) Get out of the office and get on the road. You and your key team members should visit your vendor as often as budget permits to meet your team members. If possible, engage employees across your organization as “Brand Ambassadors” and ask them to call, email, visit and otherwise engage with your vendor and their employees (your employees).

5) Send gifts. Give your vendor and your brand ambassadors any logo items your company has. Banners, signs, paperweights, pens, pencils, flash drives, it almost doesn’t matter what the trinket is as long as you include your vendor’s employees as if they were your own.

6) Ask! Customer satisfaction surveys are a normal part of any outsourcing contract so this likely doesn’t represent any additional cost. Add a question like “did the representative today represent what you expect of our brand?” What’s measured is managed, and this simple question may reveal a lot more than you expect.

Reconciling Your Brand with Their Brand

There’s a reason the brand Intel is so recognizable, and there’s a reason why people want a Mac or Lenovo, and not an Intel PC. We know that high-quality PCs have “Intel Inside” because that’s what they told us. Intel repeated this message for years, and actually put it on every device that included an Intel chip.

The purpose for this example is to highlight that powerful brands can peacefully coexist and even thrive. However, the “guts” inside must take a backseat to the primary brand, your brand.

Your outsourced vendor should provide you with a blank slate to build upon. Your vendor will build their own employee engagement programs and branding efforts to attract and retain customers and employees. An outsourcer whose message to the world is that they embrace and engage with their customers will attract more customers and employees that want to work for YOU. Your vendor should have minimal self-branding within their centers and their message to the outside world should be a celebration of their customers and you.

The most critical decision for organizations involves selecting a BPO provider whose brand is about your brand and not their own. An outsourced service provider should offer an environment that can foster and cultivate their clients’ brands rather than their own.

Expected Benefits

In the world of brands, every point of contact matters. Any interaction between your brand and your constituents builds toward the perception of your brand.

Effectively aligning your brand with that of your outsourcer’s will result in numerous benefits, including:

· Marked improvement in customer service

· Reduction in repeat calls, unresolved issues, and unhappy customers

· Enhanced customer experiences

· Dramatic reduction in costs

Tom Christenson is the President of CGS Contact Center Solutions. Prior to joining CGS, he held various operations and strategy roles including COO and Chief Strategic Development Officer at premier global companies including Xerox Business Services and Marsh & McLennan. His focus for the last 10 years has been on the BPO and contact center outsourcing sector where he has driven revenue and profitability growth as well as operations discipline through lean Six Sigma processes. He is a graduate of Colgate University with an MBA from The Amos Tuck School at Dartmouth College. Tom lives in New York City with two Patterdale Terriers.

 
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