LOOKING TO VALUES FOR STRENGTH VERSUS COVID-19

How our personal values can support us at this challenging time

I have spoken to several people, now working from home, who are feeling “lost” to varying degrees at this time, searching for structure, direction and purpose. This is a good time to reboot: clear away everything that is unnecessary and focus on what is important to us. One way to do this is to identify your values, translate these into practical behaviours and then consciously practice them every day. This is the framework for the my31Practices approach: Identify, Action, Impact, Refine. The approach draws on a variety of sources such as psychology, neuroscience, mindfulness, NLP, action learning, habit formation and others and the book, MY 31 PRACTICES, release the power of your values for authentic happiness, co-authored with Steve Payne and illustrated by John Montgomery was published in 2016.

“This book helps you think through and deal with the problems and pressures we all face (in the workplace and our personal lives) to find personal solutions and a greater sense of wellbeing.” Professor Sir Cary Cooper, CBE, President of the CIPD

There is a simple four step approach:

1. Identify what is important to you (myValues)

2. Translate these into a set of behaviours (myPractices)

3. Practice your myPractices every day (myExperiences)

4. Reflect on your myExperiences at the end of the day

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HOW TO COMMUNICATE EFFECTIVELY DURING TIMES OF CHANGE

Effective communication during times of rapid change is different in style to communication in a steady-state or “business as usual” environment. If you are a team leader, here are some tips that you might find useful to practice at this time:

Make Communication Regular and Frequent

It is imperative to set the expectation that there will be regular communication that is credible and comprehensive. Often there is a tendency for people to wait to send any type of communication until all the information is known and available. This is a mistake! It’s much more important to cycle your communication and repeat the same message often than to wait until all the information is complete and perfect. What if you don’t know something? Tell them! You can always say, “We don’t have all the information yet, but this is what we do know.”

Values and Purpose as a “guiding star”

The organization’s values are the way things work around here and the purpose is why the company exists. If you have these articulated and they are alive, keep reminding people of them and that if they make decisions based on the organization’s purpose and values they will be better decisions.

Do Not Over-Rely on Email

Many people receive lots of emails every day. So, why then, does anyone think an email is going to have enough of an impact to change someone’s behaviour? You can be pretty sure that no one will change what they are currently doing solely because an email has gone out saying they should.

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How to Formulate a Successful Customer Experience Strategy

For many customers, the service, support, and buying experience shape their opinion of a brand. It determines whether they will remain loyal customers or avoid the product in the future. For better service, many are willing to pay a premium and stay dedicated to a brand even if it is not the cheapest on the market.

The 2020 Digital Marketing Trends Report by Adobe and Econsultancy determined that Customer Experience is the most exciting opportunity named by organizations for the upcoming year. 

But how do you formulate a successful customer experience strategy?

Get a clear vision

The first step in your strategy should be a clear customer-focused vision. Create a set of statements that can act as guiding principles and determine appropriate company values. Every member of your team should be aware of these values and know what behaviours promote them. Create a clear vision and share it with your team so it can drive everyone’s actions.

Understand your Audience

Next, double your efforts to understand who your customers are. Knowing the different types of customers who deal with your support teams can help you build the customer experience with their interests in mind. 

Segment your customers and create personas that exemplify their different needs, requirements and personalities. By creating personas with names and stories, you can also easily communicate the idea of a customer type to your team and help them become truly customer-centric. 

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Creating a Culture of Service Excellence

Many customers choose to support one brand over another because they feel more of a personal connection with their values and because they've received excellent customer service. In order to stay ahead in the new paradigm of the value economy, companies should focus on delivering brand-aligned customer experience. 

The way to do so is to focus on creating a service excellence culture for your brand.

Building a Culture of Service Excellence

There's no shortage of companies that jump to mind when we think of service excellence. For instance, Apple, Disney, Amazon and more, have consistently focused on delivering better service and more value to their customers.

But what goes into building service excellence?

Each brand should recruit, promote and motivate each of their employees to step up their service quality. When a brand’s values align with excellent service, and their employees follow habits to ensure they consistently fulfil them, customers walk away with a better experience.

There is nothing accidental about the way service excellence is designed and achieved. Leaders should define what service will be like for their customer, by using the required language, knowledge and behaviours to put a plan together. This means understanding what customers need throughout their engagement with the brand and finding pain points that could be improved upon.

Listening, and taking an active step in collecting feedback and surveys from customers while promoting honest reviews is the first step to understanding where the service could be improved.

A prosperous service organization not only builds but also maintains the service excellence they have achieved. This means continuously observing behaviours and training staff to meet expectations. Practises and communication within the company must be consistently reviewed.

Service Excellence Sets You Apart

By developing service excellence, companies can set themselves apart from their competition and consistently generate more value for their customers. This level of customer service engages audiences to become loyal brand-ambassadors and creates a positive brand identity. If you need help developing practises and ideas to improve your customer experience, get in touch with Servicebrand Global today.

How to Improve the Customer Experience in a Values-driven Economy

The customer experience has never been as fundamental to business success as it is today. As well as consumers expecting more from the companies and brands they engage with as part of a values-driven economy, innovations in the world of CX have created an increasingly competitive landscape where a poor customer experience approach could put you out of the game for good.

To address your concerns over what you should and shouldn’t be doing to offer great customer experiences that support your growth, we’ve outlined five key steps you can take. While they’re not the total answer, they can help you create a solid foundation for delivering consistent customer experiences.

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Why is Organisational Alignment so Important?

The various parts of any organisation need to be “joined up”to achieve the best results. We worked with a company where the marketing department used the phrase “inspired performance” and yet in sales training they used the phrase “service excellence”.  When we asked why they had not used “inspired service” as an alternative, the answer was “This is Sales, it is different to Marketing”.  Good organisational alignment makes it easier  to realise synergies and eliminate dupliocation and waste.  We refer to this as horizontal alignment.

It is also essential for the organisation’s strategy and culture to be aligned from the boardroom to the frontline.  Within an increasingly values-driven economy, it is important that your organisation is grounded by the same principles and core values that define who you are within your market. To support your brand and differentiate yourself from competitors, everyone representing the organisation needs to be a brand ambassador, all singing from the same hymn sheet.  We refer to this as vertical alignment.

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How to Operationalize Strategic Plans in Your Business

In our experience, it’s all too common for businesses to design amazing strategies and plans that will lead to growth and success, only for these plans to fall by the wayside – never to be completed. Each business types can have its own issues in executing strategic plans, but the consequence is almost always unrealised growth potential and frustration among your team.

Whether you’re a start-up embarking on your first strategic implementation or a large enterprise who wants to roll out big changes across all your departments, we explore four key areas that will help you to implement strategic plans effectively in your business.

Execution rules

A focus on implementation needs to begin as soon as the strategic plan is created. This means when the leadership team finalises the concept and substance of any strategy. Rather than embellishing the outcome in an abstract sense, bring things back to earth with language and phrases that your whole team can understand.  Usereal and tangible actions and issueclear instructions to relevant individuals.

Individual and collective commitment

To push the strategy implementation forward, it is crucial that you have commitment from everybody in your team. Whether it is the leadership team who are initiaing the change, or employees who have certain responsibilities,  everyone needs to understand what will happen and how they will contribute to this change, at an individual level and also collectively as a team.

Focus on the outcome

Regular reinforcement of the strategic plan approach will keep everybody focussed on the outcome. For large organisations, the message can sometimes get lost among middle management or project teams, who do not prioritise the implementation among their other responsibilities and daily activities. A great way to reinforce your approach is to recognise small successes and celebrate progress towards the desired outcome.

Track your progress

Set goals and milestones to gauge your progress in implementating the strategy. This will confirm how well you are performing, identify areas for improvement, focus or correction and allow you to review whether any adjustments need to be made along the way.

Improve Employee Engagement the Right Way

Rethink your approach to autonomy

Some businesses are reluctant to offer autonomy to their employees because they believe it increases the risk of poor performance or mistakes. Instead, they opt for more rigid managerial structures or micromanagement.

This is counter productive because autonomy plays a crucial role in job satisfaction and can seriously improve employee engagement levels. Within the right structure, autonomy gives individuals the chance to define their own direction and goals, motivating them to perform better.

Offer the right incentives

Incentives should be more than just the promise of a raise or bonus. While these things are key drivers of motivation for many people, their often long-term nature means they can be forgotten in the short term .

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How to Commit to a Values-Driven Business

Practice

You will need to commit to putting your values into action in a real and practical way. Whether its prioritising values in important decision-making processes or in your internal policies, you should actively integrate your values into the day-to-day operations of your business.

This is most effective when championed by leaders who can share practical examples of the values in action.

 

Impact

It’s important to measure the impact of your values integration initiativess over time, such as your employee engagementsolutions. How will you know they have worked otherwise?

Using both internal and external measures of progress, learn how your values are being perceived, embraced and received by your customers as well as your employees, service partners and other stakeholders. Through such efforts, you will be able to hold yourself accountable for the way values are being communicated.

After you have gained insights from both objective and subjective assessment, it is recommended that you publicly report your findings on values and culture metrics as part of your core business indicators, reviewed at the most senior level in the organisation.

What is the Values Pledge?

The Values Pledge provides a framework for these important commitments and emphasises the importance of genuine and authentic values as an ongoing journey.

In a general sense, it is a commitment to upholding a values-driven approach through ongoing collective involvement, learning and curiosity and fostering greater resilience in the face of setbacks.

When performed correctly, businesses can build values-driven organisations that draw from a strong foundation of underpinning values to adapt to all kinds of future challenges while achieving long-term success.

IMPROVE ORGANISATIONAL ALIGNMENT WITH BETTER EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT

While many businesses have wrongly assumed that more control, monitoring, and management is the only way to achieve organisational alignment, the truth is very different.

When employees are given the right framework and environment to grow and feel rewarded by their work, they will be a powerful force in moving your business in the right direction and improving integration across your company.

Redefine autonomy

Autonomy is often seen as something that only senior employees have the privilege of enjoying. Otherwise, it is only perceived as suitable for people in positions that require minimal teamwork and collaboration.

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Building a Customer Experience Strategy for Your Business

Attracting and engaging customers is an art in today’s incredibly competitive landscape of inbound marketing and customer-focused brands. 

To get your prospective customer’s attention and bring them through to conversion with carefully targeted, authentic and relevant content, you’ll need to dedicate some serious time and resources to building an effective customer experience strategy.

What is a customer experience strategy? 

Customers interact with and develop perception of brands in a similar way to how they meet new people. There are a number of stages that range from initial and fleeting encounters to long-term and loyal relationships. 

The customer experience strategy is all about building a plan that allows your customers to build stronger bonds with your business. From the initial consumption of interesting content on social media, to reading your weekly newsletters or promotional emails, your strategy should consider all your customer touch points.

Ultimately, a great customer experience leads to endorsements and a growing brand presence that goes beyond your own marketing initiatives.  In the new paradigm of what we refer to as the Values Economy, an organisations stakeholder groups including customers and employees effectively become the marketing function.  At SERVICEBRAND GLOBAL, we can help you to build A sense of shared values and trust with loyal fans, which will have an exponential impact on your market reach. 

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