In an overcrowded marketplace full of options, you might be worried about how to set your business apart. That’s especially hard when your product isn’t that ‘different’ from competitors at its core.
How can you leverage the services you offer, rather than the product itself, to define yourself in such a marketplace?
Think about it – are you more convinced by a company’s pitch or by how it resolves concerns? If a help desk’s slogan is “Faster Service for Your Customers”, then unless the developer’s customer service is also prompt when responding to your inquiries, you’ll probably look elsewhere.
The point is that you can use customer service as a branding tool. It creates added value, and makes it easier to distinguish you from the competition.
What Is “Branding”, Really – And How Can You Involve Your Customer Service Team?
Branding isn’t just a slogan, punchline, or flashy Meta Ad. It’s a set of values that define your goals, intent, and purpose.
It’s the golden nugget that makes your company memorable, setting it apart from the droves of competitors. Another way to think about it is the promise you make to consumers: You’ll “deliver on X”.
When you involve customer service, you bring those values to life. They become a core component of how your business conducts itself and interacts with the public.
For example, if a company promises on social media channels that it will “guarantee fast service”, that business’ support team needs to work to resolve problems immediately. Otherwise, they fail to affirm their image and actively mislead customers.
The big question of customer service branding is: “How can you leverage the support you offer, rather than the product, to better define your business?”
So the first thing you’ll need to figure out is how the service you offer can be leveraged as a branding opportunity. Are you the fastest in the game? Do you provide highly personalized experiences?
You don’t have to excel in every area. And what you offer might not even be that dramatic. Maybe you don’t deliver anything unexpected, but you provide reliable, quality support your customers can rely on.
Don’t be afraid to think outside the box. Excellent support can mean a lot of things: reliability, constancy, human engagement, reassurance, and so on. It’s not just the hard numbers (we respond within 15 minutes!) that matter. It’s the emotions and experience your brand provides.
3 Tips for Creating a Customer Service Branding Strategy
If you’ve spent any amount of time running a business or working in customer service, you know just how integral support is to brand image.
And if you needed any further validation or proof, there are countless articles and publications that reaffirm it in big bold letters.
So how do you go about creating your own customer service branding strategy? Here’s what we’ve learned along the way – take these tips and mold them to fit your unique vision and goals.
1. Determine How Your Company Values Translate To Customer Service
The first step is to align customer service voice and brand messaging.
To do this, you’ll need to translate the values baked into the identity of your business over to the customer service experience.
If you don’t have a marketing department, that’s not necessarily a disadvantage. A small team (with each member taking on multiple roles) has a lot more direct insight into the CX.
Let’s take a look at our own business, Groove, for a moment.
Groove is a purpose-built help desk. It provides an affordable, functional platform for customer service. It was created as an easier-to-use alternative to the “big guys” like Zendesk, and prioritized clear communication from the very beginning.
Our founder, Alex, wrote a blog post years ago about the many reasons small businesses can successfully compete against Goliath – industry leaders.
In that post, he highlighted that once those big companies start to grow, their focus on support dwindles. In comparison, as a startup, customer service branding is all about going above and beyond the call of duty.
Larger support teams have access to a lot of resources, sure. But they are often too disparate, outsourced, or automated to provide hands-on and personalized customer service.
Alex took the initiative to brand Groove as a company that cares about its customers. And that allowed us to increase loyalty through otherwise straightforward service interactions.
Let’s say that your business prioritizes “speed and convenience”. You know customers visit your website frequently for help, and prefer to find answers on their own. They don’t need to speak with a human as long as they can resolve their problem.
How can you deliver on this expectation in customer service (and otherwise exemplify these qualities)?
In this case, it might mean leveraging automation or a chatbot to ensure prompt replies. It will likely also involve providing a lot of self-service resources to customers, and setting (and tracking) clear metrics for your team’s response speed.
The key is to translate brand values into tangible customer service behaviors. Provide a clear framework or process for your support team to follow.
Creating a customer service training manual or policy can help set expectations and reinforce branding within support. Use examples to show how service interactions can embody brand values like empathy, speed, or reliability.
2. Establish Brand-Aligned Customer Service Language
You know who uses your product, who you want to use your product, and why someone might subscribe or purchase.
The problem: You don’t know how to translate this knowledge into the kind of language you should use in customer service.
How do your customers like to be spoken to? Have you established a dialogue with your support team about what communication should look like?
Tone is a major component of all support communications, and should be clearly defined in your branding strategy.
The solution: Correlate language to the company values you’ve identified.
If your business wants to deliver on empathetic support, because you’ve marketed yourself as a people-first company, that should shape every interaction.
Empathy training will be vital, so that all language (written or verbal) will convey a tone that is apologetic and reassuring.
“I’m sorry to hear that happened!”
“Let me make that right for you.”
“I’m happy to help you navigate this situation.”
“Let’s troubleshoot this together!”
Don’t leave any of this to chance. Develop clear customer service guidelines that show your team what kinds of language they should and should not use. Outline any words/phrases to avoid. And provide a sample decision-making process support agents can follow to decide on the best way to respond in any given interaction.
3. Use Analytics and Tools To Build a Smart Strategy
There’s no need to rely on intuition and guesswork. You can leverage all kinds of customer insights, analysis, and feedback to deliver brand-aligned customer service.
For example, tools like Jacquard can analyze data using AI to find the most effective language and phrasing for your particular audience. Most businesses use this kind of tool for marketing campaigns. But they can be repurposed for customer service, including curated messages for social media channels based on tone-of-voice analysis.
Often, interactions on social media warrant a different response than those sent via email. And most people – even the most tech literate – seem to prefer an informal response from support. While adopting an overall neutral tone is the ‘safest’ option, it lacks emotional depth.
Your team will need to adapt to subtle differences in communication style between customers, too. An upset customer is less likely to feel heard and valued if you reply with a smiley-face emoji. To them, that understandably signals a lack of emotional intelligence.
A help desk like Groove can provide sentiment detection using AI. This helps your support team quickly determine the best way to align branding with language, especially when they’re overwhelmed by requests.
Within Groove, the AI overview summarizes the customer issue (error message) and assesses previous agent response (asked for more details) in a sentence or two. Your team can use this data to tailor their responses.
In the above example, the language in the response:
- Uses empathy to reaffirm branding (customer-first support)
- Points to additional resources on the subject so the customer can self-solve
- Asks for additional information in an indirect and non-confrontational manner
- Prompts the customer to reach back out if they need additional help
If a neutral tone is detected, you can use informal, conversational language to help the customer through their concerns. If anger is detected, you might want to use a more formal approach and focus on clear language.
Groove’s AI features allow you to adjust a pre-written response based on formality to streamline this process and create consistency. That way, you can build brand-aligned templates as starting points, and customize them to match the channel, customer, and situation.
Branding Is Just One Pillar of a Strong Customer Service Strategy
Branding is usually thought about within a marketing context. But support is equally important in distinguishing your brand from the competition.
Effective customer service branding involves careful strategy, supplemented with tools that make consistent branding easy and efficient. This starts with your help desk – your central command center for all things support.
Make it as simple as possible for your team to align with your branding in every customer interaction. Sign up for a free trial of Groove today to experience the difference!
