What Indeed can teach us about brand promises

The job search site, Indeed, ran baseball-themed commercials during the recent World Series broadcast. In this one featuring Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher, Max Scherzer, Scherzer uses baseball analogies to coach an applicant looking for a sales management position.

What's struck me about these commercials is the strength of Indeed's brand promise: "We help people get jobs."

This simplicity and focus has helped Indeed become the #1 job site in terms of total site visits and rank at the top of many "best of" lists, such as this one from The Balance Careers.

A great brand promise is a core element from my book, The Guaranteed Customer Customer Experience. For many businesses, it can be an essential part of a strategy to win and retain customers.

Here's a look at how Indeed does it so well. Let's start by looking at the connection between a brand promise and customer experience.

How brand promises influence customer experience

A brand promise influences customer experience in two ways. First, it tells the brand’s ideal customers what type of experience to expect, and assures them that this brand is the solution to a problem they’re trying to solve. Second, it gets all employees on the same page when it comes to crafting a consistent experience.

In the case of Indeed, the ideal customer is looking for a job. "We help people get jobs" could not address that need more clearly. An informal poll on LinkedIn showed that's exactly how many people view Indeed.

"I've found pretty much all my past jobs through Indeed," wrote James. "I personally like the simplicity of the website."

Devon added, "Indeed has been an excellent way to research what jobs are out there."

A great brand promise also provides clarity on how the company should operate. It focuses all of its employees on the type of experience it must deliver.

The brand promise influences advertising, such as this commercial showing hall of fame pitcher, Mariano Rivera, helping someone search for a senior accountant job.

You can also see it on the Indeed website. The home page is hyper-focused on people searching for a job.

Katie Molloy, President of the career consulting firm, Leo & Loy, is a big fan.

"I love Indeed for so many reasons," wrote Molloy. It has many standout features, including the ability to easily refine job searches and set alerts for certain types of jobs. Molloy says these features makes it easier for her clients who are searching for jobs. "Basically it does the work every night while you’re sleeping and you wake up to a new list of jobs you can apply to."

What makes a great brand promise?

The best brand promises have three characteristics that enable them to help attract customers and provide clarity for employees.

#1: Specific

A great brand promise should focus on something specific, so customers clearly understand what the brand stands for.

The Indeed brand promise is very specific. "We help people get jobs" tells you exactly you can expect from Indeed. Yes, it's very broad in the sense that there are a number of ways Indeed can deliver on this promise, but you aren't confused about what Indeed does.

#2 Valuable

A great brand promise should offer something of value to the company's ideal customer. 

You can understand what your customer finds valuable by listening to their "I need to" statements. Customers often use the words "I need to" when they are searching for a particular product or solution.

• "I need to wash my car."

• "I need to get a healthy meal on my lunch break."

• "I need to store my Halloween decorations until next year."

All of these statements bring to mind specific products or services that would satisfy a particular need, whether it's a car wash that offers incredible convenience, a fast food restaurant that offers healthy food, or company that makes storage containers.

Indeed's ideal customer is saying, "I need to find a job." The Indeed brand promise speaks to that need very directly.

#3 Realistic

Great brand promises must also be realistic. A brand has to keep its promise to customers if it wants to earn their trust and loyalty.

My friend Paul is a small business owner. Whenever he needs to hire employees, he goes to Indeed.

Paul explained that he doesn't have a lot of time to search for resumes. He found Indeed to be a simple and effective way to quickly find great candidates. Perhaps too effective, since Paul told me that if he posts a job on Indeed, he'd better be ready to hire someone right away!

Conclusion

A great brand promise should speak to your ideal customers with absolute clarity. This is the power of Indeed's deceptively simple promise, "We help people get jobs."

You can learn more about using a brand promise to attract and retain customers from The Guaranteed Customer Experience. Download the first chapter to read about a chain of convenience stores that outsells the competition by simply promising clean restrooms. You can also get a free toolkit to help you implement your own brand promises.

How a simple marketing strategy helps Buc-ee's dominate the competition

Note: The following is an excerpt from The Guaranteed Customer Experience. You can download Chapter One to read the rest of the story about Buc-ee’s.

---

Imagine driving cross-country on a road trip.

You need gas, and you need to use the restroom. Choosing a place to stop is a big decision. Gas stations can be miles apart. The station you see on the horizon probably has gas, but there's no guarantee they’ll have a clean restroom. Do you need to stop now, or do you have enough fuel to keep going until the next one?

You size up each gas station’s convenience store you pass as your level of urgency increases. Some are rejected at first glance for being too scary. You slow to scrutinize others. Will the restroom be open or out-of-order? Will there be a line? Will it be clean?!

Your car's gas gauge is hovering near "E," while your own tank is dangerously close to "F." Decision time. Where will you stop?

You're not alone in this experience. A study from the travel app GasBuddy found that 40 percent of Americans worry about finding a clean restroom on a road trip.

Buc-ee's, a chain of gas station convenience stores located primarily in Texas, has developed a devoted customer base by solving this problem.

Driving through Texas, you're likely to encounter any number of humorous billboards advertising the nearest Buc-ee's location:

Image courtesy of Lou Congelio, Acme Fish.

I once counted 19 billboards on a stretch of highway. The messages often repeat the same promise that Buc-ee’s has clean restrooms.

Image courtesy of Lou Congelio, Acme Fish.

The billboards speak clearly to customers on the go who desperately have to go. They demonstrate an understanding of this common road trip problem and promise that Buc-ee's will solve it.

Many travelers will drive past other gas stations to get to a Buc-ee's, because Buc-ee's provides an assurance that other brands don’t.

This billboard is a welcome sight to a traveler with an urgent need.

Your heart might skip a beat when you pull into a Buc-ee's for the first time. This place is huge!

There’s a steady stream of cars in the parking lot, but you’ll still find plenty of parking and gas pumps. Semi-trailer trucks are not allowed, which creates a bit more space than the typical travel stop.

The restrooms are clearly visible from the front entrance, but you might still worry. Will there be a long line? Or worse, will it be a mess?

Buc-ee's does not disappoint. 8.3 million ratings of fuel and convenience retailers on the GasBuddy travel app rated the restrooms at Buc-ee's as the best in America. The restrooms at each location are unbelievably plentiful and clean, and each is well-stocked with paper and soap. Many are downright enormous.

Clean restrooms attract customers, but that's not all Buc-ee's has to offer.

It has all the items you'd expect to see in a convenience store—such as soda, candy, and chips—though on a much larger scale.

Most convenience stores are lucky to have one Icee machine that barely works some of the time. There are four Icee machines at the Buc-ee’s in Luling, Texas. Each is in perfect working condition.

There are also things you wouldn’t expect to find in a typical convenience store. Larger Buc-ee's locations have a barbecue counter where employees make hot sandwiches to order.

There's also an enormous display of house-made beef jerky and candy past the counter. Keep walking, and you'll come to a large section selling Texas-themed gifts and Buc-ee's apparel.

I once stopped at the Buc-ee's in Luling, Texas, to get a dog leash. My wife and I were on a road trip, and I had accidentally left our dog's leash at my mother-in-law's house in Houston. "Let's stop at Buc-ee's," I said. "I bet they have dog leashes." Sure enough, they did.

The size of the store and the sheer number of customers can intimidate first-time visitors, but Buc-ee's is surprisingly convenient. There are multiple cash register lines open with friendly cashiers ready and waiting to serve you.

Buc-ee's draws large crowds. Its locations average nearly four times as many customers as a typical convenience store.

Imagine attracting four times more customers to your business than your competition. What would cause so many customers to give you a try and, once they did, keep coming back? The secret is customer experience.

Buc-ee's wins customers from competing brands by consistently providing restrooms that are far superior to anyone else's. It averages a four-star rating on Yelp across all locations, with a whopping 46 percent of those reviews mentioning the restrooms.

Cody Esser, who writes the Impulsive Traveler Guy blog, traveled to 33 Buc-ee's locations over the course of three days in 2018. He reported that not a single restroom at any of those locations was dirty. I polled family and friends in Texas, asking what they love about Buc-ee's. Nearly everyone mentioned the clean restrooms.

Of course, the Buc-ee's experience is more than just clean restrooms. It keeps customers coming back with stores that are bigger and have a broader selection of items than a typical gas station convenience store.

Outside the Buc-ee’s in Luling, Texas.

My friend Robin summarized the Buc-ee's experience nicely: "I love that you can get bakery items, fresh-made candy, wonderful hot sandwiches, that they have a gift shop, and also have clean bathrooms! They have everything a traveler could ever want."

Conclusion

The challenge for any business is to figure out exactly what problem it can consistently solve better than the competition. It has to be something that customers value so customers choose you over other options.

You can download Chapter One from The Guaranteed Customer Experience to read the rest of the story and learn how to identify the problem your customer is trying to solve.

How Elephants Delicatessen wins customers with a great brand promise

Advertising disclosure: This blog participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means to earn fees by linking to Amazon and affiliated sites.

Dining out quickly loses its luster when you travel for work.

Several years ago, I had a long-term consulting project in Portland, Oregon. I'd fly in on a Monday, work crazy hours, and then fly home at the end of the week. I did this every week for several months.

Dining out for three meals a day makes it difficult to get proper nutrition. I needed to find a solution.

Fortunately, I discovered Elephants Delicatessen.

The Elephants brand promise is "Great local foods from scratch since 1979." That's exactly what it delivered—offering me a chance to get a tasty, healthy meal on the go.

I recently interviewed Cheyenne Terbrueggen, Marketing Communications Manager at Elephants to learn how the company keeps its brand promise and wins fans like me.

Here are a few of the questions that Terbrueggen answered. I've included the point in the interview where she answered it.

• What makes a good brand promise? (1:51)

• How can a brand promise help employees? (4:21)

• How does a brand promise influence your marketing message? (9:40)

• What makes a brand promise attractive to customers? (12:09)

• How does a brand promise influence product decisions? (17:24)

You can watch the full interview or read the highlights below.

What makes a good brand promise?

Terbrueggen explained that the brand promise encapsulates everything that Elephants does in one simple, straightforward sentence.

Great local foods from scratch since 1979.

"When you put it all together, it's basic and it's straightforward, and it's friendly--all things that we want to be."

The first part, great local foods, reflects the company's commitment to sourcing fresh ingredients from the community.

"Ninety percent of our main suppliers are located within 200 miles of our stores," explained Terbrueggen.

The second part, from scratch, communicates that the food is home-made and reinforces the feeling of fresh, healthy, and tasty.

"We make everything ourselves," said Terbrueggen. "Everything you eat is something that we've made."

Finally, adding 1979 shows that Elephants has been doing it for a very long time. The company isn't just trying to be trendy—they've made a real commitment.

Terbrueggen referred to the brand promise as a tagline throughout the interview, since it plays such a prominent role in Elephants' marketing. Notice how it's clearly communicated on the company's home page.

Terbrueggen admitted there is often an impulse to change the brand promise. When she was first hired, she was asked to come up with some alternatives. Terbrueggen came up with several ideas, but none were as authentic and impactful as the existing one.

"As many times as I've tried to come up with a better tagline that states what we do, I just can't."

Hear more on this topic at 1:51 in the interview.

How can a brand promise help employees?

Many people think of a brand promise as something that's exclusively for marketing. Yet employees are the keepers of that promise.

"It's important for the consumer, it is," said Terbrueggen. "But we have 250 employees. And I can tell you that they all know our tagline."

A good brand promise functions as a company's customer experience vision. This is a shared definition of an outstanding experience that gets all employees on the same page.

At Elephants, the brand promise helps employees understand what they do and guides their daily work.

Terbrueggen explained that it's often used as a way to simplify all that the company does into one simple message. "We do so many things, it's nice to have a really descriptive, straightforward tagline."

New employees learn about the tagline in their initial training. They hear multiple leaders talk about it, and what it means. It then becomes an integral part of their jobs.

This discussion starts at 4:21 in the interview.

How can a brand promise simplify your marketing message?

Many marketers confide that crafting the right message is a struggle. Companies offer so many products and services to many different types of customers.

Sometimes, it can be difficult to distill that down to one clear message.

Terbrueggen explained that she always comes back to the tagline whenever there's any doubt. It helps answer the question, "When there's so much to say, what's the one thing I should say?"

Elephants has run advertisements that focus exclusively on the tagline. Executives reference it as talking points during interviews. It even influences product decisions.

"Everything we do that's important for people to know is in the tagline," said Terbrueggen.

Go to the 9:40 mark to hear more.

How can a great brand promise attract more customers?

This was a fun segment of the interview, because it gave me a chance to tell Terbrueggen why I'm a fan of Elephants.

Customers ultimately buy products and services to help them solve a problem. A good brand promise speaks clearly to a specific problem a customer is trying to solve.

As a business traveler, the problem I needed to solve was to get a healthy, tasty meal on the go. I didn't want another heavy meal weighing me down. Elephants solved that problem nicely, and I ate there regularly.

One important side note is that I discovered Elephants through word-of-mouth. My clients routinely ordered lunch from Elephants, so I got to experience the quality myself.

Companies that have a strong brand promise make it easier for existing customers to refer the company to new customers. They can use the brand promise to help describe what makes the company special.

Listen to the full discussion at 12:09.

How does a brand promise influence product decisions?

Customer-focused companies often take a cross-functional approach to creating new products and services. The goal is to create something that customers will not only love, but that the company is capable of consistently delivering.

In my book, The Guaranteed Customer Experience, I profiled multiple companies like Osprey Packs, Domino's, and Briggs & Riley that involve marketing, repairs, customer service, and other departments when developing new products.

The same is true at Elephants, where marketing, chefs, and procurement work together to create menu items. Ultimately, the availability of fresh, local ingredients determines whether or not a menu item can be offered.

"We wanted to do strawberry muffins this week but we can't, because we can't get great strawberries," said Terbruggen. "We can get good blueberries right now, so we're doing blueberry sour cream muffins instead."

Elephants regularly changes its menu to ensure it's keeping its promise of providing fresh local foods from scratch.

"We'd rather do that than purchase something that's not fresh and local," said Terbrueggen. "We have to be guided by what's available and what our suppliers have."

More on this at the 17:24 mark in the interview.

Take Action

First, make sure you visit Elephants the next time you are in Portland.

If you can't make it to Portland anytime soon, check out the Elephants website. Notice how the tagline is clearly communicated. (You can also order gift boxes!)

Next, discuss these questions with your team to implement these concepts in your own organization:

• What is our brand promise?

• Do we communicate it clearly to our customers?

• Do we communicate it clearly to employees?

• How can we be sure our employees know the brand promise?

• What do we do to ensure our brand promise is kept?

This last one is just for fun.

Portlandia, a TV show that poked fun at many of Portland's eccentricities, had this wonderful sketch about the importance of food being truly local.

The one customer insight you absolutely must know

Sometimes, you just get lucky.

Years ago, I became the membership director for the San Diego chapter of the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD San Diego). It's a nonprofit professional association for corporate trainers.

Membership grew 67 percent over the course of my two year term.

It might surprise you to learn we didn't resort to any traditional tactics:

• Lower our prices

• Offer new member discounts

• Run a membership drive

What we did instead was leverage one specific insight to retain members and grow via word-of-mouth.

I discovered this insight by luck. Later, I discovered it’s applicable across a wide range of industries. It's now the cornerstone of my new book, The Guaranteed Customer Experience.

I'll share that insight in a moment. But first, let's look at why so many companies struggle to win and retain customers.

Why companies struggle to grow

In the simplest terms, companies grow by adding more customers than they lose. If you lose one customer, you need to add at least two new customers to post a net gain.

Lose too many customers, and growth becomes insanely difficult.

ASTD San Diego had lost 25 percent of its members over the past year when I became membership director. Even worse, the chapter was almost out of cash.

There was a palpable desperation amongst the leadership team.

Many of my colleagues wanted to offer a membership discount. Some argued we should offer a discount to new members while others felt we should offer a discount to existing members to entice them to renew.

I made a surprising counter-proposal: raise our dues.

It might seem strange to raise prices when you're losing members, but I had good data to back it up.

First, our dues were already lower than comparable professional associations. An additional discount would only cheapen the perceived value of a membership.

Second, we weren't losing members due to price.

I knew this because I had called every person who chose not to renew their membership in the past year. I also contacted everyone whose membership was expiring within the next 60 days.

My calls revealed exactly why so many members were leaving.

What you need to know about your customers

Business leaders have a lot of data, but they don't always know what to look for. There's one particular insight that can make all the difference.

What problem is your customer trying to solve?

This insight was popularized by Clayton Christensen. Customers don't purchase a product or service, Christensen argued. They hire a product or service to solve a problem.

For example, millions of people choose Amazon when they want a fast and convenient way to get nearly any product delivered.

Starbucks wins customers by making it easy to get a consistently good cup of coffee.

People join professional associations like ASTD San Diego because they want to grow in their careers. The chapter was losing members because it wasn't addressing that problem:

1. It lacked programs and other opportunities for career growth.

2. When interesting programs were promoted, they often failed to be as good as advertised.

A lack of value was the same reason the chapter struggled to recruit new members.

It didn’t matter what we charged members. Heck, we could make membership free! People wouldn’t join the chapter unless we promised to help them grow in their career.

This insight provided a clear path for our leadership team.

How to fuel customer-driven growth

Addressing the problem your customer is trying to solve is the key to growth. You win customers by promising to solve their problem. You retain them when you prove you can keep your promises.

I was fortunate that my fellow board members took the membership feedback seriously. The team committed to creating the strongest membership value proposition possible.

• A mentoring program for new trainers was expanded.

• The quality of monthly programs was improved.

• Events were offered in multiple places to make them easy for more members to attend.

• A one-day conference was created to expand learning opportunities.

• Multiple volunteer positions were created that helped people develop new skills.

Our mantra was to make the chapter's value proposition so strong that joining or renewing was a no-brainer.

Amazing things began happening. More members started renewing. Soon, the top two reasons our chapter lost members were:

1. They moved out of town.

2. They were no longer in the training industry.

People stopped leaving due to a lack of value.

The more members that stayed, the more new members we attracted via word-of-mouth. Coworkers, professional colleagues, and friends started recommending the chapter to people they knew. Companies enrolled their whole training departments.

Over the next two years, our membership grew 67 percent.

We didn’t offer a discount. In fact, we raised our rates. We didn’t run an advertising campaign to attract more members. Our happy members did the advertising for us.

We simply helped more members grow in their careers.

How to identify your customer’s problem

There are two big advantages to identifying the problem your customer is trying to solve.

1. You can attract new customers with a promise to solve that problem.

2. You can retain customers by consistently keeping your promise.

The first chapter of The Guaranteed Customer Experience describes how to identify the problem your customer is trying to solve.

I've made it available as a special preview.

Download it now to read about a chain of convenience stores that earns far more money than its rivals by leveraging an incredibly simple insight: people want clean restrooms.

The Guaranteed Customer Experience

Get Chapter 1

How to end the conflict between marketing and customer service

Some feuds are timeless.

You have the Capulets and Montagues. The Hatfields and McCoys. And of course, there's marketing and customer service.

What's their beef?

I talked to both departments to get their sides of the story. The answers revealed a fundamental problem that plagues many companies. Here’s what they had to say.

What does marketing want from customer service?

I met with marketing to hear their side of the story. (Yes, all of marketing. Just go with it.) They tell me what they'd like most of all from the customer service department is a little cooperation.

Q: You mention cooperation is an issue. Can you tell me more about that?

"Customer service is always pushing back on everything we do.

"Take the brand style guide as an example.

"We lovingly, painstakingly put our new brand style guide together. It details the correct way to use our logo, our preferred color palettes and fonts, and even the language we should use when communicating externally.

"And this thing cost a mint. We hired expensive consulting firms, expensive research firms, and expensive graphic artists. We even printed the guide on expensive paper so people knew it was important.

"So we give the new guide to customer service and their attitude was like, 'We're busy,' and then I'm pretty sure they just dumped it in a drawer."

Q: What makes you think that?

"Just look at those chat conversations! Is 'bored robot' really our brand voice?!

"Or why do so many customer service reps write their email signature in comic sans font? Show me exactly where in the guide you see comic sans font! You know what, you can't, because it's not there!

"And show me one call where a rep uses the new, on-brand phone greeting and actually sounds like they mean it. All we hear about from customer service is how much talk time the new greeting adds, as if talk time is so bad. 

"You never hear the sales team complaining about talk time, I'll tell you that."

Q: Where are some other places you'd like more cooperation from customer service?

"Social media would be a good start. The social media coordinators are getting tired of endlessly tweeting, 'We're so sorry to hear that. Please email your information to support and we'll be happy to help you.'

"I tried asking customer service to help serve customers via social media, and they went ballistic. Something about workforce management and not having the budget to hire more people and buy more software.

"Oh and can we talk about the website?"

Q: Okay, tell me about the website.

"Well, I don't mean to get back on the branding soap box, but the support side of the website is atrocious.

"We spent a lot of time and money on an awesome website. We hired a video production company to make all these witty explainer videos that everyone loves.

"Then we hired an SEO team to..."

Q: Wait, a what?

"SEO. Search. Engine. Optimization. It improves our reach from organic searches so we can redeploy our cost-per-click ad budget to social media. We’ve been having a lot of success with retargeting campaigns lately."

Q: Um. What exactly is... No, never mind. Please keep going.

"So anyway, the website. It's amazing on the front end and then you get to the support section, which is maintained by customer service, and the whole thing couldn't be more off-brand if it tried. None of the support articles use our officially approved phrases from the brand guide.

"There's not one witty explainer video, either. Not one! I gave customer service the contact info for the video company we hired and they just complained about budget. It's always budget with them.

“And don't even get me started on the support site’s SEO."

Q: Deal. I won't. Is there anything you think customer service is doing well?

"They do have a lot of data. I've never seen so much data. Now that I think of it, it would be nice if they shared some of that data.

"No, not the boring stuff about SLAs, AHT, FCR, or any of those other boring acronyms. I'm talking about the good stuff, like what are customers saying?

"I'm looking for quality and quantity here. Give me a riveting story that aligns with one of our personas, and then give me data to tell me how many customers in that particular demographic feel that way, too!

"Is that really so hard?

"It's not. We found a contact center expert, Nate Brown, who understands a whole lot about branding and he says it's not difficult."

[Editor's note: This is true. Nate Brown did share an easy way to collect this data.]

Q: Okay, do you have time for one more question?

"Sorry. I'm double booked for two meetings and I'm already late to both. Gotta run!"

What does customer service want from marketing?

I sat down with the customer service department after meeting with marketing. Yes, the entire department. Yes, for all companies. (Seriously, this post is much better if you just go with it.)

Anyway, here's what customer service had to say.

Q: Marketing says they want some more help from you. What do you want from marketing?

"Help?! They want help?! Okay, let's talk about help.

"How about giving us more than zero notice when they launch a new promotion? Marketing is always cooking up some new idea that spikes our contact volume.

"The first time we find out about it is when the contacts start coming in, when it's too late to adjust our staffing and our team gets slammed.

"What's even worse is our reps have zero information. Customers know more about the promotion than we do, so our reps feel like idiots."

A: C'mon, it can't be that bad.

"Oh really? How about that time when marketing promised customers this special, limited-edition Szechuan sauce as part of promotion for some random cartoon show. They were really patting themselves on the back about that one, only they forgot to make sure we had enough sauce to give out.

“Nobody got enough Szechuan sauce, and customers freaked. Did they yell at marketing? No. They yelled at us.”

[Editor's note: Yes, this video is real.]

A: Have you shared this with marketing?

"We've tried, but they won't listen. Just last week, we got a ton of complaints about a new product launch.

"So I email marketing and say, 'Hey, we're getting a ton of complaints.' And their response was basically, 'You're customer service, isn't that your job?'

"They were totally dismissive."

A: How many complaints did you get?

"I don't know. A lot, I can tell you that. Everyone was talking about it."

A: Wait, but you have a ton of data. Why don't you have more data on complaints?

"I'd love to help you, but tracking that sort of thing is complicated. We've asked for some new software that will help us do that, but our request got denied. Meanwhile, marketing hired some blogger to write a fluff piece about how marketing and customer service should get along.

"We could have used that money to buy the software we need to get marketing their precious data."

A: Ahem. Let's change the subject.

"Wait! Is it you? Is that why you're writing this article? Is that what this is about?!"

A: So anyway, what else would you like from marketing?

"Resources. Marketing gets all the resources.

"The next time marketing comes up with a new, expensive campaign, it would be nice if they told us about it ahead of time and then paid for some training and collateral so we actually knew what the campaign was all about before our customers. We don’t have the budget to make all those witty explainer videos that marketing loves.

"A little understanding would also be nice. They don't realize we're working on different timelines.

"Marketing is thinking in terms of campaigns and launch dates sometime in the future. Customer service is thinking in terms of how many customers are in queue who want our attention right now.

"We need more resources if we're going to stop what we're doing and do something proactive like train our reps to respond to a new campaign."

How can marketing and customer service work together?

You might be able to tell from these interviews that marketing and customer service have conflicting goals. Marketing is focused on generating new business. Customer service is focused on efficiency.

The real victim of this feud is customer experience. Marketing makes promises that can’t be kept. Customer service isn’t empowered to make things right. They blame each other out of frustration.

The secret to resolving the conflict is creating a shared goal.

Customer experience expert, Jeanne Bliss, describes a metric called “net customer value” that can be used to unite these departments in pursuit of customer-driven growth. It tracks the value of new customers, lost customers, and customers retained in one single number.

Go to the 1:24 mark in this interview to hear her description.

What happens when marketing and customer service get along?

Buc-ee’s is a chain of gas station convenience stores, predominantly located in Texas. It wins and retains customers by doing something so mind-blowingly simple that it’s amazing competitors haven’t caught on.

The restrooms at Buc-ee's are amazing. They have been rated by GasBuddy as the cleanest in America. Several locations have 20 or more stalls in both the women’s and men’s rooms along with dedicated employees whose job is to keep everything spotless.

If you’ve ever been on a road trip, you understand the importance of clean restrooms.

Buc-ee’s can do what other gas stations can’t because it’s marketing and store operations teams (i.e. customer service) work together. Marketing knows clean restrooms are a draw, and advertises them on highway billboards. Store operators know about this important promise and ensure that promise is kept.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg for Buc-ee’s. Some gas stations have over 100 fuel pumps. It has friendly, helpful employees and the largest selection of just about anything you can imagine a gas station convenience store selling.

I wrote about this incredible company in my new book, The Guaranteed Customer Experience. The book comes out in March, but you can download chapter one right now to read about the Buc-ee’s customer experience.

Learn More

Discover how Buc-ee’s uses customer experience to drive away the competition.

Get Chapter 1

The Department You Need to Check to Avoid Service Failures

In 2008, the shipping company DHL ran an ad campaign touting their outstanding customer service.

Each ad showed different service encounters where a DHL employee went above and beyond. The tagline was, "We're putting service back in the shipping business."

It wasn't true.

In November that year, DHL announced they were pulling out of the U.S. domestic shipping business. The company faced a myriad of problems, one of the biggest being their woeful customer service.

DHL's CEO, John Mullen, was quoted at the time as saying, "It's hard to see what could have been done that would have led to a different result."

But, there is something they should have done: audit their marketing and communications.

Why Conduct an Audit?

Your company's advertising is essentially a promise to customers. So, if you advertise something, you had better be able to deliver it. Customers naturally get disappointed when you promise them something and it doesn't happen.

Imagine a chain of furniture stores that promises same day delivery in their advertising. Fast delivery is the hook to get you in the door. But, what happens if there's a laundry list of exceptions to the same day promise?

A customer who expected same-day delivery when she ordered a couch won't be very happy to learn it will actually take two weeks.

It's scenarios like that that make it essential to conduct a regular marketing and communications audit. You'll avoid service failures if you spot (and fix) promises that aren't being kept.

How to Conduct Your Audit

Here's a three step process you can use to audit your marketing and communications.

Step 1: List all advertised promises. Check your advertising, brochures, and other collateral. Find out what your salespeople are pitching. Look at signage. Listen to your hold messages.

Step 2: Test each promise. Run a test on each promise to see if your company can actually deliver it. For instance, a bank is promoting their ATM machines as a faster and easier alternative than completing a teller-assisted transaction. You can test this promise by timing the same transaction via both channels.

Step 3: Make a list to fix. Identify broken promises that need to be fixed. Perhaps your advertising needs to be adjusted. Or, maybe your company needs to boost some capabilities to improve operations. The key is making sure what's promised is what gets delivered.

What to Audit

Here are a few specific things you should consider auditing.

Delivery

As I write this, I'm waiting to get my car back from the mechanic. I was told it would be two days, but I just called to check the status and learned it will now be three. 

Check on anything you deliver, whether it's a service, merchandise, or the time to complete a repair or service call.

That's why Netflix frequently sends it's DVD subscribers an email asking, "When did you mail this DVD?" or "When did you receive this DVD?" They're monitoring their delivery to make sure it stays within the promised range.

Response Time

Check out fast you respond to customers via various channels. 

For example, the new response time standard for email is one hour. If you can't respond in one hour, make sure you have an auto-responder set up to let customers know when you will respond. And then, time your responses to make sure you're fulfilling that promise.

KLM does this for their Twitter account, regularly posting their expected response time on their profile page.

Product Image

There's a great scene in the movie Falling Down where Michael Douglas's character, D-Fens, loses his mind because he's served a fast food hamburger that looks nothing like what's shown on the menu. 

Source: IMBD

It's an extreme example, but customers really don't appreciate it when the product doesn't match what's advertised.

Look at the product images you display on websites, brochures, menus, etc. and make sure they closely match what you're actually delivering. 

Resources

You can learn more about this and other techniques in a new training video, The Manager's Guide to Managing Customer Expectations on Lynda.com. 

Here's a short preview video.

You'll need a Lynda.com account to view the entire course, but I can hook you up with a 10-day trial.

PS. Check out this slightly different, but still excellent How-To article from Denise Lee Yohn on how to conduct a brand diagnostic to scale up your brand.

Why We Need Less Marketing And More Customer Experience

Like most pet owners, I go out of my way to care for my dog.

She's a ten-year-old mutt that I've had since she was a puppy. She's a big girl, weighing just under 80 pounds. This means I make regular visits to the pet store to buy a lot of food, treats, and poop bags. I can only imagine how much I've spent over her lifetime.

There's a pet store that's just five minutes away from my house. I don't go there anymore because it offered a consistently poor experience. 

It wasn't just the customer service that was poor. It was the entire experience. Annette Franz has this handy definition of customer experience on her blog:

(a) the sum of all the interactions that a customer has with a company over the course of the relationship lifecycle and (b) the customer's feelings, emotions, and perceptions of the brand over the course of those interactions.

Someone in marketing had a new bright idea every week. They'd change the layout so frequently that each visit felt like walking through a maze. They frequently got rid of popular products because they thought they could sell a similar product under their private label for a better margin.

Now, I drive to another pet store that's fifteen minutes from my home. I literally pass the old store on my way there. The new store had a much better experience.

At least it did until Tuesday.

I went in for three items. This store usually gives you the option to get your receipt via email. I like that. It's one less piece of paper to clutter my pocket before I eventually throw it away. 

Not Tuesday. On Tuesday, the only receipt option was paper:

This monstrous receipt was for three items. It's 58.5 inches long in case you're wondering - nearly five feet tall.

Someone in marketing is responsible for this. They took away the convenient email option and replaced it with a file-clogging wad of coupons and promotions. I'm not interested in any of them. 

This isn't a customer service problem. The friendly cashier made the best of the situation when the receipt started printing and just kept going and going. We joked about it. I think she was a little embarrassed. She apologized for the hassle.

I'm sure a marketer thought this was a great idea. You can just imagine one of those creative sessions. Someone suddenly gets a devilish look in their eye and said, "What if... nah. It's too outlandish."

Someone else chimed in and said, "C'mon, Craig. We're brainstorming here! There are no bad ideas! What are you thinking?"

So Craig screwed up the courage to spit it out. "What if we gave every customer a giant receipt full of coupons? It could be like five feet long. It would be so outrageous that customers would think they were getting punked!!"

Actually, Craig, there are bad ideas.

No customer experience professional would have gone for this. One look at the awkward interaction between customer and cashier while the receipt printer spewed out coupons like a broken skee ball machine and they would have realized it was a crummy idea.

Those coupons might earn the pet store a few extra bucks. The marketers will take credit for that. It might also cost them a few customers. Whose fault will that be?