How Employees Drive Service Excellence and Brand Growth
In today’s competitive service sector, organisations are increasingly assessed not only by their product offerings but also by how they make people feel at all times, especially during service failures.
Customers demand service excellence; thus, timely engagement, personalisation, empathy, fairness, and respect. These constructs have also been discussed and highlighted in scholarly literature, including theories such as distributive justice, procedural justice, and interactional justice.
Consumers have become very sophisticated, well-informed, and are easily able to switch more than before. These evolutions, therefore, call for a fundamental shift in how organisations, particularly employees, perceive and execute service.
Service excellence focuses on ensuring seamless, delightful experiences across organisations’ customer touchpoints, and employees are central enablers of the service excellence delivery chain. Employees and frontline staff are the closest and primary touchpoints for clients’ live experiences.
Failure to deliver service excellence creates a service gap in which a brand promise often fails to align with the actual experience delivered through customer care. This situation leads to customer dissatisfaction and, at times, quietly robs an organisation of growth.
The modern service environment, therefore, expects employees of organisations to be highly conscious of the impact of negative service experience on brand performance and brand building. Brand Building, to a large extent, is influenced by a company’s employees’ attitudes towards customers.
If employees consciously handle customers with professionalism, humility, politeness, care, respect, diligence, and discipline, they are more likely to develop emotional connections and attachment with the company, be loyal, and even make referrals for the company.
Employees must rethink and reposition to always place a premium on delighting customers and building customer relationships to promote repeat purchase, referrals, and sustainable growth of their brands or organisations, rather than chasing transactions or exhibiting behaviours that lead customers to switch.
Rethinking and repositioning mean more than restructuring; they require a mindset shift of employees, in particular. It involves treating customers and every customer interaction as an extension of a brand’s promise.
If employees develop this required level of consciousness and consistently apply it, customers will experience consistency, which will facilitate trust building, loyalty, and long-term brand sustainability.
In a world where customer loyalty is fragile and public feedback is instant, the success of service-oriented organisations will largely depend on who is most trusted by their clients. This trust is built not just by what organisations say, but by what their employees do and how well they handle customers.
According to Mohammed Ali, a Brand Advocate and Head of Marketing & Communications of Agricultural Development Bank PLC, customers are the lifeblood of your organisation and yourself; seeing them as a seed to be delighted at all times for the growth of your organisation and yourself is crucial.
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