Hey Volvo, Customer Service the heartbeat of Reputation
Few public relations firms – even those that deal in reputation management – lead with the issue of sales.
But if reputational risk is anything that has the potential to damage existing customer relationships and the ability to build new relationships; if it causes a loss of current orders and future sales, then reputation management could be represented as being front and centre about sales.
It doesn’t matter whether your company is in manufacturing, mining, agriculture, high-tech products and services, biotechnology or professional services you have something to sell. Without sales, you’re out of business.
It doesn’t matter whether you work in sales, on the front desk, finance, distribution, or research whether you are the salesperson, the CEO or the CFO, you cannot separate your role from the sales process.
What will give you more sales than any new advertising campaign? Do better than a whole new sales team? Ensure longevity and sustainability of the business?
A good reputation. And what drives reputation?
Customer service. It is the heartbeat of your reputation management strategy and the key factor that will deliver ongoing sales. Or not.
Every sale means a customer, and every customer represents future sales of one hundred times the original due to their own continued purchases and referrals. With every sale, the importance of customer service increases. With every sale, reputational risk increases. Customer service is central to a company’s reputation.
Clearly, where companies have forgotten this, they eventually lose sales, lose clients, lose market share. And the losses can be directly attributed to the company’s reputation.
If you aren’t focused on customer service, if you aren’t making this the most important function of your business, you are losing customers. Whether you know it or not.
Reputation management is not about public relations or column inches in newspapers. Reputation is created at and affected by every touch point of the organisation; it is about business processes, ethics, corporate social responsibility, corporate culture, public image risk, and leadership. It is about how you treat people inside the company, outside the company, and through the sales process. And most importantly, after the sale has been achieved.
Customer service, corporate culture, employee behaviour, and operational policies and procedures are your key areas of potential reputational losses. While they are not the only areas, they can make your business, or break it. Regardless of how good the salespeople or the product, if they are not supported with the rest of the business singing to the same song sheet, your business is dying, one customer loss at a time.
Whether you make sales through tenders, through formal presentations, face-to-face, in writing or over the Internet; whether indirectly or directly; everything you do, every process along the way defines your reputation in the eyes of your customers.
Because so much of what companies do either side of the sale influences the buyer – the entire customer experience of your organisation – intentioned or not – forms the foundation of your reputation (on which others aspects of reputation can be built).
What do your clients and potential clients think of your organisation?
Why do they, or don’t they, do business with you?
The quality of contact and messages conveyed before, throughout and beyond the buying process are critical. What messages are you sending? Are you delivering them consistently?
Most companies don’t know why they get the sales they do, don’t know what sales they have missed or why, and don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the sales that could be. They are catching business by default, rather than putting together a game plan for increased sales that includes a reputation strategy.
Doing so requires that you identify what you stand for – examine the substance behind the slogan (values, vision, mission, passion, people, processes), the image desired and communication strategies necessary, implementation across the company (not just in sales or PR), and the follow through to ensure you are walking the talk.
And most importantly, walk it before you talk it. An inconsistency between advertising and reality will do more damage to a company’s reputation faster than any other issue because it will be seen as false and misleading.
Need an example of what not to do? Volvo.
For a company that leads its sales campaign with safety, one would expect a swift replacement of a faulty product to be an essential response. It clearly isn’t. Despite statutory warranties (in Australia) requiring this be done, the company fights its legal obligation, knowing the only recourse a customer has is to sue it. Such adversarial tactics against its own customers doom it to failure when its brand already struggles against the perception of finer European automotive alternatives.
I rue the day I was conned by Volvo’s advertising – believing that its engineering and safety components were superior. They might have been before Ford bought Volvo, but I don’t see evidence of that today, and I’m a bloody Volvo driver.
From my unfortunate personal experience, I have found the company to be contemptuous in its dealing with customers who have a problem-laden vehicle. I am not alone. You just have to stroll through the online forums to read what people have to say about the newer Volvo models and the problems they are having, the list of recalls of Volvo vehicles in the United States, and the customer complaints throughout the UK. It’s all online to see.
Perhaps it is why the automotive group’s reputation ranking for customer service is only 39 out of 100 (Volvo is owned by Ford).
See http://www.vanno.com for more.
Worldwide, it appears to be a brand in conflict with its customers, apparently doing a good job at undermining its own reputation. I have a whole chapter in my book dedicated to the issue of response. Clearly no one at Volvo has read it. Perhaps I should send them a copy?
You can read it here: http://www.reputationreport.com.au/2009/06/response-matters/
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Category: Reputation Management, Sin & Spin
[...] me to have a fascinating discussion with Alex Harris who recently posted an article entitled “Hey Volvo, Customer Service the heartbeat of Reputation” on her blog The Reputation Report. I like Alex, she tells it how it is. Here is a brief [...]