Ensuring every employee instinctively activates your corporate story in the customer experience is not an easy task. This is evidenced by the fact that, according to Gallup Research, 90 percent of frontline employees say they don’t understand their company’s brand promise or what makes their company different from the competition.
To ensure employees fully understand and embrace your story, marketing and brand leaders must infuse the corporate story and strategy into the company’s culture. Line of business leaders must also be held accountable for driving mindset, behavior and cultural change throughout the employee population, especially when it comes to delivering a consistent story throughout the customer experience.
Harvard Business Review explained the importance of delivering a consistent story to employees in, “Selling the Brand Inside.” The article stated …
“Employees need to hear the same messages that you send out to the marketplace. At most companies, however, internal and external communications are often mismatched. This can be very confusing, and it threatens employees’ perceptions of the company’s integrity: They are told one thing by management but observe that a different message is being sent to the public.”
To illustrate the importance of sharing a consistent corporate story inside and out, we’d like to share this experience of a major financial services institution. Leaders in the firm told customers that it was shifting from being a financial retailer (away from transactions) to being a financial adviser (building intimate customer relationships). However, a year later, research showed the customer experience had not changed. Leaders across the company did not effectively communicate the change / story internally, so employees continued doing what they had always done: churning out customer transactions. The employee story never changed, so the customer experience never changed.
The fact is, this is happening in companies everywhere. Right here. Right now.
Executives are making critical shifts in the business strategy — but those changes are not reflected in internal communication or the story that is being shared in the customer experience. As a result, those changes are not gaining traction or delivering results.
Don’t make this mistake. Invest in your story. Pull that story through your organization. Bring that story to life consistently in the customer experience. Then, and only then, will you achieve the results that you desire and deliver the measurable outcomes your business demands.
That’s Your OnMessage Minute.
