7 Signs You Need to Check Your Brand Promise
You remember the Southwest Airlines incident a couple months back when the fuselage of the plane opened up? If you fly a lot, you probably remember it well.
Southwest Airlines is long-storied for its ability to deliver a consistent brand promise of transparency, flexibility and fun travel. For the most part, they do pretty well at satisfying that promise which makes for a chipper ride.
The measure of a brand’s strength often shows during times of crisis. A company’s ability to put the policies, FAQs and exception handling in place in the face adversity can illuminate the true alignment of its brand promise throughout the organization.
A Small Brand Hiccup
I was scheduled to fly to San Fransisco a few days after the incident–a little Napa trip for the wife’s birthday. The FAA was still figuring out what happened and how wide-spread the issue was. I called Southwest to find out about cancelling the flight with a refund. Sure, it was a non-refundable ticket, but I fly them a lot and figured they had put some exceptions in place for this crisis.
Unfortunately, the conversation went something like this [paraphrasing]:
Rep: We had a program in place to refund those tickets, but it ended when the inspections were complete.
Me: Uh, I haven’t seen anything in the news about them being completed.
Rep: They are completed and the program is no long valid.
Kudos to Southwest for having an exception program, but do you mind telling people about it? Yes, there is a risk of asking people for a refund, but there’s also the risk of some sour folks.
It was clear to me that Southwest had an alignment problem. Their handling of the crisis–at least at the customer service level–didn’t match their brand promise. They had an alignment problem.
7 Signs You Need to Check Your Brand Alignment
I use this experience as an example (still love ya, SWA) because I think it illustrates a good point. If you see these symptoms, you may want to double check how your brand promise is delivered to your customers.
- Service reps lack the tone and demeanor typical of the brand.
- Customer-facing staff over-compensates for a negative and gives the impression of a fake positive.
- An unusual number of holds and escalations.
- Silence or lots of “supervisor” checking.
- A information gap exists between what customers should know but don’t.
- Your customer service and sales teams aren’t as excited to get to work as they were previously.
- Customers don’t have that simple glow they used to.
The symptoms can be subtle, but the impact surely will not. What symptoms make you realign your brand promise? Share your comments below.
Photo credit: Shazari