Q&A Jim Wardlaw: the value of "on-brand" behavior.

• Position: Marketing: News

Jim Wardlaw is an agency principal at Publicom Inc., a services marketing consultancy specializing in brand development and on-brand behavior for service companies throughout the Midwest. The firm is located in East Lansing, Mich.

Q: What does it mean to create a powerful customer experience?

A: A powerful customer experience doesn't begin when a customer walks through the door. If you've done your homework, the experience begins with a promise, a brand promise to be more exact, or the culmination of the external communications the bank and its management teams have used to promote the business.

Q: So, the brand is mare than just a logo and a name?

A: Dr. Janelle Barlow, co-author of "Branded Customer Service," says it this way:

"It's an emotional process of engagement between a bank and its customers. It's the promise that you deliver time and time again in an on-brand way. It shows up in your behavior. It's what you say is special about you, how you do it and how your customers like you."

A brand is the perception people have of your business, your services and your people. On-brand behavior shows up in the behavior of everybody linked to the brand.

Q: Does the brand promise differ from the customer service experience?

A: The brand promise generates a set of expectations that your customers bring with them into the bank. In this sense, the brand promise is linked to the "customer" service experience. The promise, almost as much as the services being delivered, contributes directly to your customers' satisfaction, and the resulting loyalty, to create a powerfully branded customer service experience. Imagine if Nordstrom didn't provide a "Nordstrom experience" or the Geek Squad didn't provide a geek. The relationship between what is promised and what is delivered is critical to the success of the brand. In fact, the failure to understand this relationship may create obstacles to service delivery, making higher satisfaction scores more difficult to achieve.

Q: Why is a branded customer-service experience so important?

A: In the mid-90s, a study conducted by Xerox and referenced in the landmark article, "Putting the Service-Profit Chain to Work," by James Leskett of the Harvard Business Review, clearly demonstrated this critical link between customer satisfaction and loyalty. Even more startling, the Xerox study demonstrated that "very satisfied" customers (scoring five on a five-point scale) were six times more likely to repurchase products...