Best Practice ABC’s for Customer Service Branding

One of the biggest areas for a building successful #brandPT generation is utilizing our compassion, our empathy, our sincerity, and the quality time we spend with our consumers as key brand identifiers. Being that we are technically part of a service industry, it is keenly important to develop best practices for customer service and customer experience. So very often, it is the service experience that develops the brand equity and market value necessary for closing the brand perception gap – the difference between what a firm identifies themselves to be versus what the market imagines that firm to be.

So! Without further ado, please enjoy this short post on my personal approach to Best Practice ABC’s for Customer Service!

Best Practice ABC’s for Customer Service Branding

A: Always Bring Your A-Game

B: Be Your Customer’s Best Advocate

C: Create Signature Moments

A: Always Bring Your A-Game

Nothing is worse for a customer experience than when service is delivered with a half-baked-attitude. EVERYONE knows the difference between service delivered because a person “wants to be there” versus service from someone “who has to be there.” Being pumped up and bringing your A-Game on a daily basis is a great way of building a consistent image to the consumer; doing this will serve to key consumers into the fact that the physical therapist is always ready to serve consumers to the best of abilities. Still not convinced? Make a quick reflection on perhaps the best service company in the world, Disney – and check out this old blog post “Lessons From a Disney New Year

B: Be Your Customer’s Best Advocate

Being your customer’s best advocate means you find ways, make ways, break ways, and build ways of satisfying the customers wants, needs, requests, demands, and expectations to the very best of your A-Game ability. 99% of the time, consumers are reasonable people with reasonable expectations for a service experience they are about to receive. Most people do not go charging into a service experience situation expecting to be treated like royalty – however, there will always be some…! In any case, fighting for the customer is one of the best ways of demonstrating an experience which advocates the sense of consumer “rights/entitlement/expectation/satisfaction.” Note, however, it is the attitude of that matters most. Many times, frontline service staff do not have the ability to make things work so perfectly for the consumer. However, consumers will most definitely appreciate the demonstrated attitude and effort of staff fighting along side of them.

C: Create Signature Moments

Perhaps the most critical facet of building a brand perception which aligns the identity and the image of any firm is the creation of signature moments. For those of you who have been following me for a while, you know that I’m a complete theme park junkie and a particular fan of Disney. Disney creates signature moments for their younger patrons through the incredible moments when character cast members interact with them. This is the moment when a life time customer is grown – the moment when “I met Mickey Mouse!!!!!”

For the physical therapist, our signature moments can be the those times when a patient feels like someone finally “gets them” after years of pain. It can be the moment when one of our customer’s family members watches them learn how to walk again after weeks of being in intensive care (you KNOW this will be a topic of discussion for months). It can be the time when you “make it happen” for them regarding equipment needs, fighting for authorization for continued care, or taking them on privately as a retained concierge service, etc. Honestly, it can be ANY moment which identifies and distinguishes the physical therapists as compared to any other health practitioner and wellness service… any moment which demonstrates how much we care.

Just keep in mind that the key to signature moments is to connect a person with their emotional core regarding the service experience by clustering the most commonly desired service moments.

 

As you an see, these ABC’s are intimately linked. One needs to have an A-Game attitude in order to deliver service which communicates to the consumer that you are the Best Advocate. And, it is only by being someone’s Best Advocate for which you can create Create Signature Moments – moments which identify an image, a striking image which strengthens the brand of *you*.