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Building Your Brand

What does your brand stand for?

Who are you to your potential client?

Other than your adverts, which you use to entice consumers to think about your services, “You” (your brand) are the person they speak to or deal with when thinking about using your services or while using your services.

Your brand is your staff.

Staff Training Is Vital

Because staff is so vital to an organization’s success, investment in training of staff should be at the forefront of your business’ strategy.

But who in your organization do you need to train?

The real truth is that training of all your staff throughout your entire company, from frontline staff to all staff throughout various departments to ensure productivity, is needed to enable them to perform to their maximum potential and handle tricky situations well.

A multitude of issues that can really hurt your brand comes from staff not being trained. But realistically you may not have budget to train all your staff all at once.

One place where lack of staff training really hurts your business and is often most visible is with frontline or call center environments.

Often businesses will focus on the tools used by such frontline staff but you should not forget that knowledge about their product and their role in the overall process are of utmost importance.

If a client asks how using your services or product will solve an unusual problem then do your staff know how to respond? Do they have enough knowledge about what you do and how your services work to give a somewhat realistic answer? Can they manage the clients’ expectations?

Well trained staff help keep clients happy and manage their expectations well. They provide your clients with the best possible experience and build your brand during every client engagement.

The Chaos Caused By Poor Staff Training

One trainer, with 39 years’ experience, who has been helping train staff in the debt counselling industry specifically for 10 years shared these observations about poorly trained staff.

    • In many practices there is inadequate basic product training
    • Some operations have no call script at all which would otherwise keep staff on track with correct and focused information
    • Untrained staff often get sidetracked and confused by questions
    • They are unable to handle or overcome objections from clients
    • There is a habit of employing “experienced” staff from other companies who unfortunately bring with them bad habits. With no additional training they then introduce those bad habits into your business.
    • Many staff lack real listening skills and are not able to pick up on subtle clues/info from clients and realize what the real issues for objections or hesitancy might be.
    • Many untrained staff members lack of empathy for clients and do not realize how this impacts on how they sound and how they act.
    • A poor or haughty attitude will only get bad results from potential clients.
    • Many staff suffer from poor concentration normally due to their work environment even ergonomics; or an uninterested attitude towards how they represent the brand or because of personal issues distracting them).
    • Many newer staff members lack life experience and so find it hard to sympathise and understand clients’ issues.
    • Others simply lack confidence because they have not received enough training or had any mentorship.

Staff Who Represent Your Brand Well

So, with such a wide range of things that can negatively impact on staff performance and how staff represent your brand what can you do to address such issues?

Here are some tips that can help you shift the dynamic within your organization:

    • Always provide a call script to help keep conversations on track;
    • Ensure your staff have in-depth knowledge of the product/service;
    • Teach your staff as much as possible about client issues they may encounter;
    • Do lots of Roleplay exercises till they develop muscle memory on how to deal with situations;
    • Do regular refreshers and provide ongoing training;
    • When bringing in staff from elsewhere do retraining to eliminate bad habits;
    • Use the right staff member to do the right staff task;
    • Apply ergonomics and create good working environments including for remote work;
    • If you receive information from the NCR, PDAs or credit providers about changes to processes then share these with staff whose administrative tasks will be effects.

One of the most perplexing rules that is sometimes given to a frontline/call center department staff member (probably to avoid conflict with the NCR):

“Do not explain the debt review process to the client – they can go on the website for that information”

Be The Best

If you can action even some of the above points you will see dramatic improvements in how consumers see your brand.

After all, your brand is not just your logo and website, it is more than you adverts and social media posts. It is the people who your clients deal with each day.