Living the brand is the duty of everyone in your company. Instilling this to people you directly work with could be easy, but for your outsourced inbound customer service representatives, living the brand may take greater effort.
Your outsourced staff represents your brand, but they are still technically part of and managed by a different organization—a third party company with its own brand image to maintain and live. These customer service representatives must act upon the policies implemented by the company and carry out its message to its clients. Even so, all support agents must present themselves according to the image you want your brand to represent.
However, embodying the ideology of your company could lead to priority conflicts if your subcontracted employees must represent it along with your outsourcing service provider’s dissimilar beliefs and image. Then how can your inbound customer service team deliver your brand message without breaking the image that your outsourcing partner projects?
Goal alignment
There won’t be two contradicting messages to carry out if you and the vendor uphold the same business principles. As living the brand means incorporating your organization’s visions into your every action, you must find a service provider whose actions show the exact principles you believe in.
The negotiation process preceding the contract signing is one way of knowing if your goals are aligned with your intended outsourcing firm. At this stage, every transaction you have with the vendor will reflect how its representatives will treat your callers or website visitors. So if you brand your product as “fast and reliable,” then expect your customers to get fast and reliable solutions from a firm that gave you the same quality of transactions during the negotiation process.
Active participation
Your inbound customer service agents’ adherence to your brand’s image doesn’t exclusively rely on the firm that manages them. You should be hands on in training the team to ensure that each member understands and genuinely incorporates your values into every interaction with your customers.
Therefore, how your outsourced employees live your brand depends on how you instill your brand’s message in them.