People Power: How Brands Can Benefit from Putting Service Culture Front and Centre

As we navigate the world as customers, we’ve all had nightmare service experiences, with (likely underpaid and overworked) employees leaving us feeling dismissed or unvalued. 

Recently, airlines have been particular culprits. With travel this summer hit by a series of disruptions, people’s main gripe was not so much that these problems occurred, but that the airline staff failed to show any sympathy or go out of their way to be helpful in a crisis.

On the other hand, we can probably all think of moments where someone seemed to enjoy helping us as a customer—making a recommendation or engaging in a conversation beyond the transactional. In its early days, the Apple Store was famous for this, with highly trained employees taking the time to personally engage with customers, often resulting in additional sales.

We know that service is important to a brand - turns out it’s crucial. Over 75% of consumers say a bad service experience can damage their perception of a brand. But taking out hard factors like pay, what’s the difference between these two employees?  

Our recent partnership with a well-known luxury retailer highlighted the high degree of connectivity between an employee’s own experience as part of the company culture, and the ultimate service and customer experience they were being asked to provide.  

The demands of a luxury experience extend the basic values of customer service into a nuanced and delicate art. According to one luxury expert, customers in this category are seeking “stimulation not standardisation”. 

So how does a brand create a consistently personalized experience via their employees? 

This iconic retailer was looking to further codify the organization’s legendary “special sauce” - between its flagship retail space, the world class fashion and brands the store offers, and the luxury service level - and extend that magic into new spaces and experiences in-store and in digital channels.

While our conversations started around further defining brand narratives and CX principles, through our discoveries (including employee interviews and roundtables, luxury landscape benchmarking, and in-store immersion), we realized that understanding what was affecting the ‘back of house’ was going to be key to unlocking any ‘front of house’ experiences and delivering them with distinction and consistency. 

‘Back of house’ essentially means how employees were brought into the brand, how they collaborated across functions and departments, and how they connected to the service culture. That resulted in a new approach, designed to guide and inspire everyone who worked for the retailer, starting with new hire training and incorporating training materials around values, behaviors and signature moments.

Service culture, especially for service-centric brands, is the base layer of what is essentially a ‘service stack’. This incorporates three stages:

1. Describe the ideal 

The first step is to paint a shared picture of what your brand experience and service culture can look like on its best day. Through a service credo and a shared narrative, brands can inspire employees and help them feel connected to the shared goal. 

For example, in traditional Nike stores, employees are called “athletes”, encouraged to not only sport their favorite athletic wear but also embody the brand ethos of Just Do It in their everyday interactions with consumers. 

In the case of the retailer, we created a customer experience guide that served as a philosophy to rally around, making day-to-day work easier, more inspiring, more motivating, and ultimately more rewarding for associates and customers alike.  

2. Articulate individual and shared roles to play 

To inspire employees to deliver, ensure that they understand the value of their commitment to the service culture as an individual and incentivize their cooperation across functions. 

Cosmetics retailer Lush trains its employees to not only understand the product offerings but also to demonstrate its usage through hands-on application for its consumers, driving a personal experience. A service-driven culture requires careful orchestration - service principles and training can help keep the group in tune. 

Our retail client deployed the customer guide in training sessions with more than 1,000 employees, engaging staff and resulting in much improved interactions with customers. 

3. Provide pathways for engagement 

Service work can be exhausting. In physical retail environments it can mean demanding clients, long days on the floor, and constant multi-tasking. In a digital environment, you can lose the connectivity and magic of in-person interaction. So, create tools—like smart uses of customer data to personalize interactions, established service principles, and employee and customer-friendly policies - that make it easier to engage better with customers, whether in digital or physical interactions. 

Following a couple of high profile, unfortunate in-flight incidents, United re-examined employee policies to embed more of what their head of HR called “a culture of autonomy”—giving employees more agency to make the right call for passengers in the moment. Similar to the tack luxury brands take, the end goal is less about compliance and more about creating the conditions for employees to best deliver for customers. 

By following these steps, brands can maintain a distinct advantage through viewing their people as their biggest asset and main connection point to customers. 

And the results are clear: for our luxury client, in just six months of employing this new customer experience strategy the brand’s Net Promoter Score had increased by more than 20 percent. 

What is more, employees felt a distinct pride in the brand: as one senior director said, the new approach inspired them “to be better, learn and grow”.