So you’ve determined your brand identity. And you’ve gone to great lengths to create a brand statement that genuinely conveys what your organization is all about. Now comes the really tough part—making sure your brand is reflected in every customer touch point.

Every contact a customer has with your organization represents a valuable touch point that can either reinforce or degrade your brand. Such interactions may be proactive, like a visit from a salesperson, or passive, like your receptionist’s greeting. Whether obvious or indirect, touch points strongly affect a customer’s relationship life cycle with your organization. And one wrong or indifferent move can blow relationships and their resulting revenue.

Moments of truth

Touch points represent an opportunity to fulfill your brand promise and foster the overall brand experience. True branding requires a well-planned integration of every touch point your customer has with your organization. Whether a customer is just considering a purchase, responding to a promotion, participating in a sale, opening an invoice, or simply calling your company with a question, every touch point is an opportunity to cultivate customer loyalty through brand reinforcement.

Most organizations, however, fail to integrate their brand in their many customer touch points, and thus, do not capitalize on their brand assets. Branding needs to be as much a part of invoicing, follow-up sales, customer service, and every other touch point, as it is a part of advertising.

Think about all the different ways your organization interacts with, and makes an impression on your customers. Then ask yourself, are you confident that every interaction reflects your brand identity? Are you missing opportunities to communicate your brand to customers? How is your brand being managed through the following customer touch points?

• Promotions. This is typically your customers’ first encounter with your brand. Promotional messages must be congruent with your organization’s brand identity and should sincerely reflect what you stand for. Otherwise, customers may view your promotions as disingenuous and misleading. They will come to believe that your products or services cannot be trusted.
  
• Sales. Usually, a sales person is the first human interaction customers have with your brand. It’s important that your sales people characterize your brand in every respect. If your brand represents great customer service, then your sales staff ought to demonstrate great listening skills. If the brand is all about low-cost, sales staff must be fast and efficient. Are you training your sales team to reflect and protect your brand?
  
• Support services. Only after they’ve been drawn in by the advertising, and convinced by the salesperson do customers build or lose trust with your company. Therefore, after-the-sale support is crucial and speaks volumes about your honest brand commitment. Every follow-up touch point is part of ongoing relationship-building. Brand every support touch point and you bolster those relationships for life.

Keep in mind that a bad experience in any one touch point can affect all the brand equity you’ve built in other touch points. Every touch point must be carefully considered, brand-planned, and executed. By proactively mapping all potential customer interactions, you’ll have the basis for stronger brand-building.

Brand champions at every level

Senior management’s commitment to branding through touch points is essential, but it must also permeate throughout the entire organization. As such, everyone in your organization must become a brand champion.

To do so, managers need to ensure that employees understand how their respective jobs can affect the brand. Additionally, they must motivate employees to be ambassadors for the brand at all times. The essence of the overall brand message must become an intrinsic part of every product or service, every communication, and every employee behavior.

In many cases, employees are not properly educated about brand or its importance. As a result, they don’t internalize brand values in their day-to-day dealings with customers. In fact, few employees in operations, call centers, sales, or any front-line position have marketing backgrounds. Yet they typically have the most contact with the customer and the greatest opportunity to be brand ambassadors.

Virtually all operational positions produce some kind of customer touch point and they all need brand buy-in—that is, the connection between how they do their jobs, what they do in their jobs, and how those efforts support brand-building.  

Everything Counts

When it comes to sustaining your brand, no touch point is unimportant. Inconsistency or contradiction—even in a seemingly insignificant effort like how invoices are distributed—can destroy brand value. The benefits of assessing and managing every touch point through branding will be essential to, and evident in, customer loyalty.