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Traditionally, branding was the responsibility of the marketing department – advertising, offers, promotions – these were what defined brand in the eyes of the consumer. Now the entire customer experience represents the brand as branding does not stop with the purchase of a product or service. Post-sales brand management is every bit as important as the sales and marketing activities.

Implementing evidence-based service requires an agile customer service platform that can support controlled experimentation, monitor the effects in real time and facilitate immediate response to improve the experience.

What is needed is an ability to align the customer  service experience with brand in a way that is appropriate for customers, yet enables the company to effectively manage costs, compliance, and other key performance indicators (KPIs). This requires the ability to measure the effect of each service interaction on brand perception and the rest of a balanced scorecard.

With the advent of evidence-based methodologies, Customer service has changed now with the advent of evidence based methodology. It helps them measure the effect of changes to the service experience on their brand. Evidence-based service is a practice that can be used to align all customer touch points with brand promise.

Importance of Customer Service
Post sales customer service is critical to the bottom line of most companies. According for Forrester research, what companies need to do now is to “consistently deliver on brand promise that resonates with customers at all customer touch points”.

It is important that post purchase experience matches company brand. This is important for companies as they can compete in today’s high level of competitive business environment and reduce costs for increasing revenue. This entails:

1. Delivering repeatable, dependable, and consistent brand promise across touch point.
2. Understanding the essence of brand and aligning service experience with your brand.

As Forrester’s Bruce Temkin points out, “customer experience is not about delivering Disney-esque moments or trying to make people happy at all costs. Good customer experience management is about consistently delivering on brand promises that resonate with customers. So you can’t rate a firm’s customer experience management efforts without fully understanding its brand strategy.”

Aligning Customer Service to Brand
The key steps to align service your brand include the following:
1. Measure the impact of your brand via customer surveys, analysis of market awareness, and Net Promoter Score.
2. Measure your service offering against your brand.
3. Tie outcomes and any changes to your service experience to outcomes.

Traditionally, service organizations do not have flexible solutions that allow them to quickly roll out service offerings, baseline them against their brand promise and other KPIs, and systematically optimize the offering. Fortunately, there are established practices from other industries that can be applied to achieving this goal.
Applying evidence-based practices to customer service solutions requires a technology solution that offers several key capabilities including the ability to:

1. Easily model and deploy service processes across all of the people and technology involved in the process.
2. Apply evidence-based techniques by changing discrete elements in a process to measure the impact on a balanced scorecard of KPIs.
3. Deploy these processes in a randomized manner.
4. Monitor and measure a process and changes made to it in real-time, so that impact is immediately understood and can be instantly modified to achieve improved business outcomes.

Thus when customer service consulting and their brand promise are in alignment, you can deliver a customer service solution that will echo with your customers, helping increase satisfaction and loyalty,