Internal Branding to be Customer Focused

I have just spoken with Steve Farber who is a wonderful author - The Radical Edge: Stoke Your Business, Amp Your Life, and Change the World and The Radical Leap: A Personal Lesson in Extreme Leadership are really worth reading. I was talking to him about being obsessed with customers - and he said any company that isn't will ultimately fail. I tend to agree and would take this one step further.

Any company that is not obsessed with their employees, and their employees being customer centric will fail. Every thing you do whether it be a service, manufacture, retail, wholesale depends on your people believing in what they do...feeling the values of the brand and displaying them throughout their interaction with the customers. An example is Toyota - the manufacturing teams live quality and want their product to live up to the customer standards. They might not meet them but they want the customer to feel the quality.

If you are going to get this level of engagement - great 4 step guide here over a series of posts - then you must interact with your team, to the same values, to the same mission that you want them to do to your customers. For many support areas such as finance that can mean their internal customers. Remember services can be outsourced and you are interacting with a customer and fighting for the contract!