branding your crm system. improved ui/ux leads to better employee engagement

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Branding Your CRM System ° In order to improve their overall performance externally, more and more corporations are looking at how their brand is translated and communicated internally to their employees. ° Building the social enterprise to improve business results involves changing business processes, encouraging collaboration and building/leveraging your brand to employees. ° Building the brand internally involves a series of steps, including ensuring employees are “surrounded” by the brand in everything they see, read and hear throughout each working day. ° Creating a branded UI/UX for employees, aligned with the branded UI/UX most companies deploy for customers/consumers, provides a platform for effective internal marketing. ° Employees with a strong connection to their employers’ brand are predisposed to provide better customer service and be a direct extension of brand values and culture. Key Takeaways: RADIANT 1 — BE BRILLIANT 1

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Page 1: Branding Your CRM System. Improved UI/UX leads to better employee engagement

Branding Your CRM System

° In order to improve their overall performance externally, more and more corporations are looking at how their brand is translated and communicated internally to their employees.

° Building the social enterprise to improve business results involves changing business processes, encouraging collaboration and building/leveraging your brand to employees.

° Building the brand internally involves a series of steps, including ensuring employees are “surrounded” by the brand in everything they see, read and hear throughout each working day.

° Creating a branded UI/UX for employees, aligned with the branded UI/UX most companies deploy for customers/consumers, provides a platform for effective internal marketing.

° Employees with a strong connection to their employers’ brand are predisposed to provide better customer service and be a direct extension of brand values and culture.

Key Takeaways:

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Companies Want Employees to Understand and Espouse their Brand Values, and Act as an Extension of the Brand.

As more companies look for the changes and tools that will help them compete in an

increasingly complex marketplace, we’re finding more are also looking internally at how

their employees can become more effective brand ambassadors. Why? It’s a great way

to help employees make a powerful emotional connection to the company’s products and

services. Without that connection, employees are merely hired hands to carry out the cor-

porate mission, rational actors without emotional attachment to the brand. They’ll focus

most likely on metrics meaningless to the customer (call time vs customer engagement).

In some circumstances, this leads employees to undermine the expectations set by execu-

tive management. If employees do not understand customers’ expectations of the brand

they will do disservice to the customer and the brand. In other circumstances, employees

who lack belief/understanding in the brand will lead to disengagement or, in extreme

cases, hostility toward the company. As Colin Mitchell wrote in a Harvard Business

Review article a few years ago, “We’ve found that when people care about and believe

in the brand, they’re motivated to work harder and their loyalty to the company increases.

Employees are unified and inspired by a common sense of purpose and identity.”

Companies as diverse as Coca Cola, Virgin, and open source technology provider Red

Hat understand that it takes more than one hall poster advocating corporate values and

culture to instill brand values in their staff. For success, companies must view every com-

munication with employees as an opportunity to embed brand values. For better brand

alignment, Virgin Media even re-writes the scripts in senior management communications

to be more conversational and less corporate1.

Companies want Advocates from Within, Not Just Customer Advocates.

Companies are waking up to the fact that employees are often underutilized as a resource

for marketing the brand to others. The use of customer advocate programs in marketing

is well established: most marketers are familiar with Fred Reicheld’s pioneering research

and his use of the Net Promoter Score (NPS), which quantifies how likely a customer is

to recommend a product, service, or company to someone else2. This measure has been

around for a number of years, used widely by the world’s top brands to determine the

effectiveness of brand engagement programs as well as identify both brand advocates

and detractors within a customer base for targeted activity. From a Salesforce.com

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perspective, the NPS compliments tools like Radian6: NPS identifies advocates and de-

tractors, Radian6 provides more particulars about what they’re actually saying about the

company or brand. Interestingly, research on NPS has shown a shift towards asking em-

ployees whether they’d be willing to refer their friends or acquaintances to the company3.

This shift from measuring and looking for customer advocates towards employees as

external advocates highlights a growing trend. Put simply, the best advocates for growing

your company could be investing 8-10 hours daily working on your premises.

Internal Branding is Growing in Importance to Senior Executives.

Measures of “employee brand equity”, and developing “internal brand communities”

attest to the growing interest in determining how developing a successful internal brand

translates into improved corporate metrics4. Developing an internal branding program, of

which their salesforce.com UI is one of the most visible tools that employees interact with

each day, can help with:

1. Improved customer service – employees who embrace the values of the brand

invariably project a better, more brand consistent image to customers.

2. Reductions in staff turnover – employees who are brand loyalists are less likely to

leave than “switchers” who perceive the company as nothing more than a monthly

paycheck.

3. Savings in recruitment – brand loyal employees can help companies cut recruitment

costs through referrals and using their personal networks to garner applicants for

available positions.

4. Motivation – the Fortune 100 is populated mainly by brands who not only service

their markets well, but also perceive their employees as key stakeholders for

communications and encouragement.

Leveraging the Social Enterprise to Build the Internal Brand.

To many, merely adding software or cloud access to the internal systems, and sprinkling

in some training is all it takes to build a social enterprise. There’s no doubt that the flex-

ibility of platforms such as Salesforce.com, and their various products targeting Customer

Service, Sales and Marketing offer one of the fastest, and easiest ways to make large

and small businesses more socially oriented, collaborative, and attentive to internal and

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external stakeholders. Yet we also recognize that where change is concerned it’s the

human element, not the technical aspects, which is often the difference between success

and failure. Getting employees to embrace changes to their daily processes and tasks is

critical to ensuring money invested in new platforms or applications delivers as outlined

in the specification documents. While we know that salesforce.com products and services

help companies give incredible tools and information to their employees (literally at their

fingertips), the potential to use these tools to advance the internal brand is huge. The

best way to encourage employees to advocate and promote your brand is to ensure it

surrounds them, and provides a method to continually explain and evolve what the brand

means. Branding the UI for their salesforce.com applications would be the central

component to achieve this goal.

What We Mean by a “Good Branded UI/UX.”

Let’s take a step back and ask more generally why customers value a good user interface

and user experience. Most people would agree that a good interface leads to a good

experience by providing users a way to get what they need, easily, intuitively, quickly. For

example, one of the reasons for the success of the iPod, iPad, and iPhone is the easy to

navigate, compelling yet simple approach to providing access to information or features.

Yet it’s not simply the interface, or the design, but the entire marketing ecosystem around

Apple products that truly distinguishes the brand and creates loyalists among its cus-

tomers. The “Jobsian” inspired look and advanced touch features, the elegantly simple

packaging and instructions, the hyper-cool advertising – it all adds up to a total positive

branded user experience, across both the technology and marketing. As Apple and many

other companies have learned, good branded UX always starts with trying to figure out

how we want people to feel about the brand. What emotions should it convey? What

does it mean to them? Then, the UI needs to do its job of saving time or money or effort.

Done well, it enhances their brand experience, and provides a pleasant surprise or even

amazement. It also provides an ongoing tool to educate employees about the brand.

Our view is that employees are no different to consumers when it comes to valuing a good

branded UX. Just as most brands would never dream of subjecting their customers to a

dull website or mobile application, so too should they avoid arming their most valuable

assets, their employees, with a dull interface that ignores user needs.

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It’s More than Slapping a Logo on the UI.When we look at developing a branded UI/UX, our first task is to get underneath the skin

of the brand: its meaning, values, and perceptions. Often, we work closely with the SFDC

technology partners to determine how functionality and marketing can align, to ensure we

not only “look” branded, but have the capability to reinforce brand messages on a regular

basis. Far more effective than a ”corporate culture poster”, the UI is a living, changing

centerpiece of a variety of processes managed or accessed by the employee, with the

power to truly build and reinforce a single vision of the brand.

Here’s the process we undertake to develop a branded UI/UX:

Stage One: Listen and Learn.

1. Get immersed in the brand and corporate context, quickly, through our RBI process.

Internal & External marketing examples

Corporate Culture, Vision,

Goals & Objectives

Brand tenants and guidelines

Rapid Brand Immersion (RBI)

2. Uncover the user context to ensure the solution builds on and enhances what is currently used to accomplish the task or process.

User Context

Review existingprocess/procedures

(incl. stakeholder IVs)Ideal State SFDC

Usage

Technology OpportunityAssessment

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What’s In It for Me?

As a salesforce.com salesperson or partner, you may be asking this question. The answer

is simple: more sales! By enhancing your presentations with an example of how a branded

UI or UX might look across a few common devices, you can start to talk in the language

of the brand you’re presenting to. By incorporating the importance of internal branding

and marketing of the brand to employees, you can gain support from executives who are

now regularly challenged to deal with this issue with something more than a poster near

the coffee machine or quarterly all-staff briefing. More importantly, the person you are

presenting to is someone who has not just “bought into” their brand – they own it – es-

pecially if they’re in marketing, sales, CS management or at the C-level. Show them their

brand in the right way, in an engaging and clever fashion, and you’ll have them on your

side from the start.

References1: http://www.brandchannel.com/brand_speak.asp?bs_id=221

2: Reichheld, Fred. The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth, 2006.

3: http://zanesafrit.typepad.com/zane_safrit/net_promoter_score/

4: Ceridwyn King, Debra Grace and Daniel C Funk “Employee brand equity: Scale development and validation” from Journal of Brand Management (2012) published 5 August 2011; and P. Raj Devasagayam, Cheryl L. Buff, Timothy W. Aurand, Kimberly M. Judson, (2010) “Building brand community membership within organizations: a viable internal branding alternative?” Journal of Product & Brand Management, Vol. 19 Issue 3.

Stage Two: Think and Act

Create the branded design platform, ready for technical development and deployment.

Branded Design Platform

Mood Boards Depicting Experience

Wireframes and Design Templates

User Interface Design(UID)

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