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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