Your Happy Employees Are Your Best Brand Ambassadors (And Social Media Can Help)

Isman Tanuri — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 04:00:20 +0000

Brenda Neckvatal asked on LinkedIn Answers:

‘Can treating employees like customers increase job satisfaction?’

The Satisfied Employee

Here’s my initial response to Brenda’s question (with edits):

It is crucial that we treat employees as ‘internal customers‘. Making that differentiation can make a lot of difference to how they perceive their jobs/roles and contribution to the company. Job satisfaction will equate to retaining of talents and knowledge assets, which is something a lot of managers are grappling with (especially in a positive economy).

Peter Drucker said ‘management’s duty is to preserve the assets of the institution in its care’*. In that respect, all employees must be equally treated with the same care typically reserved for customers. In today’s information-producing workplaces, even more importance and care must be given to increasingly-mobile employees. Unlike the manual worker (who peddles his strength and energy), today’s information-driven employees retain their practice’s knowledge and developed skills and sought to bring them along to the next employer (and, in some cases, including knowledge of the ex-employer’s strategic and operational secrets).

Now watch what Tom Peters had to say about ‘treating your employees like customers’. Peters recounts a story about an American Airlines’ annual meeting in Dallas being picketed by the Airlines Pilot Union. On the same day and in the same city, the same pilot union took out two full pages of advertisement in USA Today to honour the contribution of retiring Southwest Airlines’ co-founder, Herb Kelleher. Why? Because of Southwest’s differentiated support and care for its pilots. In Herb’s own words, the secret of Southwest’s success is “You have to treat your employees like customers.”

The Employee Ambassador

Further, I continued in my reply to Brenda and the main focus of this post ‘Employees as Brand Ambassadors’:

I personally subscribe to the belief that employees are an organisation’s best brand ambassadors. A satisfied employee talks about their employers in a better light, they share more about the brand and, in time, improve customers’ and public’s perception of the organisation. Especially when social media-generated content are indexed more and more by search engines, any brand mention by an employee (good or bad) can make a lot of perceptual difference to a prospective customer or client.

Let’s explore more on why I believe employees are an organisation’s best brand ambassadors and how social media can help.

With social media (or more accurately, user-generated content channels, including blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) becoming the norm and pervasive in our daily lives, a satisfied and happy employee is more likely to be naturally-inclined in displaying their professional affiliation on their social media profiles. We see many examples of this on our friends’ Facebook profiles. I have personally encountered many tweets from my Twitter mates professing their admiration for their bosses and colleagues. A more publicly visible example would be Robert Scoble’s initial admiration for Rackspace and his subsequent employment with Rackspace, whom he consistently and positively write about on his personal blog.

The Happy Employee Ambassador Spreads the Word

The US$1billion American shoe company, Zappos, showed that encouraging and empowering its employees to be happy gave such a positive vibe that its customers return for more, one is even quoted as saying Zappos delivers ‘Happiness in A Box‘. And how about this? Zappos further helps its employees to spread its Happiness mission by building ‘Twitter.Zappos.Com‘. Not only it showcases all Twitter mentions (positive and negative) of Zappos, the portal also displays all tweets and twitpics by its employees for the world to see. Empowerment and trust at play. See it here: http://twitter.zappos.com/employee_tweets

Closer to home, look at how an ex-employee (Wei Yang) of The Garden Slug, a dining eatery in eastern Singapore, positively responded and left a public comment on The Garden Slug’s blog post to announce his next career change. Despite the severance of professional ties, the satisfactory and appreciated stint Wei Yang most likely experienced at The Garden Slug ultimately contributed to a positive PR outcome for the eatery in the form of public endorsement.

Here’s another real-life example. As a current employee of Hogg Robinson Group (HRG), my LinkedIn profile reflects my affiliation and I am happy to include a URL link to HRG Singapore’s Communique Digital Magazine on my profile (pictured below). Why? Because I am happy to be empowered with a major responsibility, which is to develop HRG’s communication initiatives and this is one of them.

And the result? Someone did clicked on the ‘Communique: HRG Singapore’ link on my LinkedIn profile and most certainly discovered more information on my employer (shown below)*.

A simple referral link on LinkedIn has positively provided exposure for my employer’s brand (and at minimal cost). Can you imagine the impact a unified and consistent LinkedIn approach by your happy employees will have on your organisation’s brand and stature? For B2B organisations, a devised branding strategy for LinkedIn may perhaps be a valuable, effective and worthwhile effort to undertake.

So back to the question, how then do you create job satisfaction AND progressively encourage employee ambassadorship?

That’s a big question that deserves its own post. In my opinion, a full dive-in is essential to fully understand what is required by leadership teams to engage ‘social media-empowered’ employees and how they can tap into these ready-pool of brand ambassadors. Despite its infamy as an exclusive arsenal of the irate customer, leaders must now view social media and its technologies as valuable tools to help an organisation meet its business or people objectives.

Part of my current thinking has been heavily influenced by Charlene Li’s ‘Open Leadership’ book (which I am currently reviewing, have a look here at what it all means). These are some of the keywords I will explore with you in the near future: ‘employee empowerment’, ‘organisational openness’, ‘collaborative work’.

In the meantime, can you think of any other examples of happy employees who have undoubtedly become brand ambassadors for their employers? Please share in the comments as I’d love to hear from you.

* Quote from ‘Management Challenges for the 21st Century’
* Disclosure: I am currently responsible for Communique: HRG Singapore hence the access to the web analytics.
All opinions stated in this blog are of my own and not of my employer.

Internet Vendor Mentor program: Zappos done it again

Isman Tanuri — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 00:41:55 +0000

My favourite shoe folks, Zappos, (disclosure: never bought anything from them, but maybe that should change soon) has launched a no-brainer.

They’ve called it the Internet Vendor Mentor program. Rolled out by the Customer Loyalty team, they had vendor folks from Birkenstock and Munro over in Zappos to sit in with the employees who are actually selling their products. What better way to know how your sales are are being managed than to sit right in, butt-to-butt, with your salesperson!

Two major benefits of doing this:

1. For vendors: Other than being able to meet Zappos up close and providing guidance, the sessions allowed them to listen in to customers’ experience of buying their products online. The kind of questions they ask, the type or make of products they like. Any concerns that might. Very meaningful insights by really listening to your customers.

2. Zappos get to show off Zappos and what they stand for. I am sure the vendors go away knowing that their shoe-buying customers are in good hands and very well taken care of.

Absolutely Amazing Bonus: Listen closely, at 0:55, the Zappos customer consultant is giving directions to a Clarks store to a caller on the line! That is ZERO revenue and accidental COST incurred for Zappos! Can anyone else claim to such ‘shenanigans’?

I am sure all of these ‘live’ Zappos customer service goodness are rubbing off on these vendors. I had earlier posted on Zappos’ culture, watch the video if you are still unconvinced that this is the best company to work for :)

Still unconvinced? Read actual CEO’s email to employees (on acquisition by Amazon), can’t get any more open and transparent than this.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7WSH9mBo3g]

Zappos and its Customers

Isman Tanuri — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 22:03:59 +0000

I love companies with an overtly human side. Zappos is one. Any business has its core 2 important elements: employees AND customers. Zappos has plenty of both. And very happy ones. I hope they stay this way now that they’ve grown up a little.

I’m beginning to see where I can go with this blog and where my convictions lie in the face of social media engulfing the world. Quite simply: Your audience and your customers.