This article was inspired by my encounters with customers and other stakeholders who have had bad service experiences with organisations and businesses, and highlights the role of employees in promoting growth and brand building through service excellence.

In today’s competitive service sector, organisations are increasingly assessed not only by their product offerings but also by how they make people feel at all times, especially during service failures. In highly competitive sectors such as telecommunications, hospitality, fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), and banking, customers are no longer satisfied with transactional relationships.

They (customers) demand service excellence; thus, timely engagement, personalisation, empathy, fairness, and respect. These constructs have also been discussed and highlighted in scholarly literature, including theories such as distributive justice, procedural justice, and interactional justice.

Consumers have become very sophisticated, well-informed, and are easily able to switch more than before. These evolutions, therefore, call for a fundamental shift in how organisations, particularly employees, perceive and execute service.

Service excellence focuses on ensuring seamless, delightful experiences across organisations' customer touchpoints, and employees are central enablers of the service excellence delivery chain.

Other functions, such as marketing and customer care, focus on promoting organisations’ services, increasing visibility, shaping external perceptions through strategic PR and advertising, and providing training on understanding customer behaviours, emotional triggers, feedback patterns, and how to handle them, among others.

Employees and frontline staff, on the other hand, are the closest and primary touchpoints for clients' live experiences. They hear consumers' frustrations, needs, and expectations directly. These frustrations, needs, and expectations are expected to be professionally handled by employees at all times to ensure customer satisfaction and delight.

Failure to do so creates a service gap in which a brand promise often fails to align with the actual experience delivered through customer care. This situation leads to customer dissatisfaction and, at times, quietly robs an organisation of growth.

The modern service environment, therefore, expects employees of organisations to be highly conscious of the impact of negative service experience on brand performance and brand building.

Brand Building, to a large extent, is influenced by a company's employees' attitudes towards customers. If employees consciously handle customers with professionalism, humility, politeness, care, respect, diligence, and discipline, they (customers) are more likely to develop emotional connections and attachment with the company, be loyal, and even make referrals for the company. Therefore, to promote brand sustainable growth, employees must be a source of delight to customers and not a source of disappointment and distrust.    

Employees are enablers along the customers’ journey with a brand. If customers buy your product once, it means you have only made a sale. If they come back, it means you have built trust. If customers make referrals, it means you have built a brand. Therefore, employees must rethink and reposition to always place a premium on delighting customers and building customer relationships to promote repeat purchase, referrals, and sustainable growth of their brands or organisations, rather than chasing transactions or exhibiting behaviours that lead customers to switch.

Rethinking and repositioning mean more than restructuring; they require a mindset shift of employees, in particular. It involves treating customers and every customer interaction, whether it occurs through a customer hotline, a face-to-face service encounter, or other channels, as an extension of a brand’s promise. If employees develop this required level of consciousness and consistently apply it, customers will experience consistency, which will facilitate trust building, loyalty, and long-term brand sustainability.

In a world where customer loyalty is fragile and public feedback is instant, the success of service-oriented organisations will largely depend on who is most trusted by their clients. This trust is built not just by what organisations say, but by what their employees do and how well they handle customers.

It must be admitted that there are no perfect employees or systems anywhere, but through conscious efforts and self-commitment, employees can continually evolve or improve to serve well. Remember, customers are the lifeblood of your organisation and yourself; see a seed by delighting them (customers) at all times for the growth of your organisation and yourself. Be a service excellence champion! Be a brand ambassador for your organisation.

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Mohammed Ali, a Brand Advocate and Head of Marketing & Communications of Agricultural Development Bank PLC. He holds a degree in Political Science, an MBA in Marketing, an MA in Development Communication, is a Chartered Banker, and is a PhD Candidate