Extending the brand to include the call center. (ABA Resources).

All you have to do is walk casually through your local superstore to see that marketers and advertisers have been building successful brands for the better part of the last century. What has been less evident, until recent years, is the integration of the brand across multiple delivery channels, customer touch points and company communications. This pervasiveness has forced brand management out of the exclusive realm of marketing departments and into the world of sales, customer service and--yes--the call center.

It wasn't in the too distant past that bank call centers were simply extensions of bookkeeping departments, established to off-load calls from the branch. In those days, when branding the call center was mentioned, it was intended to allay branch fears that the "telephone staff" could not handle the branch's valued customers. Branding the call center is not a strategy unto itself anymore. Today it has become a critical step in leveraging the bank's image across key customer touch points.

The extension of the brand to the call center can become a powerful market differentiator and revenue generator for financial institutions. Delivering a branded customer experience at every touch point is one of the topics of the ABA Contact Center Conference April 30-May 2 at the Hotel Inter-Continental, Chicago. (For registration information, go to www.aba.com or telephone (800) BANKERS.)

In research by McKinsey Marketing Practice, companies with strong brands consistently earn two to five percentage points higher total return to shareholders than their industry counterparts. Couple that with ABA'S 2002 contact center research which found 65 percent of bank call centers reporting a desire to migrate their contact center into a profit center, and it's easy to see why leveraging the brand in the call center is a mission-critical imperative.

How to dolt

To create real brand value, call centers must embrace and embody the bank's brand on every customer call. simplistically, if the bank's brand is "Service with a smile," then agents must be sure that their smile is "heard" on the phone. There are a variety of ways to make this happen; but, if bank call centers embrace the following simple concepts, they'll be one step closer to an integrated brand--and maybe even greater profitability.

* Infuse the branding strategy in new-hire training: Call centers typically provide several weeks of new-hire training, the curriculum of which is typically focused on systems, policies, procedures, disclosures, simple etiquette and the basics of service or sales training. Often agent new-hire training does not include a company orientation where they learn the bank's approach to doing business and the corporate branding strategy. Including this component sets the stage for the importance of embracing the brand in all customer interactions.

* Ensure call center agents are kept "in the loop" on communications about the company and the brand. Too often corporate communications are kept in senior management circles and never reach the call center floor. Why? Reportedly agents are too busy to absorb all the information circulating about topics that don't relate directly to their calls. This practice makes it difficult for agents to understand enough about the corporate brand to be able to apply it during interactions with customers.

* Weave the branding strategy into the call center's performance system. The performance system in contact centers is very complex. Its components include everything from recruiting and selection, training and coaching, incentives, compensation, monitoring, recognition, measuring and celebrating successes. When you stop to think about it, how many times is the branding message built into all the aspects of an agent's performance? As the saying goes, you have to inspect what you expect, and if embracing the branding strategy is not a part of the agent's performance program, it's only going to be communicated during customer calls on a random basis, at best.

It could be argued that building the brand is much more complex than noted here. However extending the brand to the call center can begin relatively simply by following a few key steps. As the sophistication grows, and the branding strategy plateaus, it makes sense to bring in the end-to-end branding experts to ensure that all of your systems, technology and reporting tools show the vital link between the brand and the bottom line. Until then, remember that your call volumes are growing, and on every call you have the power to either anchor your brand identity or your competition's. It's all up to you.

Rhonda C. Proctor is the editor of Contact Professional magazine and owner of The Proctor Consortium, a firm dedicated to helping companies achieve growth through improved performance and communications.