What promise do you make to your customers? It’s a simple question, and one that is very important when creating a compelling brand for your small business.

To be effective, your brand must make a promise. When it does, it is more memorable and captures a place in the mind of your customer — and that’s a good place to be. For many businesses, the challenge isn’t coming up with the brand promise. That’s the easy part. The challenge is to make sure you live up to it and deliver on it every time.

Here, we provide you with some insights to make this easier for you and your business.

Refine your systems

Often the heart of delivering on a promise is to ensure your business has good processes and systems. For example, a plumbing business that provides a guaranteed turn-up time needs to ensure they have the systems in order to ensure their plumbers do in fact deliver on this promise.

These systems could include good communication as well as service processes to ensure jobs don’t run overtime.

Educate your staff

To deliver on a promise, your staff must know that it exists. That means you must educate them. This can be done through formal training or via your regular staff communication. Education in this instance is often no different to advertising: you need to keep repeating the message until it sinks in.

Give staff incentives

If educating isn’t enough, giving staff incentives around your brand promise is a great way to ensure they focus on what is important to your business. Good examples include linking pay rises to services standards or providing one-off rewards for staff that go over and above to deliver on your brand promise.

Ensure delivery at all customer touch points

Customer touch points are any areas where your business interacts with customers. For most businesses, your touch points will be through a salesperson or an online transaction.

But there are also many other touch points to consider; for example, accounts and product service departments. Many businesses don’t consider these other touch points closely enough and businesses are often let down by the experience the customer has with these departments. To keep its brand promise, a business must deliver on it at every touch point.

Ultimately, a brand promise is what a customer can expect from you every time they do business with you. If you promise next-day delivery, make sure it happens.  If you promise your staff will be on time, make sure it happens. When customers see you fulfilling your promise every time, you will build a strong brand.