Six ways to build your brand from the Harvard Business Review While customer service is sometimes left out of the brand building process, this is a mistake. Making sure that your customer service and brand are aligned helps attract customers and strengthens your brand loyalty. The Harvard Business Review offers six ways that you can ensure your customer service is aligned with your brand: Establish a customer service strategic intent, aligned with your brand: Incorporate your brand intent into your customer service, including your website, contact center, stores and branches. Design brand-aligned processes: Given that contact centers involve many customer service functions, be sure to prioritize human-assisted customer service over self-service in your center. Provide brand-aligned human-assisted service: Human-assisted service will continue to be important, as many customer service requests require human interaction. Experienced brand-aligned call center agents can train other representatives in customer service management systems and through offering guidance. Provide brand-aligned self-service: Guided-help knowledge base systems and online chatbots can also be used to promote brand-aligned customer service. Successful campaigns, including that of a well known financial company in Japan, used a chatbot modeled after a Japanese actor, who served as the company’s multimedia advertising spokesperson. Use brand-aligned metrics: Brand strategy and customer service metrics need to be aligned, depending on the company and its goals. For example, trying to fit Wal-Mart’s metrics to Nordstrom’s brand intent would not work. Brand-align all of your touchpoints: It is also important to align brand intent across different communication channels, for example, interaction, data, knowledge silos and contact centers. Aligning your customer service and brand intent can help your company. To improve your company’s customer service solutions and customer retention, consider working with a onshore customer service contact center that embraces the At-Home Agent business model.