Excerpted from StrateScapes - Volume 6, Number 1

When a choir sings, you don’t think about individual voices doing their own thing. You hear a single unit, producing a single message with one unified voice. That’s exactly how your customers should see your company: as a single entity sending a clear message and presenting one consistent image through every single contact. Yet too often, what customers get instead is a discordant mess — like a choir where the sopranos, altos and tenors are each singing different songs. When that happens at your company, your brand image fractures, your marketing message loses credibility, your CRM initiative falters — and your audience heads for the exit.

To bring back harmony, and make sure your company is cohesively delivering on its promises, you need to make sure that every person in your organization — from the mail clerk to the top executive — is singing the same song. Conducting an Areas of Impact (AOI) study is a great first step.

Unify Your Image

In a nutshell, an AOI study helps you identify and assess every single customer touchpoint in your organization, no matter how minor. By doing so, it allows you to determine whether your company is projecting a single image, brand, voice and message to your customers — or whether some departments are marching to their own beat and unintentionally damaging the overall plan.

“With an AOI study, you’re asking yourself, ‘What image are we portraying to the customer and how consistent are we being?’” says Lane Ware, CCG’s Senior VP of Strategic Marketing. “If you’re a local bank whose marketing image is warm and fuzzy, but whose customers end up in tangle of automated messages when they phone, that image is destroyed.”

One example of a company with great follow-through at every level is the Canadian grocery chain A&P. “Freshness is what differentiates them, and that message is everywhere — when they answer the phone, in the store, on the bags, in the direct mail. That’s a message that’s very consistent,” says Ware.

Share the News

A secondary benefit to conducting an AOI study is being able to see whether CRM strategies, tactics — and especially data — are getting shared through every channel. “If you keep it just in marketing, you lose the real value of that data,” notes Ware. “You need to put it out and share it with everyone in the company — merchandising, display, real estate location, training, human resources. You’ll be shocked at the impact it has and the wide range of applications people find for it.”

Case in point: A major apparel retailer gave its customer profiles to buyers in its corporate office. The buyers placed mannequins in the building and dressed them to reflect the buyer profiles and the season’s fashions. “That really helped them tune into who the customer was and what the customer wanted from the store,” says Ware.

Improve Your Vantage Point

A final fringe benefit of your AOI study is that it gives you a comprehensive overview of your company’s inner workings. You can see where functional redundancies exist that could be streamlined to realize cost and labor efficiencies. You can find areas where communication is dead-ending instead of routing through the system. And you can uncover links between different arms of the company that can be leveraged to more fully and efficiently support the brand.

In short, an AOI study shows you, top to bottom and inside-out, whether your company is simply shouting out a barrage of messages — or singing to the customer with one compelling voice.