Build a brand equity by delivering customer solutions

What is little understood generally is the importance of operations in brand building. The perception seems to be that brand building is about logos and fancy advertising. That is only part of the story.

The components of brand are building awareness, creating favorable associations and ensuring positive customer experience. When these are done well and consistently, brand loyalty is built, leading to more sales, through repeat engagement and customer referrals.

The company’s marketing and communications function ensure the first two – building awareness and creating favorable associations, but it is Operations function’s day-to-day interactions with customers that can ensure a positive experience.

Five years ago, Post Bank was a credit institution. Rising to a full-fledged commercial bank meant our service would be measured against our peers, most of whom are foreign companies with long experience in the industry not only locally but also globally.

There has been a rebranding evolution intended to strengthen the brand identity by ensuring that the visual assets accurately reflect the brand’s values and positioning. This includes logo transformation, an overhaul of the ambiance in the banking halls among others. The lessons we have learnt, that can be applied everywhere are many but let me just highlight a few; Marketing and branding will draw in the customer, but it is the user experience that will keep them coming back to your brand. 

Customer experience builds long term loyalty. We know that it is more expensive to attract new clients than to keep the existing ones and therefore it makes sense to keep improving your customer experience over trying to attract new clients. 

In this day and age, it would be criminal for any business not to have a digital transformation strategy. Digitization increases productivity and improves efficiencies. Digitization does not mean that human interaction should be ignored. 

In fact, whereas we have depopulated our banking halls, we have shifted more of our frontline staff to customer care and others to the back office, to deal with the more complex transactions. With that said, the massive processing power that comes with automation means it is now possible to better personalize the customer experience. Speaking for the banking sector whose services people have been slow to adopt over the years, trust has been an issue, because people did not know how to relate to faceless institutions. 

Most of the unbanked population have doubts about the safety of their money in banking institutions. Building trust has been key in allaying these fears. One way of building trust is through investing in training financial literacy programs. The brand building function must work hand in hand with operations function, especially in these times of fast communication. We cannot operate in silos—the left hand must know what the right hand is doing, constantly and intimately. 

Ms Damallie Nalukwago is the Head Operations & Services at Postbank Uganda