The value of Coke's communications
I heard a great story recently from a woman who participated in a workshop I offered at the US PRSA Conference, that demonstrated the impact an internal communicator is having on customer satisfaction.
First, the story: The woman tried to buy a Coke from a vending machine. It malfunctioned and returned the dollar bill she had fed into the machine, but not the quarter. However, she got lucky. The guy who collects the money and refills the vending machine of Coca-Cola products showed up at that moment. Hearing her story, he apologized, returned her quarter and offered to give her the Coke for free. OK. So far this was already a nice story about empowered employees, but it gets better.
Front line employees should have all the answers
While she insisted on paying for her Coke, she did mention she was shocked at how much Coke was charging. The employee commiserated with her about how high prices were, but explained in the nicest way just how much the higher price of oil affected the cost of his product, from the oil used to make the plastic bottle to transportation costs. He mentioned specific percentages and dollar figures. He quoted how low Coke’s profit margin actually was on that bottle she'd just purchased.
The woman walked away from that potentially negative encounter with the Coca-Cola brand to one that was as impressed with customer service as a customer could be.
So, how would we measure the impact some unknown (though hopefully not unappreciated) internal communicator at Coca-Cola headquarters has had in communicating the financial realities of making and distributing her products?
Measuring employees knowledge
The typical measurement approach would be to ask employees how well they feel they understand the pricing of their products, or the impact of marketplace issues on their business. We could even ask knowledge questions to see how many employees get the dollars and percentages right.
But this example shows how much deeper our questions should be, and how they should focus on actual behaviors resulting from the knowledge. We could ask a series of questions like:
- How many customers (or other members of the public) have you heard complaining about the cost of our product in the past month?
- How many of those people did you talk with about the costs of producing and distributing our product?
- After your discussions with members of the public about pricing, would you say that the majority of them had a more positive or less positive image of our brand, or was there no change?
Especially in difficult financial times, the more we communicators can do to help our employees learn what they need to know in order to interact more positively with customers, the more we demonstrate our own value to the bottom line. Let’s be sure we actually measure that ultimate behavioral impact we have, not just whether our employees heard our messages.
Ask Angela your measurement questions on the Internal Comms Hub.
Further reading
Ask the expert: Angela Sinickas
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