Yesterday, I was on an important business conference call. Ten minutes into the call, I was dropped. I immediately used my other line to dial back in and after 4 minutes I was dropped again. As I’ve become skilled at through years of experience, I rebooted my modem. I finally got back on the call and at the end, I complained about your company being the sole provider in this area for my cable, Internet and phone. One of the other conference attendees immediately exclaimed that he was about to sign up for your triple package. After my 3 minute rant about how abysmal your service is throughout every aspect of the organization I have touched – and I’ve got years of touching(!) – he thanked me and said he would use your competitor. Where he lives, he has options.

I realize that complicated technology sometimes goes awry. So, it is not your technology I dislike. Rather it your service. I have questions:

Why must I ALWAYS waste my time working my way up the ladder of service competence being transferred from one department to the next to the next to the next until I finally get to that really smart person who seems to hold all the answers? What’s her direct number?

Why do I need to… dial my number into the recording that answers my call, only to be required to give it AGAIN to the service person I speak with?

Why do you NOT give me the option to speak to a live person unless I trick the dial-in system by continually hitting “0″ over and over until it cries “uncle” and connects me to a live person?

Why has almost every service call over the years consisted of the technician telling me that he found the problem, only to have the technician on my next service call tell me the problem is what the last technician did?

Why must each support call I make about a dire emergency with my dead service needing to be looked at by the next level department “that handles that” end with your phone rep cheerfully asking “Is there any thing else I can help you with?”

Why do you ask me EVERY TIME at the end of a service call if I could just take a brief survey to “rate the quality of my service”? Who wastes their time taking those surveys, and do you really think that’s the way to get accurate customer feedback?

Sincerely,

A Severely Dissatisfied Customer.

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Dear Severely Dissatisfied Customer,

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Thank you for your inquiry. Your issue has been forwarded to the appropriate person and someone will get back to you within 24 – 48 hours. For additional inquiries, please email our award winning customer service at click here.

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The point is: Every customer matters, even if you are a mega billion dollar corporation, but especially if you are a small business. News travels fast and in ways you can’t even imagine. Make it easy for people to solve their occasional problems with your product or service, make live people and phone numbers easily accessible (No, the Internet hasn’t made telephones obsolete!), and rethink your policies, especially if you consider and name them “our policy”.

You can no longer hide from bad word of mouth. Ask my friend who is now that other phone company’s newest customer!

What else do they have in common? They all were either broken within a VERY short time or came defective right out of the box.

Probably like you, over the years, I could make a fairly long list of things that… shortly after their purchase became defective. But I thought it was remarkable that three of four substantial purchases made within the past two weeks share that trait. A gem fell out of a thousand dollar bracelet, the photos don’t loop as they should on a Kodak digital frame and the rotors broke upon a fairly soft helicopter landing of the initial flight of this $200 machine.

What does this have to do with branding? EVERYTHING! Most of what we are told about building a successful brand consists of a catchy name, a good web site, well-placed high quality advertising, the right pricing model, etc. All of these and other means of building a brand come a distant second place to… HAVING A GREAT PRODUCT.

Go to Amazon and you’ll find several popular books written about how to engineer good word of mouth. They go into great detail about public relations, viral & guerrilla marketing, and slick distribution schemes. But before any of that, you just have to have a great product — one that people rave about to their friends, relatives, product review pages and social web contacts.

Here’s an idea for a New Year’s resolution: At the top of every marketing meeting agenda, put “Improve Product Quality”. No matter what else is on your agenda, spend at least half the time brainstorming about how to make your product better. What? You don’t think that’s the job of marketing?

Think again, because if word of mouth is valuable to your product’s marketing, Zales, Kodak and that little toy manufacturer doing direct sales in the mall just took a big hit. No amount of expensive marketing can come close to the power of my personal dissatisfaction story to my friends considering the purchase of a Kodak digital picture frame.

So, how do you know how to start improving your product? Ask your customers. Read reviews on Amazon.com, Bazaarvoice.com, Epinions.com, Buzzillions.com, Consumerreview.com, Testseek.com, etc. Can’t find anything useful there? Then do a survey using Surveymonkey.com and ask only one question: What improvements to our product would make you rave about it to your friends, relatives, colleagues and acquaintances?

The number one way to build your brand is to sell a remarkably great product — one that people enjoy bragging to their friends about how smart a purchase it was. But remember: Just like bad news on television is more interesting that good news, stories about poor products tend to be more prolific and engaing for the teller. Instead, give them something to rave about and you won’t have to waste your money on books about manufacturing word of mouth advertising!

That day, I opted out of using the drive-through since there were three cars lined up waiting in both open lanes. As I entered the bank and took a first glance at the counter, I felt justified in walking in since there was only one person waiting in line. That assumption, however, proved to be wrong.

As I got in line, I saw that there was only one teller. Without a customer at his window, he was working on his computer, seemingly oblivious to the two of us waiting for him. As one minute grew to two, then five, I started… imagining what possibly could have been on his monitor that so captured his attention that he couldn’t even look up or acknowledge his two patiently waiting customers. Was it the checkout screen at Amazon? His Twitter page? The details of a nearby one bedroom duplex on apartments.com? Perhaps it was the recent job posts at monster.com.

I looked around the bank. I saw a partially finished Christmas display; worn and tired carpet, drapes and walls; and signs for their mortgage services that were as uninspired as the teller’s enthusiasm for his waiting customers. On the other side, drowned out under the Barry Manlow muzak were the murmurs of sullen higher-ups at rows of cheap wooden desks, on the phone and chatting with each other. “HEY, ANY OF YOU KNOW HOW TO TAKE DEPOSITS?” I felt like screaming.

At that moment, I thought about that bank’s brand. I thought about their expensive commercials, ubiquitous newspaper advertisements and the miriad of local sponsorships and donations made to bolster their community awareness. The only thing influencing my opinion of this brand, however, was their interior, staff and that lone teller. Hopefully, he’s finally on the Amazon purchase confirmation page!

Branding is supposed to be colors, fonts, logos and all the material your company produces to tell the world how great you are, right? After all, that’s all the stuff your marketing people or agency work on. It’s what you spend your money on. But there is a far more important element that defines your brand that few people ever consider: The product or service you offer your customers. It’s the experience people gain or feel when using your product or service.

We all know that word of mouth advertising is the most potent force driving someone to consider you, right? And while there are books written on how to “create” and “grow” word of mouth advertising, there is only one way: A customer experience that creates stark raving fans.

So the next time you are asking yourself or your marketing people how to better promote your brand. And the next time you are evaluating your media budget trying to calculate your ROI, take a walk through your lobby. Take a deep breath, look around and get a real sense of your brand.