Having received yet another email promising brand awareness communication strategies to increase revenue, I started to wonder how to put a value on brand awareness in the B2B space. One cannot understate the importance of brand recognition but even in B2B practices that are complex, such as Telecom billing, brand recognition alone is not enough to rest your corporate growth on.

Ensuring your customers success should be the one of the main goals behind any communications or brand strategy. Customer Assurance, wherein clients have access to and are responded to, in an effective and prompt manner is a critical component of any B2B strategy.

Support personnel

Your support personnel are your front line after development. Highly trained and highly skilled, these are the people that ensure the customer experience with your organization is managed effectively; these personnel are your brand ambassadors.

Cross-departmental collaboration

In the B2B environment, customer support extends beyond resolving trouble tickets and it is a critical component in managing the entire relationship. As an ideal the customer assurance group should be integrated to enable cross-departmental collaboration, allowing individuals access to the collective wisdom and thereby eliminating data and knowledge silos. It is the customer assurance group that discovers and shares customer pain points and products issues.

Customer experience is key

Brand awareness is no doubt one of the important tools to grow your company, but branding in its simplest definition, is the expectation that a customer has upon hearing your company name or seeing your logo. And expectations are, most often, formed by experiences.

Working with customers to ensure that they use and understand the product, such that it solves their business issues, is the key to customer growth, retention and satisfaction. A promise that many brand strategies can’t provide.