Why You Should Let Staff Members Communicate Directly With Your Customers

Your organization is filled with fascinating, passionate people who want to share their love for your brand. Their loyalty is infectious. Don’t hide them. Let them add their personal voice, their picture, their opinions, and more to your outbound communications. Let them be the voice of your brand, so that they can build real trust and solid relationships with your customers.

Video Transcript

Hi, I’m Ron Evans. Today I want to talk about staff members, and how we should let them communicate directly with our staff members.

Now for my nonprofit clients out there, think about the fundraising request that goes out at the end of the year. What’s it like? It’s personalized, certainly. It has a first-person voice, it’s probably signed, and it may even have a picture of the executive director or the development director.

Why do we do this?

Well, research has shown that when we add this level of personalization to our fundraising requests, we get a greater rate of return. We get more money. It just works. So if development directors have known this for years, why aren’t we expanding this idea to all the communications for the nonprofit? I’m talking about the email newsletter, the website, voicemail, postal mail.

Practical example: instead of getting an email that has a logo and some information, you get an email that’s curated. It’s personalized. It has a picture of the staff member there. When a customer hits reply with a question, the staff member can actually answer. How rare is it to get to talk to a real person these days?

This is going to have a couple of immediate benefits. It’s going to make your staff members feel fantastic. Their voices will have been heard. But really it’s going to make your customers feel great. They’re going to be talking to real people. And people want to follow passionate people. They don’t want to follow organizations — they want to follow passionate people. So when we put the staff member in this role, they are able to form these real relationships.

So don’t feel like you have to have this stuffy, “professional brand.” We don’t need to do that. Let your staff members speak for you. They’re talented. They’re passionate. That’s why you hired them. Let them start forming those real relationships directly with your customers, and you will see a big benefit.