Everything the customer experiences is the brand.

The impact of customer dialogue on the brand experience cannot be underestimated. When we realize that a brand is the effect of ALL the services we perceive in connection with a company, it becomes clear that "brand perception" cannot be substituted by advertising alone.

Why a lived brand philosophy should be cross-departmental and how relevant customer trust is, read in Part 1 by Prof. Dr. Oliver Errichiello, Professor/Lecturer of Brand Sociology and Brand Management at the Universities of Mittweida and Lucerne, brand expert, and prolific author.

Communication has the task of picking up on and reinforcing characteristic performance features. It's simple yet challenging—after all, this requires engaging with the performance level. Limiting the brand to the realm of communication has disastrous consequences. While management believes it can delimit the topic by department, customers do not care about this internal classification.

This is precisely where the relevance and high importance of personal customer service lies, whether on-site or over the phone.

Direct customer service on-site or over the phone is not an "add-on," a bonus, or an extra; it is a crucial, if not the crucial, element of brand development and brand strengthening. Investing in competent, human-provided service is typically significant at the key moments of customer acquisition and retention. This is particularly true when a customer has questions before making a purchase or when a problem arises. In these moments, most people want to talk to a person who "cares," not just manages.

How do many companies respond to this desire? Either with chatbots or with the almost unbelievable attempt to hide from their customers. They carefully ensure that the phone contact details are buried deep within the website. Or: consultation with a human being incurs a fee. Declaring information retrieval as a chargeable service should be avoided. What a pitiful signal.

Indeed, in a high-wage country like Germany, nothing is as expensive as human labor. But these very people make the difference and are not classic personnel costs; they are a direct investment in marketing and sales.

Even critics agree and point to the economic necessities in highly competitive markets. However, they seldom develop the creativity to create solutions or relate necessities to opportunities.

The problem with implementation lies in the factor of time: most companies no longer focus on continuous corporate governance but measure the success and failure of their activities by parameters that can be quickly and easily measured.

The direct value of excellent telephone customer service is hard to quantify. However, the number of clicks a YouTube ad receives can be easily tracked. Thus, internal management dynamics primarily drive the decline of the crucial driver of brand strength: human-to-human contact.