Is There Enough Transparency in Your Facilities Management World?

I guess it’s pretty fair to say that business is a journey, and that the perpetual and rigorous evolution-improvement-refinement cycle is as important as any success factor.  

We’re continually looking to update and refine everything we do – from providing more value in our products, to becoming more efficient, to making sure we communicate in the most direct and understandable manner.

On that last point, we’ve recently spent some time reassessing the core of our value proposition (what we REALLY do that matters MOST to our customers), as well as the clarity of our communications to you and the market in general.

So we set out on a little journey to delve into what some people call “the essence” of our brand, specifically:

• What do we want to stand for
• What can we do better than anyone else
• What is the most fundamental nugget of the value that we provide today
• What do we aspire to provide in the future

It might seem all very fundamental, but unless you’ve gone through this once or twice with your customers and your leadership team, you’ll never know how difficult of an exercise it really is!

Marching to a New Anthem

I’ve had the fortunate learning experience of doing this a few years back with a larger public company that I worked for – and we were able to hire the world’s most respected branding firm – Landor Associates – who preached in that process that “brand” is not a logo or a tagline, but an anthem that a company lives by and marches to.  

Over the course of almost a year, we were able to inoculate over 4,000 employees with a new brand identity and focus, and it helped to align us with a common “raison d’etre” that led to big improvements in customer satisfaction, market share and growth.  

So it turns out that a few of the former leaders from Landor have spotted an opportunity to help smaller, growing companies with the same process (it’s essentially the ‘happy meal’ version – quicker, less expensive and packaged to provide great value).  They formed a branding company called Brand Zoo (yeah, their first client was the San Diego Zoo) and I was lucky enough to reconnect with them a few months ago (you may check them out at www.brandzoo.com; it’s impressive stuff).  

Branding Transparency

Over the last ten weeks, they have led us on a journey to rediscover and refine the core ServiceChannel brand attributes and essence.  They first interviewed a number of you – customers, service providers, industry visionaries and even those of you who may never have even heard of us!

To fast-forward their analysis, it became evidently clear that the notion of “transparency” was the most fundamental theme of the value that you all wanted and expected from a technology solutions partner.

And, for those of you who are current customers and users, you highlighted “increased transparency” as the nucleus of the value you received from using ServiceChannel solutions.  

One of you said it best – the best thing about ServiceChannel is that:

“You shine light and provide clarity in the dark corners of our industry that have traditionally been vague, imprecise or hidden.  It help us make decisions better – and it helps our results.”

Transparency Drives Performance – and a Whole Lot More

That led to the notion (through additional interviews) that increased transparency drives increased performance (in a number of areas).  Or, to say it more succinctly – “Transparency Drives Performance.”

And the more we talked with you about it, the more it became clear that more transparency can drive all kinds of performance and results – in cost control, in quality, in compliance and in service quality.

In the world of facilities management, it’s better to “know” than to not know, and it’s better to know quantifiably, than to know vaguely.  

Based on all this, we are in the process of rolling that refined “brand anthem” out to all of our employees, and to drive “more transparency and greater performance” to you in a myriad of ways.  Please stay tuned to this “channel,” as you’ll be seeing more over the next several weeks and months.

Driving Facilities Performance

One of the first things you will see is an updated logo and visual presentation of ServiceChannel – on our website, and in all of our communications.  The new logo is designed to reflect on and incorporate several key points, and reinforce the transparency message that we’ll continue to emphasize.

The design’s two intersecting planes symbolize an unbreakable and valuable connection between facilities professionals and service providers – creating a third shape at the center – a marketplace, and a window of increased visibility, focus and clarity.  Our job is to use that central “lens” to provide more and more transparency, focus and clarity to both FM pros and service providers.  

Bottom line: Transparency is simply the most effective way to drive performance across your organization and the ecosystem as a whole.

Thanks for all of your help as part of this process – it’s exciting, it’s clarifying and we will be doing everything we can to make it something that you see and appreciate every day.

As always, I appreciate your thoughts and comments.