Building brand ambassadors from the inside out

Intranets can be a powerful medium for broadcasting important messaging and connecting directly with your employees on important topics of the day. Effective intranets in tandem with other employee communication and engagement strategies can help to:

• Build a more informed and proactive workforce
• Reinforce core culture and values
• Fuel organizational transformation in a unified direction

But can intranets also play an important role in improving your outward customer experience and external brand perception? While it might at first seem slightly counter-intuitive that an internal communications tool such as an intranet could have this kind of external impact, we know the answer to be—yes!

Clear employee communication can create more consistent customer experiences

At Habanero, we’ve observed our clients impart a more consistent understanding of vital customer-facing experiences within their intranets, provided that content is:

• Well-articulated
• Up to date
• Intuitively presented

Many of our retail, credit union, and financial customers, for example, have significant amounts of content within their employee intranets devoted to serving customers. Their intranets act as an essential tool referenced daily on the front line when interacting with customers.

Employees are more likely to hear about timely updates or changes to programs or services that might impact a customer. This can ultimately lead to a higher likelihood of delivering a consistent and positive experience for customers at each interaction.

Harnessing employee pride to build stronger brand ambassadorship

Well informed and engaged employees also have a genuine sense of pride around their workplace and a heartfelt desire to share that enthusiasm with the world. These are employees who might generally talk about their companies glowingly at a networking event, at the water cooler with colleagues, or perhaps socially amongst friends.

With the advent of social networks like LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook, organizations can tap into this enthusiasm. Harnessing these advocate employees not only amplifies the reach of key messages into broader social networks but it does so in a more genuine manner.

Whether it is celebrating an important award win, searching for that perfect new hire candidate, or perhaps promoting an upcoming event, these employees can serve as an incredibly powerful asset to amplify your messages outward, far beyond the reach of an official corporate social following.

Making social sharing one step easier

Within our Go Intranet Accelerator, we’ve made external social sharing easy. First, we created a great way for communicators to get the word out to employees through the simple creation of intranet page content and a targeted homepage experience that ensure the right audience sees it. We’ve extended that process further to allow employees to then share that associated public messaging in their respective social networks when it is appropriate to do so.

Take for example Habanero’s recent win as a 2018 Best Workplace. Our communications team was quick to post that message to our various social channels. And, our employees helped to amplify that message further by sharing that message across their social channels.

Image of Go Intranet Accelerator social post feature

Image of resulting Twitter post

Traditionally, this would take a prompt or plead of a communications manager to share a company social post (and maybe even a related all company email) which could then be shared out by an employee. Within our intranet, a page was crafted to let our employees know about recent the win. External social sharing links were enabled and thus allowing employees to directly share our official posts on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. The result was an increase in views thanks to the added reach of our enthusiastic brand advocates.

The impact of employee ambassadors

Don‘t overlook the positive impact your intranet can make on creating a more consistent customer experience and boosting your outward-facing brand awareness. Engaged employees can be your most influential brand advocates, so it is essential to give them the right information and content to share with their larger social reach. Messages coming from employees can carry with them a level of true authenticity that is hard to replicate on corporate feeds. Capabilities within our Go Intranet Accelerator make it easier for employees to promote appropriate content and share it externally.