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#3: UNIFORMS CAN GAIN CUSTOMERS AND KEEP THEM COMING BACK.

Following is an excerpt from, The Clothes Make the Brand, a Brandweek article by Bernadette Doran: “Brands are the express checkout for people living their lives at ever-increasing speed. "If you have a brand you know and trust, it helps you make choices faster, more easily," said James Lenehan, worldwide chairman of Johnson & Johnson consumer pharmaceuticals and professional group. "Can you imagine going shopping without them?"

That said, uniforms are one of the most immediate interfaces with the consumer.

As more and more consumer options emerge in the service category from healthcare to hotels, strong, clear branding helps consumers make their choices the first time, and keeps them coming back for more. And that's where uniforms and career apparel fit in. They are one of the most tangible, tactile and immediately communicated "proofs" of the brand, especially in the service industry.”

Confidence and trust, essential aspects of any customer relationship, were attributed to employees in uniform...

Another data point that drives home the importance of the uniform and its role in helping a company achieve its business objectives can be found in the Service-Profit Chain model first published in the Harvard Business Review in 1994. The Service-Profit Chain model sought to identify and explain the primary factors that stimulate revenue growth and profitability, the primary financial metrics used to evaluate the success of a commercial enterprise. The conclusion promoted by the Service-Profit Chain model is that the most consistent factor among companies that experience sustained profit and growth is customer loyalty. Loyalty is a direct result of customer satisfaction. Satisfaction is largely influenced by the value of services provided to customers. Value is created by satisfied, loyal, and productive employees. Employee satisfaction, in turn, results primarily from high-quality support services and policies that enable employees to deliver results to customers.

One of the support services that impact the attitude and actions of your employees is the uniform that you provide them to wear. In recent years, the Uniform and Textile Service Association (UTSA) sponsored a study by J.D. Power and Associates in order to quantify a number of “common-sense” beliefs about uniforms. General research on the psychology of clothing had suggested that uniforms function both as a symbol of specific occupations, such as law enforcement or home appliance repair, and as a signal of the competence of the wearer. However, there was little data available specific to uniforms.
The results of the survey provide clear evidence that that the utilization and styling of a uniform by service companies positively impacts the customer. The results of the study directly related to this impact are noted below.

“On the consumer side, the survey found that 72 percent and 74 percent of respondents, respectively, said that they would prefer to use the service where employees were wearing uniforms.

Confidence and trust, essential aspects of any customer relationship, were attributed to employees in uniform, with 62 percent responding that “Employees in uniform increase my confidence in their ability to do their jobs.” Fifty-five percent expressed a greater sense of trust.

Overwhelmingly, both business buyers (87%) and individual consumers (83%) felt that ease of identification was a crucial factor. In today’s security conscious environment, businesses and individuals do not want to have unidentified personnel in their workplaces or homes. Uniforms provide fast, easy identification of your company’s workers, and afford certainty to the customer that they are who they say they are.”

Frequent customers, and therefore the more valued (return) customers, are more likely to prefer employees in uniform than those respondents who use the product/service less frequently.”

If the wearing of any uniform is a good start, then an attractively outfitted uniform service team positively affects the consumers’ behavior. The study highlighted this finding with the following claim…

“In almost every setting, the majority of consumers would be at least slightly more likely to buy from or use the service of the provider whose employees were wearing the consumers' preferred uniform style, again, if all else (price, quality, service, etc.) were equal. This suggests that an organization's choice of the most popular and appropriate uniform style could dramatically influence a consumer's choice of service provider when comparing two otherwise similar providers.”

The Report’s Final Conclusion?

"Any business organization that in some way interacts with other business organizations or end customers may benefit by considering uniforms for employees." Businesses should consider "uniforms not just as a 'uniform' clothing style but also as an opportunity to advance an organization's brand image and upgrade the professional image of an organization's employees."

Contact us today to learn how OOBE can transform your uniform program.

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