As the Ghanasan team closes out this stage of the Clean Team project, IDEO.org Fellow Sarah Lidgus reflects on what it means when service is at the center of a brand and how to maintain this level of Clean Team service at scale.

Think of “brand” and often an image-arsenal comes to mind: billboards and websites and pop-up stores and the like. But with Clean Team, the main expression of the brand is both simpler and more complex: it’s service. The core of the Clean Team brand is about the way a sales associate interacts with a potential customer or the timeliness of a response or the anticipation of a need even before it has been expressed. When service is the center, it’s the people - the employees - who carry that brand’s biggest presence.

Hiring great people to be exemplary employees and deliver stunning customer service is a feat even at a small scale, and it’s an accomplishment that Clean Team has managed to cultivate very successfully for its pilot. The question facing the brand going forward, however, is how to maintain that level of service and professionalism at scale. And that’s why the Clean Team brand book was created.

Service-based brands like Clean Team are forever balancing flexibility with predictability, standardization with autonomy. If people are your cornerstone, they must intimately understand what they’re working on behalf of and be able to answer questions like this: What does the company believe in? What does the company hope to accomplish? Who are its customers? How can the employees work best with the customers? Just as design principles can guide a visual design towards a certain degree of consistency while still affording creative leeway and interpretation, so too can service principles.

The Clean Team has also decided upon its own design principles for service, which include things like taking the time to explain the Clean Team service and following through on promises made. Within these principles are the essential elements that make up the core of the Clean Team brand. And regardless of scale, these service principles will continue to define the experience of Clean Team. They’re where the brand will always begin, and where - whether Ghana or global - it will always return.