The first tier of brand ambassadors is valuable for its vision, its mission, its faith in the company and its leadership. These are the corporations' leaders , and they must understand your company's culture and competencies. Strong leadership is what makes creating positive customer experiences possible. This group will be responsible for envisioning the types of positive customer experiences your company is out to create and is accountable for the training, communication and culture of teamwork that will make them happen. The litmus tests of leadership support include:

	Asking managers, "What is the purpose of our business," and "What does our corporate brand represent"? Will you get the same response from everyone? If management isn't in agreement, how can front line employees be?
	How long does it take information about brand contact breakdowns to reach senior managers? Will they know in a week, a month or never?
	Is your management 100% accountable for creating a committed corps of brand ambassadors? It will take clear and consistent leadership to maintain such a team.

The second tier of a company's brand ambassador corps is its employees, past and present, and its brand is only as memorable as these employees make it. It becomes more evident with each passing day: the only source of truly sustainable competitive advantage in the 21st century marketplace lies in strong customer relationships, which are built by employees on the front line. They are the face of the brand, the "last three feet" of customer communications. If every employee is on board, acting in accordance with a company's vision and mission and creating positive experiences for customers, a company's brand will be priceless. Front line employees need to be trained, empowered and supported to consistently delight customers and integrate communication at every brand contact point. One valuable test of success is if randomly selected employees can answer the following questions correctly:

	Who are the most important customers that you are serving, how is your job impacting those customers, and how do you get feedback from them?
	What is the key message of your company?
	Which customer satisfaction improvement team are you currently on?

Of course, the ultimate test of front line success lies in customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. More often than not, though, front line employees aren't trained on sales, service and brand communication. This oversight translates into thousands of lost opportunities every day to cross-sell products, improve satisfaction and retention and build brands. Sales reps too often don't understand that the customer retention process begins before the new customer leaves the store, call center specialists don't realize that they're also critical to the sales process, store clerks don't recognize that they're serving a client who might be worth $100,000 in sales during the coming five years, and field techs rarely appreciate that they're more important in shaping public perception of the company's brand than the people who crafted the brand message, logo and ad campaigns in the first place.

This isn't to say that turning your entire work force into a round-the-clock brand embassy is a simple task. It isn't. One challenge in training frontline employees, for instance, is that they're typically dispersed in the field and busy serving customers. Pulling them together for a traditional classroom lecture or a pep rally with the CEO can be as expensive as it is ineffective, especially in cases where the work force is mistrustful of corporate leadership and therefore primed to reject anything that smacks of cheerleading.

But just because it's hard doesn't mean you have an excuse for not doing it. On the contrary. In many contemporary markets we're approaching the point where the primary, if not only differentiator is customer service. Under such conditions, a company populated by clock-gazing 9-to-5ers has no chance against a competitor whose front line employees are committed 24/7/4ever brand ambassadors. Period.

The third tier of brand ambassadorship, the largest and perhaps strongest level of your brand's diplomatic corps, is your customer base. These are the ultimate brand ambassadors: neutral, third-party advocates for your company, and the products, services and experiences you provide. Some companies have third generation loyal customers, entire families of fans raving in their own homes and communities about a company's products and services.

Most companies, though, fail to leverage their most enthusiastic user base. If you don't have customers like them, you can create them. If you do have customers like these, identify them and treat them well; they are your greatest assets. Most computer manufacturers foster user groups. Computer games have fan sites. Saturn organizes "homecoming parties." Volvo sponsors the "Volvo for Life" award. Create a club or program, incentive or award, a way to thank your valuable customers and cultivate a unified corps of customer brand ambassadors.

The single greatest hurdle to creating your own 24/7/4ever corps of brand ambassadors lies in coordinating the efforts of these three different groups. Of course, the levels are interrelated: what would it take for management, for your leaders, to create this type of environment for employees? What would this type of employee buy-in mean for customers? What types of external and internal communication must be made readily available so that everyone shares the same brand images and vision?

These are the questions to ask today. This is the place to start.