What is Customer Advocacy?
This is where the customer’s needs are put first. Their one goal is to find new ways to aid their customers and provide solution-based hand through your products. This plays a big role in improving your client’s contentment in regard to your company.
It is the process where you transform your customers into your company’s advocates, with trust being their foundation. This is done by your services, spotless customer support, and positive experiences with your services.
Once you build a team of passionate advocates, they can prove to be your promoters in the market.
Many companies say that they “put their customers first”. Often the customers turn away from such false promises due to their previous experiences that might not have been something that they expected. Providing the on-time support and solution to their problems will help your company stand out among the other competitors. A simple solution for the most commonly ignored problem.
How to implement it?
- Corroborate more adoption rates.
If your customers are not utilizing your products to their full optimization, they are not ideally profiting. Your investment for the best SAAS solutions is not being giving the amount of efficiency it is supposed to obtain. Getting customers to use all its features plays a main part in their obtainment of their use case. When done so, they recognize the connection between your product and them. This connection is what drives them to become you advocates.
This can be done by having a fully fledged communication about the features. Make them believe that your solution will make their work easy, it has to.
- Know your customers.
Yes, customers driving in revenue for your company is essential, but not all customers have the same mindset. It is important to know the difference between your customers and the advocacy that they support. This helps you to understand in which way will each of them help your brand to move forward. Many times, customer advocacy builds on the prerequisites of reward scheme, but the success gained by it for your company is more than the money. Customer Advocates are often in search of roles where they can educate others too.
- Have a track of your NPS.
Before promoting customer advocacy, you have to know how many advocates you have. This can be done by a quick single-question survey: Net Promoter Score. It portrays “How likely are you to promote our company in front of your friends and colleagues?”. It is a scale with numbers from 0 to 10. Customers that choose a 9 or 10 are your qualified promoters. The passives are the ones that opt for a 7 or 8. The detractors are the ones that choose a number from 0 to 6. The NPS is the value which you get after subtracting the %detractors from your %promoters.
This NPS helps you sort out your promoters, which in this case are your advocates, and your detractors, that are your dissatisfied customers.
You should take measure for the %detractors to make it to the other side of the spectrum. This will help you gain your customer advocacy.
Who is a Customer Advocate?
A person who carries out customer advocacy is a Customer Advocate. He/she functions with the company.
What should you look for in a good customer advocate?
- Compassion.
Though it is not something that is looked for in marketing, it holds an importance of its own. It is important for your customer advocates to be compassionate by nature. They not only have to be good listeners, but they should have the ability to grasp the customer’s needs by their heart and not only process them with their brains.
- Commitment.
These days companies will work up to their bare minimum to please their clients. Keeping in mind the worst-case scenario, they hand over the customers their hardly passable, outdated products.
A person who is commitment driven will always push forward for the better. He/She will not be satisfied with the minimal and will go beyond requirements to ensure that their customers are well pleased.
A person whose blood is warm within, not a person who looks like his grandsire cut in alabaster.
Challenges faced by Customer Advocacy.
- Getting support from the higher and senior officials to help create a world-class program.
- Drawing passionate and committed Customer Advocates and maintaining the number.
- Working in harmony with the other teams such as sales.
- Planning a successful Advocacy program with a limited budget.
- Facing the “Hypocrisy” and turning a blind eye to it.