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Basics About Customer Advocacy
Why Implement Customer Advocacy?
Basically, your payroll dollars are paid by satisfied customers. Studies prove that existing customers are 5X-7X more profitable than new customers, as they are more likely to refer additional business to your brand, buy higher volume, buy more product lines from you, and cost less to service.
What is Customer Advocacy?
This is an evolving field where companies have varying definitions. Best-in-class advocacy strategies leverage Customer Experience Management (CEM) principles for superior satisfaction, competitive differentiation, innovation, brand equity and customer profitability. CEM can include - but goes beyond - CRM, experiential marketing, customer satisfaction, customer engagement and Web 2.0 ... to prevent hassles for customers throughout their experience with your brand. CEM systemically integrates a customer-centric approach to innovation, customer contact, marketing and all groups within a company.
How to Get Started?
1) To embed a customer-centric approach throughout your company's internal and external value chains it's best to start with knowing which customer groups are more lucrative - and it's not always the biggest accounts! This knowledge guides strategic and tactical decisions at the executive and front-line levels and is used to determine appropriate ways to get input from your customers. See Customer Value GuidanceTM
2) Get to know your customers' world by listening to them, understanding the demands of their customers, and seeing things from their perspective. Use value analysis to guide your research and monitoring efforts. Create the right mix of feedback from the various parties within your customer's organization that have an impact on the buying decision and ongoing experience with your brand. See Customer World PanoramaTM
3) Train all the organizations in your company to anticipate feedback from your customers on a regular basis, and to know how to make changes that postitively impact the customers. Close the loop with customers to re-set their expectations. Make leading indicators widely visible and incentivize improvements, to predict future satisfaction, market share and profit.
See Customer-Focused Value ChainTM
4) Make sure your customers' experience is consistently positive no matter how, when and why they contact you and are exposed to your brand.
See Customer Touchpoint AlignmentTM
5) Broaden your product/market requirements documents to include the full spectrum of customer experience opportunities. View product development as customer experience development. See Customer Experience InnovationTM
6) Make it fun and rewarding for customers to do business with you. These tools include experiential marketing, CRM, communities, rewards and other enticements that seek to guide customers' attitudes and behaviors.
See Loyalty Behavior ProgramsTM
Just Do It!
CEM is a tremendous opportunity to provide highly visible and lasting
value-add to your company. You can improve profits, sustainable
growth and customer equity by inspiring systematic, ongoing
company-wide action on the customer experience.
See
Program Setup for more information about CEM and customer retention strategies.
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