Customer Advocacy

Customer Advocacy
Instructor: Brad Cleveland
Released: 1/10/2023	Course Details 1h6m Intermediate
Skills Covered Customer Advocacy		Course Link
Professional Certifications and Continuing Education Units (CEUs) National Association of State Boards of Accountancy (NASABA) – CPE: 2.6
Learn why customer advocacy is important, how to develop employees who are customer advocates, and how to use the voice of the customer (VOC) to inform strategies across functions including IT, HR, R&D, production, and legal. Customer strategist Brad Cleveland reveals a proven model for creating an effective customer advocacy initiative, which includes capturing customer insights, interpreting and analyzing intelligence, communicating findings, prioritizing action items, measuring results, and turning customers into promoters of your products and services. Learning objectives – Identify the benefits of customer advocacy. – Identify traits of successful customer advocacy. – Discover ways to understand your customer. – Evaluate results from a customer advocacy program. – Determine how to turn customers into brand advocates. – Assess how to develop a culture of customer advocacy. Source: LinkedIN Learning

Principles of Customer Advocacy

What is Customer Advocacy?

Internal Perspective
Focuses on the organization and how it creates great experiences for customers.

External Perspective
Focuses on customers who advocate and spread the word about the products, services, and brand.

Customer Advocacy
The actions we take to focus the organization on doing what is best for customers, which in turn rewards us with loyal customers who advocate for our products and brand.

Customer Experience
All of the experience that customers have with your organization. Including products, services, processes, policies, the expectations you set, and other factors. Often called the end-to-end customer journey.

Voice of the Customer (VOC)

Captures input
Seeks to understand
Reveals vital information

How Customer Advocacy is Different from Customer Experience and VOC

Takes action
Is informed by the voice of the customer
Extends across the entire customer journey

Why is Customer Advocacy Important?

Three Developments that create the need for Customer Advocacy

Rapidly evolving customer expectations
Interrelated nature of functions and departments
Importance of using time and resource wisely

Without an effective approach to customer advocacy, customers and problems making the most noise will get the attention on a case by case basis but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other issues that are just as important.

The iceberg effect means that you only hear from 1% to 5% of your customers experiencing the same problems all customers are experiencing. This means those 10 complaints could represent 40 to 200 silent customers depending on your customer base.

Benefits of Customer Advocacy

Repeat business
Positive word of mouth
Lower marketing costs
Reduced service costs

Trait of successful Customer Advocacy Initiatives

How Organizations Implement Customer Advocacy

Designate individuals as customer advocates
Establish a customer advocacy team or tier within customer service
Establish a central team that oversees customer advocacy across the organization
Build the principles of customer advocacy into strategy and culture

Customer Advocacy

Is action oriented
Has support of top management
Helps prioritize and implement overall improvements
Measures success through customers’ perspectives
Recognizes value of brand advocates

Empowering employees to be Customer Advocates

Five Components That Are Essential to Develop Employees

Customer-focused vision
A deep understanding of customer advocacy
- What does it mean to put yourself in customers’ shoes?
- How do you find the best value for them?
- How do you escalate issues and get them resolved?
- How much decision-making authority do you have?
- How and where do you capture information that enables the organization to make overall improvements?
Empowerment
Right goals and objectives
Supporting tool and processes

Harnessing service and operations

Customer Service Delivers on Three Levels:

Efficiency
Contribution to Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty
Strategic – cross-functional – share with other areas of the organization to improve

Identifying cross-functional benefits

Operations

Fixes quality problems, in turn reducing costs

Research and Development

Identifies the customers’ wants
Identifies the organization’s strengths and weaknesses

Legal

Identifies potential issues
- Defects
- Reactions
- Security Holes
- Inaccuracies

Self-Service

Lowers costs of providing service
Boosts customer satisfaction
Improves the organization’s capacity to focus on other issues
Facilitates proactive service

Human Resources

Helps reduce employee turnover

Nurturing Customers to Become Brand Advocates

The power of Brand Advocates

Benefits of Brand Advocates

Customer recommendations are more believable than paid advertisements (Nielsen)
Word-of-mouth drives 20-50% of all decisions (McKinsey & Company)
Advocate customers spend twice as much (Bain & Company)
Up to 70% of new customers are through customer referrals (The Cheesecake Factory, USAA, and Red Bull)

Brand Advocates