What is customer advocacy?
Advocacy is a form of customer service when the company focuses on and tries to do their best for the customer. It is important to keep all customers satisfied by dealing with their issues and queries. Identifying and meeting their requirements might be strenuous and difficult.ย
But, customer advocacy is still an important strategy for your business.
It can increase:
- sales
- revenues
- company credibility
- customer satisfaction
- customer retention
- brand engagement
- customer loyalty
It also creates a deep and engaging relationship with all customers.
What is a customer advocacy program?
It is a form of marketing strategy. The purpose is to create representatives/spokespeople of your company. And encourage sharing their thoughts about products/services. This could be for example through social media or by word-of-mouth. Having a great customer experience can influence their reviews/testimonials.
Here are some tips to improve customer experience:
- go omnichannelย
- use customer support software such as LiveAgent
- listen to the customers and improve
- create an easy customer journey
- empathize with the customer
- be available as much as possible
- make the customerโs experience personal
- give away gifts
- answer the customers in real-time
- invite VIP customers to launch/eventย
- skilled customer support agents
- collect customer data to improve
Customer advocate is a person whose job is to find out the needs of a company's customers, and to make sure that the customers are provided with what they want
What is the role of a customer advocate?
The role is to inform potential customers about the products or services of the company. The main goal is to positively influence a large group of people to initiate purchasing actions. This process should happen organically based on the great/outstanding customer experience. Or when the advocate for customers feels there is high value to share with their audience.
How do you drive customer advocacy?
As weโve mentioned before customer advocacy should happen organically. But, there are a few things that you can do to drive your customer advocacy.ย
Building your customer advocates might be challenging at first. Yet, if you take a close look at your current customer advocates, you can build a profile of such a persona. Thus, it is easier to take a look at your customer database and search for the right candidates.ย
Another aspect to drive customer advocates is to make them feel special. Give them certain business insights or invite them to the launch of a new product. Make them feel included in certain aspects of the company. Your company can only benefit from such feedback.ย
Another important driver of customer advocacy is social media. In recent years, this has become an important way to communicate with your customers. Therefore, you should not overlook it in your company. So, how can you drive customer advocates through social media? Observing customer engagement and asking for a review might do the trick!
These days we can automate the reviews by setting up email automation. This could be another effective driver in your company. Automated emails can generate important feedback for the company.
Frequently asked questions
What is a customer advocate?
A customer advocate is a person whose job is to discover the customers' needs to improve customer satisfaction and attract new leads.ย
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How do you build customer advocacy?
The most natural and obvious way is to ask customers for feedback after providing stellar customer service. If you receive great feedback, try to offer them a loyalty program or a referral program for repeated purchases.ย
How do you measure customer advocacy?
The best and most organic way to measure customer advocacy is through customer reviews. Customer reviews have a huge impact on any business. Thus, you should put a focus on collecting testimonials as well as responding to them if necessary.ย ย
Expert note
Customer advocacy is a crucial strategy for businesses to increase customer satisfaction, retention, and loyalty. Building strong relationships with customers and creating brand advocates can lead to organic promotion and growth.
Customer empathy is the act of understanding your customer's point of view and their feelings. Empathetic communication can help the customer feel heard and understood. There are three types of empathy: compassionate, emotional, and cognitive. To express empathy in customer service, active listening, asking questions, and avoiding assumptions are important. LiveAgent offers features like video calls and canned responses that can improve customer service.
A customer representative is an employee who interacts with customers on behalf of a company. They handle various inquiries, complaints and act as the voice of the company. Many companies use customer service software to provide support. To become a customer representative, communication skills are important along with soft and technical skills. Training is essential and involves shadowing seniors agents and learning on the go. After completing training, learning continues with on-the-job experiences and potential new training.
Customer relationship is paramount for business success, with good customer relationships leading to benefits such as customer retention, satisfaction, brand awareness, and competitive advantage. Effective communication and personalization of customer experience, even on multiple platforms, are key to building and improving customer relationships. Customer service software can aid in managing customer inquiries and engagement on various platforms, while customer interaction management software enables businesses to collect data and improve customer interactions. Effective customer service communication, which can be achieved through live chat communication tools such as canned responses, names, emojis, and auto-translation, can help retain customers and promote brand loyalty. Companies must ensure they have well-trained staff with the right communication skills to quickly resolve customer complaints. Help desk software is also an effective solution for managing customer communication across various platforms.
Consumer behavior is the study of how individuals and businesses select products or services, with the goal of understanding their psychology and motivations. By adapting marketing campaigns, sales pitches, and customer support responses to fit consumers' needs, businesses can increase sales and retention. Hello Bar, a Neil Patel company, uses pop-ups to gain insight into customer behavior through A/B testing. Small details, like the color of a website page or graphic, can trigger consumer behaviors and significantly impact conversions. Businesses should focus on providing clear and compelling benefits to customers, and use scarcity as a trigger for action. Testing and conversations are necessary to optimize for individual audiences. Ultimately, understanding consumer psychology is key to success.
