Customer advocacy

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. 

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 omnichannel 
• 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 customer’s experience personal
• give away gifts
• answer the customers in real-time
• invite VIP customers to launch/event 
• skilled customer support agents
• collect customer data to improve

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 customer advocate feels there is high value to share with their audience.

How do you drive customer advocacy?

As we’ve mentioned before the customer advocacy should happen organically. But, there are a few things that you can do to drive your customer advocacy. 

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. 

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. 

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.