Find out how to improve customer advocacy with our best practice guide. Why? Because customer advocacy is often misunderstood. Given the changes to life since the Covid-19 pandemic emerged, holding onto customers remains key. Getting them to shout about you is a little harder. So, without further ado, read on to discover customer advocacy best practice guide for more than just a smiley face.
What is customer advocacy?
Customer advocacy is a range of techniques to put the best interests of customers at the heart of marketing and service. In simple terms, it means championing the perspective of the customer.
So, isn’t this just customer service? Not at all. Customer service is a remedial action to a problem or query that a customer has and is by nature a tactical outcome. Think tickets, jobs and call queues and that would describe a lot of basic servicing of day-to-day requests.
To understand customer advocacy, we have to explore the context of what makes an advocate. The Cambridge Dictionary defines advocacy as, “public support for an idea, plan, or way of doing something.” Now, let’s go a couple of steps back to find out how.
Customer experience is the foundation
A common mistake with customer advocacy programmes is to assume that garnering reviews is enough. Some may try to ‘shortcut’ the process by paying for or offering incentives to give positive reviews online. We do know that ‘peer reviews’ are trusted by 92% of customers over other advertising when making a decision, according to LinkedIn. However, this only masks the truth in the short-term.
True advocacy means that a customer had a great experience and were so pleased with it that they go out of their way to recommend you. But what is customer experience?
Customer experience or CX is a growing field of expertise and there are many definitions. We like to define CX as “the physiological and emotional responses to interactions at any touchpoint with an organisation”. If you succeed in delivering superior CX during the consideration stage, at conversion and post-sales then you have a foundation for happy customers.
How do you measure customer advocacy?
There are many ways to measure customer advocacy but one of the favourite techniques is Net Promoter Score (NPS). This asks customers to rate the likelihood of recommending your products or services to others. Many firms do this at a regular cadence such as monthly and consolidate results across all clients. Ultimately, the aggregate results act as a bellwether to the overall probability of advocacy.
Unfortunately, a high NPS does not always mean that a customer will advocate for you externally. Yes, that’s correct, not all positive scores equal action. However, it does imply how likely they are to remain with you and so it helps with customer retention.
A major challenge of any form of advocacy or customer satisfaction (CSAT) measure is bias. Just because someone regularly ticks a box to say “Okay” or “Good”, is that how they really feel? Our experience and marketing services for customers including Neuro-Experience tools. This gives us a wide scope to look at improving CX and measure true CSAT using neuroscience in various ways to virtually eliminate bias in surveys.
Confusion around customer advocacy best practice
Sometimes, it is easy to get confused about the terminology. Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and Customer Advocacy can be used interchangeably but this is incorrect. Customer Experience (CX) is defined above and is the journey a customer goes on with any touchpoint in your business. CSAT is the outcome of that experience, usually gathered using questionnaires and surveys. Customer Satisfaction always follows the completion of a process. Finally, if CX and CSAT are good, the end result is Customer Advocacy and your customers do the selling for you.
This diagram depicts the journey a customer takes to become an advocate for your brand, products or services:
Omni-channel customer experience
If CX underpins your CSAT and Customer Advocacy, then it clearly needs focus. If you go back to the definition of “every touchpoint”, it means that your experience needs to be the same across all channels. Yes, to say that CX is the same on a website and social media would be multi-channel. To say that CX is the same online, in-person, in writing, in-store and other forms of media is omni-channel.
Additionally, while CSAT captures the end result of a process at a single point in time (think sad, neutral and smiley face buttons as you exit an airport), it is one-dimensional. It is also overly-simplistic to say that the smiley face meant they were happy with everything. Ultimately, this is why CX has developed as a profession because it must be holistic to achieve Customer Advocacy. We leverage a set of neuro research tools to measure CX at multiple touchpoints and different stages of a process. The output is positive CSAT and then Customer Advocacy.
Customers can be a smiley face and demanding too
According to a study in the US, delivering a good CX and promoting loyalty can backfire. Loyalty schemes, memberships and subscribers tended to require nearly twice as long to resolve a query. Yes, that’s right. The customers that we really want to retain, show loyalty and shout about us from the rooftops are also the hardest to please.
So, what is the lesson here? If you are going to encourage loyalty schemes and memberships, remember that these people use your products or services most often. Exactly. These people see your failures more often than promiscuous customers. Furthermore, if you continue to offer poor CX while trying to boost loyalty, they may become detractors. Yes, those that appear loyal can get more upset than other customers.
Helping with Customer Advocacy best practices
In conclusion, we advocate getting the basics right before pushing for Customer Advocacy best practice. After all, there is a quid pro quo here. We give you a great experience and you give us loyalty. We delight you and listen to your concerns and you shout about us. It sounds so easy, doesn’t it? We have great CX, we improve CSAT and that leads to Customer Advocacy.
If you would like to speak to us about CX, Neuro-Experience, CSAT or Customer Advocacy best practice, simply fill-in a few details and we will call you back.
Alternatively, why not drop us a line on 01565 632206 or email sales@think-beyond.co.uk.
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