Actionable steps to turn customers into brand advocates 

Traditionally within a company, the sales and marketing verticals were the biggest revenue earners.

These were the teams at whom the big bucks were thrown, purely because they sold product and brought in new customers - AKA the bottom line of business.

Customer service was viewed as a mundane role, essentially an individual glued to a telephone while fending off irate customers. Thankfully though, this view has evolved over the years, with organisations now seeing how crucial it is to support the customer throughout their journey, and not just at the point of sale.

In fact, Gartner tells us that 80% of organisations stay competitive only through high customer experience standards (source). Our research mirrors this trend as well, showing that growing firms are 21% more likely than their stagnant brethren to say customer success is ‘very important’ (source).

Customer service — often referred to as customer success — now forms an integral organisational function, whose focus is to help customers gain the most they can from a product or service. While customer support focussed on the frontlines – solving the one-off questions, ‌issues,‌ ‌and‌ ‌requests‌ ‌over‌ ‌phone, ‌ ‌email, ‌ ‌live‌ ‌chat, ‌ ‌and‌ ‌social‌ ‌media‌ – customer success follows a more proactive route, building a relationship with the customer ‌‌to‌ ‌help‌ ‌them‌ ‌get‌ ‌more‌ ‌value‌ ‌and‌ ‌share‌ ‌their‌ ‌feedback.‌ This proactive approach has the ultimate goal of building a base of happy and satisfied customers, resulting in upsells, cross-sells, and repeat purchases, and driving positive word of mouth.

In the age of the customer, ignoring your existing customer base is a bad idea. A study from HubSpot Research found that 81% of consumers trust the advice of their friends and family more than the advice of the businesses they buy from. Your existing customers hold an incredible amount of influence over the future success of your company, and they have the potential to be your biggest marketing channel, if you serve them well. When you focus on providing a great customer experience, you’ll find that your customers turn into advocates, and will help you create even more new customers through word-of-mouth and online reviews.

Whilst most businesses focus on how they can drive more online reviews, or create more word-of-mouth referrals, few companies look inwards to understand how they can improve and better understand the existing customer experience, and that’s a mistake. Your customers will not become brand advocates if they don’t feel you’re providing an exception experience. Here are some things you can do to understand where you’re currently, and what you can do to improve your existing customer experience.

- Earning the attention of customers

You should start by earning the attention of the customers and not stealing it. When a company reaches out to people without permission, 85% of consumers say their opinion of that company goes down. A company can grow by stealing attention and many companies have done so, but a company will ‘grow better’ by earning it.

- Businesses need customer personas

In order to make business tactics easier, you should understand what the customers are interested in learning rather than segmenting them into business goals. The goal here is to know the customers individually and how they would like to contact us: Phone, email, chat, or a knowledge base that allows them to help themselves. Businesses need to look out for the personas and the patterns in them to direct the efforts. It is also necessary to respect individuality and uniqueness of a person.

- Solving customer issues for their success

The goal here is to ensure your customers’ issues are solved seamlessly.  It is important to deliver what was promised to the customer. In order to do the same, process should always be secondary to the success of your customers.               

- Not abusing the value of data

Data has become highly important today than ever. Collecting data without permission can also be termed as abuse of data. Adhering to GDPR policies is one of the ways to prevent your data from being misused.  Leveraging AI is another way to help customers use data accurately without it being abused. Machine Learning can help in understanding themes that search engines associate with the content and Send Time Optimization Tool can get your emails to the right person at the right time.

- Acting on feedback helps

The power of feedback is immense when running a business. Listening to all the feedback is not enough unless it’s been acted upon. It is important to collect feedback into one place, analyse them from a customer’s perspective, prioritise the work needed to be done and giving it back to the business leaders. This is a cycle that needs to continue. Problem cannot be solved unless the feedback has been operationalised.

- Owning and fixing mistakes

Owning up to mistakes especially during a multi-day event neutralises the chaos. More than owning up, fixing the issue right away is all it takes. Customer satisfaction is the priority and a company can never grow without achieving that. It is crucial to have the right intentions, to take up responsibility for the mistakes quickly and honestly it is how you grow better.

- Keeping the pricing transparent

In order to maintain transparency in pricing, you need to change the communication process. One of the ways to achieve this could be by informing customers about growth in their contact database before the notice of non-renewal window closes. This change can give our customers more time to evaluate the product, the value delivered over the past year, and decide if you still made sense for them.

- Doing the right thing, even when it’s hard

It is important for all to do the right thing, even when it’s hard and especially when it’s hard. The first steps are always harder but once you move ahead, everything else seems easy. It is the difficulty that makes the success worth it. It is imperative to hold yourself accountable to do the right thing, even when it’s hard, complicated, expensive, or time-consuming.

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not in any way represent the views of exchange4media.com