Advanced Practices in Customer Advocacy and Engagement
An in-depth qualitative study of best practices at enterprise level firms that are most advanced in the area of customer advocacy and engagement. Study participants include Salesforce, Adobe, Citrix, Misys, IBM, BMC, LinkedIn, Rackspace, National Instruments, FireEye, and SAP Ariba. In most cases, we interviewed both a firm executive with oversight of customer advocacy and engagement programs, along with the leader of the customer advocacy implementation team.
Key findings include:
Why customer success efforts fail, and how to correct that.
The primary reasons are that the firm’s total customer experience (TCE) operations are misaligned with customer needs, and that firms organize to respond to customer complaints reactively. Advance Practices firms are correcting both of those.
How customer advocates are playing dramatically expanded roles throughout the customer journey.
Customers want to affiliate with other peer customers throughout the customer journey—not just when they’re buying. Advanced practices firms are responding robustly to this fairly obvious fact.
Advanced practices firms are building their growth strategies around marquee customers.
Given the importance of influential customer advocates in today’s buyer-empowered world, AP firms are responding to this upstream all the way back to formation of the firm’s business strategy. They ask, “Which prospective customers are most influential in our market, as well as innovative enough to pull us into our future?” Those are the marquee customers they go after and build their growth strategy around. AP firms are also exploring common myths about marquee customers, including that they must be famous brands and are reluctant or refuse to endorse vendors.d
AP firms are increasingly placing customer advocacy in a key position in the firm’s Total Customer Experience operations.
AP firms are finding that well run customer advocacy and related engagement programs excel at building loyal relationships with marquee customers. This includes not just retaining them as customers, but getting these customers passionate about advocating for the firm. This is scalable, since they need only a relative few marquee customers to ensure ambitious retention and market retention goals.