Trust and empathy are a must have in today’s economy. Internal, customer-impacting employees—sales, marketing communications, professional services, support services and the like—create hidden friction in the trust building department. It’s hard to find employees who are genuinely empathetic to and trusted by customers—and even when you do, it takes time.
Customers, on the other hand, immediately feel empathy and trust with other customers—their peers. That built in, automatic “trustability” represents a vast, often untapped resource for removing engagement friction and accelerating CX transformation.
From our research, firms who are advanced in their CX approaches—like Amazon, LinkedIn, Adobe, IBM, Rackspace, Cisco and others—are getting extremely creative in moving customers into positions that support or even replace the work of non-peer employees. They’re using customers in often-unexpected ways to spur growth, improve innovation or services, cut costs, address “unsolvable” problems and more.
Some examples:
LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator business engages experienced customer advocates to participate in case studies that are designed not for prospects, but for new customers, post-sale. These and other mentoring with their peers helps new customers “learn the ropes” and work through the nervous early stages of deploying a complex service—increasing the odds they’ll stay.
BMC used marquee customers to provide direction and clarity to a critical rebranding initiative as it took its solutions to the cloud. As the branding team lead by its CMO Nick Utton confronted difficult issues—such as renaming its lead product, developing a new advertising campaign and ultimately, its new brand message—its best advocacy customers provided rapid feedback that was so insightful and reassuring, Utton insisted that these customers be involved in every important branding issue thereafter.
Misys (now Finastra) addressed a major priority—improving customer retention rates—by mobilizing selected advocacy customers to play a central role. A team lead by CMO Martin Haering and Sr. Manager of Customer Advocacy Chris Aldard set up MisysConnect (now FinastraConnect) to facilitate engagement with other customers, post-sale, in ways that dramatically improved the customer experience. Misys’ retention rates have shown significant improvement since. (This story is detailed in Advanced Practices in Customer Advocacy and Engagement.)
Salesforce’s marquee customers (they use the term “MVPs”) provide extraordinary support and leadership for the firm’s vaunted customer community. Even though there are only 145 MVPs (the customer community numbers in the several millions), the MVPs generate an outsize amount of marketing information on social media, provide important feedback on new product releases, and keep the community well informed of new products and how to get the most from existing ones. That’s made Salesforce’s community a potent marketing and sales resource. Active community members generate twice the revenue of other customers, and are 33% more likely to adopt new products.
Perhaps the iconic example of deploying experienced customers to meet the post-sale needs of other customers came when Microsoft, beset with competition from “free software” (particularly Linux), found its business model under a real threat. How could Microsoft support its software when competing against free support provided by the evangelistic users of the Linux community?
Microsoft’s Sean O’Driscoll, who was brought in to build and manage the company’s own customer community, found to his and everyone else’s surprise that Microsoft had equally passionate customers of its own. That led to O’Driscoll’s game-changing idea of organizing Microsoft’s community to take service requests online, which began diverting expensive service calls away from paid employees or outsourcing firms. The result: savings in the hundreds of millions of dollars, which was critical to helping Microsoft meet the challenge of “free.”
Over time, Microsoft identified marquee customers within the community based on their influence and their knowledge of the firm’s software. These MVPs, as Microsoft calls them, have made significant contributions to the firm’s growth and competence in other areas as well.
In addition to improving the CX, here are two other growth strategies that marquee customers are significantly impacting: growth and innovation. Which is not surprising, because these are the criterial on which you select and cultivate them.
