When doing business, a startup can become too mechanical dealing with customers. They sell the product and move to the next buyer in line. But there is a better way to approach that engagement: customer advocacy. Let’s take a closer look at what it is and how Virtua Outsourcing can help you get a strong start in it.
Understanding Customer Advocacy
In its simplest definition, customer advocacy is a service that focuses on what is best for the buyer. While this might sound like what regular customer service has always intended, there is more to it than just that.
Advocacy seeks to give your patrons more solutions-based support through a combination of your products and services. Here, you become more proactive in seeking those solutions to satisfy their needs. That creates a stronger customer-centric environment that gets people invested.
The Benefits Of Customer Advocacy
Adopting an advocacy mindset can have a tremendous impact on how your startup engages its patrons. Some of the benefits you can gain from favoring this approach include the following.
Greater Retention
When customers feel they are getting the most out of the products they buy, they are more likely to stick with it. That increased customer retention can increase your revenues by twofold. They also become willing to spend more on their return purchases.
Increased Customer Acquisition
While the thrust of customer advocacy is towards retention, it can help you attract more new customers. That is mainly due to stronger word of mouth. 50% of your new customers will come from word of mouth. Giving current customers a stronger reason to talk about your brand will help them better convince people to jump in.
A Strong Start For Expanding Your Reach
An interesting side effect of stronger customer advocacy is that it can help you broaden your business partnerships. Customers who are strong advocates of your brand often have other brands they promote. Here, you might be able to find ones that complement yours. By connecting with these brands, you can reach out and engage their audiences.
Getting A Strong Start With Customer Advocacy
Now that you have a clear idea of what customer advocacy is and what it offers, you can explore how to use it. For a strong start, you need to build the framework for it. This framework centers around meeting the following customer needs:
- Physical rewards: These are the tangible rewards that initially motivate customers to purchase.
- Recognition: After getting physical rewards, your customers will want to seek recognition from you for their positive impact on your business.
- Empowerment: Allowing customers to give you suggestions makes them feel more connected with your brand and the products they get from you.
- VIP experience: Your most ardent customers also want to be pampered with exclusive deals and offers to make their stay worthwhile.
- Influence: The topmost hierarchy of customers needs is those who have a strong desire to become more influential in their circle. Here, your role is to provide them support in achieving that goal.
Note that not every customer will have all of these needs. Some might already be content with getting recognition. Segmenting your customer base according to these customer needs will help you determine what kind of advocacy plan to develop and implement.
The Four Key Areas
The next stage of building your customer advocacy program is developing four key areas. These areas will help you integrate that framework better into your overall business operations. That will help you bring greater success to the effort.
Exploration
In the first key area, you should have a good understanding of your customers. You already know their needs, as shown above. But you should also know the challenges they can encounter that prevent them from meeting those needs.
For this, go deeper into customer research. Virtua Outsourcing will help you here through our agents’ extensive customer service knowledge. We can help you identify the possible issues that they encounter. From there, we will assist in reaching out to these customers.
Motivation
The next important area is motivating your team to advocate for meeting customer needs. That does require some introspection on your part. Examine how your team connects with and engages customers.
This introspection will also help you pinpoint what kind of strategies your team needs to use. When doing this part, think about the various strengths that everyone have. Go for strategies that lean on these strengths. Your team becomes more receptive to the motivational efforts when they see that they are part of the solution and not just implementing it.
Activation
Once you have laid out your customer advocacy strategies, it is time to launch them. To implement this successfully, you might need to get some extra hands. This is where most of our help will come into play.
We can serve as a force multiplier, ensuring that you can provide for all your customers’ needs. For this, we employ a more empathic customer service strategy. Not only can we help them get the solutions they need, but we also make them feel more satisfied with the outcome of their engagement. That is important, as that feeling of satisfaction helps drive continued engagement.
Iteration
The last area in building your customer advocacy framework is iteration. Once you have gone through the initial run of your advocacy strategies, you need to review them thoroughly. Here, you can determine which of these work as expected and which needs improvement.
We review the different strategies we implement as part of our internal assessment. Based on that, we can then give you a clear picture of how your advocacy strategies work in different customer situations. Using our knowledge, we can also guide you in refining these strategies to satisfy customer needs better.
Have A Strong Start Advocating For Your Customers’ Success
Your customers’ success will lead directly to your own. Hence, you have to really put in the effort to help them to achieve it. And to get a strong start here, you need the right partner by your side. Virtua Outsourcing is ready to assist you in achieving that. Contact us today and let’s help your clients together.