Customer success stories are one of the most powerful tools in a marketer’s arsenal. Satisfied customers are a source of inspiration. They help current and potential customers make the most of their purchase, become loyal to the brand, and provide referrals
Use these tips from the Flawless Inbound marketing team to understand how you can make your customers your brand advocates — and also, what you can do to design a customer advocacy program that gears up your sales and marketing efforts.
Why You Need A Customer Advocacy Program?
Any business would want its existing customers to become advocates for their business. However, the traditional marketing funnel restricts itself to marketing, sales, and conversion. It does not speak after you've converted to a customer.
HubSpot surveyed over 1,000 service professionals about their customers. 88% of them agreed that their customers have higher expectations than in the past. 89% agreed that their customers are more likely to share their positive or negative experiences. And, 69% confirmed that review sites, social, or word-of-mouth drive more leads for their business.
The survey advanced the idea that companies need to change their marketing tactics if they want to maximize their investment in HubSpot. But not many companies focus on customer advocacy.
HubSpot further reveals that 42% of the companies don't collect feedback from their customers, and only 19% have a formal advocacy program built.
Related: 12 Customer Service Stats for 2020
The businesses need to understand that their army of advocates can motivate the prospects to buy their products through credible marketing messages.
The customer advocacy program builds a relationship with your brand advocates, capture their positive experience, and amplify their message. Think of testimonials. They're excellent in terms of building credibility because it's an authentic statement directly from a customer.
Brand advocates are well-versed on your products and brand. They are a great source of information for your leads and potential customers. The customer advocacy program assists in generating a natural conversation that boosts awareness and organic traffic.
If your company doesn't have a customer advocacy program or looking to revise it — here are some ways to get started.
New Customer Service Tools to the Rescue
Keeping your existing customers happy and satisfied is much more viable than acquiring new customers — which is why customer service is so critical for brands in 2020.
You have to invest in the customer journey. Help your sales team to increase the loyalty of your happy customers through continuous engagement.
Below are some of the tools through which you can deliver absolute confidence.
Conversations Inbox
There’s a lot to digest, but your inbox should be the first place to start in the morning. It holds the conversations with your business through diverse mediums — email, chatbots, social media, forms, etc.
It streamlines and centralizes communication with your contacts in one place, and you can view, reply and manage them all. You can assign the conversation to a particular team member, comment on it internally or develop a recourse plan before sending out a communication to the customer. Once you ensure all steps, you can also mark it as close.
Knowledge Center
As you identify advocates, the next step is to build a stronger relationship with your customers.
How can you do it? By creating helpful content or campaigns. Remember that content is no longer the king — credibility is. People want to see the truth. Unfiltered feedback from your customer will appeal to people with similar issues.
You can build a self-help resource that answers their queries. It adds incredible value to brand loyalty. It could include a library of articles for customers to help themselves.
As your customers inevitably turn to Google for help, you already have a powerful knowledge base of information that answers their problems faster. This also ranks well in the searches.
A knowledge base dramatically reduces the number of tickets and support your team’s productivity to skyrocket. Plus, you crowdsource on information that people want to learn more about — potential for future blog topics.
It doesn’t end here; you can also track the impact and usage of your knowledge base in HubSpot. A built-in reporting dashboard measures the impact of these resources, helping you improve your knowledge base over time. See usage data and customer feedback to improve documentation, and also create service tickets directly.
Help Desk for Customers
As your customer base grows, you can have customer issues slip through cracks. Once you open a ticket, it’s important to establish a standard follow-up process that tracks — time, cadence and contact method.
A ticket pipeline would help you keep monitor all your customer interactions. You can create custom ticket pipelines and statuses to define a simple business process around responding to the customer. You can also keep track of support metrics like agent response time, ticket volume, etc.
Plus, access service ticket record and prioritize support requests. This way, your team can tackle the most critical issues first. The record also to organize the data into tailored pipelines and deliver more personalized support.
As you comprehend the nature of the query, you can categorize them into different buckets and apply automation. It helps in routing the conversations to the right department.
HubSpot Feedback Surveys and Reporting Dashboard
We all know how feedback surveys identify the customer’s satisfaction with a product, service or experience. These are a great tool to altercate customer experience — turning neutral customers into happy and happy into your champions.
NPS (Net Promoter Score) creates a benchmark for customer satisfaction and measures how likely customers are going to recommend your business. It is a typical benchmark to evaluate and improve customer loyalty.
So, how you do it correctly for improving customer advocacy?
It’s a four-stage process:
- Survey customers after they’ve used your product or service
- Ask them how likely they are to recommend you.
- Use reports to track improvements and customer satisfaction.
- Use the feedback to make improvements and grow customer loyalty.
Not just NPS, different surveys can be used for various needs of the business at different times. There are customer service support surveys and customer experience surveys as well.
Feedback surveys are a great tool to gauge customer satisfaction. It allows you to diagnose potential problems — both at the individual and aggregate level. More importantly, it will enable your business to improve over time.
You can use the service reporting dashboard to get total visibility into every customer interaction across all your channels. Once you’ve opened tickets, the service dashboard in HubSpot will track the source of tickets over time, the total number of support tickets closed by their owner, give a graph of your ticket volume over time, and much more.
Once you set all the tools in place, the customer advocates and their benefit to your company will be visible. You’ll want all the support from an engaged internal team. Remember that your advocates are delighted customers. Keep their experience with your brand amazing across all channels. And take care of the relationship. If your program is well designed and executed, you will build individual customer stories that you can reuse over time.
If you want to understand in detail how you can build a customer advocacy program that fuels your sales and marketing, check our webinar.
Got additional questions? Feel free to get in touch.