MarketStar Blog | Customer Success

Key Insights

• The pandemic has led to trustworthiness becoming the top priority for customers

• Forging deeper ties with customers will be incomplete without a strong focus on effective customer success strategies 

• Outsourcing key customer success activities can contribute in several ways to revenue and growth 

• A clear vision and meticulous planning when it comes to customer success strategies can be the key differentiator between failure and success 

Amid shifting business priorities and disrupted operations brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, one lesson stands out above all others: The critical significance of customer success in growing and protecting relationships with existing customers.

Trustworthiness is now a top priority, as highlighted by a Salesforce study.

Not only has trustworthiness become more important to customers than before the pandemic but it has also grown more difficult to earn.

Building trust among B2B customers requires a sustained focus. And as the function focused on ensuring these outcomes, customer success is now a vital requirement for business continuity and growth. 

It is no surprise that customer success teams only showed an upward trajectory during the pandemic.

What Defines Customer Success? 

Before discussing the benefits of customer success solutions, it’s essential to define what customer success is. 

Customer success is a business methodology that ensures the desired outcomes for your customers throughout the customer life cycle. 

A research by Deloitte identifies three types of value that constitute customer success:

• Performance value focuses on the use of the product itself

• Business value focuses on how using the product or solution contributes to achieving specific business outcomes 

• Experience value centers on the ease of doing business and the depth of the business relationship between customer and vendor 

It also bears certain key differences from customer service and customer support.

Customer support and customer service teams are activated when customers reach out with a specific problem and are geared toward resolving the problem within a single interaction.

Customer success, on the other hand, continuously seeks to innovate new ways of gaining value for customers, providing new use cases and perspectives before customers ask for them.

Why Do Companies Need Customer Success?

In today’s B2B world, getting the signature on the dotted line is only the beginning of the customer life cycle.

With customers finding it easier than ever to switch vendors when dissatisfied with a product, a methodology focused on delivering customer experience, product value, and business value offers several distinct advantages.

Below we have listed the top benefits of customer success in business.

1. Improved Retention

Given the significance of retention, it is important to note that one of the traditional and most effective aspects of customer success is retention.

In the 2020 State of Customer Success report by ClientSuccess, customer success contributed to an average net retention rate of 99% for 411 customer success professionals across 347 organizations.

Retention, unsurprisingly, is cost-effective for companies, with estimates suggesting that retaining an existing customer is 6-7 times cheaper than acquiring a new one.

2. Increased Upsells & Cross-sells

While retention protects the revenue base, growth depends on upselling and cross-selling.

Effective customer success best practices can secure this growth by increasing the likelihood of customer satisfaction.

In fact, vendors are 60-70% likely to sell to existing customers, against being only 5-20% successful in selling to new customers.

This is because satisfied customers recognize the value of a product or service and are aware of how it contributes to securing their business outcomes.

3. Improved Advocacy

Second-order revenues, that is all those sources of revenue which are indirectly influenced by a customer, can significantly contribute to revenue growth.

One common route for second-order revenue is when a champion customer changes companies and brings the product on board with the new company.

The other is word of mouth or referrals from satisfied customers to others in their professional networks.

In either case, by directly impacting customer attitudes toward the assessments of the product and vendor, customer success is significantly responsible for driving second-order revenue.

4. Operational & Product Improvements

With its finger constantly on the pulse to uncover customer pain points, customer success is a key avenue of feedback not only on a product or solution but also on how organizational operations impact customer value.

Customer success teams can create efficient feedback loops and judge the impact of new releases and updates, gathering valuable data for optimizing the product roadmap.

Customer success can also aid in optimizing operational processes across all customer-facing and other teams by identifying key bottlenecks or sources of friction that frustrate customers.

How Outsourcing Can Help You Build Effective Customer Success

At first glance, outsourcing more transactional engagements such as customer service or customer support may seem more reasonable than doing so with a long-term, relational role like customer success.

However, outsourcing key customer success activities can contribute in several ways to revenue and growth: 

• Cost-savings: Companies can save on operational costs related to onboarding and training, renting and maintaining office space, management costs, and investing in the latest tools and technology stacks

• Overcoming talent shortages: Outsourcing can ease this process by doing the heavy lifting when it comes to hiring quality customer success representatives

• Access to expertise and technology: Outsourced CSMs have not only been hired for their skills but also undergo the necessary training in a variety of approaches, processes, and technologies so that they can hit the ground running for any organization

Effective management of the long tail: Outsourcing the long-tail customers can help organizations move beyond an 80-20 trap in their revenue generation

The Bottomline

In the wake of the pandemic, the writing on the wall is clear: customer success is integral for the survival of business organizations in a subscription economy.

Satisfying the expectations of existing customers, retaining their business, and increasing revenues through customer advocacy are all vital for sustainable growth.

However, building in-house customer success teams may not always be cost-effective or viable.

Instead, taking on a blended approach of outsourcing specific customer success functions can provide important efficiencies and resource boosts that allow for better engagement of customers.

Key Insights

• There is not a single business in the world that can say that they haven’t lost a customer. And every business employs a different approach to handling it. 

• While some look for new customers to equalize the loss, others put their focus on analyzing what went wrong and how to stop it from happening further. 

• This problem is called customer churn. Your churn rate denotes the number of customers who are leaving your product or service during a given time period.

A HubSpot report highlights that generating leads and enhancing customer engagement strategies are the top priorities for over 50% of companies today.

Organizations, irrespective of their sector, spend vast amounts of resources and energies to reduce churn because your churn highlights how happy your customers are with you.

Despite its importance, many organizations struggle in implementing successful user engagement strategies to reduce churn. So how do you reduce churn? This article deep dives into this very problem.

1. Analyze Your Market

While an obvious step to reduce churn, it is also a crucial one. You must find out why your customers left. Talking to such customers and getting to know them is one way to go about it. It is also an excellent way to demonstrate that you care.

You should actively make use of all media channels such as phone, e-mail, website, live chat, and social media. Surveys can be a useful tactic too if customers don’t want to talk.

2. Proactively Communicate

An important step in reducing customer churn is to actively engage with your customers. This is called relationship marketing wherein you take decisive steps in delighting your customers and showing them value in your product/service so they have a reason to keep coming back.

As a starting point, provide your customers with versatile content that deals with the key benefits of your product. It should include regular update announcements and news about special offers.

Simply put, when you engage proactively with your customers, you address their pain points, build trust, and brand preference which translates into a substantial increase in revenue streams.

3. Create Your Customer Roadmap

Getting started with a new product can be overwhelming for your customers. And if they are not able to figure out how to navigate through, they will lose interest, adding to your overall customer churn. 

Your customer engagement strategy here is to ease their transition by setting up an effective onboarding process or roadmap. Such a process will guide new customers through your products, their features, functions, and processes. 

Such a strategy also gives you greater control over how you want to supplement the information to your customers. Remember that your goal is to empower your customers. So it is vital that you constantly monitor and iterate your onboarding process.

4. Incentivize Your Customers

Give your customers a reason to stick around.

Offer them something special such as promo codes, discounts, and loyalty programs among others. These small steps can prove to be quite effective in reducing churn and showing your customers that you value them and their business.

A vital point to remember is the time in your customer’s lifecycle when you should offer these incentives. For instance, it can be at the end of your customer’s journey when you are not sure if they will go for a renewal. You can provide a discounted renewal rate to help them finalize their decision.

5. Focus on Customer Service

Many of the big companies made it big because of their focus on providing stellar customer service. It is an excellent way to prevent churn. Your service reps should be empowered to solve your customers’ queries in a timely manner.

An Oracle report states that incompetent staff and slow service are the top two reasons for customers leaving a company.

Enhance your customer service capabilities by upskilling your labor force or outsourcing your customer success operations.

6. Employ Success Managers

You can employ customer success managers to ensure that your most valuable customers are taken care of.

Your managers will provide your customers with the right input to maximize their investment in your product.

For your customers, they become the main point of contact, paving the way for more personalized interaction. 

A success manager will take care of the following points:

• Identifying those customers who are planning to leave your product or service 

• Nurture the relationship and make them stay

• Make way for stronger and persistent communication

The Bottomline  

There are two reasons why reducing customer churn should be at the top of your mind. 

The first is the financial aspect. 

According to Forrester, it costs 5 times more for companies to acquire new customers than it does to keep the existing ones. The second reason is that the more customers a business retains, the higher its revenue will be. 

But it all boils down to analyzing the right reasons behind your churn rate and swiftly acting on them. However, do keep in mind that you won’t go from 10-15% to 1-2% within a week or even overnight. 

Reducing your churn rates is a process that you need to improvise as you go along but it’s worth the time and effort invested. 

Best of luck!

Key Insights

• In today’s competitive marketplace, companies give much importance to finding, targeting, and acquiring new customers

• In the process of new customer acquisition, they often tend to overlook the significance of staying connected with existing customers 

• Organizations, across all sectors, should take cognizance of existing customers. Such customers contribute massively to sales, if treated with care

Acquiring new customers is expensive. Selling to existing customers is a more pocket-friendly approach.

However, providing superior customer service is also not a guarantee for better sales with 54% of all consumers having higher expectations from brands, according to a Microsoft report.

While companies tend to give much importance to finding, targeting, and acquiring new customers, they often overlook the significance of staying connected with existing customers.

But it has never been as vital to sustaining your existing customers. In fact, they contribute massively to sales if treated with care. According to a report by Bain & Company, a 5% increase in customer retention produces more than a 25% increase in profit.

Building relationships with your existing customers is a unique way to increase sales.

We have listed 7 top-notch strategies for you. If you manage to improve every step of your sales process by even a little, your sale increases by a lot.

7 Easy-to-Implement Hacks to Boost Sales with Existing Customers

1. Research Your Market

Open the door to new, untapped opportunities with market research and analytics.

It is one of the best strategies to increase sales. By taking a deeper look into the market you serve, you can better understand who your customers are, what they want, and identify their pain points.

You can collate feedback through surveys, listen to your customers through social media, read trade articles, and mine data from Google Analytics to understand the critical elements.

2. Understand Customer Behavior

Selling to existing customers will be impossible without understanding customer behavior, a vital element of your marketing campaign.

Understand how your customers relate to your products or services. Try answering questions such as:

• Do they rely on just a single feature or more?

• Are they having issues with one of your product features? 

This will help you to determine whether you need to provide upgrades in certain areas or not. Another approach is to provide personalized services or training to customers. Using this method will help you to enrich or extend your relationship with your existing customers. 

3. Run Promotions

An equally effective strategy to boost sales is to reward your existing customers.

Promotions that reward old customers will go a long way in improving their loyalty and increase sales figures significantly.

The frequency of promotions can be weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually. What matters is that it doesn’t stress your business. You must plan for promotions so that they don’t wear you out. 

4. Update Your Offering

As your business grows, your offerings will change. Turn to your existing customers when it comes to deciding what offerings to eliminate and where you can utilize opportunities.

An easy strategy to boost sales is to look at the items that your customer base ignores.

Low sales items also clutter your business. When you strip away such items, your customers can focus on the products and services that they want.

Another factor for you to avoid is offering a large variety of products in each product line.

Such an approach increases the cognitive load that may lead to inertia which interferes with decision-making. All of us have experienced some kind of cognitive overload when it comes to making a purchase decision by scrolling through page after page of offerings on Amazon or eBay.

5. Upsell and Cross-sell

Selling to existing customers will be incomplete without upselling and cross-selling. In fact, cross-selling can increase sales by 20% and profits by 30%, according to McKinsey research. 

Your biggest hurdle, which is the initial buy, is over now. You have established trust, and your customer has formed a favorable opinion about your business. Now, it’s time to think of the next step. 

An upsell takes place when you convince a customer to buy more than they originally planned. On the other hand, cross-selling happens when the customer buys a different product or service.

6. Tell Your Story

Visual mechanisms can be your companion to increase sales from existing customers. Visual aids and infographics can help you spur into action.

This type of approach makes messages actionable while subtly convincing existing customers to make more purchases. The idea is to show customers how you plan to solve their problems with your offering.

With visual mechanisms, it becomes easier to encourage the customer to close the sale.

7. After-sales Service

According to a study conducted by Shep Hyken’s CX consulting firm, 96% of customers will leave business if they receive bad service.

When it comes to selling more to existing customers, you cannot ignore after-sales service. If you abandon your customers after the sale, they won’t come back in the future.

Wrapping Up

It is critical to remember that you are building the customer and not the sale. When you succeed in this, your sales will increase.

Considering the intrinsic role of sales in business growth, you must find effective strategies to increase sales and implement those for boosting sales, increasing customer lifetime value, and better ROI. 

Key Insights

Perhaps a decade ago, organizations would typically use outsourcing to improve back-office operations through cost cutting and performance improvement. However, the situation has completely transformed and evolved in today’s rapidly changing business landscape.

Key Insights

Customers expect a good experience when they pay for a product or service. This makes customer onboarding the most important stage of the customer lifecycle. When you get new users started with your product on the right foot, it sets the tone for their relationship with your company. 

Key Takeaways

• Customer Success teams are at the forefront of helping customers achieve their goals. It is through them that a company optimizes its value in the eyes of their customers.

• In the dynamic marketplace we are in, customer success teams have become even more critical in the business growth of an organization. 

• It can also be a challenging task to establish an effective customer success function. 

• The demand for good CSMs far surpasses its supply. And unless organizations understand the core capabilities they require, the process will not bear fruit. 

When software-as-a-service became popular in the mid-2000s, vendors focusing on the business model faced a major problem- customer dissatisfaction. The product in question was complex, and many customers were unable to find value in it. 

This resulted in low adoption rates, which eventually led to greater churn. 

To counter the problem, companies began building customer-centric initiatives. Many created formal customer success functions with a unique set of tools and methodologies. 

In the aftermath of the pandemic, customer success services face a new sense of urgency around protecting and nurturing customers and enabling them to find success with the product or service. 

According to a Salesforce research, 89% of consumers are more likely to make a repeat purchase after a positive customer service experience. 

With the growing importance of retaining and maintaining long-term relationships with customers, customer success teams have become an indispensable function of any modern subscription-based enterprise. 

It’s undeniable that customer success has become the growth engine, with the potential of becoming a company’s most powerful asset. 

Deeply engaged with accounts, a skillful customer success manager (CSM) along with the entire team combines extensive product knowledge and domain experience with an intimate understanding of each customer and their objectives. 

But the backbone of a well-planned customer success framework is a talented staff. It’s the foundation of any robust customer success initiative. 

However, strong customer success leaders are in short supply. 

With an already stiff competition to recruit and retain the best in the field, many organizations are also unclear about the necessary skills for customer success management. 

So, how do you create a team that will amplify your customer success strategy? Have you set any expectations in advance? And if you already have an established customer success function, are you gauging their efficiency correctly? Let’s get started.   

What are the Top 5 Priorities in Building a Customer Success Team?

There’s immense power in great customer service. 

A company’s focus on customer success solutions heavily impacts its recommendations. It’s critical that 94% of consumers will give a company a “very good” CX rating and will be more likely to recommend it. 

As you get down to hiring your talent cluster, it is always wise to start with setting your expectations. Which roles are you looking for, and which skills will help you drive your customer success methodology? What reasons should you keep in mind? Some reasons have been listed below:

• Customer Retention: Customer success is about taking every step to ensure that your customers see value in your product or service, making customer retention a critical component. 

• Consistent Customer Feedback: In this, your customer success manager can help the organization get regular and detailed feedback from your customers. This can help other BUs such as sales, marketing, and product management teams to better align their strategies.

• Further Expansion: Upselling and cross-selling are an essential part of any customer success framework. By tapping on these opportunities, your customer success function will drive business growth.

• Brand Advocacy: While customer advocacy is usually a company-wide initiative, the customer success manager is responsible for guiding the customer throughout the journey, turning satisfied customers into loyal brand advocates.

With the why behind setting up a customer success function, let’s look at how you can make it a reality. 

1. Analyze Your Requirement

As a first step, organizations should examine their current team.

Link this information to the desired customer success outcomes, such as adoption, satisfaction, and growth. The insights you achieve will help you to transform your hiring and talent attraction processes.

2. Know How Many Members You Need

26% of respondents highlight that the typical customer success manager at their company handles anywhere between 51-100 accounts, according to a survey by Totango.

The number of people you require for an effective customer success framework depends on how many customers you check up on a weekly or monthly basis. Many organizations divide their customer base into three segments: High, Medium, and Low-Dollar customers. 

3. Create an Onboarding Process

It’s easy to assume that the ins and outs of your product or service are easily understandable to an outsider. But not everyone works on it every single day as you do, which means that what is straightforward to you might not be so for others.

An effective onboarding process can help your customer success team have a thorough understanding of the product, which, in turn, they will proactively use to help your customers gain value from your product. This saves the customer’s time in the early stages of their journey, and you benefit from a reduced churn rate. 

4. Upskill Your Existing Team

Equipped with the insights on your preliminary analysis of the team, you can deploy programs to build on capabilities. 

Many companies have established “field and forum”-based training programs where employees alternate between classes and apply them in the workplace. 

Ensure that you are creating personalized learning journeys since the strengths and weaknesses of each member of your customer success team will vary. 

5.Use Segmentation

Segmenting your customers can help your division of labor. 

When you divide your customers into groups based on shared features such as customer lifetime value (CLV) or geography, you deliver greater levels of personalized customer experience. 

Additionally, your teams provide contextual and relevant information. This type of segmentation can help you determine high-value accounts which require dedicated CSMs.

6.Get Feedback from Customers

How your customers feel about their interactions with your customer success team can help you assess their performance. This feedback is a simple yet effective way to boost engagement. Use this feedback to optimize your customer success framework.

Team Up for Success!

Companies derive more value when they identify opportunities to deliver greater value to customers. But few organizations have mastered this mutually beneficial relationship. 

Customer success management will only be effective when you have a team guided by the company's vision and mission. 

Looking to make customers your best growth engine? 
Benefit from a world-class CS strategy at scale with MarketStar.

Key Insights

• It is easy to fall into the mindset that customer success is only about keeping customers happy. In reality, customer success is a vital domain that can help you reach your business goals

• Between building internally and outsourcing, the right decision lies in having a solid grasp on your needs, as well as confidence in yourself

• Take the time to make the right decision, and you will see a big increase in the lifetime value of your customers 

Many customer-facing business functions get outsourced regularly. Outsourcing customer success is a standard practice wherein technical teams are used on a contract basis.

So, whether you are in the early stages of developing a customer success team or revamping your existing CS efforts, you may wonder this question: Is outsourcing customer success right for me?

Bringing in an experienced external partner has its benefits, but it is essential to keep your short-term and long-term goals in mind.

Let’s look at the pros and cons of each setup and evaluate which will be the best fit for your organization.

What are the Pros and Cons of Building Internally?

An in-house solution might work for you if you have an organization at scale and the resources who can focus their time and energy on this function. 

The Pros

• Company Knowledge: Your people have complete knowledge about the company, its culture, your business goals, and every detail of the product or service. In short, you have a resource pool that has grown with you. Additionally, they share your vision and have been serving customers for years. All this knowledge is already in place when you get to build an in-house CS team.

• Better Control: You can have complete control of the entire team when it is in-house. You have power over the goals, strategies, budget, and almost everything that has been etched out by the team. So, if your customers are not happy with your CS team, the responsibility unavoidably falls on you.

• Ownership: You have complete ownership of the logistics. When companies sometimes break their partnerships with an outsourced partner, it becomes a daunting task to get everything under control. With an in-house customer success team, you need not worry about this.

The Cons

• Lack of Good CSMs: While it is one of the fastest-growing jobs in recent years, finding a good Customer Success Manager can be challenging. This is because the demand is much higher than the supply. It is also critical to keep in account that CSMs have a higher attrition rate, up to 20% year over year, according to TSIA’s State of Customer Success report.

• Consistent Training: If you are building an in-house customer success team, you need to ensure that you have proper training and change management processes in place. Your training module must also match the job roles of the different members of your customer success team.

• Inefficient Mapping: You have to segment your customers and then assign the relevant CSM for them. If this part is mismanaged, your customer success module will fail, as your managers will work on too many accounts. Consequently, your customers will be unhappy and might move to another organization with better customer support

What are the Pros and Cons of Outsourcing?

An outsourced customer success model is a viable path for businesses that need to expand their customer base quickly. Let’s look at some of the advantages and disadvantages of this model.

The Pros

• Streamlined User Onboarding: Increasing retention rate begins at onboarding. When you outsource customer success, your vendor will assign a CSM for each account, ensuring that your customers are comfortable and satisfied through their journey. Likewise, the Customer Success Manager will be instrumental in retaining a customer who is currently on a free trial by guiding them through the process. 

• Cost-effective: Building an in-house team involves more than just paying salaries. You need to consider employee benefits, ongoing training, software, equipment, and facilities. Add to this the high turnover rates of losing your customer success manager. You can save these costs with an outsourcing solutions provider that has already invested in these areas. 

• Expansion: Your customer’s lifetime value is primarily generated through renewals, cross-sells, and up-sells. When you work with an outsourced customer success team you will be better equipped to identify and convert valuable upsells and cross-sell opportunities. Consequently, you will create a more profound association between your customer and your product.

• Consistent Experience: Customer success is all about the customer. With an outsourced manager, you can ensure your customer experience is always smooth, even if there are transitions between various points of contact. This is especially important when about 80% of consumers will leave a product after just one bad experience.  

The Cons

• Trust: Establishing trust with an external organization can be hard. Your goal should be to find a solutions provider who is passionate about nurturing customer relationships and has established leading methodologies for customer success. Evaluating your ideal outsourcing agency will be a smooth process once you have done your homework. 

• Loss of Control: If you feel like you need to have visibility and control over every detail of running your customer success department, then an outsourced model might not be the right fit for you. Seamless collaboration can only take place when your outsourcing partner has control over how your CS module should work. 

Finding Your Fit

Between the in-house vs. outsource debate, don’t forget to look at the value of having a customer success function. 

Long gone are the days when customer success was viewed as a ‘nice-to-have’ function. More than 90% of organizations have identified customer success as a dedicated function in their company. 

The reasons to outsource customer success are umpteen and its benefits permeate throughout your organization and work at different levels for the overall success of your business. 

Consequently, decide after considering how a particular model will affect you in the long term and the cost efficiencies that will come with it.

The term ‘customer-centric culture’ might feel self-explanatory. While it does entail that you put your customers first, it only scratches the surface of “customer-centric”. To truly define its aspects, many researchers have spent a good amount of time thinking about it.

Key Insights

Gone are the days when adding a person’s first name into a generic email promotion counted as personalization.

Key Takeaways

• When businesses think of growth, they usually think about reaching out to more people and acquiring more sales

• Besides traditional marketing and customer acquisition strategies, it is brand advocacy that can help you keep your marketing costs low

• It is one of the most valuable marketing strategies where you tap into your happy customer base to spread the word about your brand

• There are numerous strategies that can help companies to harness the enthusiasm of their brand advocates for business growth

Getting new customers is good for any business.

But real business growth comes from existing customers.

In fact, a research by Bain and Company shows that return customers spend 33% more per order compared to new clients. Another study suggests that existing customers are 50% more likely to try new products.

Why is this important? 

In an era where it has become surprisingly easy for consumers to walk away from brands after a single bad experience, turning your customers into brand advocates should be at the top of the to-do list. This is more critical than ever since new acquisition costs have increased by almost 50%. 

Think of this as a fandom, like how major sports teams and musicians operate. 

Instead of buying out the tickets, these brand advocates will fill their social media feeds with news about your brand, helping move prospective customers through the marketing funnel. 

So how do you build brand advocacy? And what should be your brand advocacy strategy? 

As you get down to turning your target audience to brand advocates, remember it all starts with the efficacy of your customer success solution. Only when you deliver experiences that delight your customers will they endorse your brand in their network.

Let’s begin.

What is Brand Advocacy?

Did you know that a staggering 76% of individuals surveyed said that they have a deeper trust in the content shared by “regular” people than content shared by brands? 

Simply put, brand advocacy means that the people who are closest to your brand will continue to show their love and support for your product(s) or service(s) by promoting your organization organically to new audiences. While referring new customers, they also create content on your behalf. 

Your brand advocates can include your customers as they are not affiliated with your company which makes their support genuine and more influential. Your employees can be brand advocates too. Armed with deep insights into how your solution caters to clients, they can positively influence your brand through superior customer success management. 

Your business partners can also affect your customers’ purchasing decisions. These include charitable organizations and other companies affiliated with your brand. Lastly, you have influencers. A well-known influencer can extend the reach of your brand far and wide. 

Turning Customers into Brand Advocates: Why is it Important?

With brand advocacy, you will quickly find an increase in your revenue without increasing your marketing budget. Your fans will do a lot of word-of-mouth marketing for you on their social media platforms. 

Another good reason is that your happy customers will continue to return to you again and again. 

According to a report by PwC, 17% of consumers will leave a brand after just one bad experience. Since finding a brand that precisely caters to their needs can be challenging, customers who genuinely love a brand will stick with the company for a very long time. 

Strong brand advocates will increase awareness about your company beyond your immediate target audience. This will help you eliminate costs associated with customer acquisition strategies. 

For these reasons, both B2B and B2C companies have begun to focus their initiatives on developing effective brand advocacy programs. 

How Do You Turn Customers into Brand Advocates?

1. Know Your Customers

Despite the expansive power of brand advocates, this will still be a small portion of your overall customer base. 

Most customers will probably purchase from you once (or perhaps repeatedly) but will not engage with your brand as much as you hope. This means that you need to keep a steady eye on the ones who do and who are taking their time to spread the positive word about your product or service. 

A simple question such as “How likely are you to recommend us to a friend” can help you understand what makes your customers happy. Social listening can come in handy. Keep an eye on people who are speaking favorably about you on social media. 

2. Appreciate Your Customers

Your customers want to feel like a VIP when they do business with you. 

Deliver an enhanced and personalized customer experience at every touchpoint, whether it means optimizing your website for search engines to having helpful support, both chat and call options, in place. 

Having a happy customer base can also be achieved through giving extra perks. 

Loyalty programs can help deliver this value to your customers consistently. 

Rewards, discounts, promotions, and special events will demonstrate that your relationship is more than just transactional. 

3. Establish a Memorable Onboarding Process

Your onboarding process has a direct impact on your customer retention rates. It’s also a crucial facet of your brand advocacy strategy. 

In fact, 86% of consumers are likely to stick longer with a product if they experience a better onboarding process that gives a holistic education about the many offerings. 

So how do you do this? 

Start with asking your customers why they are using your product and what they want to achieve with it. 

Equipped with this information, guide them to the most useful features of your product rather than throwing all your product features all at once. This will also minimize friction points for your customers.

You can also give them templates so they can start using your product features at once. Additionally, develop an email sequence that educates your customers on the best use of your product. 

4. Give Them Exciting News

Turning customers into brand advocates means sharing exciting news, exclusive sneak-peeks, and one-time-only discounts to keep the excitement going. 

Hold special “fans-only” shopping events where customers have unique access to your products. This will encourage them to spread the word in their network. 

Amplify this word-of-mouth marketing with referral rewards for fans who successfully encourage someone to buy your product or service. Such rewards can be a free product, a discount, or even cash for their next purchase. 

5. Create a Customer-Centric Culture

Zendesk conducted a detailed study of more than 45000 businesses across 140 countries and found that almost 70% of customers expect companies to collaborate between different departments on their behalf. 

If your employees are transferring a customer to another BU for issue resolution, it can create a bad image in the eyes of your customers. 

This is where a customer-centric culture can help you. Brand advocacy can only be effective if you help establish a culture where customer satisfaction and happiness are at the center of all your key decision-making. 

Such a culture must be part of your core value system and every department should take the onus of effective customer success management.

6. Amplify Your Presence

While 70% of consumers expect brands to respond within a day of reaching out over social media, the average brand response rate stands at just 25%. The more active you are on social media, the higher your chances are to reach out to your potential brand advocates. 

Don’t be active on every channel. But you should be present in more than one. 

Conduct an analysis of the platforms where your customers are the most active. 

Once you have established the channels, it’s time to get creative. 

Encourage your brand advocates to create their own content. This can be through video submissions of how they are using your product for YouTube or images where they are using your product for Instagram Story.

Immersing your brand advocates with content development can help them feel like they are part of your brand and not just observers. 

Ready for Brand Advocacy?

Your job is not done when your customer has successfully transacted. Keep your customers engaged to turn them into brand advocates who will do a lot of the marketing work for you. 

Brand advocates play a critical role in driving sales for you. 

While in the age of 24/7 connectivity and social media, it’s not so tough to keep your customers engaged. The challenge, however, is to be consistent in providing your customers with first-class services. This helps to nurture your customers into brand advocates. 

Looking to make customers your best growth engine? Benefit from a world-class CS strategy at scale, Partner with MarketStar today!