Get Started With Customer Advocacy
Customer advocacy provides needed fuel for attracting new customers. Start building a customer advocacy program to transform customer satisfaction into revenue growth.
Member Challenge
Getting started with customer advocacy (CA) is no easy task. Many customer success professionals carry out ad hoc customer advocacy activities to address immediate needs but lack a more strategic approach.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
- Customer success leaders must reposition their CA program around growth; the recognition that customer advocacy is a strategic growth initiative is necessary to succeed in today’s competitive market.
- Get key stakeholders on board early – especially Sales!
- Always link your CA efforts back to retention and growth.
- Make building genuine relationships with your advocates the cornerstone of your CA program.
Impact and Result
- Enable the organization to identify and develop meaningful relationships with top customers and advocates.
- Understand the concepts and benefits of CA and how CA can be used to improve marketing and sales and fuel growth and competitiveness.
- Follow SoftwareReviews’ methodology to identify where to start to apply CA within the organization.
- Develop a customer advocacy proof of concept/pilot program to gain stakeholder approval and funding to get started with or expand efforts around customer advocacy.
Research & Tools
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1. Get Started With Customer Advocacy Executive Brief – An overview of why customer advocacy is critical to your organization and the recommended approach for getting started with a pilot program.
Understand the strategic benefits and process for building a formal customer advocacy program. To be successful, you must reposition CA as a strategic growth initiative and continually link any CA efforts back to growth.
This storyboard will help you build the business case for launching a formal CA program as well as provide you with the overall steps for how to get started.
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Get Started With Customer Advocacy Storyboard
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2. Define Your Advocacy Requirements – Assess your current customer advocacy efforts, identify gaps, and define your program requirements.
With the assessment tool and steps outlined in the storyboard, you will be able to understand the gaps and pain points, where and how to improve your efforts, and how to establish program requirements.
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Customer Advocacy Maturity Assessment Tool
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3. Win Executive Approval and Launch Pilot – Develop goals, success metrics, and timelines, and gain approval for your customer advocacy pilot.
Align on pilot goals, key milestones, and program elements using the template and storyboard to effectively communicate with stakeholders and gain executive buy-in for your customer advocacy pilot.
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Get Started With Customer Advocacy Executive Presentation Template
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