Your customer advocacy program can benefit from technology to provide you a single view of communication with a customer and equally important, provide you a single view of communication between your sales and marketing teams internally.
Many of today’s reference management software solutions can be integrated with CRM solutions and automate the processes you have established in your program for customer engagement, like developing a customer success story, tracking revenue to reference requests or nominating customers for the program.
We used one such tool to be our single source of internal communication for customer engagement. Here is what we did and how we benefited:
- Streamlined the creative process directly to the agency. Through the tool, we created a line of communication between our creative agency and the global team on developing customer assets, like success stories. Benefit: We enabled brand consistency and tone, drove global economies of scale, and improved response time to our customers.
- Integrated the sales request process for references with SFDC. All sales requests for references were integrated at the opportunity level. Benefit: We accurately tracked revenue influence directly between reference activity (customer) and sales opportunity.
- Tracked program participation by our customers. We identified each time a customer was engaged in our program and for which activity. Benefit: This gave us a view of those customers who are advocating for us. We also leveraged this information to offer a token of our company’s appreciation for their active participation.
- Enabled program expansion. We launched a workflow process that allowed anyone who identified a Happy Customer to let us know so we could follow up. Benefit: We grew our internal support that grew our program participation.
- Provided customer data 24/7. As a SaaS-based tool, all departments had access to seeing if customer X was in our program and in what activities they were interested to participate or had already participated. Benefit: One true source of customer information connected many groups around customer engagement, such as product marketing, account-based marketing, demand generation teams, PR and the brand team, not to mention sales.
- Curated externally available customer marketing material. We used the tool to house our newly created customer success stories, press releases, thought leadership, and any material where the customer was telling their story with our brand. Benefit: Presales Consultants had customer reference points at their fingertips for Proof of Concept demos; Account teams and inside sales used this information to demonstrate customer proof points when engaging prospects; Demand generation teams used these materials in their campaigns, etc.
The benefits of managing a customer advocacy program with today’s technology are endless and allows you to bring together your internal teams around your company’s greatest assets – your customers!
