As companies strive to better understand their customers and stand out from the competition, you start seeing a merging of otherwise unrelated roles. Today, many job opportunities combine programs under one title or team, such as Customer Experience and Advocacy, Customer Programs and Advocacy, or even more general Customer Marketing.
Defining the Programs
The Voice of the Customer program is a component of customer experience. It centers on customer needs, expectations, and preferences about your products and services. The VoC program gathers, analyzes, and acts on customer feedback to improve the customer experience.
Implementing a Voice of the Customer program can lead to higher retention rates, improved product and service offerings, and increased revenue. Today, VoC programs are essential to many company strategies. The benefits reach all company areas, going beyond just sales and marketing.
A Customer Advocacy program focuses on turning happy customers into brand advocates. It gives customers a platform to amplify their voice with your brand and to proactively promote and recommend your product or service to their peers. It is much more than customer satisfaction; it shows higher commitment and loyalty to your brand.
Offering a Customer Advocacy program can lead to higher retention rates, a shortened sales cycle, increased revenue, and stronger brand awareness. The program aligns many internal stakeholders, from marketing to sales to customer success and more.
Bringing Them Together
The VoC and Customer Advocacy programs have a common intersection – higher retention rates and increased revenue. A Voice of the Customer program helps identify happy customers who can advocate for your brand while identifying actionable areas for improvement in customer experience (CX). A Customer Advocacy program helps to identify brand advocates for one or more feedback activities in a VoC program, such as a customer or product advisory board.
I have held one of these combined roles as Director of Customer Experience and Advocacy at an industry-leading technology company in the DevSecOps space. My job involved creating the company’s inaugural customer advisory program and a customer reference and advocacy program.
In the development of these programs, I first identified the opportunities to align them with the company’s goals:
- Capture new customer references and generate value from existing customers
- Build brand awareness and drive customer retention by turning our customers into brand advocates.
- Facilitate a customer advisory relationship that creates value for the company and our customers (feedback).
Next, I presented an overview of each program’s approach:
Customer Reference & Advocacy Program
- Develop content – create the customer story
- Offer engagement activities – leverage the customer story
- Promote and drive awareness – share the customer story
Customer Advisory Program
- Customer Advisory Board (audience is business executive)
- In-person and virtual components
- Bi-annual meetings
- Invite members to speak at internal sales kickoffs – learn from the decision-makers
- Align customer invitations to a retention and growth strategy for major accounts.
- Product Advisory Board (audience is product owner)
- Virtual component
- Minimum of bi-annual meetings if not quarterly meetings
- Align customer invitations to product power users
- Net Promoter Survey
- Align this feedback loop to the sales cycle (business/product)
- Identify promoters for the Customer Reference & Advocacy Program
Then, I teamed with internal stakeholders in marketing, sales, sales & marketing operations, customer success, and customer support to understand our customer journey map. This helped us identify our roles & responsibilities in the programs’ charters.
For the Customer Reference & Advocacy program, we focused on sales enablement and amplifying our customers’ stories. I developed the program to offer multiple ways customers could tell their stories based on varying levels of commitment and exposure for each activity. We let the customer tell us which activities met their needs, time constraints, and comfort level.
For the Customer Advisory program, we focused on capturing feedback, analyzing the data, developing an action plan, and monitoring customer responses. We identified internal stakeholders, set objectives, and selected the tools and methodology to launch the Customer and Product Advisory Boards and the Net Promoter survey.
The Results
Within four months, the Customer Reference & Advocacy program and Net Promoter survey were underway. Seven months later, we hosted our first virtual Customer Advisory Board meeting.
Within eighteen months, we had doubled our customer references and advocates. Additionally, we had a 100% turnout for our virtual Customer Advisory Board meeting and a 77% attendance rate for our in-person meeting. One of our Product Advisory Boards had held two meetings, and we were expanding the board concept to other product lines.
We evolved our Net Promoter survey to include both automatic and manual processes. The automatic process allowed us to capture customer sentiment during the sales cycle. The manual process enabled our customer success team to take the pulse of their customers outside the sales cycle. This was particularly important before a renewal deal and driving retention.
The Power of Integration
Companies can create exceptional customer experiences by gathering customer feedback through a Voice of the Customer program and making the necessary adjustments to improve and expand the processes. Likewise, providing your customers with a platform to tell and share their success stories with your brand through a Customer Advocacy program helps you stand out from the competition.
More businesses are seeing an opportunity to combine these roles under one title or team. Both programs aid in driving higher retention rates, increasing revenue, and building a deeper relationship with customers.
