| Experts Corner |  CRM investment is wasted if the intelligence it delivers fails to influence despatched communications. How can businesses ensure that money spent on CRM analytics actually begins to benefit the messages that are delivered to customers and prospects?
David Jefferies, Marketing Director, Pitney Bowes
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Building Trust and Relationships Through Customer Advocacy (Part I)
Chris Lawer, Founder and CEO, The OMC Group
 Through the internet and other new technologies, customers are able to acquire more detailed information about brands, products and services in order to make smarter and more personalised choices on their own terms. They can validate what a company is saying and can more easily reject claims or statements based on their own knowledge.
Also, customers can access new knowledge about the behaviour of companies and can more readily question and challenge this behaviour. Similarly, they can more easily consult and collaborate with other customers. In doing so, they place higher value on peer-group reviews and dialogue than the one-way marketing messages sent out by firms.
Taken together, today’s customer is less “value-taking” — accepting whatever is offered them as a passive recipient of marketing and brand messages - and more “value-extracting” — defining value on their own terms according to their personal needs and then taking more control of how this value is delivered and ultimately used. This “value-extracting” behaviour of customers means that traditional or “conventional wisdom” marketing and CRM approaches are becoming less effective. It also means that consumers are less inclined to trust what companies say because they can more easily disprove it.
Nevertheless, some companies are discovering important new mechanisms and approaches to ”align” their CRM, branding and marketing practices with the needs of their customers. These methods are being dubbed “customer advocacy” based responses and in this short article, I briefly attempt to define and explore them.
Defining customer advocacy
Customer advocacy strategy aims to build deeper customer relationships by earning new levels of trust and commitment. Put simply, customer advocacy is “doing what is best for the customer” even if this sometimes entails recommending a competitor’s product. This may seem counter-intuitive yet the logic is quite clear. By acting as the customer’s advocate in a market, a company has a greater chance of earning higher levels of loyalty and has a superior ability to spread positive word-of-mouth, thereby reducing marketing costs and achieving new forms of customer alignment and partnership.
I identify four, interrelated firm strategies for leveraging customer advocacy. I illustrate each with reference to companies that are able to occupy this privileged position.
1. Focus on customer success
The main intent of organisations with a customer advocacy strategy is “customer success”. They aim to create more authentic customer relationships by providing expert levels of individual customer protection and support. As higher levels of trust, accountability and transparency build, customer advocacy is a means for organisations to resolve their customer’s problems, and help them make important decisions.
Focusing on customer success requires that firms sometimes step outside the boundaries of the company’s offer to consider the whole context in which customer’s use its products and services. Second it demands a focus on the experience and emotion of providing successful outcomes. Third, it means educating and incentivising business partners to align with the advocacy strategy.
Cisco Systems, the network solutions technology provider, has been developing customer advocacy for over a decade. Because customer satisfaction has been a core value of the organisation since its inception in 1984, Sandy Lerner, one of the founders of Cisco Systems, created a company specifically to accelerate customer success with Cisco network technology and applications that meet their business needs.
Together with their partners, Cisco regards its overall purpose as helping customers improve their productivity, reduce operational costs, and get their applications and services to market as quickly as possible. More recently, with the creation of Cisco Services, the company has evolved from a product-based to a solution-based offer. In doing so, the company is responding to their customer’s demand for more proactive thought-leadership, increased knowledge transfer, tailored offerings, and consistent quality.
Now, Cisco not only supplies the network, but also provides the support necessary to ensure that customers make the most of their networks. This allows them to build more integrated relationships with their customers and their partners. Uniquely, Cisco stages annual customer advocacy awards for business partners whose performance and behaviour is most aligned with Cisco’s advocacy principles.
2. Achieve greater marketing context
Second, customer advocacy firms seek to incentivise and involve customers in their marketing and branding efforts. They support customers with marketing approaches that help them to proactively and voluntarily convey their experiences to friends, relatives and colleagues. To do this effectively, they must integrate new marketing techniques into the overall customer experience by creating and facilitating environments and contexts for customers to become more engaged or have to a dialogue with the brand. In this way, customer advocacy-based marketing avoids the overt “push” marketing strategies characterised by a lot of relationship marketing efforts.
So Harley Davidson — at the extreme end — does not do any marketing at all! It stages regular HOG Club events at which avid Harley enthusiasts share their experiences, buy merchandise and live the brand, spreading word-of-mouth. Their marketing is mutual and respectful between Harley and the customer.
GM’s On*Star service is an example of a medium that delivers marketing messages linked to a driver’s location, event and context. By reconceiving the vehicle as an information device, the car becomes a means for On*Star to be the customer's advocate and to build a relationship along higher — more involved - dimensions. Such information also helps the firm to shape its and its partners offer by responding to customer preferences, e.g. which restaurants in a local area are rated highly and which are not.
Part I
Chris is the founder of The OMC Group - consultancy specialising in customer-based innovation and business strategy. The OMC Group can help you to:
• Diagnose your key customer-related issues and challenges
• Envision and explore innovative strategies and options for creating breakthrough customer value and enhanced marketing performance
• Design and execute new customer experiences for lasting competitive advantage
• Successfully undertake organisation-wide customer-based innovation projects that have top- and bottom-line impact
Contact The OMC Group at info@theomcgroup.com or www.theomcgroup.com
Company: The OMC Group
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