Successful businesses are built through hard work, determination and ambition, but they also rely on one thing – customers. Without customers, there would be no business.
All organisations need to ensure they have a steady flow of people who want to buy whatever product or service is being sold.
As well as attracting new customers, it’s vital to retain those a business already has, and to encourage them to keep spending money. That can only be achieved if the organisation puts the customers first and is entirely focused on their needs.
It means offering outstanding customer service, responding to feedback or complaints, and regularly reviewing what the business is doing, how it operates, and the products or services it offers.
It’s important because a satisfied customer is a benefit way beyond the individual financial contribution they may make to the business’s income.
In fact, customers can be a powerful form of marketing and advertising in their own right, especially if they are so impressed with the product or service they’ve received that they are happy to tell someone else about it. This is called customer advocacy.
There’s a lot of research to suggest that personal recommendations influence many – if not all – of the purchase decisions we make.
Advertising is still important, but, when given a choice of products we’re more likely to select the one that has been recommended, even if we have been swayed by marketing messages.
We’re also likely to trust the opinions of our friends and family more than any other source of information.
Of course, while a personal, face-to-face recommendation is by far the best endorsement, it’s still possible to harness the power of channels like social media to encourage and promote conversation about a business.
Customer advocacy is nothing new and we do it all the time. You may have told a neighbour about a good tradesperson when they needed some work doing, or told a friend about the fantastic food at a local restaurant, or waxed lyrical to work colleagues about a recent holiday experience.
If so, you’ve been a customer advocate.
Why do businesses need to bother with customer advocacy?
Business owners won’t like this – but they are no longer the most important person when it comes to selling a product or service. In fact, it’s the customers themselves.
If they are loyal and highly-satisfied, they are more likely to proactively recommend a brand without being paid to do so.
On average, about 50% of customers are likely to say something positive about products they buy or the firms they do business with. That’s why organisations need to be creative and find ways of putting happy and loyal customers in front of buyers.
But, customer advocates don’t just refer new business: they are repeat customers in their own right and keep spending their own money as well.
For some firms, customer advocacy is a relatively new concept.
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