Customer Advocacy Framework - what is yours?

Jeff Breunsbach

As you've rolled our "Customer Advocacy" programs to both your team and your customers, how have you put that into a framework that can be simple? 

We're looking at bucketing categories under 5 or 6 main advocate motivations.
1. Gratitude
2. Rewards & Gifts
3. Feedback
4. 6 Degrees
5. Influence

There are probably 50+ advocacy activities to track, so curious how you have tried to make that into a language that everyone understands and can get behind.

Jeff Breunsbach

Bubbling this up

Sean Wilkes

These programs so often start with good intentions and often descend to just being used to signal to certain customers that "you are important to us" and massage their ego. Following this topic with interest.

Dana Alvarenga

What is the 6 Degrees? And yes making the activities more broad is easier for your customers to consume. Events for example - but that can map to webinars, meetups, conferences

Harsh Shah

Thanks for sharing this @Jeff Breunsbach , would love to know each of these categories in detail. I believe there is an event coming in May about CAB, not sure if it is related.

If you've some resources to understand all these categories in detail then please do share, would love to know how it works.

Thanks!

Jeff Breunsbach

https://gaingrowretain.com/discussion/comment/9898#Comment_9898

@Dana Alvarenga 6 Degrees is the idea of 6 Degrees of Separation - so helping our contacts meet one another and network with other people in the same industry, use case, etc.

Brian O'Keeffe

I am in the process of working on expanding the program in my latest role and can tell you what works:

1) We created. a club and invited customers to be members. Each was nominated and then enrolled.

2) Insiders was a reference program but also included a private community group, members only invites such as regional gathering or during the pandemic, Zoom events. Advocacy was only a small part of the program, but the key part.

3) Rewards were super simple and provided when a reference was provided or other advocacy event took place, like speaking at a conference. (Rewards might be gift cards but more often a discount or even complete covering the cost of attending an event, if they participated in a panel.)

4) Enrollees are VIPs at all company gatherings and get super duper deluxe treatment. Showing that we value them at every opportunity. For example, I reserved a private VIP booth at our Las Vegas user conference at the Hard Rock and then texted every Insider to be a VIP guest at the event, all of who I knew were attending and would have had floor seats. It was talked about for a long time after, everyone remembered attending and having deluxe seating and food and drink options.

I led an initiative to expand our advocacy program and achieved great results. It took a bit of experimentation and a lot of having to barrel past objections and build advocates internally for the program. A lot of the issues to overcome were internal partners sabotaging potential advocates, or outreach attempts, either because they had a pre-defined, rigid expectation of what an advocate was that did not match, or they expressed a negative element to the customer that might have been accurate, but was presented poorly and undermined the outreach.

Hope this helps!