C-CHANGE GROWTH DRIVERS

• Customer advocates are the most effective salesforce your company will ever recruit. It is far better to invest in great customer experience, led by cross-functional teams and customer advocates, than it is to spend inordinate money purely on recruiting and training expensive sales teams.
• Customer Advocacy is the result of implementing the C-change growth engine, and it helps create customer-led brands and drive sustainable, profitable growth.
• Customer Advocacy creates a cultural C-change. It does this by galvanising the organisation around listening directly to insight from customer advocates (this is a key part of Customer Voice) to co-create more targeted products and services that meet their needs, as well as by customer advocates telling their story in a far more authentic way. This is done at every stage of the customer journey to drive organic growth (i.e. with existing customers) as well as to engage prospective customers.

TALKING ABOUT A CUSTOMER REVOLUTION!

Since the launch of the Internet, the floodgates of information have opened, leading to greater transparency for customers. We have seen the breakdown of control by ‘corporations’ over the buying process. We have gone from having a captive audience with customers to a situation where their attention is now scarce. This means that companies now face the challenge of spending disproportionally more money for a land grab for the remaining attention of time-poor customers. Customer Advocacy, if executed well, spans both marketing and sales to accelerate growth. Also, it represents a smart way to capture customer attention.

Bill Lee, author of The Hidden Wealth of Customers and founder of the Centre for Customer Engagement, commented, ‘For me, firms like HubSpot, BMC, Marketo (an Adobe company), Salesforce, Finastra, and Microsoft have stand out capabilities for creating and leveraging customer advocates and influencers. Led by smart people, they often build relationships with the firm's best customers more effectively than anyone else in the organisation’.

Now, the customer has the power over the buying process and their journey. This is especially important when you consider that, according to Forrester, up to 90% of the buying process in B2B is done before a business makes a sales call; hence, hearing from customer advocates online and offline as credible sources of information are very important in driving growth. In this chapter, there are fascinating examples of Microsoft in the technology sector and LCH (formerly London Clearing House) in the financial services sector on how marketing and sales skills are blurring in the quest for organisations to be genuinely customer-led.

The Internet and the advent of social media have brought transparency and ubiquitous access to information. However, they bring with them a whole new set of challenges. While it allows businesses of all sizes to sell their wares to the world, how can potential customers determine those who will really deliver against their well-crafted promises? This brings us to highlight the twenty-first-century customer journey (see Figure 10.1), where the buying process has shifted from a linear model. In this context, customer advocacy represents a shooting star in a galaxy of information.

CUSTOMER ADVOCACY IS THE SHOOTING STAR IN A GALAXY OF INFORMATION

In the past, customers had to go through a fairly uniform number of linear steps before purchasing products and services. Typically, a customer would have little choice other than to accept information given from organisations. They would only have a limited number of alternative, independent sources of information, such as their peers, industry associations and the press, on which to rely before buying. In the twenty-first century, customers and prospective customers are bombarded with an abundance of information via multiple channels including the web, smartphones and tablets, through to events, direct messaging, social media and review sites. All of this has brought us full circle. Word of mouth, perhaps the oldest form of communication, is still today the most effective way of sorting the wheat from the chaff. As customers, we seek out those who we respect and trust, and so we will trust products and services endorsed by these individuals and organisations. The smart organisations in today's market are letting their customers do the talking.

They are helping them to do it with customer advocacy to drive awareness, engagement, business development, sales – and, ultimately, more meaningful, customer-led brands. It is all about nurturing your customers in the Customer Economy as genuine champions or ‘advocates’ to tell their stories in their own words online and offline. Organisations should work closely with customer advocates tell these stories tightly, following along the customer journey to help you cut through the noise and drive sustainable growth.

The answer to achieving this lies in the careful joint business and marketing planning with customer advocates which we term ‘mutual business currency’. This provides credible, authentic content combined with strategic, targeted customer advocacy marketing and sales placements to appeal to decision-makers on their buying journey. We know this works and that it provides tangible returns on investment.

In this chapter, we will also share how customer advocacy can provide a ‘C-change’ for leaders and employees to evolve into a customer-led culture. Also, customer advocates are a key part of customer engagement and demand-generation programmes. Customer advocates are known and trusted and help drive a higher quality and value of leads, as well as higher conversion rates, in shorter timeframes. This chapter discusses the customer advocacy programme implemented by Microsoft, and the amazing results they have achieved.

SO, WHAT IS AN ADVOCATE?

‘An advocate is a person who supports or recommends on behalf of another. Further to that, customer advocates are more likely to spend more with your organisation and more frequently. With their emotional attachment to your customer-led brand, the possibilities to work with customer advocates are infinite in terms of driving long-term business growth’.

We define four types of customers, culminating in the highest level being the customer advocate, to which companies should aspire in order to accelerate growth. By adopting the C-change growth engine, companies can catalyse the number and quality of customer advocates.

1. Customer negative – where a customer has a negative perception of the brand from their own experience, or influenced by a trusted source such as a colleague, family member or the views of an opinion former or influencer – such as vloggers in business-to-consumer (B2C) (e.g. James Charles, the American make-up artist). It is worth noting that there is an opportunity to turn ‘customer negative’, or what Mark Organ, Chairman of the Board at Influitive, calls ‘Badvocates’, into advocates. In fact, they can often become the best advocates.
2. Customer neutral – they are customers who are agnostic in their attitude towards your brand and organisation and have no strong emotional attachment to them. This represents an opportunity to nurture them and move one step closer to the customer advocacy bullseye. However, ‘customer neutrals’ can be the hardest to turn into advocates.
3. Customer positive – is where the customer has positive perceptions of your brand but a passive relationship. Therefore, they have insufficient emotion towards the brand to instigate action and customer advocacy. Many organisations make the mistake of thinking they have customer advocates who want to work with them. In fact, these customers are often ‘customer positive’, where they have to be given some inducement such as a financial discount for them to endorse the organisation. This is not a customer advocate.
4. Customer advocate – where the customer has an active and emotional relationship with the brand and is willing to be an ambassador for the organisation. The aim of every organisation should be to reach the Customer Advocacy Bullseye (see Figure 10.2). This brings an enhanced customer relationship and improved loyalty, which results in increased brand awareness, profitability and market share. The customer advocate does not need to rely on financial inducements to endorse your organisation. They will tell their story with you because they have an emotional attachment to you, owing to which they will go to extraordinary lengths to be your advocate. This is hugely powerful.

THE NEED FOR NEW SKILLS: THE RISE OF THE ‘CUSTOMER ADVOCACY CONSULTANT’

The Customer Economy requires new skills to meet the far more demanding needs of the customer who is information-rich and in control of the buying process. As a result, the roles of the traditional salesperson or marketer from a siloed department with constrained skills and limited access to the knowledge needed to satisfy more sophisticated customer needs are under threat.

With the fight to capture customers' attention, the customer advocate marketer needs to be adept at being creative to engage and nurture customer advocates. Meanwhile, they need to be good at data with a disciplined, scientific approach to testing messages, customer-led issues and campaigns that resonate with other customers. Mark Organ, Chairman of the Board at Influitive, a software and services company, ranked 87th on Deloitte's Technology Fast 500™ (fastest-growing technology, media, telecommunications, life sciences and energy tech companies in North America), says that the reason why there is a scarcity of customer advocacy consultants doing it well is because there are few people who are creative while possessing scientific and data skills. The best customer advocacy consultants need to combine the ‘one-to-one’ empathy and love for customers typical of Customer Success departments with creative ‘one to many’ marketing campaign skills. Traditional marketers prefer to segment the market and deliver campaigns to a large number of people and are conversely less inclined to build one-to-one relationships.

Mark Organ continued, ‘The Customer Advocacy marketer is both a creative artist and a scientist. They balance creativity such as the application of what, how and where a customer advocate tells their story, as well as psychology, gut feelings, and emotional intelligence for relationship building, plus hard data, facts and statistics to track ROI’.

In addition, there is an emergence of leaders and vice-presidents of customer marketing both ‘selling to’ and ‘selling through’ customers, nurturing customer advocates for organic growth as well as new customers. It is a sector that is growing in maturity, with impressive people moving into these roles who love customers, including tech companies in business-to-business (B2B) as well as in B2C, examining converting leads into lifetime value customers. Now, there are examples of tech companies with teams of up to 200 people working in customer marketing globally. Typically, the role reports into the CMO and looks at how to make the customer journey more satisfying. For example, the hospitality industry with Ritz-Carlton and Disney is innovating guest experience with direct input from customer advocates in the form of ‘guest advocates’. Typically, customer marketers are taking responsibility for a number of areas from customer advocacy communities, nurturing customer advocates as references with prospects, getting them to speak at events to drive organic growth and new business. This is all in pursuit of becoming what Mark Organ describes a ‘customer-powered enterprise’, competing on the basis of the relationships with customer advocates. As a result, we are seeing the customer becoming central to marketing within organisations, and, conversely, sales teams are becoming smaller because the cost per head is high. The corollary of this is that customer marketing will continue to represent an increasingly larger proportion of the company budget, because it has increasingly proved the success of integrating successfully into every part of the organisation from sales to experience.

The best customer advocate marketers share these skills with growth hackers who bend rules to find new ways of engaging customers while, at the same time, having incredible discipline. Mark Organ added, ‘Influitive is investing in training dozens of people every month to develop this rare combination of creative and scientific skills – as we know, the demand is there in the Customer Economy’. Calling CEOs and CxOs, you need to cultivate these skills in your organisations in order to drive profitable growth.

CUSTOMER ADVOCACY TO DRIVE GROWTH

One of the main issues facing organisations and a key accusation levelled at marketing is how to generate leads which are short-term and diminish the perceived value of marketing. Of paramount importance is to change the tactical conversation of marketing's ability to create leads to a strategic one about mapping customer advocates onto the business objectives, mission and vision of your organisation to drive measurable, sustainable growth. Read our four stages of Customer Advocacy as a framework to deliver success for you and your customer advocates.

STAGE 1: LISTENING TO YOUR CUSTOMER VOICE TO INFORM YOUR CUSTOMER ADVOCACY STRATEGY

First, you need to listen to your customer advocates to determine their traits from the Customer Voice data (see Chapter 1), from which you can nurture ‘Customer Neutrals and Customer Negatives’. This will inform and shape your Customer Advocacy strategy.

Bill Lee added, ‘I think it's important for practitioners to use Customer Voice to inform the development of Customer Advocacy programmes. My advice would be: transparent, authentic conversations between customers and prospects is the true “Voice of the Customer” and the best sales tool you have in today's world. In the early days of Salesforce, Marc Benioff found (to his surprise) that bringing prospects together with existing customers at local events simply to have conversations drove growth. 80% of prospects who attended such events eventually became customers’.

STAGE 2: PROFILING YOUR CUSTOMER ADVOCATES

Customer advocate profiling needs to take place with CxO involvement. This is where the customer advocacy programme leader's consultancy skills kick in. They need to work with CxOs, the CEO and heads of sales and marketing to build on the data from Customer Voice and identify existing and potential customer advocates. The profiling of these customer advocates will be aligned to the business growth plan and also will involve consultation with the client directors or CSMs. The customer advocacy programme leader needs to sell the benefits and value of customer advocacy to the client directors and CxOs for them to have confidence in opening the next stage of direct contact with the customers.

STAGE 3: MAPPING YOUR CUSTOMER ADVOCATES ONTO YOUR BUSINESS STRATEGY AND PLAN

Map your customer advocates onto your business plan, so that they can be embedded in every area of the business as well as at every touchpoint on the customer journey. Working with customer advocates can be a positive business disrupter, driving a quantum leap in organic growth; that is, with retained customers as well as in forging new business.

This is not a one-off process of gleaning information but a dynamic, two-way process with your customer advocates. For example, if your business strategy is to focus on certain horizontal products and services with say, 40% of planned revenues in financial services, 30% in retail and 30% in manufacturing, then the next step is to map potential customer advocates proportionately on those respective business areas. This is a pivotal business planning process which needs to bring together CxOs, including the CCO, CMO and chief sales or revenue officer, and customer experience.

‘Select customer advocates as if they'll become your most important growth asset – because if you do so, they will’, pointed out Bill Lee. ‘Don't limit your choices to your existing customer base. Look at the whole market, and ask, “Which prospects out there would make the best advocates for us?” Make it a priority to win their business. By the way, your “best advocates” aren't necessarily the biggest logos’.

STAGE 4: JOINT CUSTOMER ADVOCACY AND ENGAGEMENT PLANNING – NURTURE, NURTURE, NURTURE!

Individual customer advocate programme planning needs to take place with the client directors, or, increasingly, the CSMs, to develop customer engagement (also, see Chapter 8 on Customer Engagement). This should include several initial, target sales and marketing placements that are likely to deliver ‘mutual business currency’. This needs to be mutually beneficial for both customer advocates as well as your organisation. Importantly, this process should be led by ‘What's in It for Me’ (WIFM) for your customer advocates. ‘Ultimately, the best customer advocates need to feel valued, not just valuable’, says Mark Organ, Chairman of the Board at Influitive.

We see two financial and emotional drivers for customer advocates from both an organisational and personal perspective: ‘make me rich’ and ‘make me famous’. ‘Make me rich’ is obviously a financial driver. For example, the customer advocate may achieve a financial bonus as a result of the customer advocacy programme promoting their business and driving growth. Conversely, ‘make me famous’ involves tapping into the social media and selfie age for personal promotion. Now, in the Customer Economy, customer decision-makers – even if they are introverts – realise that they need to promote themselves to build their careers. Customer advocacy is an enabler for this – which is powerful, as it is an independent, third-party endorsement. What's key is for the customer advocacy programme leader and consultants to identify and tap into these drivers to create ‘mutual business currency’. This is highly effective as a C-change to drive success for your customer advocates as well as profitable growth for your organisation.

GETTING ENGAGED WITH YOUR CUSTOMER ADVOCATES

Profiling and nurturing your customer advocates are symbiotically linked with effective engagement programmes (see Chapter 9 on Customer Engagement) that marry your customers' business and marketing objectives with those of your organisation to drive the ‘mutual business currency’, which we have spoken about.

Primary data and feedback from your customer advocates will shape your customer engagement strategy and tactics. A good example is asking what media and information sources your customer advocates consult on their journey which prompts them to act and buy. Most customers have a profile on social media from LinkedIn to Instagram that can be easily researched. This is valuable information on which to base customer advocacy placements that meet and exceed their needs. Once created, your customer advocacy leader must test and refine the programme continuously. This is a classic example of where the hybrid creative and scientific skills of customer advocacy leaders come to the fore. Read the Engagement chapter to explore the most powerful elements of a customer engagement programme.

However, trust has been challenged with, for example, an abundance of fake reviews for consumer tech products on Amazon, where companies have manipulated reviews. It is not long before the truth comes out with telltale signs such as a high number of unverified, five-star ratings posted in a short space of time – indicating inauthentic reviews. The important point here is the one we made in Chapter 2 on culture, where transparency and authenticity from the inside show up on the outside. In 2019, those organisations which manipulated customer reviews on Amazon got found out by consumer champion, Which? This had the knock-on effect of damaging the product brands of those organisations and diminished their sales – in addition to tainting Amazon's brand too.

THE BUSINESS BENEFITS OF NURTURING CUSTOMER ADVOCATES

A company that has genuine customer advocacy will possess a customer-led brand and will, therefore, be much more trusted. Taking that a step further, such a company with high levels of customer advocacy typically has a response rate that is four to five times higher than a company that is not trusted.

‘Companies can create a virtuous circle of advocacy and growth. A company with high levels of customer advocacy can more easily augment and improve the customer experience. In doing so, it is then able to further drive customer advocacy, which can propel the company to market growth and dominance. If you have an army of unpaid customer advocates who are helping to convert existing customers and prospects through the funnel, how can you not win?’, commented Mark Organ.

This contrasts with companies which look at NPS in isolation, where NPS is only the propensity to recommend, versus actually tracking if the customer has advocated, that is, by using the customer advocacy placements that we have discussed in this chapter. In the simplest terms, customer advocacy tracks these placements and, essentially, evidence of why customers love your product or service.

HOW CAN YOU USE CUSTOMER ADVOCACY TO POWER SALES ENABLEMENT?

The job of sales enablement is to equip sales with tools to improve their effectiveness and productivity. So, getting the right customer-led evidence at their fingertips at every step of the customer journey is fundamental to winning market share in the Customer Economy. A company with a smart customer advocacy strategy and assets will drive sales enablement. This is all about giving salespeople specific customer advocacy assets such as customer reviews and stories in video and in the press to help drive awareness and sales. This can be tracked with platforms (see the Technology chapter) and often cuts sales cycles in half. This is not the old-fashioned sterile case study, but storytelling on how the product or service has improved the business and the life of the customer advocate.

CREATING A VIRTUOUS CUSTOMER ADVOCACY CIRCLE

The organisation needs to think of Customer Advocacy programmes as a virtuous circle, feeding a pipeline of customer advocates to maintain momentum and growth. Also, customer advocates will leave the programmes, often because they are leaving a company, which represents a growth opportunity. On many occasions, the customer advocate will move to a new organisation, which can be a new prospect. However, companies need to ensure they have enough advocates in their pipeline to achieve the organisation's business objectives.

CASE STUDY: MICROSOFT AND ITS CUSTOMERS DOING THE TALKING!

Claire Grove (see Figure 10.3), Head of Customer Advocacy and Storytelling, Microsoft UK, says, ‘I am convinced I have the best job in Microsoft: I get to go out and talk to customers, learn what's important to them and create win-win scenarios. It is a privilege to share their stories'.

Claire Grove has been a leader in the practice of Customer Advocacy for over 20 years and has seen it become a strategic weapon in driving sustainable growth for organisations. She has led customer advocacy and storytelling for over 5 years in the United Kingdom for Microsoft. Her role is to meet with key customers, not just by spend, but according to their innovation and alignment with Microsoft's growth areas. It is interesting to note that companies that are successful at driving customer advocacy to achieve growth for themselves as well as their customer advocates have a deep-seated, customer-led culture, as well as the other elements of the C-change growth engine. Microsoft is no exception and makes no secret of its customer-led mission, ‘Our mission is to empower every person and every organisation on the planet to achieve more’.

Microsoft is a customer-obsessed company that believes in ‘Customer First’, which is led from the top by Satya Nadella, its CEO, who is an inspirational and highly successful customer-focused leader. This has had a positive impact on the company's customer advocacy function which, interestingly, in the United Kingdom, has been moved from marketing to a ‘Customer and Partner Experience’ function. Customer Advocacy at Microsoft starts with the Customer Voice, which echoes what we said earlier in this chapter about it informing which customer advocates to nurture.

In the past, Microsoft customer references were driven out of the business groups with a tendency to be internally focused. However, with the ‘One Microsoft’ approach, there has been recognition that customers do not typically go out and buy one product or service from one business group; that is, that customers do not follow our business groups, and that we need to be more customer-focused and bridge organisation siloes.

Claire's role was created to bridge all of the four business groups – Intelligent Cloud, Modern Workplace, BizApps and Devices – to pursue Microsoft's business goal to help drive digital transformation. ‘This is because when we talk to customers, we want to represent their full story rather than telling it in isolation just from one particular business group’, said Claire Grove. This is about driving value for customers, driving business results and Microsoft's ‘Tech for Good’ approach, which helps customers across three areas: AI for Accessibility, AI for Earth and AI for Humanitarian Action.

The role of customer advocacy in Microsoft aligns to customers in these and other business priority areas, to understand their business objectives, helping them to tell their story in an impactful way, and then representing VoC information back into Microsoft to provide a better customer experience. Claire Grove pointed out, ‘At Microsoft, we mean what we say when we talk about empowering our customers. It's not about the product – it's about how we drive our customers to achieve their business objectives. My role is to communicate internally and externally as to how we're doing that through customer advocacy and storytelling'.

Of the utmost importance is for Claire to understand the business objectives of Microsoft's customer advocates and what they are fundamentally trying to achieve. Claire says, ‘Customers don't go out to just buy cool technology for the sake of it – they want to address a need, now or are anticipating a need in the future. So, they're looking to effect change for their customers and/or employees, which Microsoft technology can enable'. This reinforces our point of finding the ‘mutual business value’ for your organisation and customer advocates, which is the secret to successful advocacy.

There has been a company-wide approach to drive value to customers as well as Microsoft itself via storytelling. When Claire started in 2014, her vision was to show impact on customer advocacy as soon as possible and approach it in a different way. ‘I do see people in this field who focus on a single dimension of the old-fashioned case study and challenge, solution, benefit approach. Customers see this as asking for a favour because it's about you. However, if we ramp up storytelling to be truly about the customer and our role in their success, we can effect change. If our customers use our storytelling assets in the course of their own business, that's a key endorsement and measure of success'.

The Microsoft culture is very open, where everyone is behind the ultimate aim of providing value for their customers and being customer-focused. ‘At Microsoft, you have permission to fail and to learn from that. So, we have the backing to try new things with our customers’.

SO HOW DOES MICROSOFT'S CUSTOMER ADVOCACY PROGRAMME OPERATE?

As part of the Customer Experience and Partner team, Microsoft's Customer Advocacy programme works with specialist creative agencies to help tell customers digital transformation stories.

Step 1 – Identification of customer advocates: At the beginning of the financial year, the business vision and goals are clearly identified and communicated by Microsoft's CEO and COO. The Customer Advocacy programme then aligns to these goals – from horizontal areas in which the company is leading, such as the responsible and ethical application of AI, through to vertical markets. For example, Claire will work with customers who are embracing AI and look at the quality of the story. Claire and the team then connect with the business groups, comms, marketing and sales to plan target customer advocates that Microsoft would like to work with. ‘At Microsoft, everyone understands the value that the Customer Advocacy programme can deliver. As a result, we have a healthy pipeline of opportunity’, commented Claire.

Step 2 – Customer advocacy listening and planning: Claire is very close to Microsoft's business and planning process and uses data from Customer Voice to drive value through the Customer Advocacy programme for both customer advocates as well as Microsoft. A customer advocacy framework is built aligned to the business focus areas. There is a customer advocate nomination process internally from the business groups, marketing and sales – as well as externally, with nominations from partners and the customers themselves. Claire and team embark on customer listening, identifying which customers could be advocates. ‘There is consultation with the internal Customer Account and Success teams, where conveying the benefits to our teams and our customers is vital’. Then, there is an introduction to the customer, but Claire says, ‘It's not about “asking for a favour” – it's about delivering real value: helping customers reach their business and marketing goals. For example, understanding the audiences they want to reach from PR, events and social media'.

Step 3 – Customer advocacy engagement: Claire effects change from the Customer Advocacy programme for both Microsoft and its customers by looking for stories that really resonate with the target audiences of both parties. Ambionics (www.ambionics.co.uk), a pre-revenue start-up providing prosthetic limbs to children, is a great story which had incredible results for its founder as well as Microsoft's Devices business group. Ben Ryan, a self-taught engineer, started Ambionics after his son, Sol, had to have his arm amputated at just 10 days of age. As a result, Ben found out that, if young children were not given prosthetic limbs at an early age, the likelihood of them taking to using them lowered significantly. This, in turn, potentially limited their movement and choices in life. Ben set out on an inspiring journey to build the Ambionics business and help other families in a similar situation and open up opportunities for children such as Sol.

AMBIONICS: BORN TO ENGINEER

Ambionics was reliant on donations, so Microsoft gave Ben a Surface Pro, which he used to work alongside a second-hand Kinect and 3D printer to develop a 3D prosthetic limb for Sol (see Figure 10.5). Also, Ben needed awareness to garner support from other organisations to bring his 3D printed prosthetic arm business into operation. This involved scanning a child's body accurately and providing a fully functioning 3D-printed prosthetic arm.

Microsoft spent time with Ben and his family, told the story in a video clip which was promoted within Microsoft to employees and externally online, in the media and via social media. Ben shared the story at Microsoft's Partner Conference too. As a result, from being in a precarious situation in terms of the future of his venture, the global awareness generated has helped Ben to turn Ambionics' future into a thriving one. This is a great example of a ‘Tech for Good’ story where Microsoft has added value to people's lives by ‘empowering people’. This shows how the power of storytelling can be applied by any size of organisation. For Microsoft, this was not about selling; it showed how technology could effect change and illustrated the art of the possible.

Step 4 – Customer advocacy – measure, measure, measure! Claire and her team recommend embedding the Customer Advocacy programme in marketing, sales and across the whole organisation, so that there are multiple placements with clear and transparent measurement. Microsoft has multiple measures for customer advocacy: there is customer advocacy content, which provides resonance at the top of the marketing funnel; customer assets on the Microsoft website (https://customers.microsoft.com); and the use of social media to share customer stories, where click-throughs, engagement, scroll-depth and dwell time are measured. This measures how much time is spent watching a customer video, including the written content alongside it. The number of unique and returning visitors is also measured. Customer stories and assets can be tracked on the customer journey, including the PR coverage generated and the use of customer speakers at events. Also, all of the customer content is integrated via marketing, so that Microsoft has a clear audit trail on where the customer content has been placed.

Microsoft's commitment to customer advocacy is epitomised by its website, where the URL says it all: ‘Customers.Microsoft.com’ – this is the showcase for customer advocates and their stories. The company's Customer Advocacy programme typically generates 700 customer assets every year from around 80–100 enterprise customers (public sector and health, to the private sector). This is from social media content, audio descriptors as well as customer video subtitles to meet Microsoft's accessibility goals. The diversity of Claire's job with customer advocates is enormous. On any day, she might be in a London law firm climbing a ladder with a hard hat, getting a great photo of the firm on the London skyline; or, she could be on a dairy farm in North Devon, telling the story of a retailer specialising in selling agricultural goods where she had to be hosed down by the farmer before getting back into her car! In addition, wherever possible, Microsoft will always look at their customers' customer – so that they are truly customer-led.

HAVE YOU HAD ANY FAILURES WITH CUSTOMER ADVOCACY?

‘I've had failures with Customer Advocacy: particularly early in my Customer Advocacy career, I took a defensive view to Customer Advocacy where we would ask the customer to become a reference – thinking of the value to our business rather than benefits aligned to our customers', said Claire Grove. A lot of organisations do this, which causes sales and their customers to miss the value of the Customer Advocacy programme. For Claire, this resulted in one-dimensional customer references who were not genuine advocates. She added, ‘You have to develop a Customer Advocacy programme based on value for your customers. We have to make it easy for customers, and you really have to understand the customers’ drivers and their business priorities. It's Marketing 101 – understand your customers and address their needs'!

Daniel Langton (see Figure 10.6), Head of Customer and Partner Experience, Microsoft UK, concluded, ‘We know that Customer Advocacy resonates – it drives customer engagement via our digital and social channels. Also, it helps bring to life just what the right technology can do to help our customers transform in a context that's relevant to them'. He continues, ‘Our customer storytelling is supporting our sales teams by providing invaluable proof points that give confidence and accelerate the sales cycle. Above all, Customer Advocacy is driving sustainable growth for Microsoft and our customer advocates’.

While there is overwhelming evidence that customer advocacy provides far more authentic and credible customer-led marketing, its use by organisations still remains the minority rather than the norm. IDC's customer experience practice conducted a study as part of its loyalty marketing and advocacy marketing barometer to chart the progress being made to support customer advocacy marketing efforts across the industry. In its 2016 Five Key Competencies for Modern Marketing Assessment, only 10% of B2B IT vendors surveyed had advocate marketing programmes in place. In 2017, this increased to 67%, a 570% increase year over year. While this is only in the IT sector, it highlights the value of customer advocacy and its rise in importance within marketing. Customer Advocacy programmes need to be adopted strategically at the top of the organisation while aligning customer advocates onto the business plan for sustainable growth in the Customer Economy. It is important for customer advocates to be linked dynamically across the whole organisation – for example, guiding the overall customer experience from customer advocacy Councils to Customer Voice – and fundamentally as an integral part of the customer-led culture that we spoke about in Chapter 2.

Above all, trust is fundamental to the success of Customer Advocacy. The greater the trust between customer advocates and the organisation, the deeper the relationships and a greater potential for mutual business currency. As Mark Organ says, ‘Customers will discover your flaws anyway, so it's better to be open and transparent, which is a cornerstone to foster Customer Advocacy. Trust is a key differentiator between the successful and unsuccessful companies in the Customer Economy'.

Greater trust leads to achieving the planned customer advocacy marketing and sales placements to achieve the business objectives of both the customer advocate and your organisation. Some companies like Salesforce are even using a trust URL to be transparent on who they are and how they operate (https://trust.salesforce.com). What is significant about this is that customers can see key information on all of Salesforce services. Salesforce even tells you when their system has not been available. So, it gives a prospective customer a new level of information about what it would be like to work with Salesforce on a day-to-day basis, which previously was not available. Buyers do not want to spend ages during the buying process. So, with a move like this to openness, and rationalising the whole process, the buyers are more likely to buy. Furthermore, they are far more likely to buy more quickly.

TAKING CUSTOMER ADVOCACY TO THE NEW FRONTIERS

Customer advocacy – just like the customer experience as a whole – will have differences, often subtle, from one region to another: differences in the best ways to recruit advocates, to engage them in advocacy efforts and to communicate advocates' experiences to your market. Bill Lee makes the point that ‘Many companies make the mistake of transferring a model of Customer Experience that succeeded in their home country to other cultures – even the smartest companies make this mistake’. He added, ‘For example, Walt Disney's Euro Theme Park, Eurodisney TM, (located in Paris) was a disaster in its first few years because of a failure to adapt the “formula” to French sensibilities'. He argues that the solution to overcome this is to have both HQ representation and local representation in a global Customer Advocacy programme. The HQ representative keeps things focused on corporate strategy, while the local representation adapts initiatives to the local culture.

Bill Lee makes a valid point concurring with us on the blurring of customer advocates into other areas of the C-change model – notably, co-creation. He states, ‘Current approaches to the customer experience are failing badly. Companies that are succeeding at improving the CX are moving away from creating the CX for customers to co-creating the customer experience with customers. And they're doing this throughout the customer journey'. He added, ‘The most prolific co-creators tend to be what we now call customer advocates or customers in related engagement initiatives like your customer community and customer advisory boards. These customers will no longer be supporting traditional marketing, sales and other customer-impacting functions. They'll be driving these functions, and eventually the entire customer experience'.

TOP THREE LESSONS OF CUSTOMER ADVOCACY PROGRAMMES

1. Integrate customer advocates into the heart and soul of your organisation. Make advocate marketing a corporate initiative that is embedded in the customer journey, where there is a shared mission to nurture and retain successful customers. For many organisations, this will mean moving from a one-dimensional customer reference programme to a strategic customer advocacy and engagement programme. Customer advocates inform with insight and value at every step of the customer journey and should be integrated into your organisation – from a customer-led brand and messaging to new product development. For example, work with your customer advocates to test your messaging and brand, through to your go-to-market strategy.
2. CEOs need to cultivate customer advocate marketers' combination of creative and scientific skills to drive best-practice customer advocacy and engagement for growth.
3. Getting customer advocacy storytelling right will be key to success in the Customer Economy. This involves blending creativity, science and planning. Propagating customer advocacy video clips via social media is highly effective, and not just the high-production, corporate videos but more conversational, human stories planned with different decision-makers. This can deliver exponential ROI in driving awareness and customer-led evidence early in the buying process.

We believe the companies that put their customer advocates at the heart of their business – so that it guides their culture, mission and their entire raison d'être – are the ones that will win in the Customer Economy.