Customer Advocacy as an outcome of Customer Intelligence
The ultimate goal of Customer Intelligence is to help customers thrive. Right? Thriving customers lead to healthy business. They lead to revenue growth and strong morale.
At involve.ai, we often refer to growth in terms of upsell and cross-sell because our AI models identify indicators of those behaviors. But predictive data analysis supports the scoring of another outcome too, one that leads to a whole different layer of growth: advocacy.
What is Customer Advocacy?
Customer advocates are those who are so smitten with your product or service that they rave to others about them. They serve as references and advisors. They amplify your message in the market, bringing in new customers.
Customer advocacy has long been a recognized and in-demand effort in the B2C space, from word of mouth campaigns to social media sponsorships, and it’s a growing B2B marketing effort as well.
Developing happy customers into advocates is a huge opportunity for the Customer Intelligence space for all industries and organizational types as we forge our way into 2023.
The connection between Customer Intelligence and Customer Advocacy
It sounds simple. It sounds… silly. But the first step in creating advocates is to deliver value. Give the people what they came for!
Customer Intelligence - data-driven insights - helps us do this in a way we’ve never been able to do before. It lets organizations be more proactive and prescriptive, to support customers before they have even identified the need for support, and to help them better adopt and achieve value on their own.
The second step is to identify and nurture customers who are realizing value, and arming them to become advocates. Maybe this means inviting them to speak at a conference, or providing an advocacy platform. Or maybe it means carrying on with delivering value and letting them organically speak up on your behalf.
How does data factor in? As with upsell opportunity, data-driven health scoring and early indicators of growth behavior can be used to score and pinpoint potential advocates. Marketing teams can reach out early and to specific customers who are happy to be recognized in such a way.
Finally, and no less importantly, advocacy is a new, rich source of data. Measuring how advocates are impacting the market, tracking what behaviors they are engaging in, and using data to predict whether certain advocate behaviors are more helpful than others at bringing in new business will take your Customer Intelligence program to the next level. Additionally, over time, you will be able to determine whether advocacy is not just an outcome of health, but another early indicator of it.
We’ve said it before: Customer Intelligence cannot and should not be boxed into any single department. Customer Success, Marketing, Revenue, Sales and Ops are intertwined by the happiness and success of your customers, so let your data support you across functions to create thriving customers and enthusiastic advocates in 2023!
Meet with us to learn more about how your data can lead to thriving customers and, ultimately, growth.