Customer Engagement and Advocacy - Some tips for 2013

As each one of us is a customer of some brand ourselves, we should understand customer experience management like the back of our hand. Yet, for many marketers customer experience seems a bit mysterious, and certainly has a myriad of definitions.  Customer experience and advocacy management is a dedication to serving customer needs from their perspective and research techniques can enhance how organisations react to changing levels of satisfaction and advocacy, where your customers promote or recommend your brand to those that detract from your brand through negative word of mouth.

In the first of a series of 3 posts iReach propose that customer experience management must have the following 10 qualities in order to consistently win your customers (and prospects) heart to win a share of their wallet:

• Perspective (the experience is defined entirely by the customer, not the brand).
• Preventive (the customer gravitates toward the easiest and nicest brands that address customers’ needs).
• Duration (encompasses the point from which customers become aware they have a need until they say that need is extinct).
• Dynamic (the experience evolves with the customers’ context – the purpose and circumstances of their need, and overall experience reference points).
• Choice (the experience is built on trust and mutual respect for brand; advocacy is more important than loyalty).
• Multi-faceted (the experience is measured by functional and emotional (social and personal) judgments related to the customers’ expectations).
• Operational (the experience is shaped by all the touch-points to an organisation’s processes, policies and culture, in addition to the physical product or service associated with the customer’s need).
• Integrative (the experience is impacted by the degree of alignment among touch-points, technologies, channels, etc).
• Anticipatory (the brand experience is on-going, where the present and future are equally or more important than the past).
• Transparent (the customer sees through the brand’s motives and intentions, and favours genuine sincerity for the customer’s well-being).
• Advocate (the customer is proactive about recommending the brand experience for friends and family generation positive word of mouth)

Next Blog post we will explore the difference between customer experience and Advocacy and explore how to measure and enhance customer advocacy. Feel free to comment or contact the writer; Oisin.Byrne@ireach.ie