Think about the last time you had an incredible experience with a company.

From start to finish every interaction was seamless. Finding the product or service was effortless, the download or purchase process was simple, you quickly received the product, the user experience was intuitive, and it was easy to get answers to any questions you had.

Now, think about a time you had an overall good experience with a company. Meaning, there were some hiccups, but all-in-all you were satisfied with the end result.

Finally, consider a time when you had a great outcome with a company. The entire process – from discovery, to purchase, to use – was kind of a headache but the customer service experience to resolve your issues was great.

Which experience is most likely going to turn you into a loyal customer who raves about and refers the product to everyone you meet?

The answer seems obvious. Yet, there are still teams who place the bulk of the responsibility of turning customers into raving advocates on the shoulders of a department like customer service (or worse, one or two team members).

If you struggle to create customer advocates – customers who consistently refer your product, who happily and even voluntarily provide testimonials and glowing reviews, and are fiercely loyal to your brand – here’s one thing that will improve your customer advocacy efforts:

Get every employee in your organization to care about the customer.

This means, regardless of their role in your organization, every employee should be thinking about the customer experience and how they can improve this experience as part of their daily duties.

Here’s how to make this happen in your company or department.

Make “Customer-Focus” a Pre-Hire Priority

This organization-wide, customer-centric mindset should start before an employee is hired.

Everything from the job description to the interview and onboarding process needs to include the customer. For example:

• Your job descriptions should be heavily peppered with “so the customer” details. As in: The Technical Product Manager will work closely with the marketing and engineering teams. You’ll be responsible for taking the business requirements and translating them into development requirements so the customer experience is improved with each product iteration.”
• During the interview process, be sure to ask questions that allow the applicant to share what they would do or have done in scenarios that directly relate to how their choices or strategy affect the customer.
• Once you’ve made a decision to hire someone, create opportunities for the new hire to interact directly with customers as part of their onboarding process. This could range from answering support questions to conducting surveys, to actually meeting with customers depending on the nature of your business.

The goal is to make customers real and important to each and every employee.

 

Create a Customer Shadow

To create customer-centricity in already established teams, bring the customer into everything you do as if they were shadowing you.

You can do this in several ways. For example, make time for empathy exercises that help team members understand what it is like to be in the customer’s shoes.

Regularly and prominently sharing customer feedback should be another priority.

Use your company’s digital messaging channels, like Slack, to share a feed of real-time feedback or allocate time during company calls and staff meetings to share metrics like Net Promoter Score and themes in the feedback.  The point is to ensure the entire team is consistently aware of your customers’ input on an ongoing basis.

Tell Stories

Another way to keep your customers top of mind across the entire organization is to encourage your team to incorporate user stories into their planning and decision-making sessions.

A user story is a short description told from the perspective of the individual or group who will experience the result. You can craft a user story by following this framework:

As a (type of user) I want (some feature or experience) so that (some goal or reason).

When planning campaigns, designing product roadmaps, or developing features for your customer, include user stories as told from your customers’ point of view.

Let’s say your company provides knowledge management software for enterprise companies. Your customer user story might look like this:

As a customer service representative at an enterprise corporation, I want to be able to easily and intuitively create, co-edit, review, and approve FAQ content internally with my team so that I can publish accurate and helpful answers into my customer-facing help desk portal more quickly.

With a user story, your team is no longer hyper-focused on copy, individual buttons, or colors. Those are merely tools. Instead, a user story helps your team focus on the customer need/desire and whether or not the tool (e.g. the design, feature, or messaging) your team is creating allows the customer to understand and accomplish their specific goal.

Customer empathy propels customer advocacy

Incredible start-to-finish customer experience has the power to exponentially increase your customer advocacy results.

However, to achieve this, each individual team member should understand the customer problem, the customer desire or need, the outcomes the customer is expecting, and how their role in the organization can directly help meet or exceed those expectations.