Discover the power of customer advocacy and how it can drive product success. Read our blog post on customer advocacy.
The B2B purchasing process can feel complicated for customers. They have to weigh a bevy of product features against their business needs and budget, sometimes without a complete understanding of what a SaaS product really does. Faced with too many options, many buyers base their buying decisions on the frank opinions—both good and bad—of your current customers. That’s why you need strong customer advocates who believe in your product and can speak to its benefits.
As a product manager, you can influence whether your customers advocate for your product by consistently meeting their needs and prioritizing their experience. If you don’t yet have a core group of advocates among your B2B customers, you can build one by delivering a product they continue to find valuable over time.
Customer advocates are users who find so much value in your product that they’re willing to spread the word about it to their coworkers and industry peers. Customer advocacy turns organic word-of-mouth excitement into honest, persuasive referrals for new prospects.
Compelling social proof, like honest reviews from existing B2B customers, goes a long way toward informing new customers’ purchasing decisions. According to a 2018 report, more than 92% of buyers were more likely to purchase after reading a trusted review about a product or service.
Customer advocates can have a positive effect on sales all on their own, simply by telling their peers and coworkers about how much they enjoy your product. You can also lean on your most loyal customers by featuring them in promotional content, like case studies, videos, or testimonials.
There is some disagreement about the difference between customer advocates and brand advocates. While “customer advocate” is sometimes used to describe an internal job role, we use them here to refer to an external role, and we use the two terms interchangeably. Both customer advocacy and brand advocacy describe customers who promote your product or brand because they believe in it.
Customer advocates show that your customer base is highly engaged and excited about your product. If that segment is large enough, it indicates that you’ve found product-market fit—and you can build explosive growth off of a product that’s ideal for its market (especially if other metrics are positive, like customer retention, customer satisfaction, and customer engagement).
Because customer advocates talk naturally about your product to their peers and colleagues, it’s a low-lift way to increase brand awareness among an audience that’s well-suited to your product. In fact, organic word-of-mouth growth is highly sought after because it happens naturally and instills trust. It doesn’t involve dedicated marketing strategies or extra budget spent to achieve positive results (though, as mentioned, your marketing team can work with advocates to collect and share their testimonials). Customers simply share their positive experiences because they want to.
For the most full-throated, genuine recommendations of your product, you need authentically engaged, happy customers. However, you can’t advertise your way into organic customer advocacy. If you want a devoted group of advocates among your customer base, you must first offer an amazing customer experience and a highly valuable product.
Without an overall positive customer experience, you’ll probably run into speed bumps on your path to product growth. It’s difficult to retain customers if they’re unhappy with their experience—59% of them will churn after a handful of negative incidents. Customer retention doesn’t have to be a mystery, though. You just need to be open to feedback and communicate clearly. Do that, and you’ll easily address your customers’ needs.
Ensure that your customer feedback collection process allows for constant touchpoints with your users. As a best practice, make it easy for customers to leave their feedback. Give them multiple channels to contact you—such as through email, chat, a web portal, community forum, comments on social media, or as a response to solicited questions—and ensure that the feedback funnels into a single feedback management tool that’s shared across your organization.
This process starts with follow-ups in your customer feedback process. A message or call after you receive feedback helps your customers feel heard and valued. If you were able to update your product based on feedback, deliver that positive news to your customers directly. Even if you weren’t able to act on a particular feature request at that time, letting your customers know you considered it shows them how much you value their thoughts about your product.
For example, we developed Outreaches as a way to make it easier to follow up with your customers. Using this feature, your team can ask customers questions directly through UserVoice, so you can follow up or ask for additional details however often you need to.
Outreaches are also a great way to find out that your customers’ needs have changed because you’re keeping communication with them open. Even though customer communication is often a job function of the customer success department, your product team can talk with customers and get their opinions on your product. Regular communication helps to build trust and strengthen customer relationships—and trusting relationships help with customer loyalty.
You can check in with customers through:
Focus your team on valuable product updates that solve your customers’ pain points. If you’re working with limited time and resources (as many of us are), you simply won’t be able to make every product update that customers request. What’s more, if you did update your product each time a customer suggested it, you’d likely end up with extraneous features that don’t directly deliver more value to your core customer.
Instead, determine which customer requests are the highest priority for you to meet based on how they relate to your product’s value. Align your entire team around meeting those top-priority customer needs.
We address that challenge at UserVoice with tools that sort feedback based on a number of factors, like how frequently you get a similar request, how many customers are asking for a product change, and the amount of revenue associated with your various customer accounts. You also have the ability to filter feedback by account status—for instance, you can view requests associated with at-risk accounts, prospective customer accounts, and accounts that recently churned. Having these insights may help identify trends to build for. This allows you to work cross-functionally with your customer success and sales teams to help spot top-priority requests.
Turn scattered user data into meaningful customer intelligence, guiding smarter decisions and creating a better product.
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