Developing a CA Score to Identify Your Best Customer Advocates

Developing a CA Score to Identify Your Best Customer Advocates

Note: This is #7 in the Customer Advocacy Success Practice Blog Series by Jonathan Lee. To read other articles in the series, go to the ISSI Knowledge Bank.

Many organizations use a Customer Satisfaction or Net Promoter Score (NPS) to measure customer satisfaction. While this is a good way to understand their satisfaction level, it usually does not result in significant tangible returns to the organization, such as customers providing a reference site or testimonial.

Perhaps it is time to consider a more innovative and structured way to get the most out of loyal customers. It's what I call the Customer Advocacy Way.

This blog will cover what the Customer Advocacy Way is, who Customer Advocates are and how to identify them, what contributions they can make, and how to measure their value to your organization by developing a Customer Advocacy (CA) score.

What is Customer Advocacy

First, let's examine the term "Customer Advocacy." Here is a good definition:

"Customer advocacy is the act of building and nurturing relationships with loyal customers, who then act as spokespeople and champions for your brand, products, or services. This process starts by identifying who those loyal customers are. To pinpoint your customer advocates, look for happy customers who frequently use your products or services in innovative ways and see a big impact on their business as a result." ¹

Customer Advocacy is a way to identify loyal customers-or Customer Advocates-and actively engage them. But who are these Customer Advocates? They are

"Highly-satisfied customers who share information about the products and services they use without any incentive to do so. Their action influences the opinions and purchase decisions of a large audience." ²

The diagram below from Deloitte provides a clear visual representation of Advocates vs. Buyers vs. Critics.

Why is Customer Advocacy important?

As seen from the diagram above, Customer Advocates are more than just repeat buyers. They are "strong customers" as they usually buy more, make recommendations, are more likely to share favourable reviews, influence purchase decisions, provide testimonials, act as reference sites, and even refer and evangelize your products/company. ²

How to Identify Customer Advocates

Now that we understand the importance of Customer Advocates, how do we identify them? This can be done in two ways:

1. Objective data - Revenue contribution (annual recurring revenue, total revenue, number of workloads, etc.), margin analysis, customer sentiment (Customer Satisfaction rating, NPS rating), Customer Health Score rating (Green in all metrics), etc.
2. Subjective input - Feedback from the management team, account team, CSM, engagement level with the sponsor and key stakeholders, etc.

What Contributions Can Customer Advocates Make?

The diagram below shows various forms of Customer Advocacy ³. They range from a simple logo approval for a reference site to a more complex referral, speaking engagement, or customer advisory board.

Each of these activities is immensely beneficial to the seller organization.

Measuring the Effectiveness of Customer Advocacy with a CA score

As mentioned in the previous section above, there are several ways that a Customer Advocate can contribute to the seller organization. Each of these activities can be tracked. For example, who among the advocates has consented to using their logo in a reference site, who wrote a testimonial, or who participated in an event as a guest speaker?

However, organizations usually lack a structured and organized way to consolidate all these CA contributions, apply a weightage, and rank each of the advocates.

Perhaps it is time to create a "Customer Advocacy Score" to clearly define the level of contribution from each of the advocates, put a weightage based on the relative importance of the activity, and then combine them to have a consolidated score.

The example table below shows how an overall CA score can be computed.

This table and total score can help the seller organization clearly understand who has contributed, what they have contributed, and how additional engagement can derive more benefits from these advocates.

How is Customer Advocacy Related to Customer Success?

The Customer Success organization is perhaps the best team to execute Customer Advocacy activities. A Customer Success Manager acts as a "Trusted Advisor" to the customer, has an intimate relationship with them, and has great insights into their environment and how the customer has gained business outcomes from using the solution. Many of these customers will be willing advocates once the trusted relationship has been established.

In fact, as the Customer Success team matures, they should start measuring Customer Advocacy beyond just customer satisfaction/NPS, renewal and expansion (upsell/cross-sell).

Conclusion

Customer Advocacy is a next-level measurement of customer engagement that goes beyond basic customer satisfaction metrics or a Net Promotor Score. Identifying Customer Advocates and engaging them in order to increase their participation will help the seller organization achieve better returns.

The Customer Advocacy score is a structured way to establish a baseline for their contribution while providing a basis for the seller organization to strategize their engagement with their Customer Advocate.

To learn more about this topic and how you can execute a Customer Advocacy program, contact us at sales@issi-inc.com

About the Author

Jonathan WM Lee is the ISSI Customer Success Practice Lead. He holds the following certifications: Prosci Certified Change Management, Cisco Customer Success Manager, Microsoft Services Adoption Specialist, Certified Customer Success Manager Level 1 & 2 (SuccessHacker), and ISO 27001 Lead Auditor. He has extensive experience with over 100 engagements in training, consulting, and auditing of Customer Success programs, processes, and tools. He is also the co-author of the Cisco Advanced Customer Experience Specialization Checklist and Juniper Networks Business Model Transformation Blueprint/Playbook. He previously spoke in the ISSI-TSIA webinar on "Identifying Strengths & Gaps of your CS Practice."

¹ Zendesk blog, 23 May 2022 - https://www.zendesk.com/sg/blog/customer-advocates-secret-ingredient-sales-support-success/

² Jitbit, 10 Aug 2020 - https://www.jitbit.com/news/customer-advocacy/

³ Gainsight - Creating a Global Customer Advocacy program - https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/creating-a-global-customer-advocacy-program/65828190