How to leverage brand advocates to reduce your customer support costs?
Within 48 hours of the Windows 10 launch, he provided about 712 answers regarding the launch and adoption of Windows 10 – he was not an employee of Microsoft, he was a passionate brand advocate part of Microsoft’s Brand Advocacy program. (Source).
It’s mind boggling when you think in terms of the customer support cost savings due to just one of these passionate brand advocates. Microsoft currently has approximately 3000 such brand advocates in just one of their advocacy programs. They have many such brand advocacy programs.
Customer Support
Traditionally it used to be the call center where people dial-in and ask their questions, that’s how customer support was provided. It is still the same way many organizations operate. To reduce the cost of customer support one needs to really embrace the self-service era.
The Self-Service Era
In the Internet/Digital era, people access online support forums, read blogs, attend webcasts, chat with experts maybe over Twitter, raise questions on community sites or via Q&A sites like Quora etc.
Content to Support Customers
In order to meet the needs of this digital era audience one would need to do some or all of the below items:
- Create tons of content in a variety of formats (Blogs, Presentations, Podcasts, Webcasts…)
- Establish Support Forums, User Groups/ Communities
- Enable interactions with Experts
The hard way
The difficult way of going about creating these interactions is by creating all the content yourself.
The easy way
The easy way is to leverage the power of already existing passionate brand advocates in addition to your corporate initiatives. In fact creating a brand advocacy program which fuels these brand advocates should be a corporate initiative.
Examples
When Microsoft was planning it’s Windows 10 product, it took the path of involving it’s most passionate customers. It publicly launched an advocacy program inviting thousands of it’s customers to participate –
With the Insider program, we’re inviting our most enthusiastic Windows customers to shape Windows 10 with us. We know they’re a vocal bunch – and we’re looking forward to hearing from them.
– Source blogs.windows.com
They were looking for people who’re vocal in terms of providing feedback to the company. In exchange they provided them early access, this ensured that they got a bunch of motivated experts on the product much before the actual product launch. What would these experts do? (Besides providing feedback to Microsoft) They would share their expertise with others.
What were the steps they took:
- Invited people to get early access
- Took their feedback (Improved their product in the bargain)
- Got a bunch of motivated experts who naturally evolved to helping solve customer queries
That’s exactly what happened with the person who provided about 712 answers regarding the launch and adoption of Windows 10. He was a passionate brand advocate who was involved with the program, partly due to his passion and interest and because Microsoft created a program and platform enabling him and others like him to participate.
Create a platform for brand advocates to engage with you and your customers
As an organization they provided a platform for brand advocates to actively engage and support other customers. http://answers.microsoft.com/
Here you will find that customer queries are answered by a whole host of enthused brand advocates. The platform enables Microsoft to highlight the top brand advocates as well, based on other customer feedback.
(Badges are awarded for being an active contributor and awesome community member. Over time, good contributors earn a variety of badges.)
But…Will a third party individual know more about my products than my employed customer support personnel?
Surprisingly yes. More often than not I’ve seen brand advocates who’re passionate about a product sticking around to using that product for a much longer time than the employee sticking around in the company. Their passion and sticking around help them often gain far more mastery of the product than the typical customer support executive.
However, there is an easy fix to this problem, where the community itself helps in regulating inefficient responses which are a reality.
What if these brand advocates provide faulty or incorrect information?
One simple fix to this problem is to allow the customers to rate the responses. For instance on the Microsoft Community Support site users can rate if they found a response helpful.
Start Small
If you’ve not yet started down this path i.e. you don’t have an advocacy program in place, start small. Pick one activity which will help you go down the path to providing support to other customers.
Whether it’s inviting your brand advocates to contribute content(blogs, presentations etc.), or inviting them to test a product, or establish a support forum or a group on social media, and enable interactions with brand advocates. (Simultaneously work on creating your own brand advocacy program.) The small wins will help you get the necessary corporate support to evolve a larger program resulting in much larger cost savings in customer support.
I would love to hear from you if you have stories on how Brand Advocates have helped other customers. Do share in the comments below.