From Customers to Brand Advocates
Customers are the backbone of every business, every business has some sort of customer and keeping them happy is a way to ensure that the business can continue to function, salaries can be continue to be paid and new products can continue to be shipped.
Making sure that these customers are happy should be one of the primary goals of a business and this isn’t just because happy customers are the customers who stay and bring others with them, this is because if you can make a customer happy enough with their experience with your products, they’ll recommend you to their friends.
Word of mouth is the most effective form of marketing and providing great customer experience could dramatically improve the chances that your customer will talk about your business to others.
I’m guilty of this myself, I’m a huge fan of Buffer and Intercom and I’ve noticed that I’ve recommended them to numerous people over the years, and that’s purely because any experiences I’ve had with their teams have been delightful and their products are so nice to use that I feel obliged to recommend them to anyone I meet who might benefit from using them as well.
Brand advocacy is commonplace in the technology industry, we’ll suggest different products to different people, it’s the reason why so many people have tweeted about their love for Airbnb, Sketch and Figma.
Brand advocacy is so important in the technology industry that for some people it’s their full-time profession.
So, you’re a growing business and you want your customers to love your company so much that they become volunteer brand advocates. Well, I’ll share just a few steps that you can take in order to improve your chances of that happening. I really want to stress that these steps are for any type of business, not just software companies.
And before I suggest anything, I want you to understand how important your customer’s experience is to the health of your business because your customer experience is part of your branding and most businesses completely miss that. Okay, here we go, three simple steps your business can easily doing easily straight away.
Listen
Make yourself easy to contact and be conversational.
Businesses have started using chatbots, which they call ‘conversational’ but the fact is, no one enjoys talking to a robot when they’re looking for help. Messenger bot’s are great for making requests, but when I’m looking for help, I want either an FAQ or I want to talk to a human being.
A good way to show your customers that you’re listening, is to prompt them for their opinion, whether that’s done face-to-face, in an email or with a plugin added to your website.
Talk
Social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, and activities like Blogging or Newsletters are perfect tools that aid customer communication. In the age of internet-connected businesses, there’s no excuse to being an anti-social business. Communicate with your users, let them know when you’re about to launch new things, ask them what they think.
Communicating with your customers should accompany every single stage of your development process.
Respond
If someone gives you feedback or criticism, follow up with them, get more information, let them know what you did after you received their feedback.
Publically sharing that you respond to feedback from your customers will benefit your business dramatically, it shows your customers you care and that you’re invested in the products that you’re building, they will in turn invest more time and effort into using your products, knowing that there thoughts could help shape the future of the product in some way.
As a designer, I’m passionate about building products that can benefit people and more importantly building tools that can help people benefit others, that this is Feather’s entire mission: to help businesses understand their customers.
We do this by building customer intelligence tools that are simple to use, for both you and your customers.
