How to Build Customer Advocacy with the HubSpot Service Hub Software Suite
Jamie Midgley
Fractional RevOps & GTM built on HubSpot for Tech Founders - creating stronger boardrooms and engine rooms.
Business is changing. It’s no longer a one-way street; it’s no longer businesses talking, and customers listening. Today, the customer voice is strong. And when it’s not only strong, but also positive, it can bring huge advantages to modern organisations invested in customer success.?
Today’s businesses shouldn’t be competing with the customer voice, but rather using it to complement their own. “Those doing it best are often seeing willing customer participants become brand ambassadors, influencers, advocates, collaborators, and even innovators, representing and?driving brand participation?across the marketplace” says Diana O'Brien, Global Chief Marketing Officer for professional services firm Deloitte.
By providing positive, successful, and seamless experiences across every stage of the customer journey map, organisations can transform their users from customers into advocates; into powerful influencers that shape the decisions of like minded peers.?
It is clear that today’s businesses need to build a strong customer advocacy programme. But what is the best way to facilitate experiences that motivate, encourage, and inspire customers to go above and beyond for their providers?
Building a Strong Advocacy Programme
Organisations shouldn’t be afraid to bring in helpful tools and resources to assist the design, development, and implementation of a strong customer advocacy programme, and one of the best options is the HubSpot Service Hub software suite.?
The Service Hub has been built specially for today’s service companies, helping them to better understand the needs of their customers and create customer-centric strategies. The hub offers a number of features that can specifically help with customer advocacy:
Advocacy comes from excellence. Quite simply, customers who don’t experience excellence throughout their journey are very unlikely to want to invest their time into promoting and advocating for your business in the future. The HubSpot Service Hub plays a big role in creating positive, impactful experiences for the customer. One way is through the conversations inbox which brings together multi-channel communication - including messages from email, live chat, and social media - into a single inbox that enables teams to respond to customer enquiries efficiently. Another is the software’s 1:1 video creation tool that allows you to create personalised video content for each customer.?
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Nearly half of all customers claim that they have switched companies because of a?poor personalisation?experience, which demonstrates just how important personalisation is to customer satisfaction and, in turn, advocacy. In addition to the 1:1 video creation tool, the HubSpot Service Hub also offers many more personalisation options. The biggest advantage of the Service Hub in this regard is that it integrates seamlessly with the HubSpot CRM, which means that any information you hold about your customer in the CRM can be shared with the Service Hub. This ensures your support team has access to names and other vital data to improve customer personalisation.?
HubSpot lists silos as one of the top 5 barriers preventing the success of a customer advocacy programme. When sales teams, marketing teams, and customer success teams fail to work together in harmony, the customer experience can feel disjointed, and customers with disjointed experiences don’t always feel compelled to advocate.
Today’s customers want to move forward through the customer journey at their own pace, without feeling pushed by sales. And to do this, they need to be able to self-serve; to find answers to their questions and locate the information they need to make smart, informed, confident decisions. Through the HubSpot Service Hub, businesses can facilitate this self-serve trend using the knowledge base builder. This innovative feature enables businesses to identify the most commonly asked questions and turn them into articles or FAQ snippets, all organised in a single, searchable knowledge base platform that’s available to customers from anywhere, at any time.?
By using both the HubSpot CRM and the HubSpot Service Hub, businesses can generate a more comprehensive, more transparent, more clear picture of their customers. By aligning the data held across both systems, organisations can easily match interactions with core customer data to highlight those customers that are most likely to show willingness to advocate for the business in the future. At the same time, Service Hub features such as customer feedback surveys can help to identify those customers who may be having a poor experience, and could turn to a competitor. It provides organisations with a chance to proactively find problems and introduce solutions.
The Importance of Flexibility
There’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to customer advocacy, and HubSpot states that one of the biggest mistakes that organisations are making today is that they are using ‘software that forces you to perform advocacy as the software sees it’. Customer advocacy doesn’t work like that. It needs to be flexible. That’s why it’s so important to use a flexible software solution like Service Hub that lets you do your thing, your way.