3 Steps to Convert Loyal Customers into Enthusiastic Customer Advocates

Customer loyalty is not easy to achieve, especially in any kind of competitive business category. After all, imitation is the sincerest form of competition. 

Analysis shows that merely satisfying customers is not sufficient to generate loyalty, because the world is full of perfectly functional companies like yours that are every bit as capable of providing satisfaction.

However, while loyalty is not highly correlated with satisfaction, disloyalty is in fact very highly correlated with dissatisfaction. So, as I’ve said before, before you can delight even your most loyal customers enough to turn them into the advocates you want them to be, you first need to remove every shred of friction from the customer experience.

Only then can you concentrate on turning loyal customers into genuine advocates on your behalf – customers who enthusiastically promote your product or service to their friends. To do it, there are three steps to take, involving empathy, trust, and humanity.

Step One: Em?pathy

Always try to see the problem through the customer’s eyes. You want to know how to think like the customer, how it feels to be that particular customer. 

And at its root, empathy involves always acting in the customer’s interest. Treating each customer the way you’d want to be treated yourself if you were that customer. After all, this is how you’d treat a friend, right? You want a customer advocate to feel they’re helping their friends simply by recommending you. 

Step Two: Demonstrate Trust

Empathy and trust are related, but to earn someone’s trust you have to demonstrate that you are empathetic, and that your intentions are good. You need to prove by your actions that you want to help them solve their problem or meet their need, rather than simply using them as instruments to boost your company’s financial performance.

But demonstrating proactive honesty is not the same as advertising it. In fact, in my experience, if a company has to advertise it can be trusted, it usually can’t be.

So, to cultivate genuine customer advocates, you have to do such things as: 

• Telling a customer if they’re about to incur a late fee, before they incur it;
• Letting them know if they’re paying a higher price than required;
• Cautioning them that they might be buying more than they need, or forgetting to use a credit that’s already available to them; or
• Recommending a competitor’s product, when appropriate. 

These practices on your part demonstrate that you can always be trusted to act in the customer’s interest, even when it costs you money to do so. But don't worry, because that cost is just a short-term loss. What you’ll likely earn in its place is a lifetime of advocacy, with all the shareholder value such advocacy will likely produce. Just ask Amazon. Or Amex. Or USAA.

Step Three: Be Human

Sometimes, when customers do choose to go to the trouble of personally engaging or interacting with a company, what they want most is simply empathy or understanding, or maybe some hand-holding or commiseration. And these aims can only really be achieved by making some sort of human connection. To deliver that connection, to create true customer advocacy, you need to maximize the effectiveness of the human-to-human element, while also minimizing its cost (by using technology to eliminate friction).

This means that in addition to designing all your interactions from the customer’s own perspective, you have to seek out, hire, and develop talented people who can make these interactions and experiences emotionally engaging and memorable for the customer. And once you have them, augment their capabilities with the right automation, tools, and support to be able to deliver your humanity at scale.

So if you’re really serious about creating customer advocates, then start by focusing on the success of your employees, especially your frontline workers. Demonstrate the same care and empathy for them that you want them to show for your customers. Take pains to make sure they aren’t unnecessarily distracted by their own problems. Because to a customer, the frontline employee they talk to or chat with – that frontline employee is your company.