"Church of the Customer" authors Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba provide tips for turning loyal customers into brand ambassadors.
Want more word-of-mouth marketing for your product or service? Create customer evangelists.
In a Leadership Forum Seminar last month, Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba provided tips on how to cultivate word of mouth by creating these ultra-loyal consumers.
According to McConnell and Huba, who co-authored the book "Creating Customer Evangelists," the number one indicator of growth is whether a customer would recommend a brand to a friend or colleague. Citing statistics from RoperASW, they demonstrated that the best sources of information for customers interested in new products and services ranging from restaurants and hotels to prescriptions drugs and financial services is word of mouth.
Customers who make recommendations for such things to their circle of friends and colleagues are considered evangelists -- customers with a true loyalty to your brand. Approximately 20 to 25 percent of customers might be evangelists.
McConnell and Huba define loyalty as the willingness of someone -- a customer, an employee, a friend -- to make an investment or personal sacrifice in order to strengthen a relationship.
If that sounds too good to be true, take a look at Southwest Airlines. During the airline industry's toughest time after 9/11, loyal customers did all they could, including contributing money, to keep "their" airline afloat. A letter from one customer read: "We are encouraging our clients to fly Southwest Airlines. We are buying more stock… and we stand ready to do anything else to help. Count on our continuing support."
An evangelist like the Southwest fan above demonstrates a behavior at the top of a customer behavior hierarchy - taking responsibility for the brand's continued success. At the bottom of the chart is mere satisfaction with a product, service, company. In the middle: frequent purchasing, a commitment to the brand and evangelist behavior (convincing others in the brand).
Evangelists will support you, defend you, help you improve your products and services, recruit new customers for you, and spread the word.
So, how does one gain evangelism? The authors list five steps:
1. Customer plus-delta. The point here is to continually gather feedback. One way the authors suggest to do this is by creating a customer advisory board. C&M Auto Service, for example, created such a board, asking select customers to find areas where improvement was needed. Their comments and suggestions resulted in a 30 percent increase in revenue for the company.
McConnell and Huba suggest you make it a voluntary system, but provide the board members with access to leaders and principles, and keep them in the know with what's happening at the company.
2. Napsterize your knowledge -- Make it a point to share knowledge freely -- even if you think it's secret or proprietary. "The value of an idea increases in value as it reaches more people," said McConnell.
MIT, for example, is making its entire courseware available for free -- teachers' notes, presentations, syllabuses, et cetera -- enabling people to become pseudo MIT students. The reason: increase value of the institution by attracting more people.
Another way to share knowledge is through a blog, ala Microsoft's Channel9 and Bob Scoble blogs.
3. Build the buzz. Evangelism is a long-term strategy -- buzz is the fodder that keeps the evangelists talking. To stimulate buzz, the authors suggest disclosing information to invitation-only lists, creating sneak previews for "hubs" (those widely connected), go beyond the obvious, make your "behind the scenes' visible and be a little outrageous.
Of course this requires identifying your brands' network and the hubs that supply the most connections.
4. Create community. Don't think of customers as transactions. Think of them as a community of like-minded people. Then, address the community, not the transaction.
One bike company, for example, created Bike Friday, encouraging someone from various cities to organize Friday bike rides. These put the customers together, and the evangelists will talk -- and sell!
Other tactics include inviting customers to dinners, or creating calendars of events in which your community would be interested.
5. Make bite-size chunks. Do you have a service that is complex? Devise specialized, smaller offerings to get customers to bite. For example, consultants can create workbooks or deliver seminars to provide a piece of what they have to offer.
6. Create a cause. Think about what your organization stands for. How are you trying to change the world?
Every organization can have a cause in which it's passionate. Starbucks, for example, isn't just about serving great coffee. It's about creating a gathering place, a place where people get together, talk and, yes, buy coffee.
Among the benefits of a well-defined cause:
- It embodies a vision
- It makes people better
- It generates big effects
- It catalyzes selfless actions
- It polarizes effects.