The Customer Advocate and the Customer Saboteur

Michael W. Lowenstein

Description

Over the past decade, the concept and effective execution of off-line and online social (and business-related) informal peer-to-peer communication has become extremely important to marketers as business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) customers have increasingly shown distrust, disinterest, and disdain for most supplier messages conveyed through traditional media.
The Customer Advocate and the Customer Saboteur offers a comprehensive overview and sets of actionable insights into this new world of customer-led communication and behavioral influence:
How we got here
How objective, original, credible, authentic and effective brand, product, or service word-of-mouth programs can be initiated and scaled
How contemporary and actionable measures can be applied to assess strategic and tactical customer experience and relationship effectiveness
Why advocacy is the ultimate customer loyalty behavior goal
How to identify drivers of, and minimize, customer sabotage
How employee behavior links to customer advocacy behavior
How social word-of-mouth is addressed differently around the world
How the core concept of advocacy can be expected to morph going forward through more proactive marketing and leveraging of customer behavior
Praise for The Customer Advocate and the Customer Saboteur
"Michael Lowenstein offers excellent insights and methods any business can apply to achieve high customer advocacy from its customer base."
- Professor Philip Kotler, Northwestern University
"Proactive endorsements of customers and employees are earned by making deliberate decisions about how you run your business. Michael Lowenstein's book gives readers dedicated to company growth through customer advocacy the specifics and tools to 'earn the right' to those endorsements."

- Jeanne Bliss, noted customer experience expert and author (www.customerbliss.com); co-founder, Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA)
"The Customer Advocate and the Customer Saboteur is fantastic! Michael eloquently presents customer service theories and research techniques that reinforce what we all already know but now intimately understand so we can confidently expand our best practices. I have gone back to the material several times since initially reading this masterpiece to clarify and tweak current programs as well as justifying the implementation of new customer relationship building initiatives. Since our nation now relies on the service sector to support the economy, this book and Michael Lowenstein are a block in the foundation of our economic recovery. Read this book; your customers, your employees, and the nation will benefit.”
- Chris Zane, Founder/Pres, Zane’s Cycle; author of Reinventing the Wheel; the Science of Creating Lifetime Customers
“Social Customers can have an enormous impact on brand value. Michael Lowenstein's The Customer Advocate and the Customer Saboteur synthesizes solid research and compelling examples to show how to capitalize on advocacy behavior while minimizing the potential for damage from ‘badvocacy.’ Essential reading for customer-centric business leaders!”
- Bob Thompson, Founder/CEO, CustomerThink Corp.

Sujets

• Business
• Qualité, hygiène, sécurité, environnement
• Vente
• Customer Relations
• Marketing et communication
• Economics
• Gestion des ventes

Informations

• Publié par: ASQ Quality Press
• Date de parution: 19 novembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780873894647
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Customer Advocate and the Customer Saboteur
Linking Social Word-of-Mouth, Brand Impression, and Stakeholder Behavior
Michael W. Lowenstein
ASQ Quality Press
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
American Society for Quality, Quality Press, Milwaukee 53203
© 2012 by ASQ
All rights reserved. Published 2011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lowenstein, Michael W., 1942–.
The customer advocate and the customer saboteur : linking social word-of-mouth, brand impression, and stakeholder behavior / Michael W. Lowenstein.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-87389-811-9 (alk. paper)
1. Customer loyalty. 2. Customer services. 3. Customer relations. I. Title.
HF5415.5.L685 2011 658.8'12—dc22
2011015231
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To Susan, my truth woman
and
in loving memory of my mother, Sylvia Yoffee Lowenstein
Preface
Why Customer Loyalty Matters (and It Absolutely Does!) but May Not Be Enough
Businesses, hoping to capitalize on the explosive potential power of word-of-mouth in their marketing programs, have come to something of an epiphany. The seemingly simple process of people talking to one another about a product or service, a behavior that has been around for as long as humans have lived in civilized communities, is not as easy to manage as they once believed, nor in most cases has it generated the lofty and consistent results they had expected.
Over the past decade, the concept, and effective execution, of off-line and online social (and business-related) word-of-mouth has become extremely important to marketers as, increasingly, business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) customers have shown distrust, disinterest, and disdain for most supplier messages conveyed through traditional media.
Several books have served to raise awareness of such new-age social word-of-mouth marketing components as influencer relations, buzz, viral communication, neural networks, online community, collaboration, consumer-generated media (blogs, boards, user forums, online reviews, and direct supplier feedback), and other peer-to-peer dialogue. However, given the availability of techniques such as text mining, analytics, electronic (consumer-generated) content monitoring and harvesting, and downstream behavior analysis, they have barely scratched the surface in defining how to use these techniques and assess their effectiveness to achieve and sustain success.
Today, we are witnessing customer-driven marketing through empowerment and self-management, and companies have often found themselves in the backseat of the new customer–supplier relationships. They are forced to modify existing communication techniques or create new ones so that they can be positioned to generate advocates (and avoid or minimize sabotage) among their customer bases. How they use, or misuse, these new-age relationships and techniques, and how they assess the return-on-customer effectiveness and level of monetization of their initiatives will change how social word-of-mouth is pursued by both small and large enterprises.
The false sense of simplicity surrounding the early application of social word-of-mouth techniques has given way to real challenges that businesses must address: What is true word-of-mouth versus artificial word-of-mouth, and why is it essential for marketers to distinguish between the real and engineered versions? How do marketers build plans around social word-of-mouth, run an effective word-of-mouth program, and track its success? Is social word-of-mouth the same in every market or geographic situation? If not, what are the key differences for marketers to understand? Why is customer advocacy the ultimate attainment of behavior in behalf of a brand or supplier? What is customer sabotage and how can it be avoided? What kinds of research and metrics are available to monitor the revenue impact of social word-of-mouth and advocacy among customers? How does word-of-mouth compare with recommendation as a downstream behavior lever? Why is the act of recommendation considerably more complex, and less prevalent as an action, than originally believed? What is necessary to get staff buy-in, and what are the roles and effects of employee advocacy and sabotage in word-of-mouth? What is the real, likely future of social word-of-mouth marketing?
The Customer Advocate and the Customer Saboteur offers a comprehensive overview of and actionable insight into the social word-of-mouth landscape: How we got here How true, original, credible, and authentic word-of-mouth campaigns can be generated and modeled How appropriate measures need to be applied to assess strategic and tactical campaign effectiveness Why customer advocacy is the ultimate goal of word-of-mouth How to minimize customer sabotage How technology tools are being integrated to facilitate learning from word-of-mouth campaigns How employee behavior links to customer advocacy behavior How social word-of-mouth is addressed differently around the world How the core concept is likely to morph going forward vis-à-vis marketing and leveraging customer behavior
For many years, marketing practitioners have focused on customer loyalty. How do you measure it, how do you protect it, and how do you reward customers for their loyal behavior? What we are now coming to understand is that creating a loyal customer may not be enough to prevent risk and even loss. Customers may say that they are loyal to the brand and that they will use the brand again, but given the opportunity, they will often switch with little or no hesitation. We have seen this in industries such as retail, wireless telecom, credit cards, and travel, each of which has spent more than almost any other industry on loyalty tools. However, the switching virus has spread to many other B2B and B2C sectors to the point where it is at pandemic levels.
At the same time, we are seeing brands such as Google, Red Bull, Zappos, Apple, Umpqua Bank, Wegmans Food Markets, IKEA, and Harley-Davidson, each having a dedicated and enthusiastic group of customers who are more than just loyal; they are customer advocates . Once these select companies built a critical mass of customer advocates, they began to enjoy benefits that most brands could only dream of. They get massive social word-of-mouth exposure, they have lower customer acquisition costs and marketing budgets, they have lower customer service costs (or none in the case of Google), they can enter new market areas, and so forth. The most remarkable example of customer advocacy may be Google, which not only doesn’t do any marketing (in the traditional sense) but also doesn’t have any customer service. And yet, Google still has a large cadre of users who are passionate about its value proposition.
Customer loyalty, in and of itself, principally focuses on retaining customers, cross-selling to customers, upselling customers, and creating “barriers to exit” in the macro sense. In today’s interconnected world, with active vendor substitution, search-and-switch migration, and high churn rates an everyday reality, traditional approaches to customer behavior and experience management can often fall short. Advocacy, the highest expression of customer loyalty behavior, will be the standard for successful brand and corporate performance going forward.
Business and academic thought leaders have discovered the powerful leverage and impact of customer advocacy on marketplace behavior. Major consulting organizations have led the way regarding application and business outcome of advocacy. In a time requiring extreme marketing budget accountability, my colleagues at Market Probe and I have conducted groundbreaking research in multiple business sectors that absolutely makes the monetizing outcome case for customer advocacy. In the following chapters, all of this will be shared with you.
Acknowledgments
First and foremost, I would like to thank T. R. Rao, PhD, president and CEO of Market Probe, for his encouragement and support throughout the book development process. His leadership and deep understanding of the value of customer and brand advocacy to companies around the world are gratefully acknowledged. The concept and the outline for this work were born at previous employers, but apart from me, it had no other champion until I joined Market Probe as executive vice president, bringing passion for advocacy and its application with me. Again, my sincere gratitude to T. R.
Thanks also to senior colleagues at Market Probe: principally, Tom Fusso, PhD, John Morton, Judy Ricker, Lisa Wiland, John Gilbert, Jack Jefferson, Dominique Vanmarsenille, Marcus Hallam, Saji Kumar, and Viraag Agnihotri for their support and sharing of insights.
My appreciation also goes to professional and academic colleagues who provided content, insight, counsel, inspiration, or all of these: Leslie Gaines-Ross, PhD, chief reputation strategist at Weber Shandwick, who wrote the afterword; Jeanne Bliss; Jill Griff