Yalman Khan, Managing Director of EMEA, ResponseTek
Story telling has long been important to us. From ancient cave paintings to blogs, we have recorded and shared our experiences. The stories we tell continue to be about what’s important to us (though the details have changed from highlighting the latest buffalo hunt to our jobs, families, and opinions), but it’s the impact that our stories have—and how many people we tell them to—that has changed with time.
Until relatively recently, you could really only tell your story to people that you knew. Story telling was more or less a one-to-one event, whether in-person, via post, or over the phone. Of course, some stories—usually the cautionary tales—would be passed along and become legend. These are the “it happened to a friend-of-a-friend” type.
Email and blogs have opened up a story teller’s audience, so stories can spread faster and be shared with more people at once. Who can’t think of an email that has been forwarded through offices around the world seemingly before the send button is clicked? These technologies have increased the power of customers to make—or ruin—a company’s reputation: Using blogs, forums, and other websites, customers can research companies, their products, and others’ experiences with them, and then make decisions based on what others say about those experiences.
People sharing positive stories are advocates—they have a strong positive connection to the company or product. Not only do they spend more, the people that they tell about their experiences spend more, and are more likely to become advocates, too. For example, IKEA and Apple have many fierce advocates. Both companies are successful largely due to word-of-mouth. Advocates represent real growth opportunities for companies.
Customers sharing negative stories about their experiences are opponents. Few companies with fierce opponents survive.
For companies, the challenge is identifying which customers are advocates and which are opponents, and then creating more advocates and reducing the number of opponents. Building advocates requires knowing first what kind of experiences your company is delivering. Once you know if you are creating advocates or opponents, you can begin to identify where you are creating them. By mapping your customer lifecycle and measuring customer experiences throughout it, you can begin to understand your delivered customer experience and improve your advocacy.
We’ve all heard that a person tells three others about a good experience and tells eight others about a bad experience. But did you realize that the people who hear the stories are less likely than the story teller to purchase from a retailer after hearing a bad story? Clearly, customer stories are powerful. Which kind of story do you want your customers telling about you?
Learn more about customer advocacy: Sign up for the executive web seminar Using CEM to Build Advocacy, read more about customer advocacy or contact us to receive a copy of our advocacy brochure.
